This does not hinder the rise of rationalism and irrationalism, but rather first prepares it and strengthens it.

Because beings have been created by God, that is, have been thought out rationally in advance, then as soon as the relation of creature to creator is dissolved, while at the same time human reason attains predominance, and even posits itself as absolute, the Being of beings must become thinkable in the pure thinking [148|202] of mathematics. Being as calculable in this way, Being as set into calculation, makes beings into something that can be ruled in modern, mathematically structured technology, which is essentially something different from every previously known use of tools.

That which is, is only that which, when correctly thought, stands up to correct thinking.

The main term for the Being of beings, that is, its definitive interpretation, is οὐσία. As a philosophical concept, the word means constant presence. Even at the time when this word had already become the dominant conceptual term in philosophy, it still retained its original meaning: ἡ ὑπαρχοῦσα οὐσία (Isocrates) is present-at-hand possessions.¹¹⁰ But even this fundamental meaning of οὐσία and the track it lays out for the interpretation of Being could not maintain itself. Οὐσία immediately began to be reinterpreted as substantia. This meaning remains current in the Middle Ages and in modernity up to now. Greek philosophy is then interpreted retroactively, that is, falsified from the bottom up, on the basis of the dominant concept of substance—the concept of function is only its mathematicized degeneration.

It remains to be seen how, starting with οὐσία as the term that is now definitive for Being, the separations we have discussed before between Being and becoming, Being and seeming are also conceived.

110. Isocrates, To Demonicus, chap. 19 and chap. 28.