of time) cannot resist the future. The current now will be overcome by the not-yet-now, the future as ever pressing upon it. Here too we can see that Hegel, entirely consistent and consonant with the natural understanding of time, sees time and becoming as running from the future through the present into the past, i.e., as a “passing”: a future that passes into the past. So the now, as a now, is a not-yet-now (the future) that has become the present now. In this sense the present now is the future. Hegel even says so explicitly: “The future is the essence [Wesen] of the present” (ibid.). Here he understands Wesen in the Greek sense—as that-from-which-arises every now as now, viz., from out of its not-yet-now. I intentionally emphasize this thesis of Hegel—that the essence of the present is the future—because in a lecture I presented in the summer of 1924,⁴¹ I emphasized not that the future is the essence of the present but [265] that the future is the meaning of temporality. But the meaning of the thesis I hold is diametrically opposed to what Hegel says here. We will come back to that later. What is clear is that Hegel understands time as coming from out of the future, through the present now, into the past. For Hegel, the past is real time, “time that has turned back into itself” (p. 204). But because every former or past moment is always a former now, time in a certain sense constantly runs back into the present, and, as Hegel says, is thus an endless “circular movement” (ibid.). As regards the reality of time, here again it becomes clear that the proper accent is on the past. This is a matter that I cannot explain now because it is much too difficult: in a very particular sense, the idea of the now-present “exceeds itself” [übersteigert]. That is, for Hegel the present now is not simply the present now. It also is the now-present of the past. With this thesis Hegel is as far from the proper sense of time as it is possible to get.

Even on a first reading of Hegel’s exposition, it takes only a superficial knowledge of Aristotle’s philosophy to see the obvious: What underlies this outline of a system and this particular piece of it is nothing less than a direct paraphrase of Aristotle’s treatise on time, and this is something quite important. But you should not misunderstand me when I say this. I do not mean to say that Hegel is dependent [on Aristotle]. Quite the contrary, it is devoutly to be wished that our philosophy today were even more dependent on Greek philosophy than it is—not by simply appropriating it but by positively understanding the issues. Here again it is clear that Aristotle has helped out not only Hegel but many philosophers before Hegel and even more of them after. I say this now only as regards Hegel’s treatise on time, but I take it that, in its essentials,

41. [“The Concept of Time,” trans. Theodore Kisiel, in Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan, eds., Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pages 200–213.]