Martin Heidegger
The following deliberations deal with time. What is time?
If time finds its meaning in eternity, it then has to be understood by starting from eternity. The starting point and direction of this exploration are thereby mapped out in advance: from eternity to time. This way of raising the question is in order, provided that such a starting point is available to us, i.e., provided that we have an acquaintance and an adequate understanding of eternity at our disposal. If eternity were something more than an empty “being forever and always,” the ἀεί, if God were eternity, then this initially suggested way of considering time would necessarily present a quandary as long as one knows nothing of God and does not understand how to ask about Him. If the access to God is faith and if letting oneself become involved with eternity is nothing but faith, then philosophy will never have access to eternity. Accordingly, it can never make methodological usage of eternity as a possible way of discussing time. Philosophy can never escape this predicament. The theologian is accordingly the appropriate savant on time. And if memory serves me rightly, theology has to do with time in more ways that one.
Firstly, theology deals with human Da-sein as be-ing3 before God, with its temporal be-ing in its relationship to eternity. God himself does not need theology, for His existence is not grounded by faith.
Secondly, Christian faith in itself is to have a relation to something that happened in time—at a time, we are told, of which it is said: ‘In that time . . . ,’ ‘when time was fulfilled . . .’4
The philosopher does not believe. When the philosopher asks about time, he has resolved to understand time from out of time, or even from out of the ἀεί [ever, always], which looks like eternity but turns out to be a mere derivative of being temporal.
The following treatment is not theological. Theologically, this treatment of time can only mean making the question of eternity more difficult, preparing this question in the right way and posing it properly. The treatment is not even philosophical, since it does not pretend to provide a universally valid and systematic definition of time, and such a definition would then have to go back behind time and ask about its connection with other categories.
The following deliberations perhaps belong to a pre-science whose business it is to conduct investigations into what could ultimately be meant by what philosophy and science say and what the expository and interpretive speech of Da-sein says about itself and about the world. Clarifying what a clock is allows the kind of apprehension operative in physics to come alive, and with that also the way in which time has occasion to show itself. This pre-science within which this study moves is vitalized by the perhaps unusual presupposition that philosophy and science operate in concepts. The possibility of this pre-science resides in the presumption that all researchers must become clear on what they understand and do not understand. It lets us know when research is directly involved with its matter [Sache], or when it is simply feeding off a traditional and trite verbal knowledge of it. Such investigations are almost like the police force in service at the parade of the sciences, certainly a subordinate yet, in the opinion of some, a sometimes urgent business. The relationship of this pre-science to philosophy is only that of an escort, which at times must conduct a house search of the ancients in order to see how they did things. The following deliberation has only this much in common with philosophy, that it is not theology.
First a preliminary reference to the time that we encounter in everydayness, to the time of nature and of the world. Interest in what time is has been newly awakened in the present day by the development of research in physics and its reflection [Besinnung] on the basic principles of the kind of apprehending and defining that it performs: measuring nature within a system of space-time relations. The current state of this research is marked out by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Some of its propositions: “Space is nothing in itself; there is no absolute space. It exists only by way of the bodies and energies contained in it.” (An old proposition of Aristotle’s:) “Time too is nothing. It persists only as a result of the events occurring in it. There is no absolute time, and also no absolute simultaneity.”5 The overtly destructive statement of this theory allows one to easily overlook its positive side, namely, its demonstration of the invariance of the equations that describe natural processes, over against arbitrary transformations.
“Time is that within which events take place and run their course.”6 This was already seen by Aristotle in conjunction with the basic kind of being that befits natural being: change [Veränderung], change of place, locomotion: ἐπεὶ οὖν οὐ κίνησις, ἀνάγκη τῆς κινήσεώς τι εἶναι αὐτόν. “Since time is not itself motion, it must somehow have to do with motion.”7 Time is first encountered in changeable entities; change is in time. How is time found in this kind of encounter, namely, as the within- which of the changeable? Does it give itself here as itself in what it is? Can an explication of time that begins here guarantee that time will thereby yield, so to speak, the basic phenomena that define it in its very own be-ing? Or does the search for the grounds of the phenomena refer us to something else?
How do physicists encounter time? Their apprehension defining the time has the character of measuring. Measuring specifies the how-long and the when, the from-when-till-when. A clock shows the time. A clock is a physical system in which exactly the same temporal sequence is constantly repeated, as long as this physical system is not subject to change by any external influence. The repetition is cyclical. Each period has exactly the same temporal duration. The clock provides a constantly recurring equal duration, a duration to which one can always refer. The division of this constantly recurring stretch of duration is arbitrary. The clock measures time inasmuch as the stretch of the duration of an occurrence is compared with equivalent sequences of the clock and from that is numerically determined in its “so much.”
What do we learn about time from the clock? Time is something in which a now-point can be arbitrarily fixed so that, in regard to two different points of time, one is always earlier and the other later. Thereby no now-point of time is privileged over any other. As a “now,” it is the possible earlier of a later, and as a “later,” it is the later of an earlier. This time is through and through uniform, homogeneous. Only in so far as it is constituted homogeneously is time measurable. Time is thus an unreeling whose stages stand in a relation of earlier and later to one another. Each earlier and later is determinable from a now which, however, is itself arbitrary. If one goes to an event with a clock, then the clock makes the event explicit, but more with regard to its running its course in the now than with regard to the how-much of its duration. The primary determination achieved by the clock at any given time [jeweils] is not the declaration of how long or how much time transpired in the flowing present, but rather the fixing of the now at the time [jeweilig].8 When I take out my watch, the first thing I say is: “It is now nine o’clock; thirty minutes since that happened. In three hours it will be twelve.”
This time now, as I look at my watch, what is this now? Now, as I do this; now, as the light goes out here, for example. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other [person] the now? Then time would indeed be I myself, and every other [person] would be time. And in our being with one another we would be time—everyone and no one. Am I the now, or only the one who is saying this? With or without an actual clock? Now, in the evening, in the morning, tonight, today: Here we come upon a “clock” that human Da-sein has from the beginning and all along assumed, the natural clock of the rhythmic change of day and night.
What relevance is there in the fact that human Da-sein has already provided itself with a clock before all pocket watches and sundials? Do I have the be-ing of time at my disposal, and do I in the now also mean myself ? Am I myself the now and is my Da-sein time? Or is it in the end time itself that provides the clock in us for itself ? Augustine, in the Eleventh Book of his Confessions, pursued the question to the point of asking whether spirit itself is time. And Augustine left the question at that. “In te, anime meus, tempora metior; noli mihi obstrepere: quod est; noli tibi obstrepere turbis affectionum tuarum. In te, inquam, tempora metior; affectionem quam res praetereuntes in te faciunt, et cum illae praeterierint manet, ipsam metior praesentem, non eas quae praeterierunt ut fieret: ipsam metior, cum tempora metior.”9 To paraphrase: “In you, my spirit, I measure times; you I measure, thus I measure time. Do not cross me with the question: How is that? Do not mislead me into looking away from you through a false question. Do not obstruct your own path by confounding what may well concern you yourself. In you, I say again and again, I measure time; the things encountered transitorily bring you into a disposition [Befindlichkeit] that remains, while those things disappear. The disposition I measure in my present Da-sein, and not the things that pass by and pass over in order that this disposition may first arise. My very finding myself disposed, I repeat, is what I measure when I measure time.”
The question of what time is has referred our deliberations in the direction of Da-sein, if by Da-sein we mean that entity familiar to us in its be-ing as human life; this entity in each particular while10 of its be-ing, the entity that each of us ourselves is, that each of us finds in the ground assertion “I am.” The assertion “I am” is the proper assertion of be-ing pertaining to the Da-sein of human being. This entity is in each particular while mine.
But was this complicated deliberation necessary in order to arrive at Da-sein? Is it not enough to point out that acts of consciousness, psychic processes, are in time— even when these acts are directed toward something that is not itself defined by time? This is a detour. But what matters in the question of time is to arrive at an answer from which the various ways of being temporal become comprehensible, as well as to let a possible connection of that which is in time with proper temporality to become evident from the start.
Natural time as something long familiar and much discussed has hitherto provided the ground for the explication of time. If human be-ing is in time in an outstanding sense, so that we can read off from it what time is, then this Da-sein must be characterized in the basic determinations of its be-ing. Indeed, be-ing temporal, rightly understood, would have to be the fundamental assertion of Da-sein with regard to its be-ing. Yet even here a preliminary indication [Anzeige] of several basic structures of Da-sein itself is required.
1. Da-sein is that entity which is characterized as being-in-the-world. Human life is not some sort of a subject that needs to perform some sleight-of-hand in order to come into the world. Da-sein as being-in-the-world means: being in the world in such a way that this be-ing means: having to do with the world, sojourning within it in the routines of working, of managing and taking care of things, but also of examining, interrogating, and determining them by way of examination and comparison. Being-in-the-world is characterized as concern.
2. As this being-in-the-world, Da-sein is simultaneously being-with-one-another, being with others: having the same world there with others, meeting one another, being with one another in the manner of being-for-one-another. Yet this Da-sein is at the same time a being extant and on hand for others, just as a stone is there without having a world or a concern for it.
3. Being with one another in the world, having this world as being with one another, is defined by a distinctive determination of be-ing. The basic way of the Da-sein of the world, having it there with one another, is speaking. Fully seen, speaking is: oneself speaking out in speaking with another about something. It is predominantly in speaking that human being-in-the-world takes place and plays itself out [sich abspielt]. Aristotle already knew that. How Da-sein in its world speaks about its way of having to do with its world already includes a self-interpretation of Da-sein. It expresses how Da-sein understands itself in each instantiation for the time being [jeweilig], how it takes itself to be. In speaking with one another, in what one thus circulates in conversing, implicit in this colloquial round of conversation, lies the particular self-interpretation of the present in particular currency at any given time [jeweils].
4. Da-sein is an entity that defines itself as “I am.” Each particular while [Jeweiligkeit] of the “I am” is constitutive for each Da-sein. Just as primarily as it is being-in-the-world, Dasein is therefore also my Da-sein. It is in each instantiation its own and, as its own while, each its own time. If this entity is to be defined in its character of be-ing, then we must not abstract from each whileness [Jeweiligkeit] as in each instantiation mine. Mea res agitur.11 All basic characters must therefore converge in each particular while as in each instantiation mine [je meinigen].
5. Insofar as Da-sein is an entity that I am, and is at once defined as beingwith- one-another, I for the most part and on average am not myself my Da-sein, rather I am the others; I am with the others, and the others are equally with the others. No one is himself in everydayness. What he is and how he is, is nobody: no one and yet everyone with one another. Everyone is not himself. This nobody by whom we ourselves are lived in everydayness is the “Everyone.” Everyone says so, everyone has heard that, everyone is for it, concerned about it. The obstinate persistence of the dominion of this everyone holds the possibilities of my Da-sein. Out of this leveling-down, the “I am” is possible. An entity that is the possibility of the “I am” is as such mostly an entity that everyone is.
6. The entity thus characterized is one to whom its be-ing matters in its everyday being-in-the-world in its particular while. Just as all speaking about the world implies Da-sein itself speaking out about itself, so all concernful having-to-do with things is a concern for the be-ing of Da-sein. I myself am to a certain extent that with which I have to do, that with which I occupy myself, that to which my profession chains me; it is in these that my Da-sein plays itself out and runs its course. The care for Da-sein has in each particular while [jeweils] placed be-ing into my care as it is familiar and understood in the prevalent interpretation of Da-sein.
7. The averageness of everyday Da-sein does not imply a reflection [Reflexion] upon the ego or the self, and nevertheless Da-sein has itself. It finds itself with itself, intimately disposed to itself. It comes across itself there in that with which it commonly has to do.
8. As an entity, Da-sein cannot be proven, nor can it can even be pointed out. The primary relation to Da-sein is not that of seeing but of “be-ing it.” Experiencing itself, like speaking about itself or self-interpretation, is only one particular outstanding way in which each Da-sein has itself at the time, for a while [jeweils]. On the average the interpretation of Da-sein is dominated by everydayness, by what one traditionally says about Da-sein and human life. It is dominated by the “Everyone,” by tradition.
The indication [Anzeige] of all of these characters of be-ing stands entirely under the presupposition that this entity is in itself accessible to an investigation that is to interpret it with regard to its be-ing. Is this presupposition correct, or can it be shaken? As a matter of fact it can, but not by appealing to the fact that a psychological consideration of Da-sein leads to obscurity. A far more serious difficulty than the fact that human knowledge is limited must be made evident, indeed such that, precisely in not evading our predicament, we bring ourselves into the possibility of grasping Da-sein in the propriety [Eigentlichkeit] of its be-ing.
The propriety of Da-sein is what constitutes its most extreme possibility of be-ing. Da-sein is primarily defined by this outermost possibility of Da-sein. Propriety as the most extreme possibility of Da-sein’s be-ing is that determination of be-ing in which all of the above mentioned characters are what they are. The predicament of apprehending Da-sein is grounded not in the limitation, uncertainty, or imperfection of our cognitive faculty, but in the very entity to be known, in a ground possibility of its be-ing.
Among other characters, we identified the [distributive] definition: Each Dasein is in its particular while [Je-weiligkeit]: insofar as it is what it can be, it is in each instantiation mine. This definition is thoroughgoing, total, constitutive for this be-ing. Those who would strike it out have lost what they are thematically talking about.
Yet how is this entity to be known in its be-ing before it has come to its end? After all, I am always still underway with my Da-sein. It is still always something that is not yet finished, at an end. In the end, if it has really gone that far, it is no more. Before this end, it never really, properly, is what it can be; and when it is that, then it is no more.
Can the Da-sein of others not take the place of Da-sein in the proper sense? News of the Da-sein of others who were with me and who have come to their end is very bad news. One day they are no more. The end of their Da-sein would indeed be the nothing. For this reason the Da-sein of others cannot take the place of Dasein in its proper sense, if in any case its particular whileness as in each instance mine is to be maintained. I never have the Da-sein of the other in an original way, in the singular appropriate way of having Da-sein: I never am the other.
The less we are in a hurry to sneak away unnoticed from this predicament, the longer we endure it, the more clearly it becomes evident: Da-sein shows itself in its most extreme possibility precisely at the sticking point that creates this difficulty for Da-sein. The end of my Da-sein, my death, is not some point at which a course of events one day breaks off; it is rather a possibility that Da-sein [already] knows about in one way or another: the most extreme possibility of itself, which it can grasp and make its own as imminent, looming before it. Da-sein has in itself the possibility to join with its death as the outermost possibility of itself. This most extreme possibility of be-ing has in its imminence the character of certainty, and this certainty for its part is characterized by a total indefiniteness. The self-exposition of Da-sein which in certainty and propriety surpasses every other statement is the exposition of its death in terms of its death: the indefinite certainty of its ownmost possibility of being-at-an-end [Zu-Ende-sein].
What does this have to do with our question, “What is time?,” and especially with the immediate question, “What is Da-sein in time?” Each Da-sein, ever in the particular whileness [Jeweiligkeit] of what is in each instantiation my [jemeinigen] Da-sein, knows of its death and does so even when it wants to know nothing of it. What does it mean to have, in each particular instance [je] of the “my,” my own death? It is Da-sein’s forerunning to its being gone [Vorbei], to a most extreme possibility of itself that stands before it, imminent, in certainty and absolute indefiniteness. Da-sein as human life is primarily being possible, the be-ing of the possibility of its certain but indefinite being gone.12
The be-ing of possibility here is thereby always the possibility of knowing of death, for the most part in the sense of “Yes, I already know, but I don’t think about it.” Mostly, I know of death in a kind of knowing that shrinks back. As an expository interpretation of Da-sein, this knowing is ever ready to dissemble this possibility of its be-ing. Da-sein itself has the possibility of evading its own death.
This being gone, as that to which I forerun, brings about a discovery in my thus forerunning to it: it is my being gone. As thus being gone, it uncovers my Dasein as all at once no longer there; all of a sudden I am no longer there in the midst of such and such matters and affairs, intimate with such and such people, surrounded by these vanities, these subterfuges, this verbosity. This being gone dissipates all secrecies and busyness, it takes everything with it into the nothing. Being gone is not some occurrence, not some chance incident in my Da-sein. It is its own being gone, not some “what” about it, some event that by chance befalls Da-sein and alters it. This being gone is not a “what,” but a “how,” indeed the proper “how” of my Da[-sein].13 This being gone, which I can forerun as my very own, is not some “what,” but the “how” of my Da-sein pure and simple.
Inasmuch as forerunning to this being gone holds this in the how of the particular while, each Da-sein itself becomes visible in its how. Running ahead to this being gone is at once Da-sein’s running up against its most extreme possibility; and insofar as this “running up against” is serious, Da-sein in this running is thrown back into itself as “still being here” [Noch-dasein]. This is Da-sein’s coming back to its everydayness that it still is, such that being gone as the proper how also uncovers everydayness in its how, takes it in its bustle and its busyness back into its how. Being gone thus brings every what, all care-taking and plan-making, back into the how.
This being-gone-from, as the how, brings Da-sein unrelentingly into its singular possibility of itself, allowing it to stand totally alone, all by itself. Being gone has the capacity to place Da-sein, in the midst of the glory of its everydayness, into uncanniness. Insofar as it holds before Da-sein its outermost possibility, the forerun itself is the fundamental actualization and fulfillment of the expository interpretation of Da-sein. The forerun lays hold of the fundamental regard in which Da-sein sets itself and at the same time shows that the ground category of this entity [“be-ing here”] is its how.
Perhaps it is not an accident that Kant defined the ground principle of his ethics such that we call it formal. Perhaps he knew from a familiarity with Da-sein that it itself is the how. It remained for present-day prophets to organize Da-sein in such a way that the how gets covered up.
Da-sein is properly close to itself, it is truly existent, whenever it holds itself in this forerunning. This forerunning is nothing but the proper and singular future of one’s own Da-sein. In forerunning, Da-sein is its future such that in this being futural it comes back to its past and present. Da-sein, conceived in its outermost possibility of be-ing, is time itself and not in time. Being futural characterized in this way, as the proper how of being temporal, is Da-sein’s way of be-ing, in which and out of which it gives itself its time. By holding myself close to my being gone in forerunning, I have time. All idle chatter and all of that in which such idle chatter sustains itself, namely, all restlessness, all busyness, all noise and all running around, now breaks down. To have no time means to project time into the cheap present of the everyday. Being futural gives time, cultivates the present and lets the past be repeated in the how of its being-lived.
Time viewed in this way thus means that the ground phenomenon of time is the future. In order to see this and not sell it as an interesting paradox, each Dasein in its own particular while must hold itself in its forerunning. In this forerunning it becomes clear that the original way of having to do with time is not a measuring. The coming back that occurs in forerunning is itself the how of that concern in which I am leisurely “whiling” [verweile].14 This coming back can never become what one calls “long-whiling” [langweilig], a boring time that is being spent, used up, wasted. Each whileness is distinctive in that, from forerunning into proper time, the whiling has in each of its instantiations all the time for itself. Time never becomes long or boring because it originally has no length. Forerunning to . . . falls apart if it is understood as a question of the “when” of it and the “how much longer” to being gone, because inquiries about being gone in terms of “how much longer” and “when” are not at all internal to being gone as this possibility has been characterized. Such questions cling precisely to the “I’m not gone yet!” and busy themselves with what might possibly still remain for me. Such questioning does not grasp the indefiniteness of the certainty of being gone, but instead wishes to define indefinite time. This questioning wants to flee from what being gone in itself is, namely, indefinite, and as indefinite, certain. Such questioning is so little a forerunning toward being gone that it organizes straightaway the characteristically direct flight from ever being gone.
Forerunning takes up being gone as the proper possibility of every moment of decision [Augenblick], choosing it as what is now certain. Being futural, as a possibility of each Da-sein in its particular while, gives time, because it is time itself. Inasmuch as futurity is properly time, it at once becomes evident that the question of how much time, how long, and when, must remain inappropriate to such time. The only appropriate assertion would be to say, “Time proper really has no time to calculate time.”
Yet we first got to know Da-sein, which itself is to be time, in its reckoning with time and even measuring it with the clock. Da-sein is there with the clock even when it is only the immediate everyday clock of day and night. Da-sein reckons and asks about the “how much” of time, and thus appears unfamiliar with time in its proper being. Thus asking about the “when” and “how much,” Da-sein loses its time. What is it with this asking that loses time? Where does time go? The Dasein that reckons with time and lives with a watch in its hand—it is precisely this time-reckoning Da-sein that continually says “I have no time.” Does it not thereby betray itself in what it makes of time, inasmuch as it is in fact time itself ? Losing time and getting a clock to do it! Does not the uncanniness of Da-sein start here?
The question of the when of the indefinite being gone, and in general of the how-much of time, is the question of what is still left for me, of how much of a present I still have. To bring time into the how-much means to take time as the now of the present. Asking “How much time?” means to become absorbed in the concern for a present what. Da-sein flees from the how and attaches itself to the particular what present “at the time” [jeweilige]. Da-sein is what it is concerned with. Thus, Da-sein is its present. Everything encountered in the world is encountered by a Da-sein that is sojourning in the now. It thus encounters the time that Da-sein itself in each instance of Da-sein [je] is, but is as present.
Concern as absorption in the present is, as care, nevertheless familiar with a not-yet that is to be brought to a close only by taking care of it. Even in the present of its concern, Dasein is “full time,” the whole of time, so much so that it is never done with the future. The future is now that which care hangs on to—not the proper being-futural of being gone, but the future that the present itself cultivates for itself as its own, since being gone as the proper future can never become present. If it could, it would be nothing, [i.e., gone]. The futurity that care hangs on to is such thanks to the present. And Da-sein, absorbed as it is in the now of the present world, wants so little to admit that it has slipped away from proper futurity that it says it has grasped the future out of concern for the development of humanity, culture, and the like.
Da-sein as the concernful present dwells in what concerns it. It grows weary in the what, and sick and tired of filling up the days. For the Da-sein that is its present and never has time, time suddenly becomes long. Time becomes empty because Da-sein, by asking the question of quantity, “how much,” has all along made time long, while the constant comeback to forerunning toward being gone never becomes monotonous, “long-whiling,” boring. In its own present, Da-sein continually wants to meet something new. In everydayness, current world events [the “news”] are encountered in time, in the present. The everyday lives by the clock, which means that concern unceasingly comes back to the now, talks without end about the now: “in a moment now,” “from now until then,” “till the next now.”
Da-sein, defined as being-with-one-another, at the same time means being guided by the prevailing interpretation that Da-sein gives of itself; being led by what everyone says, by modes and fashions and trends, by whatever happens to be “going on”: the trend that no one is, whatever is modish: nobody. In everydayness Da-sein is not the be-ing that I am [in each proper instantiation], the everydayness of Da-sein is rather that be-ing that everyone is [the generic common “all”]. Da-sein is accordingly the time in which everyone is with one another, “everyone’s” time. The clock that everyone has, each and every clock, shows the time of being-with-one-another-in-the-world.
Connected with such phenomena are certain relevant but still totally obscure phenomena that we encounter in historical research, such as the phenomena of generations and of generational continuity. The clock shows us the now, but no clock ever [je] shows the future nor has ever [je] shown the past [particularly indicated in such phenomena]. All measuring of time means bringing time into the how-much. If by the clock I determine the future arrival of an event, I do not really mean the future. Rather, what I determine is how long I now have to wait until the now meant is now. The time made accessible by a clock is seen as present time. If one tries to derive what time is from the time of nature, then the νῦν [now] is the μέτρον [measure] of the past and future. Then time is already interpreted as the present, the past is interpreted as the no-longer-present, the future as the indefinite not-yet-present: the past is irretrievable, the future is indefinite.
Accordingly, everydayness speaks of itself as that within which nature is constantly encountered. [Natural] occurrences are in time; but this does not mean that they have time. Rather, in that they occur and are there, they are encountered as running right through a present. This time of the present is explicated as a sequence that continually rolls on through the now, a succession whose sense of direction is said to be unique and irreversible. All that occurs rolls out of an endless future into an irretrievable past.
This interpretation is characterized by two features: 1) irreversibility; 2) the homogenization of now-points.
Irreversibility incorporates what this explication can still retrieve from proper time. It is what is left over from futurity as the ground phenomenon of time as Dasein. This way of looking at time looks away from the future into the present, from which it follows time flying into the past. The definition of time in its irreversibility finds its ground in time already having been reversed.
Homogenization is an assimilation of time to space, to Präsenz pure and simple; it is the tendency to force all time out of itself into a present. Time becomes fully mathematized and becomes the fourth coordinate t next to the spatial coordinates x, y, z. Time is irreversible. This irreversibility is the single vestige in which time still asserts itself as “time,” the only way in which it resists a definitive mathematization. Before and after are not necessarily earlier and later, are not modes of temporality. In the series of numbers, for example, the 3 is before the 4, the 8 after the 7. But this does make the 3 earlier than the 4 nor the 8 later than the 7. Numbers are not earlier or later, because they are not as such in time. Earlier and later is a very specific before and after. Once time is defined as clock time, it then becomes hopeless of ever (re)gaining its original meaning.
That time is first and foremost defined in this way nonetheless resides in Dasein itself, for which each particular while [Je-weiligkeit] is constitutive. Da-sein is mine in its propriety only as possible Da-sein, being-there. Da-sein is mostly there in everydayness. But everydayness as the particular temporality which flees from futurity, itself can only be understood when it is confronted with the proper time of the futural being of being gone. What Da-sein says about time is expressed out of everydayness. Hanging on to its present Da-sein says: the past is the bygone, and in being gone it is irretrievable. This is the past of the present of the everyday that sojourns in the present of its busyness. Da-sein as a present defined in this way accordingly does not truly see what is past.
The study of history that thrives in the present only sees history as irrecuperable activity and busyness: what once went on. The examination of what once had gone on is inexhaustible. It gets lost in its material. Because this history and temporality of the present does not get at the past at all, it merely has another present. A past remains closed off from a present as long as such a present, Da-sein, is not itself historical. But Da-sein is in itself historical insofar as it is its possibility. In being futural Da-sein is its past, coming back to it in the how. The manner [how] of coming back to it is, among other ways, conscience. Only the how is repeatable. A past—experienced as proper historicality—is anything but “dead and gone.” It is something to which I can return time and again.
The present generation thinks it is really into [sei bei] history, it even thinks it is supercharged with history. It bewails its historicism—lucus a non lucendo. Something is called history that is not history at all. Since everything gets merged into history, one must (so says the present) return to the supra-historical. It is not enough that Da-sein today has lost itself in the pseudo-history of the present, it must also use the last vestige of its temporality (i.e., of Da-sein) in order to slip out of time entirely, out of Da-sein. And it is upon this imaginary path to supra-historicality that one presumes to find “the worldview.” (This is the disquieting uncanniness that constitutes the present age.)
The common interpretation of Da-sein is threatened by the menace and danger of relativism. But the angst of relativism is the angst of Da-sein. A past as proper history is repeatable in the how. The possibility of access to history is grounded in the possibility according to which a particular present each time [jeweils] understands how, in each instantiation, to be futural.This is the first principle of all hermeneutics. It says something about the be-ing of Da-sein, which is historicality itself. Philosophy will never get to the bottom of what history is as long as it dissects history as an object of methodological examination. The mystery of history resides in what it means to be historical.
In summary, we can now say: time is Da-sein. Da-sein is my particular whileness, and this instantiation can be its whileness in being futural by forerunning its certain but indefinite being gone. Da-sein is always in one of its possible modes of being temporal. Da-sein is time, time is temporal. Da-sein is not time, but temporality. The ground assertion, time is temporal, is therefore the most proper definition. It is not a tautology because the be-ing of temporality signifies an unequal, differing actuality. Da-sein is its being gone, it is its possibility in forerunning this being gone. In this forerunning I am properly time, I have time. Insofar as time is in each instantiation mine, there are many times. The time is meaningless, time is temporal.
If time is thus understood as Da-sein, then for the first time the meaning of the traditional assertion about time becomes clear: time is the proper principium individuationis. This is mostly understood as irreversible succession, as the time of the present and the time of nature. But to what extent is time, as proper time, the principle of individuation, i.e., that out of which each Dasein is in its unique whileness? In the futural being of forerunning, each Da-sein, which [first and foremost] is in the average and common and ordinary, becomes itself. In forerunning it becomes visible as the unique this-time-here-and-now and once-and-for-all [Diesmaligkeit] of its unique fate in the possibility of its one-and-only being gone. What is peculiar about this individuation is that it does not allow for any individuation that would involve the imaginary cultivation of exceptional existences. It disclaims any attempt to make exceptions. It individuates in a way that makes all equal. In our being together with death each is brought into the how that each can be in equal measure; into a possibility in relation to which no one is [exceptionally] distinguished; into the how in which every what is pulverized.
Let us conclude with a test sample of historicality and the possibility of repeating. Aristotle in his writings often tended to emphasize that the most important thing is the right παιδεία, the original security in a matter arising from a familiarity with the matter itself [die Sache selbst], the security of the appropriate way of coping with the matter. In order to be responsive to the character-of-being of the theme being handled here, we must talk temporally about time. We want to repeat the question “What is time?” temporally. Time is the how. When we inquire into what time is, we should not hastily latch onto an answer (time is such and such), which always implies a what.
Let us not regard the answer but instead repeat the question. What happened to the question? It has transformed itself. “What is time?” turned into the question “Who is time?” More precisely: Are we ourselves time? Still more precisely: Am I time?15 Or closer still: Am I my time? With this latter question I come closest to the matter at issue, and if I understand the question correctly, it is then taken in its total seriousness. Such questioning is therefore the most appropriate way of access to time and of coping with time as in each instantiation mine. Da-sein would then be [itself ]: being questionable.
3. Dasein als Sein: Even though this first usage of Heidegger’s two most basic ontological terms are probably meant in their ordinary German sense—Dasein as “existence” and Sein as “being”—we have translated them in Heidegger’s sense from the start, with the emphasis he wishes to give to them especially in this talk on time. Instead of the long-standing convention of capitalizing “Being” for the active infinitive used as a noun, Sein, which still conveys the misimpression of a hypostatized abstraction, we shall consistently translate it as “be-ing” to convey quite deliberately its “temporal be-ing” and its concretely experienced dynamis. Moreover, it also conveys, by way of the very dynamics of the relational hyphen, the ongoing multifarious action of relating entities to itself, to other entities in interrelating worlds, and eventually each of them properly to themselves. This orthography at once also serves to differentiate Sein ontologically from Seiendes, the plurality of “beings” in the entitative substantive sense, which in this essay will be translated as “entity, entities.”
In the opening hour of his course on ontology in SS 1923, one year before this lecture, Heidegger for the first time formally designates the term Da-sein in its Da (there, here) to indicate the unique and temporally particular human situation that we human beings in each of our instantiations (“each particular while”) are. See GA63, 7. There is sufficient evidence within the text of the lecture—no doubt reinforced by Heidegger’s intonation in the delivery of the lecture—to indicate that Heidegger meant the term to be taken in its etymological, literal, and so hyphenated sense as Da-sein, being-(t)here. We have accordingly, following the convention initiated by the new English translation of Being and Time, consistently translated the German term “Dasein” into the “English” Da-sein.
4. Gal. 4:4; see Mark 1:15 and Eph. 1:9–10. These notes were provided by the German editor.
5. Heidegger’s pointed condensation of the following texts of Albert Einstein: “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” Annalen der Physik 49 (Leipzig, 1916); Über die spezielle und allgemeine Relativitätstheorie (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 7th ed., 1920), 90 ff. and 95 ff.; Vier Vorlesungen über Relativitätstheorie (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1922), 2.
6. See Aristotle, Physics IV.11.219a ff.
7. Ibid., IV.11.219a9–10.
8. We begin by noting these first, incidental, idiomatic uses in the lecture of the family of German words that designate temporal individuation, and that Heidegger, in a formally indicative abstract coinage, Jeweiligkeit, will shortly make the central term guiding the formation of thought of this lecture. [In n. 3 above, the virtual synonymy of this abstraction with “Da-sein” was already underscored.] Some standard translations of this very flexible family of terms: jeweils, each time, at any given (particular) time; jeweilig, at the (that, its) time, for the time being; jedes, each; je, in each case (situation). For the latter, I prefer “in each instance (instantiation)” to suggest its connection with the later Heidegger’s Inständigkeit des Seins, Da-sein’s instantiation or “standing in” the context of be-ing. The contextual or hermeneutical thrust of such words, their indexical or occasional quality, is captured nicely by the extremely common colloquialism in conversational German, je nach dem, “it depends on the circumstances (situation), as the case may be, according to the context.”
9. Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, chap. 27. Sancti Aurelii Augustini opera omnia, post Lovaniensium theologorum recensionem. Editio novissima, emendata et auctior, accurante Migne (Paris, 1841), vol. 1, pp. 823 ff.
10. Jeweiligkeit, underscored by the German editor.If we ignore the abstract suffix for the time being, the word is a contraction of jede Weile, “each (particular) while,” our preferred translation. In abstraction, it combines the distributive note of “eachness” and the temporally particular note of “whileness,” each a possible translation of the abstract term. When translated abstractly, however, we will usually endeavor to convey both notes in the same sentence. “Each” is to be taken in the strong sense of a distributive universal that refers to its particulars as unique individuals that vary the universal notes to accord with their individual indexical occasional context. This hermeneutical, temporally properizing “each” is in no way to be conflated with the common generic universal “all,” which subdivides into equally common species. See n. 8 above.
11. “My life is at stake.” Translated non-idiomatically and verbatim: “My thing is being enacted.” Note that Heidegger returns to this very same “thing,” res, central issue, matter of concern, the pressing matter of time, die Sache selbst, as an impersonal res beyond my control, in his concluding remarks that raise the question, “Am I my time?”
12. Das Vorbei, the “being gone;” the adverb vorbei temporally also connotes being over, past in the sense of passed by, gone by, bygone. The idiomatic “having passed away” also has possibilities. The Italian translation is il non-più, the no-more, and the French is le révolu, the accomplished, completed, finished, elapsed, ended. This adverbial noun for a “goner” and state of goneness will in Being and Time disappear in favor of “being-at-an-end,” a phrase already equated with it in this lecture, which in turn is itself quickly displaced by the more active “being towards the end” (BT, 234 n., 245–46).
13. The Buchner transcript varies from the Haecker transcript in speaking only of the Da at this point, the “there,” suggesting that Heidegger was at least intoning the highfrequency word Da-sein, perhaps throughout this portion of the talk, to convey its separable etymological sense.
14. The bilingual English translation, going beyond the original German, here succumbs to temptation and hyphenates ver-weile while (!) translating it as “tarrying,” as it were, “whiling away the time,” in preparation for a discussion of the boring, langweilig in the German. In the Heideggerian thesaurus, verweilen, leisurely lingering, is synonymous with another favorite word of his for the central theme of quality “dwelling” or living, namely, sich aufhalten, staying awhile, “holding up” for a while (say, on earth), abiding. The English “sojourning” brings in the note of living daily (à la journée) as well as journeying in one place. Heidegger’s question is aimed primarily at the quality (the “how”) of this time and be-ing, living, dwelling, whiling.
15. Noch näher: bin ich die Zeit? This sentence is taken from the Buchner transcript. It is not in the Haecker transcript and is “passed over” in the published German edition.
Martin Heidegger - The Concept of Time (GA 64)
Translated and edited by Theodore Kisiel.
Original PDF version from Becoming Heidegger.