The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me, it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being; that table which is there is being and ‘nothing’ more; that rock, that tree, that landscape -- being and ‘nothing’ else. I want to grasp this being and I no longer find anything by ‘myself.’ This is because knowledge, intermediate between being and non-being, refers me to absolute being it I want to make knowledge subjective and refers me to myself when I think to grasp the absolute. The very meaning of knowledge is what it is not and is not what it is; for in order to know being such as it is, it would be necessary to be that being. But there is this “such as it is” only because I am not the being which I know; and if I should become it, then the “such as it is” would vanish and could no longer even be thought. We are not dealing here either with scepticism -- which supposes precisely that the ‘such as is’ belongs to being -- or with relativism. Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowledge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less than the absolute, remains strictly human. 297