thinking, a beginning in which the essence of truth as the basic character of beings had to flame up, only to expire once again. This reflection is a historical one. It has value not in our applying the past to ourselves but only insofar as we enter into the history of the essence of truth, i.e., insofar as we have an ear for the demand of this hidden history, for its future, by turning the essence of truth into what is most worthy of questioning and doing so on the basis of a genuine necessity. The reflection addresses the necessity of our question of truth, out of which alone the direction and the domain of the questioning are determined, as well as what is to be founded as the essence of truth. For the character of the necessity of such questioning we require a sure eye. We will procure it only through reflection on the beginning and its necessity. This necessity springs forth out of a need. The need compels in the mode of a disposition.
Therefore it was important to say something in advance about need and disposition, in order then to characterize the basic disposition of primordial thinking as θαυμάζειν, wonder. Here we are constantly subject to the danger of making a norm out of our ordinary, habitual, and everyday experiences and interpretations of need, necessity, and disposition. We are now seeking what these same words name at the beginning of Western thought, and that is always incompatible with our everyday understanding.
Need is for us ordinarily a lack, something “negative.” We immediately judge the negative, however, in a depreciatory way as the adverse pure and simple. Thus our only relation to it is defense and elimination. Now everything negative is in fact determined by a no and a not. But not every no and not, the negative, is nothingness. Need in the essential sense is indeed something negative, and yet not nothingness, which we can only be content with by eliminating or avoiding.
The need we have in mind, the ground of the necessity of primordial questioning, is a negativity in the sense of the distress of not knowing the way out or the way in. This whence and whither, as they exist in the beginning, do not constitute some definite, determinate situation, occasion, or perplexity as regards some particular comportment or relation to a determinate object and circumstance. On the contrary, the whence and whither exist no