because God cannot. As perfectly self-coincident, with no unrealized potential (μὴ ὕλην ἔχει),154 Aristotle’s God is the apex of immediacy, perfectly closed in upon itself in a divine narcissism of pure self-presence.
This reference to a theological limit-situation helps clarify why “time”—thrown-openness—is associated with the understanding of being. In order to know anything at all we must synthesize and distinguish the thing and its possible meanings; and in order to do that, we must (metaphorically speaking) “traverse an open space” (eine offene Weite zu durchgehen) within which the synthesizing-and-distinguishing can take place.155 This “open space” is what Heidegger calls the clearing that lets us relate things and meanings.156 As thrown-open, human beings are a priori thrown into the labor of mediation, condemned to (or better, liberated for) making sense of things both practically and theoretically. This fatedness to mediation is emblematic of finitude, proof positive that we are not completely self-present and thus are bereft of a godlike intuition of the “unchanging reality” of things. Meaningful presence is never pure presence and actuality, but always open-ended, suffused with further possibilities. Our knowing is not perfect light but chiaroscuro, not the divine’s eternal rest but an ever ongoing movement of disclosure coupled with an inevitable failure-to-disclose.
At the very beginning of his 1915 inaugural habilitation lecture, “The Concept of Time in the Science of History.” Heidegger placed an epigram taken from Meister Eckhart that defines time in terms of possibility: “Time is what changes and becomes multiple. Eternity remains simple.”157 Before Eckhart, St. Augustine had likewise drawn a contrast between the concentrated unity of the eternal God and the dispersion and distraction of human beings (inter te unum et nos multos in multis per multa),158 which is further evidenced in the simplicity of eternity versus the distention of time: “Nothing passes away in eternity; all is present. Time, on the other hand, is never completely present, but the past is always driven on by the future.”159 Over against God’s ever-actualized self-coincidence there is the dispersion and stretching out of the human spirit, the distentio animi, a
154. Metaphysics XII 9, 1075a4.
155. GA 15: 380.6 = 68.43. See GA 14: 81.35 and 84.3–4 = 66.19 and 68.9; and GA 7: 19.12 = 18.32.
156. Also “world.” Cf. “Die Lichtung des Seins, und nur sie, ist Welt”: GA 9: 326.15–16 = 248.37–38. GA 38: 168.13–14 = 140.7–8: “Das Sein im Ganzen . . . ist die Welt.” GA 79: 51.34–52.1 = 49.18: “Die Welt ist . . . das Sein selber.”
157. GA 1: 415.1–3 = 61.2–4. Heidegger’s italics.
158. Augustine, Confessiones XI 29, 39, Patrologia Latina, 32, 825.8–9.
159. Confessiones XI 11, 13, Patrologia Latina, 32, 814.48–51: “non autem praeterire quidquam in aeterno, sed totum esse praesens; nullum vero tempus totum esse praesens; et videat [quisquis] omne praeteritum propelli ex futuro.”