of”—have the time-characteristics of ordinary time? Our analysis has shown that this is impossible. The moments of care cannot have the ordinary sense of “temporal.” If they did, the very structure of care—a form of being—would have the character of a being, since we have shown that only the present-there can have the determinations of ordinary time. Care is not a being but a way of being, specifically existence’s way of being, which is the opposite of mere presence and the merely present. Therefore, there is no way we can understand “ahead of” and “already” in terms of the ordinary understanding of time and its characteristics. Hence the need to ask how, if at all, the “already” and “ahead of” can be understood temporally.

For that to happen, we will have to come up with a more original (or more cautiously: a different) understanding of time that will allow us to determine the meaning of these characteristics. The methodological path we are following does not have such an understanding of time at hand. Instead we have to acquire it indirectly and in the following way: While holding firm to the characteristics of care that we have already gained, we propose the hypothesis that their time-characteristics have a different sense, so we orient ourselves in a more precise way to the usual concept of time and its structures. In highlighting those characteristics, we will soon arrive at a broader understanding of ur-time. Only then can we understand how, within the original understanding of time, ur-temporality is possible.

We want to highlight the initially unclear time-characteristics of “already” and “ahead of” as determinations of care in contrast to the ordinary concept of time. The more securely and concretely we understand the ordinary concept of time, the more confident will be our progress. [246] To that end, let us direct ourselves very briefly to the history of the development of the concept (and thus the interpretation) of time heretofore. Naturally, in doing so, we do not need to come up with an extended history of the concept of time. Instead, we will pause only at certain points in that history where the explanation of the concept of time took on a certain fundamental, ontological significance. We do so with the intention of thereby showing that right up to our own day the philosophical interpretation of time has in fact been oriented to the ordinary understanding of time; we will prove the thesis that right up to today, time has always been understood as now-time.

Some philosophers, in the course of expounding the phenomenon of time, especially recently, have made a distinction between objective and subjective time, or between transcendent and immanent time. This distinction says nothing, however, because it could well be that even the so-called “immanent” time, the time of lived experience, merely carries over into itself the characteristics of the so-called transcendent