being, whose history is surely hidden to us but is indeed common and pressing in historiological representation.
260. The gigantic
was determined as that whereby the ""quantitative" is transformed into a "quality" of its own, into a kind of greatness. The gigantic is thus not something quantitative that commences when a relatively high number is attained (through enumeration and measurement), although it can indeed appear first and foremost as "quantitative." The gigantic is grounded in the decisiveness and exceptionlessness of "calculation" and is rooted in a reaching out of subjective representation to the whole of beings. Residing therein is the possibility of a kind of greatness, one which is meant here in the historical (historiological) sense. Greatness refers here to the self-rooted erecting of beyng in a self-grounded ground out of which must arise anything that wishes to count as a being. The gigantic manifests the greatness of the subjectum which is certain of itself and which builds everything upon its own representing and producing.
The gigantic appears in many forms; above all, it does not leap into view immediately and "overwhelmingly" in each of those forms. That whose representation demands vast numbers and measures is only the semblance of the gigantic, though it does admittedly belong to it, since the gigantic brings into play the kind of greatness which relies essentially on positing and representing.
Numbered among the forms of the gigantic are:
1. The gigantic retardation of history (as the remaining absent of essential decisions, up to the complete absence of history) in the semblance of the rapidity and controllability of "historiological" development and of its anticipations.
2. The gigantic publicness of the uniting of everything interrelated, along with the concealment of the destroying and undermining of every passion for essential gathering.
3. The gigantic claim of naturalness in the semblance of what is self-evident and "logical"; the question-worthiness of being [Sein] put completely out of question.
4. The gigantic diminution of beings as a whole in the semblance of their boundless expansion through unconditional control over them. The only impossibility is the word "impossible" and the very notion of it.
Occurring essentially in all these interconnected forms of the gigantic is the abandonment of beings by being, and indeed no longer merely