merely an indifferent occasion for thought to move in some way or other. Instead, the truth of beyng, the knowledge born of meditation, is everything.
Yet the way of this inventive thinking of beyng does not already have a fixed and plotted course on a map of the land. Indeed the land only first comes to be through the way and is unknown and incalculable at every point along the way.
The more genuinely the way of inventive thinking is a way to beyng, the more unconditionally is it determined by beyng itself. Inventive thinking does not mean thinking up or arbitrarily devising; instead, it refers to that thinking which, in questioning, stands up to beyng and challenges beyng to attune the questioning through and through.
The inventive thinking of beyng must always put beings as a whole up for decision. That indeed succeeds each time in only one line of sight and turns out ever more poorly the more the intimation of beyng strikes home more originally.
The land that comes to be through and as the way of the inventive thinking of beyng is the between which appropriates Da-sein to the god. In this appropriation, the human being and god first become "recognizable" to each other, in their belonging to the stewardship and neededness of beyng.
43. Beyng and decision
To be needed by the gods and to be shattered by such an elevation—it is in the direction of this concealment that we must interrogate the essence of beyng as such. Then we cannot explain beyng as something apparently supervenient but must apprehend it as the origin, one which first de-cides and ap-propriates gods and humans.
This interrogation of beyng carries out the opening of the temporal- spatial playing field of the essential occurrence of beyng: the grounding of Da-sein.
When we hear talk of "de-cision," we think of a human act, something carried out, a procedure. What is essential here, however, is neither the humanness of the act nor the procedural quality.
To be sure, it is scarcely possible to come near the essence of decision (an essence that belongs to the historicality of beyng) without starting again with the human being, with ourselves. Then we think of "decision" as choice, resolution, the preferring of one thing and the setting aside of another, and we end up with freedom as a cause and a capacity. We divert the question of decision in the direction of