THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE
setting-before, and therewith the realm of all representedness and hence of all certainty and truth, he is securely established - which means, now, that he is. Only because, in the fundamental certainty (in the fundamentum absolutum inconcussum of the me cogitare = me esse), man is necessarily co-represented; only because man who has been liberated to himself belongs, of necessity, within the subiectum of this freedom - only for this reason can and must this man himself become the preeminent being, a mbiectu111 which, in respect of the primary [erste] true (i.e., certain) beings, takes precedence over all other subiecta. That is the fundamental equation of certainty. The fact, therefore, that in the authentic subiectum, the ego is named, does not mean that man now becomes an I-ness and is egoistically defined. It means only this: to be the subject now becomes the distinctiveness of man, of man as the being that thinks and represents. The human "I" is placed in the service of this subiectum. The certainty lying at the foundation of this subiectum is, as such, indeed subjective i.e., holding sway in the essence of the subiectum, but is not egoistic. In the same way, everything that is to be secured by means of representing objectification, and is established thereby as in being, is binding for everyone. From this objectification, however, which is at the same time the decision as to what may count as an object, nothing can escape. To the essence of the subjectivity of the subiectum, and of man as subject, belongs the unconditional delimiting forth [Entschränkung] of the sphere of possible objectification and the right to determine this objectification.
We have now explained the sense in which man is, and must be, the subject, measure, and center of beings: of, that is, objects [Objekte], things which stand over and against [Gegenstände]. Man is no longer the μέτρον in the sense of restraining his apprehension to the sphere of the unconcealment of what presences at his time — the sphere toward which man then presences. As subiectum man is the co-agitatio of the ego. Man establishes himself as the measure of all measures with which whatever can count as certain, i.e., true, i.e., in being, is measured off and measured out. Freedom is new as the freedom of the subiectum. In the Meditationes de prima philosophia the liberation of man to his new freedom is brought to that which grounds it. The liberation of modern humanity does not first begin with the ego cogito ergo sum, and neither is the metaphysics of Descartes merely supplied later on as something built on externally, a metaphysics in the sense of an ideology. In the co-agitBtio representation gathers everything that is an object in the gatheredness of representedness. The ego of the cogitare now discovers, in the self-securing togetherness of representedness, in the con-scientia, its essence. Conscientia is the representing gathering of
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