The ontological and the ontic

Here is a handy way to grasp what Heidegger means by specifying something as "ontological" instead of "ontic." Essentially, you reckon with the ontic, you understand the ontological: the ontic is something adequately grasped by something like counting, while the ontological is something grasped only adequately when it is seen and participated in as significant.
When someone sees something recur many times and points it out repeatedly, we complain to her or him sometimes by saying sarcastically, "geez, are you counting?" For example, say I am talking, and I keep unintentionally saying the word "like:" "so I was like, at the store and like, totally like saw this dude there that like looked like, like, Josh, man." My listener interrupts my discourse with the following: "dude, you said "like," like 50 times there." I would find this comment annoying and inappropriate to the matter at hand--what I'm trying to get across is my encounter with this guy who looked like Josh, not how many times I said "like." So I'd say back to him sarcastically, "dude--are you like counting how many times I say 'like'?" It makes him seem obsessive and unable to grasp the import of what I'm getting at because he's focused on some trivial thing. Another, perhaps better example (which comes c/o watching the Yankees game in my apartment in the Village tonight): say I'm at a baseball game with some friends, and I keep noticing that Derek Jeter keeps scratching his leg when he comes up to the plate. I say something like, "He's doing it again!" each time he comes up to bat, and finally all my friends get annoyed and yell at me "dude, are you like, counting?" In essence, what has happened is that I have focused on something that diminishes the essence of whatever is occuring or existing then in the game by drawing attention away from it and towards some minor event.
This chastizing, sarcastic phrase, "are you counting or something?" functions to call us away from the ontic and towards the ontological. The ontic was the phenomenon that was countable or rather reckon-able--the "like," and the scratching of the leg. In other words, it was what had such little significance that it could be grasped by merely marking its simply occuring--by saying "dude you said 'like' like 50 times" or by just saying "it's happening again!" In short, it was a discrete, contained event that cut itself off from the significance of the conversation and the game--this is why the phrase "are you counting!?" is so apt. There is a mode of interpretation of the event that indeed thinks that it adequately grasps the particular event by merely counting it, by limiting significance down to individual elements that make up the whole of significance. The ontological is that significance without any differentiation into things like elements--in the examples, it is the making of the point in the conversation and the importance of the particular at bat in which Jeets scratches his leg. I limit down this importance--to use the second example--by focusing on the leg, by treating the importance of the at-bat as something that can be localized into a small area of significance. I get called back by the sarcastic remark from my friends to an event that is not merely adequately grasped by counting or reckoning with it, but by understanding it, by interpreting it and letting myself be free for interpretation in various ways. The ontological is something that gets understood in a larger sense by me taking up whatever is going on and giving meaning to it: in the at bat, I certainly don't "understand" it by remarking "he's doing it again!" but by participating in the event, by being a spectator watching the game. For my friend who is listening to me, he understands me by making my point mean something for him as he is listening to me--not by pointing out that I say "like" a lot. For my friends at the game--to conclude with this example--I am hopelessly lost however if I continue to talk about the leg-scratching: I cannot see what they see, the larger significance of the game that makes them a fan and a fan of Jeter. This is the "ontological difference," a phrase often used to describe Heidegger's distinction between the ontic and the ontological. On either side of this difference, there is a different way of grasping what is going on.
One last remark, using the baseball example: we indeed do have people who just reckon with statistics: they are announcers and bookkeepers and in fact enhance the significance of the game for the fans through their ontical understanding, by their reducing the overall significance of the game into little elements. Thus the ontic can enrich the ontological understanding of something. But it would be sad if all the significance of a game were reduced down to statistics merely--this lament is one that is said from an grasping or understanding of the game that is ontological and not ontic, that sees it as something that has significance that is taken over and reinterpreted by anyone who views it ontologically.

A bit of a technical post-script is in order, however--and this is just a post-script, by the way, unessential to the above part. Just because you "count" or reckon with the ontic, and understand the "significance" of the ontological, doesn't mean that the ontic is what is merely quantitative and the ontological merely qualitative. Nor does it mean that the ontic is something determinate and the ontological indeterminate. For even when we say that the ontic might be what is quantative we are already attributing a quality to it: the quality of being able to be only conceived quantitatively. So too do we attribute quantity to the qualitative in calling it merely qualitative: it has a singular quantity as opposed to a multiplicity--it is one whereas the quantiative proper is supposedly many. What characterizes the ontic and the ontological is not quantity or quality but significance--in technical terms, the "kind of Being" of things that fall into each category. The ontic has essentially a different type of significance than the significance of the ontological: it is a significance that is adequately grasped in reckoning or counting. The ontological, however, only has a signficance that can be grasped insofar as we grasp it in terms of significance. This is why it is more "primordial" than the ontic--that is not because it is "qualitative" or "indeterminate," murky and obscure in its profundity, but because it is the significance of something explicitly taken as significance. To just hint at what this means, we might say that it requires a shift in the way we conceive of truth. The truth of the ontological is not conceived in terms of how correct something is to how it is represented, because if we are not within the sphere of the ontic, the representation of the thing and the thing itself are both taken in terms of significance. Rather, the truth is in how profoundly as significance the significance of something constitutes itself. Its truth is in terms of how profoundly it reveals itself to be part of its essence as existent, or, rather, in terms of how it discloses its Being.