greatness of thought, then it became clear that the beginning had turned into the end and that the need and its compelling had to become different, assuming that there is still supposed to be another beginning.
After Nietzsche, and in a certain way through him (for as truly as he is the end, he is at the same time a transition), the other need comes into play, and this again only, as in the case of the first beginning, for a few rare persons, to whom is meted out the power to question and the power over declining in the transition.
The other need, that is, if we may say so, our need, has this peculiarity that it is not experienced as a need. Everything has become calculable, and consequently everything is understandable. There are no longer any limits to our domination over beings, if only our will is great enough and constant enough. Everything becomes obvious, without any impenetrable depths, and this transparency derives from a luminosity in which the eye of knowledge is dazzled to the verge of blindness.
Questioning, at one time the primordial eruption into the open on the part of what is concealed, and the pride in holding fast to what is worthy of questioning now succumb to the suspicion of weakness and insecurity. Questioning is a sign of a lack of the power to act. Whoever acknowledges and experiences this situation, one that has been becoming more acute for decades in the most varied forms, will find that beings are now taken for all that is, as if there were no such thing as Being and the truth of Being. Beings strut as beings and yet are abandoned by Being. The nearly unacknowledged need arising from the abandonment by Being becomes compelling in the basic disposition of terror. One can no longer be struck by the miracle of beings: that they are. For, quite to the contrary, this has become obvious long ago. And it is a gaping abyss that beings, apparently closer to reality than ever before, can be taken for all that is, while Being and the truth of Being are forgotten.
In wonder, the basic disposition of the first beginning, beings first come to stand in their form. Terror, the basic disposition of the other beginning, reveals behind all progress and all domination over beings a dark emptiness of irrelevance and a shrinking back in face of the first and last decisions.
2. The question of the essence of truth as the necessity of the highest need arising from the abandonment of Being.
It would be a very extrinsic conception of these various basic dispositions if we would see in wonder only inflamed desire and jubilation and seek terror in the nebulous realm of aversion, grief, and despair. Just as wonder bears in itself its own sort of terror, so does terror involve its own mode of self-composure, calm steadfastness, and new wonder. The quite different question, into which the basic disposition of terror compels, concerns the abandonment by Being and the fact that beings can be