or even a "definition" and bring it into the free domain of its dispositional power. Yet now and then we must speak "about" disposition in order to point the way, but only because psychology has for a long time restricted the scope of the word "disposition," i.e., only because the craving for "lived experiences" today, without a meditation on disposition, would all the more drag astray everything said of it.
All essential thinking demands that its thoughts and utterances be newly extracted each time, like an ore, out of the basic disposition. If the basic disposition is lacking, then everything is a forced clatter of concepts and of the mere shells of words.
Since indeed a misconception about "thinking" has long since dominated the common opinion regarding "philosophy," the way disposition is represented and judged can therefore be absolutely nothing other than a scion of this misinterpretation of thinking (disposition is weak, erratic, unclear, and dull, versus the acuity, certainty, clarity, and nimbleness of "thought"). In the best case, disposition might be tolerated as an embellishment of thinking.
On the other hand, the basic disposition disposes Da-sein and thereby disposes thinking as a projection of the truth of beyng in word and concept.
Disposition is the diffusion of the trembling of beyng as event in Da-sein. Diffusion: not mere vanishment and expiration, but just the opposite—preservation of the spark in the sense of the clearing of the "there" according to the full fissure of beyng.
The basic disposition of the other beginning can almost never—and certainly not in the transition to that beginning—be designated with one single name. The multiplicity of names, however, does not negate the simplicity of this basic disposition; it merely points to the ungraspableness of everything simple. The basic disposition is called by us: shock, restraint, diffidence, presentiment, foreboding.
Presentiment opens the expanse of the concealment of what is assigned and perhaps refused.
Presentiment—taken in terms of the basic disposition, versus the ordinary, calculative understanding of it—does not at all concern merely the future, merely what is imminent, but instead traverses and measures up the whole of temporality: the temporal-spatial playing field of the "there."
Presentiment is in itself the self-grounded holding-open of the dispositional power; it is the hesitant (yet already ascendant over all the uncertainty of mere opinion) sheltering of the unconcealment of the concealed (the refusal) as such.
Presentiment places inceptual steadfastness into Da-sein. Presentiment is in itself at once shock and exaltation—always assuming that