In this way, the pure relation of the I-think-unity (basically a tautology) becomes the unconditioned relation, which means that the self-present present becomes the paradigm of all beingness.
However much everything in the deeper relations remains hidden, the one decisive circumstance thereby shows itself: because thinking becomes without condition the guideline, and the more genuinely it does so, all the more decisively is presentness as such—i.e., "time"—in an original sense that which in an entirely hidden and unquestioned way gives truth to beingness.
Absolute knowledge, unconditioned thinking, is now the utterly paradigmatic being and likewise the one that grounds everything.
Only now can we see that the guideline is not a mere procedural aid in the act of thinking; it is rather the foundational and as such hidden provision of the horizon for the interpretation of beingness. Since it arises from ungrounded ἀλήθεια, this provision of the horizon can develop in the beginning only by forming out of itself the basic component (the subject-object relation) of correctness along with its own possibilities (of self-knowledge—reflexion) up to the level of the unconditioned in identity as such.
Thus it becomes clear at the same time how, in absolute knowledge, "correctness" is maximally increased, so that as the present of the present it must return to ἀλήθεια in a certain way and on another level—in such a way, of course, that every explicit relation to correctness now still more definitively comes to be known and even questioned.
How little this can succeed is manifest in Nietzsche's understanding of truth. For him, truth deteriorates into a necessary illusion, into an unavoidable stabilization introduced into beings themselves, which are determined as "will to power."
Thus Western metaphysics at its end is furthest from the question of the truth of beyng and yet is at once closest—in the sense that as it ends it has prepared the transition to this question.
Truth as correctness is unable to recognize (i.e., to ground) its own playing field as such. It helps itself by raising itself up to the unconditioned and by bringing everything under itself, so as to become (it seems) free from the need for a ground.
In order to expose the history of the "guideline," i.e., the establishment of the horizon in absolute knowledge, the following steps and levels are important:
From the ego cogito sum as the first certainty (the definitive certum = verum = ens) to the connaissance des verites necessaires ["knowledge of necessary truths"] as condition of possibility for reflexion, i.e., for grasping the I as "1." The most necessary truth is the essence of what