90. From the first to the other beginning.
Negation
How few understand "negation," and how seldom is it firmly grasped by those who do have some understanding of it! Negation is spontaneously taken to be sheer rejection, dismissal, disparagement, and even disintegration. Not only are these forms of negation the most frequent and widespread, they also accommodate most immediately the ordinary conception of the "no." Thus is excluded the thought of the possibility that negation could be of an even deeper essence than the "yes," especially since the yes is readily taken in the sense of any kind of consent, as superficially as the no.
But are consent and rejection in the domain of representation and representational "valuation" the only forms of the yes and the no? Is it at all the case that that domain is the uniquely essential one? Or does it not rather, like all correctness, descend from a more original truth? And, ultimately, do not the yes and the no—indeed the latter more originally than the former—constitute an essential possession of being itself?
How is that possible, however, unless the essential form of the "no" (and of the yes) resided in the Da-sein which is needed by beyng? The no is the great leap away from, in which the "there" [Da-] in Da-sein is leaped into. This leaping-away-from "affirms" that from which it leaps but also possesses nothing negative as a leap. Of itself, the leaping-away-from first takes on the leaping of the leap, and thus here the no surpasses the yes. Accordingly, however, this no as seen from the outside is the setting of the first beginning out in relief against the other one but is never "negation" in the usual sense of rejection and disparagement. Instead, this original negation is the same in kind as that refusal which deprives itself of any accompanying and does so out of a knowledge and recognition of the uniqueness of what, at its end, demands the other beginning.
To be sure, such negation is not satisfied with leaping-away-from in the sense of merely leaving behind. Rather, it develops by laying bare the first beginning and its inceptual history and by placing back into the possession of the beginning what has been laid bare, which, as deposited there, both now and in the future stands out above everything that ever arose in its wake and became an object of historiological reckoning. This erecting of what stands out in the first beginning is the meaning of the "destruction" occurring in the transition to the other beginning.