Richard Polt
At first – before this “first” was generated or the “after” was wanted – time was not, but was at rest with itself in what is, and itself kept quiet in what is. But there was a busy, active nature, wanting to rule itself and be its own, choosing to seek more than the present, that moved itself, and time moved too; and always moving on to the “next” and the “later” and to what is not the same but one after another, we turned our journey into a long stretch and fabricated time as an image of eternity. For there was an unquiet power of soul that always wanted to transfer what it saw there into something else, that was unwilling for the whole to be present to it all at once.
(Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.11)
The human being is a creature of distance! And only by way of the real primordial distance that the human in his transcendence establishes toward all beings does the true nearness to things begin to grow in him.
(Heidegger, MFL 221)
Plotinus and Heidegger – one of the greatest Platonists and a philosopher who viewed Platonism as a colossal dead end – have this in common: for them, time is not simply an aspect of change, or a subjective framework for perceiving change. Time is rooted in our very essence, in our concern with our own being. For us, our existence is at issue: we are faced with the task of making someone of ourselves, of deciding who and how to be. But this means that there is a gap between our given being and our possible being, between facticity and futurity. The future – not simply as a set of events that have not yet been realized, but as the need to come to grips with our own existence – generates time and, along with it, generates our interpretations of the world and all that is in it.
The contrast lies here: Plotinus, harking back to the roots of Greek thought in Parmenides and anticipating much of the later Western tradition, sees the primal event, the event that distances the present from the future, as a fall. Full presence, full being, would not be torn asunder; it would be a self-contained plenitude without distance. Against this tradition, Heidegger asks why we understand being as presence in the first place, and proposes in Being and Time that this understanding is made possible by our own temporality. Our extension into future, past and present is more primordial than our encounters with present entities. When we take presence as the definitive sense of being, we lose sight of its roots in time, and inevitably misunderstand ourselves; this absorption in the present, not the loss of eternity, is the true fall. Heidegger thus seeks his founding insights not in a putative moment of full presence, but in the recognition of our deep temporality.
The publication of Wilhelm Dilthey and Count Yorck’s letters on historicity was the occasion for Heidegger to compose what was to serve as the first draft of Being and Time, a 1924 text titled The Concept of Time (GA 64).1 Here Heidegger puts it bluntly: “Each Dasein is itself ‘time’” (GA 64: 57); “Dasein is history” (GA 64: 86). Time and history are neither obstacles to our fulfilment nor simply arenas in which we happen to act, but are the heart of our own being. To be human is to be temporal and historical; conversely, time and history can be understood only with reference to ourselves.
In conjunction with Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity (see Chapter 1), these thoughts on temporality point to a new ontology of the human way of being. But humans also use time as a general ontological guideline, a way of understanding all entities (time serves as an onto-logical criterion when we distinguish being and becoming, or timeless and temporal realms; SZ 18). Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of human being thus demands a new approach to the question of being in general, as well as a critique of how time and being have traditionally been understood.
Being and Time develops these thoughts with the aim of showing that time is the “horizon” for any understanding of being (SZ 1, 17, 235): our temporality makes it possible for being to mean something to us. Were we not temporal, we could not distinguish entities from nonentities; beings could not make a difference to us, or strike us as significant. We could not “be there” at all: there would be no Dasein, and thus no one to whom being could be given.
Division One lays the groundwork for the thesis that time is the horizon for being by means of a phenomenology of everyday being-in-the-world (see Chapter 3). We find ourselves “thrown” into a given situation (SZ §29); we also “project” possibilities in terms of which we understand ourselves and other beings (SZ §31). Dasein is “ thrown possibility through and through” (SZ 144): both projection and thrownness are at work whenever we are absorbed in a present state of affairs. This analysis culminates in a conception of Dasein’s being as “care”, which is given an implicitly temporal definition: “ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)” (SZ 192, trans. mod.).
Division Two deepens this interpretation of Dasein and brings out temporality more explicitly by considering phenomena that interrupt and transcend everydayness. In facing my own death, I recognize that all my possibilities are shadowed by my possible non-existence (Division Two, ch. I). In facing my primordial guilt, I recognize that I am responsible for choosing my own defining possibility and that I have to do so on the basis of what I already am (ch. II). In “anticipatory resoluteness”, I respond authentically to death and guilt; this authentic response yields insight into the primordial temporality of Dasein (ch. III) and enables us to reinterpret everydayness in terms of this temporality (ch. IV). In the dramatic climax of Being and Time, Heidegger points to “historicality” as the deep temporality of being with others in a group that shares a heritage and is working out a communal destiny (ch. V). Finally, he argues that the ordinary conception of linear clock time arises from everyday falling (ch. VI).
Let us look more closely at the three dimensions of Dasein’s “primordial temporality”: future, past and present.
Futurity essentially involves our concern with who we are: Dasein is “being out toward what it is not yet, but can be” (GA 64, 46). Thus we always understand ourselves and our surroundings in terms of a possible way for us to be (SZ 43, 86). Facing up to death allows us to recognize this futurity as a “coming in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-being, comes towards itself” (SZ 325). What Heidegger means by “death” and whether his emphasis on it is appropriate have long been subjects of controversy. It is helpful to remember that “death” does not mean “demise”, or the termination of human life (SZ 247). Heideggerian “death” is really mortality: a possibility rather than an actual event. Death is “the possible no-longer-there” (GA 64: 52), or the possibility of the impossibility of being-there any more (SZ 250). If this possibility is actualized, we cease to exist, and nothing can have meaning for us. But as long as we are existing, the possibility of death stands before us, urging us to choose to exist authentically, to decide on one possible way of being-in-the-world at the expense of others that we must forego (SZ 285). The phenomenon of “being-towards-death” thus reveals possibility as such, in a sense that cannot be reduced to present actuality.
Pastness, or having-been, is also essential to us: Dasein “is its past, whether explicitly or not” (SZ 20). Whether we take our facticity for granted or appropriate it creatively, we are situated in a milieu into which we have been “thrown”. We experience this thrownness as mood, which plays an essential role in disclosing the world (SZ §29). Pastness also collaborates with futurity: “Only in so far as Dasein is as an ‘I-am-as-having been,’ can Dasein come towards itself futurally in such a way that it comes back….. The character of ‘having been’ arises, in a certain way, from the future” (SZ 326). Choosing a possible way to be requires making something of what one already finds oneself to be: one has to take up one’s own past as an unavoidable burden and inheritance. In this way, the past provides possibilities for the future: Dasein “has already got itself into definite possibilities” (SZ 144) or “abandoned itself” to them (SZ 270); resoluteness discloses these possibilities as such (SZ 298) by “repeating” or retrieving them (SZ 339, 385): appropriating them as guiding interpretations of existence.
This authentic, futural retrieval of the past is “precisely proper becoming-present” (GA 64: 94): it “discloses the current Situation of the ‘there’” (SZ 326) and achieves a “moment of vision” (SZ 328, 338). Presence, then, is at its fullest not when time is suspended or when we live only in the “now” (as if such things were possible), but when we draw most authentically on the future and past dimensions of our being. Heidegger thus denies presence its traditional ontological priority, and insists that the present becomes available to us only through the interplay of future and past (SZ 350–51). The traditional focus on presence is not simply an intellectual error, but is due to “falling”, or Dasein’s tendency to get absorbed inauthentically in the present (SZ 328).
Heidegger emphasizes several traits of primordial temporality (SZ 329–30). First, it is ecstatic: the future, past and present are ways in which we “stand out” into possibilities, facticity and the current situation. Time does not consist of pointlike instants, but stretches into three dimensions. Secondly, the primary temporal ecstasis is the future: the present and past are awakened as such by Dasein’s need to pursue some possible way of existing (as Plotinus puts it, the soul wants to “rule itself”). Time is also finite, in that the future is always limited by the possibility of death; this is not to deny that the universe will outlast me, but futurity itself is disclosed to me only because I am faced with mutually exclusive possibilities, all of which are exposed to the possibility of my own extinction.
These traits of temporality may not be apparent in everydayness, and when we conceive of time using everyday common sense, we do so in very different terms: we picture time as a line whose intervals can be measured by a clock, and we assign priority to the present instant. This ordinary conception of time is impoverished; even aside from the aspects of temporality that are disclosed only in authenticity, a phenomenological inspection of everyday temporality shows that the ordinary conception omits several crucial features. Everyday time is public and worldly: we share our time with others with whom we share our world (SZ 411–12). Furthermore, everyday time is datable and significant. It is not an empty, formal structure, but is tied to particular events and purposes; time is always time for this or that (SZ 407, 414). The phenomenon of the right time – the appropriate moment – is primary. Of course, there can also be wrong times and so-called “senseless” events, but these are the exceptions that prove the rule: we understand them in terms of appropriateness. Thus, although we may correctly lay out a timeline for certain purposes, this quantitative, neutral succession is founded on meaningful time, and not the other way round; significance trumps sequence.
Our everyday unawareness of primordial temporality and our tendency to reduce all time to clock time must stem from a certain inau-thenticity in everyday temporality itself. The authentic future, past and present consist in anticipation (authentically facing death), repetition (retrieving past possibilities), and the moment of vision (see Chapter 4); their inauthentic, everyday counterparts are awaiting, forgetting (one’s own thrownness), and making present (SZ 336–9). Because it is mired in these relatively oblivious modes of temporality, everydayness is insensitive to the genuinely unique; nothing seems to happen for the first or last time (GA 64: 75–6; SZ 370–71). In contrast, primordial time plunges us into “the unique this-once-ness [Diesmaligkeit] of [our] being-there” (GA 64: 82). The urgency of our own existence is diluted in everydayness, and we tend to notice only the changes occurring in the entities we encounter, changes that lend themselves to measurement in terms of linear clock time. Such measurement is legitimate within its limits, but primordial time is phenomenologically prior: were it not for the ecstatic time of Dasein, we could not encounter other entities to begin with, much less measure their changes (SZ 333). In order to reconnect to this primordial temporality, we cannot just sharpen our concepts; we must seize on our own existence authentically. I cannot simply ask, “What is time?”; I must ask myself, “Am I time?” (GA 64: 83).
The unfinished and never published Division Three of Part One of Being and Time was supposed to pass beyond this account of Dasein’s temporality in order to support the main thesis of the work. Heidegger planned to show how our temporality (Zeitlichkeit) functions as the horizon for being, such that being itself is characterized by “Temporality” (Temporalität) (SZ 19). Although this project was not completed, we can find the rudiments of it in several texts. According to §69c of Being and Time, the three “ecstases” of time disclose three “hori-zonal schemata” in terms of which we can understand the modes of being. Thanks to the horizonal schema of “the for-the-sake-of-itself”, we understand possibilities (SZ 365; see also MFL 208). Thanks to the horizonal schema of “what has been”, we understand facticity (SZ 365). Thanks to the horizonal schema that Heidegger dubs praesens, we understand presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand (BPP 305–7). The question, then, is how these various modes of being cohere and can be brought together under a single concept (SZ 333).
One might try to resist Heidegger’s subordination of natural, linear time to the temporality of Dasein: was there not a time before Dasein? In 1935 he replies: “strictly speaking, we cannot say there was a time when there were no human beings. At every time, there were and are and will be human beings, because time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings” (IM 88–9). He makes much the same claim some three decades later: “Strictly speaking, we cannot say what happened before the human being existed. Neither can we say that the Alps existed, nor can we say that they did not” (ZS 55–6). These passages are very similar to the claims in Being and Time that truth and being are dependent on Dasein (SZ 212, 226–7). Heidegger’s point is not the triviality that there would be no one to say or know anything about beings if no one existed. Nor is he espousing absolute idealism: the view that it is false or meaningless to claim that there are entities in themselves, independent of us. Instead, this claim is both meaningful and correct, but its meaning and truth always presuppose the fundamental significance and disclosure that belong to Dasein’s temporal existence. That is, factually correct statements about pre-human nature depend on the human temporality that allows these statements to be intelligible. This means that such statements can never explain human temporality itself; our time can never be reduced to empirical facts.
We could thus speak with William Blattner of “Heidegger’s temporal idealism”. Realism and idealism may be superficial categories, yet idealism has the advantage of recognizing that being cannot be reduced to beings, “but is already that which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity” (SZ 207). Similarly, Dasein’s temporality is transcendental for every event within time. Tracing our temporality back to a set of facts in serial, objective time would be a reductive “myth” (see SZ 6). There can be no empirical account of the origin of Dasein’s time, because Dasein’s time is what makes all accounts possible. As Heidegger puts it in 1927, “[Dasein’s] time is earlier than any possible earlier of whatever sort, because it is the basic condition for an earlier as such” (BPP 325).
Although Heidegger never countenanced naturalistic explanations of human time, he became dissatisfied with the transcendental standpoint of Being and Time shortly after its publication, and embarked on a philosophical transformation that can be summed up in the slogan: “from the understanding of being to the happening of being” (GA 40: 219). The new phase of his thought that comes into full swing in the 1930s understands being itself as happening historically, and recognizes Dasein’s facticity as a way in which we ourselves are claimed by the happening of being and participate in its unfolding destiny (see Chapter 11). Ecstatic time is no longer simply primordial, and natural time is not simply derivative; we are indebted to nature, but are raised above it at founding moments that generate ecstatic, meaningful time.
As we have seen, Being and Time stands in the transcendental tradition inaugurated by Kant: just as Kant enquires into the structures of subjectivity as the conditions of the possibility of experience, Heidegger enquires into the temporality of Dasein as the condition of the possibility of understanding being and beings. But the transcendental approach threatens to obscure Dasein’s profound historicity and facticity; it tends to create the impression that Dasein stands above all other beings and functions as a framework that sets a fixed horizon for what being can mean. In his lecture course of Winter Semester 1929–30, Heidegger thus calls the whole notion of a temporal horizon into question. “What does it mean to say that time is a horizon? … we do not have the slightest intimation of the abysses of the essence of time” (FCM 146).
If Dasein is not something like a transcendental subject hovering above other beings, then Dasein is part of what there is: it is an entity amid entities, even though it is extraordinary because it has some understanding of being. The project of interpreting this condition is described under the rubric of “metontology” in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic: “the entity ‘man’ understands being … the possibility that being is there in the understanding presupposes the factical existence of Dasein, and this in turn presupposes the factual presence at hand of nature” (MFL 156–7, trans. mod.). We thus need a way to think about the thrownness of our thinking: the indebtedness of our understanding of being to an ontic ground from which it emerges. Heidegger now tries to grasp this dual character of Dasein, doing justice not only to our projection of a meaningful “world”, but also to our dependence on an “earth” on which our world is grounded, an earth that we can never fully comprehend (see “The Origin of the Work of Art” [1935], in BW).
Heidegger’s new perspective makes it legitimate to ask: how does Dasein’s time – the ecstatic temporality that grants us access to other entities – first emerge? “The primal fact … is that there is anything like temporality at all. The entrance into world by beings is primal history pure and simple” (MFL 209). Can we enquire into this primal fact, and investigate how historical time begins? “Can one ask, ‘How does time arise?’” Heidegger increasingly believes that one can, but he cannot give the Platonist answer: “through the deformation and restriction of eternity” (UV 9). Nor can he try to answer the question in physical or biological terms; this empirical, naturalistic approach would simply disregard the whole problematic of being while naively presupposing some ontology. Dasein’s temporality is not to be reduced to scientific findings about nature, since science itself depends on this temporality. “Primal history” must emerge from nature as earth, which is deeper and more mysterious than the nature discovered by science.
In order to reflect appropriately on the origin of time, Heidegger begins to think in terms of a mysterious founding event from which meaningful time and being erupt. This event is, to put it paradoxically, the time when time begins. “Ever since time arose and was brought to stand, since then we are historical” (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, in EHP 57). This origin of time is an “inception” (Anfang) rather than a mere “beginning” (Beginn). According to the 1941 text Über den Anfang:
“beginning” … means a distinctive position and phase in the course of a process. But … here the word “inception” is supposed to name the essence of be-ing [Seyn].. To start inceptively [Anfangen] is to seize oneself and raise oneself up in the appropriating event itself, the event as which the clearing essentially happens.
(GA 70: 9–10)
Only in an inception does a clearing open against concealment; in inception, the difference between being and non-being takes place. With the obsolete spelling Seyn, Heidegger here indicates this event of inception, rather than a particular sense of what it is to be; all such senses are generated in the inception. Our mission is to participate creatively in this event that is the source of truth, worldhood, history and Dasein itself. In this event, a qualitatively new kind of time, meaningful time, comes to be in a way that cannot be reduced to the natural sequence that precedes it: “Why is this sudden moment of ‘world history’ essentially and abyssally other than all the ‘millions of years’ of worldless processes? Because this suddenness lights up the uniqueness of be-ing … The ‘moment’ is the origin of ‘time’ itself” (GA 66: 113–14). An inception emerges from the earth and founds a new, ecstatic temporality that spreads open a world.
Heidegger often thinks of inception as a poetic event (see Chapter 14). “Poetry is the fundamental happening of be-ing as such. It founds be-ing and must found it” (GA 39: 257). Poetry happens at the times when time itself happens most intensely: the moments that Heidegger, following Hölderlin, calls “the peaks of time” (GA 39: 52, 56). These poetic peaks are the origin of ecstatic, primordial time:
In this holding-sway-forward of what has been into the future, which, pointing back, opens what was already preparing itself earlier as such, there holds sway the coming-towards and the still-essentially-happening (future and past) at once: originary time… This originary time transports our Dasein into the future and past, or better, brings it about that our being as such is a transported being – if it is authentic, that is… In such time, time “comes to be” …
(GA 9: 109)
This passage recalls Being and Time’s description of the ecstatic interplay of future, past and present. But while the language of Being and Time can suggest that ecstatic temporality is a fixed structure, Heidegger now presents time as gushing forth at great historical moments that establish a way of existing for a people or an age.
Poets are not the only founders; in the mid 1930s Heidegger typically speaks of the triumvirate of poet, thinker and statesman. “Founding” is, among other things, a political concept, and it is not a coincidence that Heidegger is thinking about the founding of time during a period of revolution and political “inception”. What is at stake, as he says in 1934, is “a transformation of our entire being in its relation to the power of time … this transformation depends on … how we temporalize time itself. … [We] ourselves are time” (GA 38: 120).
The Contributions to Philosophy (1936–8; hereafter Contributions) give the inception of time and being the name Ereignis, which normally means “event” but also echoes the word eigen (own, proper). The appropriating event is “the event of the grounding of the there” (GA 65: 183). In this event, Dasein comes into its own because it comes to belong to the happening of being (see Chapter 10). At this moment, we are seized or appropriated by an inception. We can then properly “be there”, and things can gain their proper places and significance. Entities become interpretable, accessible, explicable; but the original appropriating event cannot itself be explained as if it were just an entity. It eludes our search for grounds; it is an abyss.
We could also think of Ereignis as the event in which the human being becomes, as Heidegger put it in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, “a creature of distance”. Being and Time already insisted that the fact that our own being is an issue for us is essential to temporality and to our understanding of being. But how does our being come to be an issue for us? We must first be separated from our own being, so that it becomes something towards which we can adopt, or fail to adopt, a stance. We are indebted, then, to a strange event, the event of estrangement itself: a disquieting event in which we are distanced from ourselves, so that we are then faced with the task of being ourselves. As the domain of selfhood unfolds, so does the “there”: the space in which we can encounter and interpret beings (GA 65: 320).
The appropriating event would take place at a “site of the moment” where “time-space” would emerge. Heidegger’s tentative description of time-space (GA 65: §242) is best read not as a transcendental account of the “formal concepts” of time and space in general (GA 65: 261), but as an attempt to speak of a unique moment that would initiate (or perhaps re-initiate) meaningful time and space. The Contributions describe time-space as an “abyssal ground” that opens a domain of unconcealment, yet denies this domain any absolute foundation. Timespace implicates us in the unfolding of Western history as Heidegger understands it: it ties us back to “the first inception” of the revelation of being among the Greeks, readies us for “the other inception” that may bring a new destiny of being, and ties us to the present as the site where the current “abandonment” of being must be endured.
As this last thought suggests, for Heidegger in this period, being is not constantly given; “be-ing is at times” (das Seyn ist zuzeiten; GA 70: 15). How often do these times come? Has such a time ever fully taken place? The answers are elusive. “When and how long being ‘is’ cannot be asked” (GA 69: 145).
In the last phase of his thought, beginning around 1940, Heidegger de-emphasizes the quasi-political moment of inceptive founding, and instead concentrates on cultivating gratitude for time, truth and being as dispensations from Ereignis itself. As we can see in the Zollikon Seminars of the 1950s and 1960s, where Heidegger introduces a group of psychiatrists to phenomenology, he remains loyal to Being and Time’s analysis of everyday temporality: it is datable, ecstatic, public and significant. But he now seeks authentic temporality neither through deathbound resoluteness nor in powerful moments of inception, but in Gelassenheit a non-wilful “releasement” that can admit us into unconcealment, allowing us to receive the gift of being (see Chapter 12).
The late lecture “Time and Being” (1962) is an introduction to Ereignis as that which gives both being and time. Being appears to be governed by time, because being seems tantamount to presence, which is a temporal determination. Time, in turn, appears to be governed by being, because time seems to be constantly present (TB 3). Yet neither time nor being is an entity; we can say only that they are given. How are they given, then? Being is given as an anonymous donation, so to speak: it is “sent” by a hidden source (TB 8). Time is given as the “time-space” (TB 14) or “nearness” (TB 15) that opens in the extending of future, past and present. In the giving of being and time we can discern “a dedication [Zueignen], a delivering over [Übereignen] into what is their own [ihr Eigenes]” (TB 19). The fitting word, then, for the source that gives us being and time and unites them is Ereignis. Ereignis withdraws or conceals itself, so it includes its own “expropriation”; yet it also appropriates us, bringing us into our own. Because Ereignis intimately constitutes us, we cannot objectify it in propositions (TB 23).
Heidegger’s reflections in this lecture are highly abstract and preliminary. It would seem, though, that he has backed away from thinking of Ereignis as the time when time begins. In contrast to the Contributions, which frequently describe Ereignis as an inceptive or inaugural happening (e.g. GA 65: 57, 183, 247), several post-war essays insist that it is not a happening at all (IDS 36; OWL 127). Heidegger warns us that “time itself is nothing temporal” (TB 14) and that we should not misconstrue appropriation – again, “something which is not temporal” as an event within time (TB 20, 47). Heidegger has apparently returned to a quasi-transcendental standpoint. The usual sense of the word Ereignis (event) seems to have disappeared: Ereignis is no longer a historical inception from which truth and being erupt, but appears to be a timeless ground (see Polt 2005).
We can conclude with a few historical comparisons. Heidegger stands in a tradition that links time with the soul; like Augustine, for example, he highlights our ecstatic extension into the three dimensions of time, an extension that Augustine identifies with the mental acts of expectation, recollection and attention (Confessions 11.27–8). Husserl’s phenomenology of “internal time consciousness” also follows this line of thought; here Husserl applies his discriminative genius to temporal experiences such as “pretention” and “retention” (see Husserl 1991).
Heidegger insists that there is more at stake in time than the observation of passing events: our very self is ineluctably temporal, because it is in time that we discover or create who we are and where we stand. Augustine comes close to this insight through his concern with the temporality of sin and redemption (see PRL 127–84), but his Christian Platonism orients him towards the eternal and leads him to see time itself as fallen. As for Husserl, his paradigmatic example of temporal experience is listening to a series of tones: a case of disengaged observation that may not shed light on temporal phenomena that grip us personally, such as guilt or fate. Heidegger, who edited a volume of Husserl’s lectures on time, never explicitly criticizes his mentor’s approach, but he must have seen it as derivative and limited; the temporality of observation presupposes the deeper temporality of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
In the name of retrieving this temporality, Heidegger deconstructs traditional ontology. This deconstruction can help us untangle certain conundrums about time and being. For example, philosophers have often asked whether time itself exists: it seems to consist of what is no longer, what is not yet, and what is only for an infinitesimal instant (Aristotle, Physics 4.10; Augustine, Confessions 11.14). Heidegger’s approach allows us to “show on the basis of ‘time’ that this kind of question cannot be asked anymore” (GA 64: 61 n.). When we ask whether time “exists” or “is”, we presuppose some understanding of being – and almost inevitably, we understand presence as the primary or central sense of being (GA 64: 101; SZ 25–6). But if Being and Time is right, our access to presence is itself made possible by time. Time, then, cannot be subordinated to presence; time itself makes presence meaningful.
Heidegger’s temporal deconstruction of traditional ontology is not a demolition; it brings out the limited validity of the tradition. An ontology of presence has its legitimate scope as “an ontology of the world in which every Dasein is” (GA 64: 103): that is, it illuminates the present-at-hand entities within this world. What it cannot illuminate is Dasein’s own temporality and historicity.
Heidegger leaves us with no final solutions, but with fresh concepts and new questions. Among many, we can mention the problem of how to conceive of God once traditional notions of time and being have been exposed to the Heideggerian critiques. Platonism is a powerful factor in traditional theology, and monotheists may find it almost impossible to understand their religion except in relation to a timeless presence. Heidegger’s thought suggests the perhaps refreshing, perhaps troubling, alternative of thinking of a god as an event: “passing by” may be precisely how the gods are present (GA 39: 111). It may be that our deepest destiny does not return us to a divine eternity, but awakens us to the opening of a divine distance: a distance that is also a divine nearness.
1. A short lecture based on this text, by the same name, is also included in this volume of the Collected Edition and is available in English (CT).
Aristotle 1969. Physics, H. G. Apostle (trans.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Augustine 1961. Confessions, R. S. Pine-Coffin (trans.). Baltimore, MD: Penguin.
Husserl, E. 1991. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), J. B. Brough (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Plotinus 1966. Enneads, with English trans. by A. H. Armstrong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Polt, R. 2005. “Ereignis”. In A Companion to Heidegger, H. L. Dreyfus & M. Wrathall (eds), 375–91. Oxford: Blackwell.
See Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology; Being and Time, Division Two; “The Concept of Time”, in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927; “Time and Being”, in On Time and Being; and Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations-Letters, esp. 33–67.
See Blattner (1999); Dastur (1998); Polt (2005: esp. chs 2, 9, 11); Polt (2006: esp. 72–87 on Ereignis as event and 180–92 on time-space); and Wood (2001: pt III).