Chapter Five
§25. The distress of not knowing the way out or the way in, as a mode of Being. The untrodden time-space of the between.
What sort of need held sway in the necessity to put in motion the beginning of Western thinking? And what do we understand here by “need”? “Need” is redolent of misery and complaint, it connotes deprivation and requirement, and on the whole it means lack, absence, “away,” “not.” Not every negation is negative in a depreciatory sense. Silence, for example, means the absence, the “away,” and the “not” of noise and disturbance. But here we are just interpreting something original as negative with the aid of the negative, namely, noise and disturbance, without considering the essence of “not” and “no.” Not everything negative needs to be deficient and certainly not miserable and lamentable. We have the habit of interpreting need and care only on the basis of our everyday surrounding world of what is disturbing, lamentable, and burdensome; i.e., we make our griefs and afflictions the measure of things. This habit of ours is so ineradicable that it apparently has an exclusive claim to justification, yet we must ever anew attempt to win back, or, perhaps, first develop, for our language a hidden power of naming the essential.