and being-for-itself as subjectivity. [261] And therefore Hegel can say—brilliantly, but without any real basis—that to the degree that time is the negation of the negation, it is abstract subjectivity, pure for-itself-ness in being-outside-itself.
4. Time is the being of space, and consequently, as the being of the spatial, it is for Hegel the very process of things themselves.
5. Time qua now-time is the truth of space. The phenomenal content and legitimacy that underlies this thesis can be clarified by way of Kant’s and Leibniz’s conceptions of time and their explanations thereof. To anticipate: That Hegel can say (without understanding its proper sense) that the truth of space is time, is grounded in the ur-temporal structure as simultaneity and in the fact that puncti-formity as space in general must be characterized by simultaneity. “Simultaneity” means that every point is co-present [mitanwesend] with every other point in every now.
When it comes to taking a critical stance on all this, we must remember two things. (We prescind here from our emphasis on the fundamental limits of Hegel’s conception of time, namely, that he knows time only as now-time.)
1. Time is characterized as intuited becoming only thanks to the formal and empty schema of being—nothing—becoming, a schema whose many dubious characteristics we cannot discuss in the present context.
2. From within Hegel’s own position, it is incomprehensible why time, as he says, is a “using up.” The ordinary experience of time lives off this phenomenon directly. However, it necessarily remains a puzzle within the horizon of Hegelian dialectic.
It is clear that Hegel’s interpretation of time is bound up exclusively with the now, the now-present, insofar as it is precisely the now-present that properly and exclusively is. This is clear from the fact that Hegel quite consistently dismisses the past and future as non-being. But since they must be something, he says: “They are necessarily only in subjective representation, in memory and in fear or hope” (§259, Remark). It is characteristic [262] of Hegel that he refers to this merely in passing and as something of no real importance (cf. “subjective representation”), and then moves on. It is also characteristic that he designates memory, fear, and hope as subjective representations.
Lining up the past with memory and the future with hope is a determination already familiar to the everyday experience of time. It is a determination that Aristotle (from whom Hegel obviously got it) had already grasped theoretically, although only (and typically so) as a form