37
ZOLLIKON SEMINARS, 1959-1969
circle belongs to the nature of all questioning and answering.* It is quite possible that I have some knowledge of what I am asking about, but this does not mean that I already know explicitly what I am asking about, that is, in the sense [that I] have made a thematic apprehension and determination.
Thus, time is already known to us in some way, that is, we have a relationship to time beforehand without expressly paying attention to it as such or to the relationship to it as such. In view of this matter, we begin with a relationship that is most familiar and realizable [vollziehbar] at any time, namely, the relationship to time as mediated for us by the clock.
In the previous seminar we already touched on this question, but we have not yet developed it sufficiently. We have only given a preview of it. Its protocol is very good but is misleading just because of this. It could give the impression that the subject matter has already been dealt with sufficiently and that we should move on. We are not going on, but rather we are going back. You will see then how crudely we have spoken about time up to now.
It is important to attend to the fact that the belonging-together of the human being and time, of "soul" and time, or of mind and time is repeatedly mentioned in all discourse on time. For example, Aristotle has said: "It is also worth considering how time can be related to the soul."3 If the soul were not capable of receiving-perceiving time, of counting (in the broadest meaning of "to say something about it*), then it would be impossible for there to be time if there were no soul.4 In short, this means: If there were no soul, there would be no time. Soul is to be understood here as the distinctive and enduring being (entelechy) of the human being's unfolding essence [Menschenwesen], and not, let us say, in the modern sense as an ego-subject and an ego-consciousness. On the contrary, for Greek thought, the human being's distinctive character is receiving perceiving and saying. Its main feature is always unconcealing [entbergen] something, which must not be represented as an event "immanent in the subject.* In Augustine we read: "It is in you, my mind [animus, not anima], that I measure time" (Confessions XI.27).
Meanwhile, we can gather from both authorities that the relationship to time consists in counting and measuring, that is, in a reckoning with [rechnen mit] time. This matter of the belonging together of time and the human being's unfolding essence is expressed in modern thought in the way and the manner in which the problem of time is approached, that is, with the expressions: sense of time, experience of time, and consciousness of
* See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 194 f.—TRANSLATORS