view quality. This has contributed to one's never having really arrived at insight into the metaphysical significance of the phenomenon of time.
All these descriptions of time, known both to the common as well as the philosophical understanding, can not have been simply arbitrary fabrications and inventions. The essence of time must itself make these kinds of conceptions possible and even plausible. Yet none of them touches exactly the metaphysical essence of time.
If one therefore simplifies matters and from these common perspectives merely assimilates what the fundamental-ontological analysis of time discovers, instead of first appropriating this discovery independently and in terms of its own purpose, then everything falls into confusion. We want to set forth, in a positive way, the main features of the metaphysical essence of time in five points, which do not, however, directly correspond to the four mentioned above.
1. The essence of time has an ecstatic character.
2. Together with this ecstatic structure there is a horizonal character which belongs to time.
3. Time neither passes nor remains but it temporalizes itself. Temporalization is the primal phenomenon of "motion:'
4. Time is not relative to sensibility but is more primordial than sensibility and than mind and reason as well. Here we suppose, of course, the only conception of reason with which we are acquainted, that of finite reason.
5. Methodologically we should note that, because it constitutes the metaphysical continuity of Dasein, time is not intelligible if Dasein is construed in some sort of theoretical scheme, whether it be as a psychical whole, as cognitive-volitional subject, as self-awareness, or as the unity of body, soul, and mind. Moreover, the analysis of Dasein must select for its guiding horizon the horizon which, in factic existence, continually guides Dasein's being-toward-itself in its being-with with others and in its relation to beings unlike Dasein prior to, outside of, and despite all theory.
The classical texts on the problem of time are the following: Aristotle's Physics, Δ 10-14; Plotinus' Enneades III,7; Augustine's Confessiones, Book XI; Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcendental Deduction, and the chapter on Schematism, the Analytic of Principles, the Doctrine of Antinomies; Hegel's Encyclopedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (a prior stage in the "Jena Logic") and Phenomenologie des Geistes; Bergson, all his writings; Husserl, in Ideen zu einer reinen