we say, in its own way does very much concernfully approach us. For the indifferent comes to concern us in that we constantly go past it and leave it alone.

Everything that presences and absences bears the character of what concernfully approaches. Distance lies in concerned approach. The concerned approach lies in nearness. We are too easily of the opinion that distance would consist in a standing opposite from us. On this account, distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition and first secured in the oppositional object. But the oppositional object is only the last term and the final remnant of what stands at a distance. When what presences becomes the oppositional object of a representation, the dominance of the distanceless has already installed itself, even if still unobtrusively. In the objective, what concernfully approaches us has been placed before us. Thus it stands away from us and we from it. Indeed, this objective representation, which by all appearances first lets us encounter what presences, is in its essence already an assault upon what concernfully approaches us. In the appearance of the purely present as proffered by the oppositional object, in the objective [das Objektive], there lies concealed the greed of representational calculation. Among what is oppositionally objective, there likewise belong the conditions in which we stand to ourselves, within which we monitor and dissect ourselves. Psychology and the dominance of psychological explanations contain the beginnings of the leveling down of the mental-spiritual into something that is accessible to everyone at all times and thus, at base, already distanceless. The dominance of what is oppositionally objective does not secure distance. Rather, there already lurks in it the insistence of the distanceless. If distance lies in concerned approach, then where the distanceless reigns we are really no longer approached concernfully by anything at all. Everything slides into the basic trait of the indifferent, even if here and there, like lost scatterings, much might still matter to us. The concernful approach of the indifferent is a wresting away into monotony that stops and starts, stands and falls, neither nearby nor far off. The distanceless [Das Abstandlose] so decisively concerns the human that he is approached in equal measure everywhere by what is uniformly without distance [Distanzlosen]. The equal measure of this approach by the distanceless consists in