interpretation of οὐσία and of all the determinations that were given of the essential nature of beings. To be sure, production functions here in a different sense, which connects up with the function mentioned.

Earlier we said that the production of something involves a peculiar character of discharge and release on the basis of which the product is apprehended from the beginning as having been put there for itself and being present there independently and of itself. It is apprehended in this way in the producing itself. not only after the producing, but already in the consciousness of the project. In the function of production now under discussion, its function for the interpretation of the possibility of knowing the being of a being, a different structural moment of production comes into question. one that we also touched on earlier. All production takes place in conformity with an original and prototypical image as model. The antecedent imagining of such a model is part of the producing. We heard earlier that the concept of εἶδος also had grown from the horizon of production. In the antecedent imagining and projecting of the prototypical image. there is already a direct grasp of what the product-to-be really is. What is at first thought of as the original, prototypical model to be copied in production is apprehended directly in the imagining. What constitutes the being of the being is already anticipated in the εἶδος. That which says how the thing will look or, as we also say. how it will tum out-if and when, of course, it has turned out-is already anticipated and circumscribed in the εἶδος. The anticipation of the prototypical pattern which takes place in production is the true knowledge of what the product is. It is for this reason that only the producer of something. its originator. perceives a being in the light of what it is. Because the creator and producer imagines the model beforehand, he is therefore also the one who really knows the product. As self-producer (uncreated), he is also the authentic being.

By reason of this connection, the concept οὐσία already has a twofold meaning in Greek ontology. For one thing οὐσία signifies the produced extant entity itself or also its extantness. But at the same time οὐσία also signifies much the same thing as εἶδος in the sense of the prototypical pattern which is merely thought of or imagined-what the being already really is as produced. its appearance, what outlines it, the way in which it will show up and look as product, how it will turn out.

God is regarded as a sculptor and specifically as the prototypical modeller of all things who needs nothing given to him beforehand and therefore also is not determined by receptivity. By reason of his absolute spontaneity, as actus purus, he is the first giver of everything that is, and not just that but even more, of everything possible. The finitude of things and persons is due to the producedness of things in general. The ens finitum is finite because it