If we speak of need as that which makes needful the highest form of necessity, we are not referring to misery and lack. Nevertheless, we are thinking of a not, a negative. But we know little enough of he negative and the “no,” for example in forms of refusal, deferment, and failure. Yet all that is not nothingness but is at most (if not something higher still) its opposite. It never enters the field of view of our calculating reason that a no and a not may arise out of a surplus or abundance, may be the highest gift, and as this not and no may infinitely, i.e., essentially, surpass every ordinary yes. And that is all to the good. For reason would “explain” it according to the principles of logic, whereby both affirmation and denial exist, but the yes has the priority since it posits and thus acknowledges something present at hand. What is present and at hand counts as a being. Therefore it is difficult for us, wherever we encounter something apparently “negative,” not only to see in it the “positive” but also to conceive something more original, transcending that distinction. Here, where we are reflecting on the need of the necessity of the beginning, only the most profound understanding of the essence of need will suffice.Continued.
The need we have in mind arises from the distress of not knowing the way out or the way in; but that is by no means to be understood as a perplexity in some particular circumstances or other. What then is it? Not knowing the way out or the way in: that is to say, out of and into that which such knowing first opens up as an untrodden and ungrounded “space.” This space (time-space)—if we may so speak of it here—is that “between” where it has not yet been determined what being is or what non-being is, though where by the same token a total confusion and undifferentiation of beings and non-beings does not sweep everything away either, letting one thing wander into another. This distress, as such a not knowing the way out of or into this self-opening “between,” is a mode of “Being,” in which man arrives or perhaps is thrown and for the first time experiences—but does not explicitly consider—that which we are calling the “in the midst” of beings.
P. 132