THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
remains open within the essential realm thus decided. In accordance with the precedence of beings which starts with the beginning of metaphysics, Being, meanwhile represented as the general determination (koinon, katholou, genus, commune) of beings, takes its essential shape in virtue of an authoritative being.
What real being the authoritative effecting effects as the determination of reality's essence cannot be calculated and can only be seemingly established historically. Since the creator god as first cause is what primarily effects, and since his effects, however, are the world, and within the world the true effector is man; the triad: God, world (nature), man circumscribes the realm of possibilities according to which one of these realms of what is real takes over the structuring of reality's essence. Assuming, however, that the determination of reality in accordance with what is authoritatively real also does not primordially come from beings, but rather stems from Being itself; then the development of reality's essence within a metaphysics must also point to this origin. An indication of this becomes apparent in the fact that the actual essence of truth, in whose light a period of mankind experiences beings, participates in the history of Being. The manner of this participation remains, of course, profoundly veiled.
Truth, meanwhile in metaphysics changed to the distinctive trait of the intellect (humanus, divinus), comes to its ultimate essence which is called certainty. The name expresses the fact that truth concerns consciousness as a knowledge, a representation which is grounded in consciousness in such a way that only that knowledge is valid as knowledge which at the same time knows itself and what it knows as such, and is certain of itself in this knowledge. Certainty here is not to be taken only as an addition to knowledge in the sense that it accomplishes the appropriation and the possession of knowledge. Rather, certainty is the authoritative mode of knowledge, that is, "truth," as the consciousness, conscious of itself, of what is known. The mere having of something in consciousness is, in contrast, either no longer knowledge or not yet knowledge.
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