The age of a complete absence of questioning and an unwillingness to establish any goals. Mediocrity as status symbol.
The resonating of the refusal—in what sort of sounding?
51. The resonating2
The resonating of beyng as refusal in the abandonment of beings by being—this already indicates that the task here is not the description, explanation, or ordering of something objectively present. In the other beginning of philosophy, the burden of thinking is different: to think inventively that which eventuates as the event itself, to bring beyng into the truth of its essential occurrence. In the other beginning, however, beyng becomes event, and therefore the resonating of beyng must also be history, must undergo history in an essential upheaval, must be able to both know and say the moment of this history. (Knowledge is meant here not in the sense of the labeling and pigeonholing that would pertain to a philosophy of history but in the sense of a knowledge of history out of and as the moment of the first resonating of the truth of beyng itself.)
Yet this way of speaking makes it seem that what matters is only to designate the present. Let us speak of the age of the complete absence of questioning, an age whose temporal span stretches beneath time backward and forward far beyond what happens today. In this age, nothing essential—supposing this determination still makes sense—is any longer impossible or inaccessible. Everything "is made" and "can be made," if only the "will" to it is summoned up. Yet what is from the start unrecognized and not in the least questioned is that this "will" is precisely what has in advance already posited and reduced that which may be possible and especially that which may be necessary. For, this will which makes everything has in advance pledged itself to machination, i.e., to that interpretation of beings as representable and represented. Representable means, on the one hand, accessible in opinion and calculation and, on the other hand, providable in production and implementation. All this is thought on the grounds that beings as such are the represented, and only the represented is a being. What seems to oppose and limit machination is, for machination itself, merely material for further work, an impetus to progress, and an opportunity for expansion and augmentation. Within machination, there is nothing question-worthy, nothing that could be deemed worthy through questioning as such, alone deemed worthy and thereby illuminated and raised into truth.
2. Cf. The Resonating, 72. Nihilism.