said about a subject during a lecture course within the appropriate methodological limits is the only thing that could be said. One can, in fact, discuss exclusively the fundamental issues, but what is discussed does not have to include everything. Having defined the limits of our investigation and excluded the phenomenon of concern-for, we may return to our topic.
The ontological structure of concernful care is what determines existence as: a priori ahead-of-oneself-and-familiar-with-one’s-world. Is there anything in this ontological structure of existence that has to do with the temporal? And by the way, what is this “temporal,” whose basic structures we are supposed to investigate? We have already emphasized the drawbacks of our chosen path, including the indeterminateness of the phenomenon of time itself, in reference [238] to which we use terms like “ur-temporality” and “the ur-temporal.” Our lack of a specific orientation concerns not just any phenomenon, but time. Of course it is a commonplace to say that time is hard to understand, and there is no doubt that we lack a clear idea of what we call “time.”
We will get some help by orienting ourselves to the everyday understanding of time, pursuing and critically discussing what is meant by “ur-temporal” characteristics, especially with regard to care. The everyday understanding of time is not wrong or the like. It has its own legitimacy and even an understandable necessity.19
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The structure of the everyday understanding of time must be intrinsically ur-temporal, it must formally have a “relation to time.” To say that something is temporally determined means that it is “earlier” or “later” than something else; it comes “before” or “after” something. Or it has “already” or “not yet” taken place. Moreover, we say something is “at the same time” as something else, or in another case that it is not at the same time but “of the same duration.” “Earlier—at the same time—later” do not simply coincide with “past–present–future,” since the past itself, as past, can be earlier or later or at the same time, and the same with the future. And even in the “now” there is a before and an after, and since they are found in every now, they are therefore found in every “just now” [Soeben] and “already-has-been,” and likewise in every “right away” [Sofort]. Every “just now” is, in the very next now, a “just a second ago.” The past constantly increases in its pastness. It becomes intrinsically ever-more past, so that ever-new nows and just-nows are produced and push the past into already-has-been-ness.
19. [Here (Moser, p. 507) Heidegger ends his lecture of Thursday, 21 January 1926, to be followed by that of Friday, 22 January, which opened with a 560-word summary that is omitted in GA 21.]