The Ordinary Interpretation of Time – Part 2 (BT426/427) (2025) Peinture par Noël Van Hoof

Martin Heidegger – Being and Time – BT426/427

The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of “nows” which passed away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein. The ordinary representation of time has its natural justification. It belongs to Dasein's average kind of Being, and to that understanding of Being which proximally prevails. Thus proximally and for the most part, even history gets understood publicly as happening within-time. This interpretation of time loses its exclusive and pre-eminent justification only if it claims to convey the 'true' conception of time and to be able to prescribe the sole possible horizon within which time is to be Interpreted. On the contrary, it has emerged that why and how world-time belongs to Dasein's temporality is intelligible only in terms of that temporality and its temporalizing. From temporality the full structure of world-time has been drawn; and only the Interpretation of this structure gives us the clue for 'seeing' at all that in the ordinary conception of time something has been covered up, and for estimating how much the ecstatico-horizontal constitution of temporality has been levelled off. This orientation by Dasein's temporality indeed makes it possible to exhibit the origin and the factical necessity of this levelling off and covering up, and at the same time to test the arguments for the ordinary theses about time.
On the other hand, within the horizon of the way time is ordinarily understood, temporality is inaccessible in the reverse direction. Not only must the now-time be oriented primarily by temporality in the order of possible interpretation, but it temporalizes itself only in the inauthentic temporality of Dasein; so if one has regard for the way the now-time is derived from temporality, one is justified in considering temporality as the time which is primordial.
Ecstatico-horizontal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future. In the way time is ordinarily understood, however, the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”, and indeed in that pure “now” which has been shorn in its full structure – that which they call the 'Present'. One can gather from this that there is in principle no prospect that in terms of this kind of “now” one can clarify the ecstatico-horizontal phenomenon of the moment of vision which belongs to temporality, or even that one can derive it thus. Correspondingly, the future as ecstatically understood – the datable and significant 'then' – does not coincide with the ordinary conception of the 'future' in the sense of a pure “now' which has not yet come along but is only coming along. And the concept of the past in the sense of the pure “now” which has passed away, is just as far from coinciding with the ecstatical “having-been” – the datable and significant 'on a former occasion'. The “now” is not pregnant with the “not-yet-now”, but the Present arises from the future in the primordial ecstatical unity of the temporalizing of temporality.

(Translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson)

Thèmes connexes

Martin HeideggerNapoleon