Why “mortal”? To answer that we step back once again into Heidegger’s philosophical narrative about the original, non-subjective Greek sense of meaningful presence, an experience available to us as well. We find the things of the world already opened up, accessible, and meaningful before we ourselves have any chance to make it so. The wondrous fact is that things already make sense and that “something” (although the Greeks knew not what) has antecedently opened the world for human use and enjoyment, knowledge and exploitation, creativity and appreciation. Plato and Aristotle were quite aware of the wonder of meaningful presence (τὸ ὄν ὡς ἀληϑές = ἀλήϑεια-2), but what they did not know is how and why that is the case. They missed the fact that it is our own nature—the very way we are: thrown-open/appropriated—that has “preceded” us and, as ἀλήϑεια-1, has always already opened up the world of ἀλήϑεια-2. But the poets and tragedians of ancient Greece were attuned to this basic human fact to the degree that they understood our desperate need to hold things together against the onslaught of chaos, to gather them into a coherent whole within which we strive to fulfill our needs and desires. Sustaining and living in such a world is our response to the fact that all around us things are changing, going their own way, unfolding in multiple directions, and at the same time falling apart. Everything is in a state of flux, everything is becoming. And becoming not only generates novelty but also leads things to their demise.
On the one hand, in the return of things and seasons, in the world’s “slow rotation suggesting permanence,”11 the Greeks saw some hope of constancy and eternity—what Heidegger calls “stable presence.” But on the other hand, their tragedians had a strong sense of the struggle to the death, the πόλεμος, that underlies such ultimately transient stability. We are enveloped both by riotous becoming and by death-dealing entropy, and nowhere is this more evident than in our own lives, which ever shoulder up against mortality: nascendo et moriendo.12 Our urge to survive resists death and the chaos of things going their own way apart from us—and yet our mortality is our very bondedness to the chaos that will finally swallow us. We struggle for a secure space where we can, at least for a while, hold things together. We are born as λόγος, the need and ability to gather disparate things into a tentative unity of sense and thereby secure a shared human world (perhaps overseen and guaranteed by the gods) that we can inhabit for these few years. Our inescapable need of meaning is both the passing remedy for and the surest sign of our mortality. We cannot have one without the other. Ours is a fight to the death against death in the
11. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” III. See chapter 2, note 111.
12. A favorite phrase of Augustine’s: De vera religione liber unus, XLVI, 88: Patrologia Latina, 34, 161.35 (repeated, Retractationes, liber primus, XIII, 8: ibid., 32, 605.18). Also: De natura boni contra manicheos, liber unus, VIII: ibid., 42, 554.39; De sermone domini in monte, liber primus, XV, 40 and 41: ibid., 34, 1249.57–58; etc.