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We are indeed made for meaning, but that very fact is glaring proof of our finitude. By our very nature we are onto-logists, caught on the hyphen between the ὄν and the λόγος—between what we encounter and its possible meanings—and condemned to mediate between the two. As we mentioned in chapter 3, the God of traditional theology is not an onto-logist, because God does not mediate.11 In fact, God does not do meaning at all. “Ontology is an index of finitude. God does not have it. . . . Only a finite being requires ontology.”12 Here “ontology” refers to metaphysica naturalis,13 our need and ability to discursively interpret things (τὰ ὄντα λέγειν) in terms of their possible whatness and howness, something that God does not have to (and arguably cannot) do. Ontology in this broad sense is the purview only of the human subject as λόγον ἔχων, as endowed with the need and the ability to bind together things and their possible meanings.
Heidegger pierces through human discursivity to the underlying finitude that makes it possible. He was after the source of intelligibility, but unlike traditional metaphysics he sought a non-theistic, non-subjective, non-substantive source, the correlative of which was not an ontological subject, either divine or human, but a phenomenologically experienced “e-ject,” a self-concerned thrown-openness. Heidegger placed in question the “subject” that is correlative to meaning, first by strongly thematizing the ineluctable finitude of all the meaning that this subject can know. In Heidegger’s telling, the correlativity of man and being has long been known to philosophy. However, the open space (Lichtung) which makes such correlation possible, as well as the opening up (Lichten) of that space—or better, its ever-openedness (thrown-openness)—has long been overlooked by metaphysics because of the intrinsic hiddenness of that openness. Heidegger’s goal was to find and announce (kundgeben, κηρύσσειν) the ever-opened yet hidden clearing that makes possible the correlation of minding and the meant. The path to that goal led through the fundamental finitude of ex-sistence, and his early name for that finitude was thrownness (Geworfenheit).
11. See Aquinas, Scriptum super sententiis I, distinctio 25, quaestio 1, articulum 1, ad 4: “rationale est differentia animalis, et Deo non convenit nec angelis.” Roughly: The term “rational” has to do with a difference between species of animals [i.e., it differentiates man as the rational animal from other non-rational animals], and it does not pertain to either God or angels.
12. GA 3: 280.30–33 = 197.24–27.
13. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 21.