the paths leading out of it. In each case the world is brought to man in a different way; in each case his self is differently opened up and resolved with regard to beings.
To say it still more essentially:1 the previous conception of man, i.e., the biological and psychological conception, would misinterpret what we have just said and would maintain that disposition is but a human capacity, though to be sure a very important one and perhaps one not yet sufficiently appreciated; a correct understanding of disposition, however, leads in fact to a surpassing of this very conception of man. We sometimes say that we have been transported into this or that disposition. In truth, i.e., understood on the basis of the original essence of Being, it is rather the reverse: it is the disposition that transports, transports us into this or that basic relation to beings as such. More precisely, disposition is what transports us in such a way that it co-founds the time-space of the transporting itself.
We cannot yet ask how this transporting is to be understood. But this question is an essential track within our question of openness as such (ex-istence) [(Da-sein)].
In view of the essence of our need, this is what we have to think in the first place: as disposing, the distress, the not knowing the way out or the way in, does not simply compel us into already determined relations to beings, ones already opened up and interpreted in their beingness; on the contrary, it compels us first of all into that "between," that "in the midst of," in whose space and time beings as a whole can be determined in their beingness. This need of primordial thinking, as we mean it here, can affectively compel us only in an essential disposition, or, as we say, in a basic one.
Finally, it might be claimed that our comments on need and disposition are merely latter-day "fantasies" and ultimately, in spite of everything, merely "psychological" opinions about the wholly unknown psychology of the early Greek thinkers. There is indeed not enough resistance to be found today against this misinterpretation, and there will not be enough even in the future, for these misinterpretations, which are always possible, will
1. On the essence of disposition see Sein und Zeit, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 2, and above all the lecture course on Hölderlin: Hölderlins Hymnen "Germanien" und "Der Rhein." Gesamtausgabe, Bd . 39.