The denial of being to "the gods" means at first only that being does not stand "above" the gods and that they also do not stand "above" being. Yet "the gods" indeed need beyng, and in this declaration the essence "of" beyng is already thought. "The gods" do not need beyng as their proper domain, in which they themselves find a place to stand. "The gods" require beyng so that through beyng, which does not belong to them, they might indeed belong to themselves. Beyng is that which is required by the gods; it is their need, and the neededness of beyng names its essential occurrence, which is necessitated by "the gods" but is never what can be caused or conditioned. The circumstance that "the gods" require beyng moves them into the abyss (freedom) and expresses the failure of all founding and proving. As obfuscated as the neededness of beyng still remains for thinking, this neededness nevertheless provides a first foothold for thinking "the gods" as the ones that need beyng. We thereby take the first steps into the history of beyng, the thinking of the historicality of beyng thus first gets under way, and every effort to force what is said in this commencement into an ordinary understandability is otiose and, above all, opposed to this kind of thinking. Now, if beyng is what is needed by the god, and beyng itself finds its truth only in the inventive thinking which is philosophy (in the other beginning), then "the gods" are in need of the thinking of the historicality of beyng, i.e., they need philosophy. It is not as if they themselves had to philosophize for the sake of their own divinization; instead, it is because there must be philosophy if "the gods" are once again to come into decision and if history is to attain its essential ground. As determined on the basis of the gods, the thinking of the historicality of beyng is that thinking of beyng which grasps the abyss of the neededness of beyng as what is first and never seeks the essence of beyng in what is godly itself as that which supposedly is most eminently. The thinking of the historicality of beyng stands outside every theology and is equally removed from any atheism, whether in the sense of a "worldview" or of a doctrine having some other character.
To grasp the abyss of the neededness of beyng means to be transposed into the necessity of grounding the truth for beyng and not to resist the essential consequences of this necessity but, instead, to think toward them and thereby to know, without playing into the hands of the claim to "absoluteness," that that necessity withdraws all thinking of beyng from every merely human arrangement.
To grasp on the basis of the gods the thinking of the historicality of beyng is, however, "the same" as the attempt at an indication of the essence of this thinking on the basis of the human being.
Regarding 2. It is the case here as well that no already extant, customary view of the human being can serve as the point of departure,