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finally dominates and permeates everything, then there are no longer any conditions by which still actually to detect the enchantment and to protect oneself from it. The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage. breeding. manageability. and regulation. Even "taste" now becomes a matter for this regulation, and everything depends on a "good ambiance." The average becomes better and better, and by virtue of this bettering it secures its dominion always more irresistibly and more inconspicuously.

It is of course a deceptive conclusion to believe that, the higher the average. the more unsurpassable the height of above-average efforts becomes. This conclusion itself betrays the calculating character of this attitude. The question remains: Is any room still needed at all for the above-average? Or does satisfaction with the average not become more and more soothing and legitimate, until it convinces itself that it has already achieved-and can immediately achieve at will-what the above-average claims to offer?

Constantly raising the level of the average and simultaneously broadening and widening the level up to the platform of every operation in general is the uncanniest indication of the disappearance of sites for decision-indicates the abandonment of being.

60. Whence the Lack of Distress as
Utmost Distress?

The lack of distress is the greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable and, above all, where it is decided, without a preceding question, who we are and what we are to do-where knowing awareness has been lost without its ever actually having been established that the actual self-being happens by way of a grounding-beyond-oneself, which requires the grounding of the grounding-space and its time. This. in tum, requires knowing what is ownmost to truth as what knowing cannot avoid.

But wherever "truth" is long since no longer a question and even the attempt at such a question is already rejected as a disturbance and an irrelevant brooding. there the distress of abandonment of being has no time-space at all.

Wherever possession of the true as the correct is beyond questioning and steers all dealings, what is then still the point of raising the question of what is ownmost to truth?

And wherever this possession of the true can even rely on deeds. who wants to wallow there in the uselessness of an essential questioning and to expose himself to ridicule?