The Understanding of Time in Phenomenology and in the Thinking of the Being-Question

Martin Heidegger


Translated by Thomas Sheehan and Frederick Elliston


Introductory Note
by
Thomas Sheehan


In this brief contribution1 Heidegger takes the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Husserl's death to claim the title of phenomenology for the whole of his own work while noting his distance from his master. Husserl stated the maxim of phenomenology in section 24 of his Ideas (1913) as the requirement of accepting, for the legitimation of knowledge, only that which gives itself in original intuition as it gives itself within the limits of its self-givenness. Husserl had already shown in Logical Investigations (VI, 6) that such presentations are categorial as well as sensuous: beings in their beingness, as Heidegger would put it. The younger Heidegger read that earlier work as freeing the beingness of beings from its traditional imprisonment in the copula of sentential logic so as to render it present for intuition. Husserl had thus brilliantly uncovered the major premise of the tradition, unspoken since the Greeks, that beingness (whether idea, energeia, esse, or whatever) was givenness or presen tness and that the true field for philosophy was the correlation between ousia and logos in their phenomenological immediacy. But the later Ideas, in Heidegger's reading, slipped back into the power of a neo-Kantian transcendental ego and the problematic of consciousness.

In a recently discovered letter of June 20, 1919, from one Herr Walter of Freiburg to Professor Pfänder, we find that, a full eight years before the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger was openly criticizing the transcendental ego in Husserl. Walter reports that at one of the Saturday-morning discussions which Husserl was accustomed to have at his home, the young Doctors Ebbinghaus and Heidegger launched a "campaign against the pure ego." Whereas Ebbinghaus, from his Fichtean and Hegelian standpoint, entirely dismissed the possibility of a contentless transcendental ego, Heidegger expressed his opposition by mediating between Husserl and Ebbinghaus: "He says that the pure ego would derive from the 'historical ego' via the repression of all historicity and quality, but that it could only be the subject of material-theoretical acts [sachlich-theoretischer Akte]."2

For Heidegger, the "historical ego" (a stand-in word for what he properly called the facticity of Dasein) is thrown into the privative "absence" whence arises the revealedness, or aletheia, of whatever appears. If Husserl had discovered that ousia, beingness, is present givenness, then one could ask the phenomenological Wie-Frage about how that givenness is given. This would be the promised land of the question of the possibilizing condition or "meaning" of beingness, but Husserl was refused access by his eventual self-restriction to the issues of consciousness and its objectivity. It was Heidegger's privilege to enter that land and chart its topology by pushing the ousia-logos correlation of immediately intuitable givenness back to the prior kinesis or movement which is the very enactment (Vollzug) of the bond between man and beingness. Since kinesis is fundamentally a matter of presence-by-absence (in Aristotle, energeia that is still caught in dynamis, hence energeia ateles ), Heidegger would enter the promised land by reawakening the question of "time" - not as Aristotle's number of movement in terms of no-longer and not-yet but as a unique kind of movement itself: absence as the condition of presentness (beingness) in phenomenological appearance. Thus, while the tradition, from Plato through Husserl, had been clear about the beingness of beings (the givenness of what is given), it had overlooked the question of the giving of givenness itself: how absence, held open but never controlled by man's transcendence, allows the presentness of whatever appears: presence-by-absence, pres-ab-sence.

The historicity which Heidegger claims for Dasein is not primarily a matter of tracing the history of thought but one of deconstructing that history in order to find its primal event: man's thrownness into, or appropriation by, the ever-receding dimension he calls lethe, which makes the revealedness or givenness (aletheia) of beings possible. That event remains the one and only topic of Heidegger's thought from beginning to end, whether he calls it the time-fraught "meaning" of beingness or its self-opening "truth" or its dynamic "place." We might call it the "kinetic determination of givenness" in an interplay of "recess" (self-withdrawing lethe) which claims "excess" (Dasein's transcendence) for the sake of "access" (the givenness of beings) . Such a unique conception of time as kinesis remains foreign to Husserl's studies in internal time-consciousness. It is entirely at the service of asking how givenness is given: the "Being-question."

Article

Being and Time says that we must understand and do phenomenology not in its actuality but in its possibility. The real maxim of phenomenology is not the "principle of all principles" but the maxim "To the issue itself!" But if we think about this maxim phenomenologically, the question arises: What is the issue for philosophy? Is it consciousness? It remains to be asked: By what route do I get at an answer to this question? Can I decide this question purely from myself in my own egological intuition? Or does this reflection necessarily have a relation to history [Geschichte], not just an historiological relation but an historical [geschichtlicher] one? For the history of thought is not just a bunch of differing opinions from the past but rather contains the claim which is made on us to pose the same question again and again, the question about the Being of beings. From this there follows the larger question which I emphatically claim to be phenomenological: If throughout its whole history metaphysics certainly speaks of the Being of beings in the various transformations of idea, energeia, actualitas, monad, objectivity, Absolute Spirit, absolute knowledge, Will to Power -then in terms of what is the essence of Being to be determined?

The first impetus toward this question hit me during a long-standing occupation with Aristotle, my first guide being Franz Brentano's dissertation On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (1862) . The question which bothered me more and more was this: What is the determining unity in these several senses? What does "Being" mean? The other impetus toward the development of the "Being-question" came from the insight that the Greeks think of Being as presentness, in conjunction with aletheia, i.e., unconcealment. As I pondered this thought, especially when in the meanwhile my way of seeing had been trained in phenomenology, I succeeded in taking the question a step further. Inasmuch as a characteristic of time manifests itself in presentness and the present [in Anwesenheit, Gegenwart], must not the meaning of Being receive its determination from time? Meanwhile, it became evident that the determination of time in philosophy since Aristotle had been carried out from the standpoint of Being as presentness. What is in time is always the now; the past is the no-longer-now, the future is the not-yet-now. The traditional notion of time proved to be inadequate for the attempt to discuss the relation of Being and time. My question about time was determined from the question of Being. It went in a direction which has always remained foreign to Husserl's investigations on internal time-consciousness.


Notes

1 This text first appeared in Phänomenologie - lebendig oder tot? ed. Helmut Gehrig (Karlsruhe: Badenia, 1969), p. 47, under the title "Ueber das Zeitverständnis in der Phänomenologie und im Denken der Seinsfrage." The volume was published under the auspices of the Catholic Academy of Freiburg in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of Husserl's death. An editor's note to the German text says that the statement is to be taken together with Heidegger's contribution to the Festgabe for Hermann Niemeyer that has since come into English as "My Way Phenomenology," in Martin Heidegger, On 'Time and Being,' trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 74-82. The translators express thanks to Mrs. Elfride Heidegger and to the Catholic Academy of Freiburg for permission to bring this text into English.

2 Husserl Archives, R. III Walter 20. VI. 19.



Martin Heidegger - The Understanding of Time in Phenomenology and in the Thinking of the Being-Question (GA 14)

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