Although the past no longer “is,” it continually becomes more and more past. The past “is” not simply past. It is not the one track of time, the one “arm” of time, that is not.
There is a plethora of time-characteristics: earlier, later, before, by now, already, not yet, at the same time, just now, [239] right way (in the very next second), now; past, present, future. With them we have essentially exhausted what can be established about time—I mean: not as regards the reckoning of time, but as regards the philosophical interpretation of the interconnection of these characteristics and of the “propositions about time” that are grounded in these interconnections, for example: “Different times cannot be at the same time.”
In the course of the history of the problem of time, all the characteristics have been examined more or less with deep insight and with surety as regards the methodological focus of the analysis. In the process the terms were coined that are used for all research into time.
Here we have chiefly named time-characteristics that at first sight are not congruous, although they are “promiscuously” employed in the common understanding and imprecise everyday linguistic usage: earlier, later, before, after, already, not yet. And now we see that two of the characteristics we just named occur in the notion of the structure of concernful care: already-being-with and being-ahead-of-oneself. “Already” is the opposite of “not yet,” as “before” [vor] is the opposite of “after.”
The question remains whether the aforementioned structure of care is adequately understood when it is interpreted in the sense of the characteristics of “already” and “before” that we have just adduced. The “already” means an “already-having-been,” a “no-longer-now.” The “before” means a “not-yet-now” in contrast to a “now” or a “nolonger-now.” Both characteristics refer to a being with reference to the fact that it is experienced as running its course “in time.” And if something gets determined by these characteristics, then it is determined in relation to time.
But what does it mean that something is determined in relation to time in this fashion? And what is the condition of possibility for something being determined in this way? To speak of something as determined in relation to time is to speak of it with regard to its traversing a now.
Something can traverse a now only if it comes into a now, only if we encounter it in a now. In turn, we can encounter something only if it can show up— [240] and the only thing that can show up is something whose kind of being is presence-there. We say that what is present-there occurs in the world. So the kind of being that pertains to what is present-there is precisely this “occurring within the world.”20
20. Presence-there and occurrence-within-the-world are to be sharply separated from being-in qua being in a world. The latter pertains to the very essence of existence’s kind of being. A stone or a table is present within the world. It is a thing-of-the-world. It is, but it never is in-a-world in the sense of being in and being familiar with a world. By contrast a human being is, strictly speaking, never just present-there within a world. We attain this supposedly “primary” form of being only when we are dead. In fact, only at that point is a human being something [that is] just present-there—because then the human being is no longer “there” [da] in the sense of existence that we have explained.