Heidegger is concerned with laying the foundations of ontology, more precisely with a phenomenological determination of “Dasein” from the existence of man, which he analyzes as a way of being in the world. For him, time has no tangible character, but is a mode of appearance of being: time is not a what, but a how. His starting point is a temporal analysis of existence, which he associates with presence and present.

Following on from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dilthey and their emphasis on the historical variability of our understanding of the world and ourselves, shaped by coincidences, Heidegger turns against traditional metaphysics, which, with its search for primal causes and eternal laws, strives for ultimate truths and determined security or absolute controllability. He focuses his interest on concrete life in its historically evolved reality, shaped by coincidences. He is concerned not with making one’s own life into an object and thus understanding it as a thing, but with focusing on the performance of living itself.

Beings in general and life in particular are not just existing isolated things, but are embedded in world relationships whose meaning only becomes clear against a temporal horizon. Heidegger illustrates this with means-end relationships, which can only be understood in the temporal description of use. However, his aim is not to make the unavailable future available through determinations or calculations, but to remain open and ready at all times for the event that suddenly breaks out, for life that is lived immediately. In terms of time, his aim is to direct our attention away from the usability of things that currently exist and towards their becoming and their limited but not predetermined development possibilities.

Beyond Kant’s definition of time as an a priori form of perception through which we can fix something as something in the ’now‘, Heidegger defines time as an existential condition for us to be able to design a world at all and thus place ourselves in a life context in which the knowledge of existing objects also plays a secondary role. According to Heidegger, what a thing is in general and life in particular cannot be understood from its present being here, but only in the meaningful context of temporal world relations. Only then, to quote Heidegger’s well-known example, does a piece of wood and iron become a hammer.

The world design and the context of life emerge from a temporal double movement which, in relation to the present, takes place in a run-forward into an indeterminate but finite future (being towards death) and a return from a past/has-been that shapes openness to the world we encounter.

For Heidegger, death does not simply limit life in a final, ending sense after the passage of a lifetime, but rather the knowledge of one’s own mortality, as borderline knowledge, runs through the whole of life (being towards death) in his view, whether spoken or unspoken, and shapes existence in its existential attitude. If people did not have to die, not only would the end of life be eliminated, but their whole life would take on a different character. Thus, the indeterminate death that lies in the future already has an effect in the present. There is a reference of the future to the present. Heidegger sees the original phenomenon of the future in the approach of the last possibility of death to humans.

The past also has an effect on the present. Heidegger speaks of „having been“ (Gewesenheit) and thereby refers to the acceptance of the thrownness of humans, the fact that they do not define or create themselves, but as humans always already are what they have become. The past is not a supporting foundation, but rather something that forces us into the present human constitution and restricts our possibilities of being.

For Heidegger, temporality is the unity of future, having been (Gewesenheit) and present (the meaning of existence that enables us to care). „Temporality is a comprehensive characterization of finitude and an emphasis on the simultaneous openness of existence towards what happened in the past, what we encounter in the present and future possibilities. With historicity, man is revealed as a repeating being who can only reach the possibilities of his existence through internalized appropriation of the historical heritage.“ (Stegmüller, p. 157)

The radical experience of one’s own finiteness enables, in Heidegger’s view, an “ authentic“ existence and opens up the horizon of the diverse possibilities of our everyday existence (Dasein). Being and time emerge from the deep dimension of an „there is“, which is conceived as a fundamentally indeterminate space of possibility, from which reality in the sense of a concrete being with a concrete temporality first crystallizes.

For Heidegger, authenticity and inauthenticity are modes of temporalization (ecstasies) of temporality. In inauthentic being in the world, the tension between past and future shrinks to a minimum and man loses himself in the everyday. Only in authentic existence does this tension come to full effect. For Heidegger, the specific characteristics of the authentic, temporally unfolding existence of man are the mood of fear, the experience of guilt, hearing the call of conscience, the ability to gain and lose oneself, dying and the appropriation of what has been handed down through history.

In Heidegger’s existentially defined, authentic temporality, the past and present are determined by the future and the determined, anticipatory knowledge of one’s own mortality. Heidegger contrasts this with the everyday, practical normal case of inauthentic temporality, in which we ignore the knowledge of mortality and the future and past are determined by our present needs and interests. In the practical contexts of everyday life, time appears as a „world time“ built into everyday errands and determined by them.

While in inauthentic temporality, which is understood as deficient, something of the ecstatic constitution of actual temporality can still be felt, this ecstatic reference is completely ignored in the temporality described by Heidegger as vulgar. Time becomes an external temporal power that has become objective, a pure now-sequence in which deadlines rule and which one is always just running after. Objectified time flows under one’s hands. Any time saved immediately becomes empty time, which has to be filled with work again. In Therapie words of Mike Sandbothe: „It is no longer the concrete errands and needs that determine the timetable, but rather it is empty time itself that awakens new needs and forces its own capitalization.“

Infinite measured time is derived from the authentic finite temporality and is secondary. It has a public character and is assigned to the events in the world reduced to their presence as something that is itself merely present, leveled as a „gapless, indifferent succession of qualitatively indifferent existing now points“ (Stegmüller).

Heidegger thus distinguishes between three forms of temporality, which according to Sandbothe represents a continuation of the temporalization of time initiated by Kant under the concrete conditions of human being-in-the-world: the fundamental, authentic temporality concerned with concern for the future, the present-centered, practically oriented inauthentic temporality, and the linear vulgar temporality.

Man is not temporal because he is in the flow of time, but because temporality constitutes his innermost essence. Likewise, he is not historical because he is bound up in the objective course of world history, but because existence as such is constituted by historicity. Heidegger consistently gives priority to the subjective over the objective. According to Heidegger, the possibilities that man can seize come from the acquired traditional heritage. He is a being that is open to the future and repeats the past. Human action does not gain historical meaning from a supposedly objectively known context of history, but by referring back to the individual uniqueness of what has been and, in response, „pushing forward into the still undecided darkness of the future“ (Stegmüller).

While the early Heidegger connects the basic temporal structures with Dasein, the late Heidegger places the basic temporal structures in connection with Being. The „priority of the future“ takes a back seat to „the unity of the three dimensions of authetic time“, which is now thought of as an equal „reciprocal relationship“. The temporality of being is no longer conceived as the ultimate foundational dimension, but as an occurrence that can also take place differently, i.e. is in principle open to historical-cultural change.

The various definitions of being in metaphysics lead Heidegger to the conclusion that being itself has a history. He describes his turn to the history of being as the history of concealing the original (still authentic) understanding of being as a „turn“ (Kehre). This is not about overcoming metaphysics, but rather a „twisting“ because he wants to uncover a „different“ beginning by going back to the first beginnings with the original, pre-metaphysical understanding of being and a learning understanding of its metaphysical over-imprints.

Heidegger characterizes the desired transition from the first to the other beginning as a leap into a true historical thinking of being, in which being is not addressed as a definable given, but rather an unavailable historical process of concealing and revealing the experience of being, through which the world occurs epochally as a whole of meaning and from which it is then determined what is essential and what is inessential, what is and what is not. Heidegger’s talk of the event, of the fate of being and the withdrawal of being expresses the fact that man is embedded in a process of transmission over which he cannot simply dispose, but which in a certain way disposes him.

Literature:

Böhler, Arno, in 6. Vorlesung GesmbH (0:56:50), gehalten mit Manfred Füllsack an der Uni Wien

Poller, Horst, Die Philosophen und ihre Kerngedanken, München Olzog Verlag, 2. Auflg. 2007 S. 428

Sandbothe, Mike, Die Verzeitlichung der Zeit in der modernen Philosophie unter Rückbezug auf Kant und Heidegger, erschienen in: Die Wiederentdeckung der Zeit, hrsg. von Antje Gimmler, Mike Sandbothe und Walther Ch. Zimmerli, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1997

Sandbothe, Mike, Stichwort: Zeit – Von der Grundverfassung des Daseins zur Vielfalt der Zeit-Sprachspiele, in Heidegger-Handbuch, Hg. Dieter Thomä, Stuttgart: Metzler 2003, 87-92

Stegemüller, Wolfgang, Hauptströmungen der Gegenwartsphilosophie, Bd. 1, 7. Auflage, Alfred Kröner Verlag 1989, 135-177

Wikpedia-Artikel zu Martin Heidegger in der Version vom 21.12.2024, mit starken Bezügen auf Rainer Thurnher: Martin Heidegger. In: Heinrich Schmidinger, Wolfgang Röd, Rainer Thurnher: Geschichte der Philosophie. Band XIII, München 2002

Further Reading:

Sören Kierkegaard (Time Thinkers)

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