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§61 [124-126]

could immediately accomplish at will-what the above-average claims to offer.

The constant raising of the average level and the concurrent widening and wide application of this level, until it becomes the platform for all activity, constitute the most uncanny sign of the vanishing of the decisive places; it is a sign of the abandonment by being.


60. Whence the lack of a sense of plight as the greatest plight?


The lack of a sense of plight is greatest where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do. This is where the knowledge has been lost (and never was properly grounded) that genuine selfhood occurs in a grounding beyond oneself, which requires the grounding of a grounding space and of its time. And such grounding requires a knowledge of the essence of truth as that which must be known

Where "truth" has long since ceased to be a question, however, and even the attempt at such a question is dismissed as a disturbance and as inconsequential musing, there the plight of the abandonment by being has no time-space at all.

Where the possession of what is true as what is correct is beyond question and directs all actions and omissions, what is the question of the essence of truth still supposed to accomplish?

And where this possession of what is true can even cite actual deeds, who would still want to stray into the uselessness of a questioning of an essence and be exposed to ridicule?

The lack of a sense of plight is due to this obstructing of the essence of truth as the ground of Da-sein and of the grounding of history.


61. Machination3


ordinarily means a "bad" kind of human endeavor and the scheming that goes into it

In the context of the question of being, it does not name a kind of human conduct but a mode of the essential occurrence of being. The pejorative connotation should also be avoided, even if machination does promote the distorted essence of being. Yet even this distorted essence itself, since it is essential to the essence, is never to be depreciated



3. Cf. The resonating, 70 and 71. The gigantic.


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger