imposed upon to collaborate in carrying out the requisitioning in a human manner. Requisitioning comes upon nature and history, all that is, and in every way that whatever presences is. What presences is imposed upon as such for orderability and thus represented in advance as something7 steady, whose standing essences from requisitioning. What is constant in such a way and constantly present is the standing reserve.
Consequently, requisitioning can never be explained by any single item of standing reserve, just as little as it can be conceived from the sum of items of standing reserve at hand as a universal that would just hover above them. Requisitioning cannot be explained at all, i.e., it cannot be led back to something clear. We unwittingly pass off as clear everything that is readily and commonly known to us and generally held to be unquestionable. What we are in the habit of explaining by something clear is always merely rendered unconsidered and thoughtless. We are not able to explain the requisitioning wherein the standing reserve essences.8 Rather, we must first of all attempt to experience its still unthought essence.
For this it is necessary that we observe how requisitioning from the outset attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities; for if an ill-advised theology today orders the results of modern atomic physics so as to secure with their help its proofs for the existence of God, then in so doing God is placed into the realm of the orderable.
Requisitioning affects all that presences in respect to its presence9 with a conscripting. Requisitioning is only directed at one thing, versus unum, namely to position the one whole of what presences as standing reserve. Requisitioning is in itself universal. It gathers in itself all possible types of placing and all manner of their linking. In itself, requisitioning is already gathered for the continual securing of the status of the orderability of all that presences as standing reserve.
We name the collection of mountains [der Berge] that are already gathered together, united of themselves and never belatedly, the mountain range [das Gebirge]. We name the collection
7. so ordered and thus in this sense
8. to the extent that explanation leads away from the issue at stake
9. presencing—why, from where?