Heidegger - Modernity and Mediocrity (German Philosophy)

The truly uncanny circumstance that must arise in the age of the consummation of modernity, i.e., in the age of the exploration, conquest, and the mastery of the earth, is the gigantic mediocrity in everything.  Thereby everything is protected but is also only used as a means to power.  'Culture' (itself already a modern formation) and 'barbarity' amount to the same, their difference collapses, the one stands for the other.  On this basis, the entire past is correspondingly recalculated and the 'goals' of the 'future' are 'posited'.  Therefore to fear the advent of an age of 'barbarity' is childish.  That age will never arrive.  But just as little will a 'culture in itself' blossom.  The gigantism [riesig] of the unconditional mediocrity in everything becomes a genuine bulwark against every decision regarding anything essential and obstructs the way to a presentiment of what is inceptual.  Everything that emerges and bestirs itself is also already calculated and arranged.  The unconditional, all-knowing, all calculating, all-computing mediocrity in everything as the measure of what is highest...

  

M.H.  Ponderings, XII-XV

trns. by Richard Rojcewicz 


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