85

to forget rapidly and to lose oneself in what comes next. From this point of view, then, the false idea of what is high and "highest" in the dis-figuring [Mißgestalt] of maximum accomplishment; purely quantitative enhancement, blindness to what is truly momentary, which is not fleeting but opens up eternity. But from the point of view of acceleration the eternal is the mere lasting of the same, the empty "and-so-forth." The genuine restlessness of the struggle remains hidden. Its place is taken by the restlessness of the always inventive operation, which is driven by the anxiety of boredom.

3. The outbreak of massiveness. That does not only mean the "masses" in a "societal" sense. These masses mount up only because numbers and the calculable already count as what is equally accessible to everyone. What is common to the many and to all is what the "many" know as what towers over them. Hence responding to calculation and acceleration, just as on the other hand calculation and acceleration provide massiveness with its track and scope. Here is the sharpest opposition—because it is inconspicuous—to the rare and unique (the essential sway of being). Everywhere in these disguises of the abandonment of being, what is not ownmost to beings, the non-beings, spreads—and indeed in the semblance of an "important" event.

The spreading out of these disguises of the abandonment of being and thus precisely this abandonment itself is the strongest hindrance—because initially hardly noticeable—for appropriately estimating and grounding the grounding-attunement of reservedness, in which what is ownmost to truth first lights up, insofar as shifting into Da-sein happens.

But those ways of dwelling in beings and their "domination" are therefore so undermining, because they do not one day simply let themselves be removed as supposedly only external forms that encompass something inner. They occupy the place of the inner and in the end deny the difference between the inner and the outer, since they are foremost and everything. This corresponds to the way in which one attains knowledge [Wissen]—corresponds to the calculated, swift, massive distribution of ununderstood information [Kenntnis] to as many as possible in the shortest possible time. "Schooling" [becomes] a word that, in the meaning that it now has, turns upside down what is ownmost to school and to σχολή. But this too is only a new sign of the collapse which does not stop the growing uprootedness, because this collapse does not get at—or want to get at—the roots of beings, because there it would have to come up against its own lack of ground.

These three—calculation, acceleration, and massiveness—are accompanied by a fourth, one that is related to all three and takes