Truth and Finitude • 219
itself—in existential responsibility. Therefore, resolute being toward death is the condition of the possibility of ontological truth.
The first and second stages of the grounding showed in a preliminary way how ontical truth is feasible and nonarbitrary and how, as such, it is beholden to entities and binding on dasein. Those demonstrations were only preliminary, however, because the status of the presupposed possibilities for those entities was left out of account. If those possibilities themselves (the disclosed being of the entities) were to remain arbitrary and therefore neither beholden nor binding, then the achievement of the first two stages would be hollow at best— even ontical truth would not be a sort of truth after all. The demonstration that ontological truth (disclosedness) is itself feasibly nonarbitrary and, as resolute, also bound and beholden closes that gap. It constitutes, therefore, the third and most fundamental stage in the grounding of ontical truth. The existential conception of finitude—death—that is its crux is accordingly transcendental.
Kant understands human knowledge as essentially finite. Only in terms of this finitude does a transcendental grounding of its objectivity so much as make sense. But the finitude of knowledge is itself grasped only in contrast to and as falling short of infinite knowing. The relationship between any knowing and what is known in it can never be merely arbitrary. Infinite (divine) knowledge is perfect in itself in that it is not in any way limited by what it knows. Infinite just means unlimited: unbounded and unbound. Such knowledge is therefore originary or creative; that is how the relationship to what it knows is nonarbitrary (in effect, what is known is bounded and bound by the knowing of it).
Finite human knowledge, by contrast, is not perfect in itself. Since it is not originary, it can be knowledge only insofar as it is bounded and bound by what it knows. But that means that what ever it knows must stand over against it as an object (Gegenstand). So, finite knowledge can only (at best) be objective—it falls short of being creative. In order to be objective (bounded and bound), it must be responsive to objects, which means it needs a passive faculty of receptivity. But since mere passivity does not suffice for objectivity (it suffices for boundedness but not for bindingness), finite knowledge also needs an active faculty of spontaneity—a faculty that can somehow bind itself to what is accessible in receptivity. The entire problem of the transcendental analytic is to delineate the conditions under which this self-binding is possible—an issue that arises only because human knowledge is only finite.