occurrences and processes within an organism, as psychic lived experiences, ones we either have or do not have. This also means that we are “subjects,” present at hand, who are displaced into these or those dispositions by “getting” them. In truth, however, it is the disposition that displaces us, displaces us into such and such a relation to the world, into this or that understanding or disclosure of the world, into such and such a resolve or occlusion of one’s self, a self which is essentially a being-in-the-world.
The need compels by disposing, and this disposing is a displacing in such fashion that we find ourselves disposed (or not disposed) toward beings in a definite way.1 If we interpret this psychologically, as lived experience, then everything is lost. That is why it is so difficult for us to gain access to the Greek world—especially its beginning—for we immediately seek “lived experiences,” “personalities,” and “culture”—precisely what was not there in this very great and equally short time. And that is why we are completely excluded from a real understanding of, e.g., Greek tragedy or the poetry of Pindar, for we read and hear the Greeks in psychological, even in Christian, terms. If, e.g., a Greek speaks of αἰδώς, awe, which affects ones who risk and only them, or of χάρις, the grace that donates and protects, and which in itself is severity (all these translations are miserable failures), then he is not naming lived experiences or feelings which arise in an organism and which a person might “have.” The Greek indicates what he means by calling these “goddesses,” or “demi-goddesses.” But here again we are ready with our psychological explanations insofar as we would say that these are precisely mythical lived experiences. For myth is a particular form of lived experience, namely the irrational.
3) Θαυμάζειν as the basic disposition of the primordial thinking of the Occident.
In view of modern man’s intoxication with lived experience, it is in the first place very difficult to capture a basic disposition, the basic disposition, which compelled the primordial thinking of the Occident into its question and let it become a necessity. Prior
1. Cf. Being and Time on “finding oneself disposed” [Befindlichkeit].