one. On the contrary, the uniqueness of the unconditioned domination of this disposition and of its compelling character involves, as is the case with every basic disposition, the highest simplicity of complete incomprehensibility and its unconditioned expansion. Our analysis—should we want to name it such—is not a dissection in the sense of an explanatory dissolution into a manifold of components. It is simply an attempt at a retrospective sketch of the simplicity and incomprehensibility of that displacement of man, into beings as such, which comes to Pass as wonder. And the latter remains exactly as ungraspable as the beginning itself, toward which it compels.
The misinterpretation of this retrospective sketch as a dissection is, to be sure, all the more tempting the longer we have been habituated, even here, precisely in this pre-eminent realm, to take everything “psychologically,” as occurrences of lived experiences “in” the human soul. Whereas, on the contrary, man himself is first disposed toward the beginning through the occurrence of this displacement and is thereby determined as a primordial perceiver of beings as such.
All this contains a clue indicating where we might find the necessity of the attitude of primordial thinking. The basic disposition of θαυμάζειν compels us to a pure acknowledgment of the unusualness of the usual. The purest acknowledgment of what is most unusual is fulfilled, however, in the questioning that asks what the most usual itself might be, such that it can reveal itself as what is most unusual.
But is this questioning not precisely intrusiveness and curiosity, hence that which most eludes all pure acknowledgment? To be sure it is, but only if we understand this questioning as a part of our everyday comportment and dealings and as a part of the rage to make explanation the measuring rod for the determination of the essence of thoughtful questioning. But thoughtful questioning is not the intrusive and rash curiosity of the search for explanations; it is the tolerating and sustaining of the unexplainable