mutual giving to one another of future, past and present, that is, to their own unity.
This procedure is obviously not in keeping with the matter, assuming that we must give the name "time" to the unity of reaching out and giving which we have now shown, to this unity alone. For time itself is nothing temporal, no more than it is something that is. It is thus inadmissible to say that future, past and present are before us "at the same time." Yet they belong together in the way they offer themselves to one another. Their unifying unity can be determined only by what is their own; that they offer themselves to one another. But what do they offer to one another?
Nothing other than themselves-which means: the presencing that is given in them. With this presencing, there opens up what we call time-space. But with the word "time" we no longer mean the succession of a sequence of nows. Accordingly, time-space no longer means merely the distance between two now-points of calculated time, such as we have in mind when we note, (or instance: this or that occurred within a time-span of fifty years. Time-space now is the name for the openness which opens up in the mutual self-extending of futural approach, past and present. This openness exclusively and primarily provides the space in which space as we usually know it can unfold. The self-extending, the opening up, of future, past and present is itself prespatial; only thus can it make room, that is, provide space.
Time-space as commonly understood,. in the sense of the distance measured between two time-points, is the result of time calculation. In this calculation, time represented as a line and parameter and thus one-dimensional is measured out in terms of numbers. The dimensionality of time, thought as the succession of the sequence of nows, is borrowed from the representation of three-dimensional space.
But prior to all calculation of time and independent of such calculation, what is germane to the time-space of true time consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past and present. Accordingly, what we call dimension and dimensionality in a way easily misconstrued, belongs to true time and to it alone. Dimensionality