numbers of every kind, true of movements in the sense of mathematically calculated spatiotemporal intervals. We conceive of the unbroken and consecutive sequence of parameters, of what is measured by them, as the continuum. It excludes a face-to-face encounter of its elements so resolutely that even where we meet with interruptions, the fractions can never come face-to-face with each other.
Although space and time within their reach as parameters admit of no encounter of their elements, yet the dominance of space and time as parameters for all conceptualization, production, and accumulation—the parameters of the modern technical world—encroaches in an unearthly manner upon the dominion of nearness, that is, upon the nighness of the regions of the world. Where everything is fixed at calculated distances, precisely there, the absence of distance spreads due to the unbounded calculability of everything, and spreads in the form of the refusal of neighborly nearness of the world's regions. In the absence of distance, everything becomes equal and indifferent in consequence of the one will intent upon the uniformly calculated availability of the whole earth. This is why the battle for the dominion of the earth has now entered its decisive phase. The all-out challenge to secure dominion over the earth can be met only by occupying an ultimate position beyond the earth from which to establish control over the earth. The battle for this position, however, is the thoroughgoing calculative conversion of all connections among all things into the calculable absence of distance. This is making a desert of the encounter of the world's fourfold—it is the refusal of nearness. In the battle for dominion over the earth, now, space and time reach their supreme dominion as parameters. However—their power becomes unleashed only because space and time are still, are already, something other than the long-familiar parameters. Their parametrical character obstructs the nature of time and space. Above all it conceals the relation of that nature to the nature of nearness. Simple as these relations are, they remain wholly inaccessible to calculative thinking. Where they are held up to us nonetheless, our current notions resist the insight.