University of Arkansas Press

The Understanding of Time in Phenomenology and in the Thinking of the Being-Question

Author(s): MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Thomas Sheehan and Frederick Elliston
Source: The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 2 (SUMMER, 1979), pp. 199-
201
Published by: University of Arkansas Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43155353
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The Understanding of Time in
Phenomenology and in the
Thinking of the Being-Question
MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Translated by
Thomas Sheehan
Loyola University of Chicago
and
Frederick Elliston
State University of New York at Albany

Introductory Note
by
Thomas Sheehan

In this brief contribution1 Heidegger takes the occasion of the thirtieth anni-
versary of Husserl's death to claim the title of phenomenology for the whole of
his own work while noting his distance from his master. Husserl stated the maxim
of phenomenology in section 24 of his Ideas (1913) as the requirement of ac-
cepting, for the legitimation of knowledge, only that which gives itself in original
intuition as it gives itself within the limits of its self-givenness. Husserl had
already shown in Logical Investigations (VI, 6) that such presentations are
categorial as well as sensuous: beings in their beingness, as Heidegger would put
it. The younger Heidegger read that earlier work as freeing the beingness of
beings from its traditional imprisonment in the copula of sentential logic so as to
render it present for intuition. Husserl had thus brilliantly uncovered the major
premise of the tradition, unspoken since the Greeks, that beingness (whether
idea , energeia , esse, or whatever) was givenness or presen tness and that the true
field for philosophy was the correlation between ousia and logos in their phe-
nomenological immediacy. But the later Ideas , in Heidegger's reading, slipped
back into the power of a neo-Kantian transcendental ego and the problematic
of consciousness.
In a recently discovered letter of June 20, 1919, from one Herr Walter of
Freiburg to Professor Pfänder, we find that, a full eight years before the publica-
tion of Being and Time , Heidegger was openly criticizing the transcendental ego
in Husserl. Walter reports that at one of the Saturday-morning discussions which
Husserl was accustomed to have at his home, the young Doctors Ebbinghaus and
Heidegger launched a "campaign against the pure ego." Whereas Ebbinghaus,
from his Fichtean and Hegelian standpoint, entirely dismissed the possibility of a
contentless transcendental ego, Heidegger expressed his opposition by mediating
between Husserl and Ebbinghaus: "He says that the pure ego would derive from
the 'historical ego' via the repression of all historicity and quality, but that it
could only be the subject of material-theoretical acts [sachlich-theoretischer
Afete]."2
1Q9

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 For Heidegger, the "historical ego" (a stand-in word for what he properly
called the facticity of Dasein) is thrown into the privative "absence" whence
arises the revealedness, or aletheia, of whatever appears. If Husserl had dis-
covered that ousia, beingness, is present givenness, then one could ask the
phenomenological W ie-Frage about how that givenness is given. This would
be the promised land of the question of the possibilizing condition or "meaning"
of beingness, but Husserl was refused access by his eventual self-restriction to the
issues of consciousness and its objectivity. It was Heidegger's privilege to enter
that land and chart its topology by pushing the ousia-logos correlation of im-
mediately intuitable givenness back to the prior kinesis or movement which is
the very enactment (Vollzug) of the bond between man and beingness. Since
kinesis is fundamentally a matter of presence-by-absence (in Aristotle, energeia
that is still caught in dynamis , hence energeia ateies ), Heidegger would enter the
promised land by reawakening the question of "time" - not as Aristotle's number
of movement in terms of no-longer and not-yet but as a unique kind of move-
ment itself: absence as the condition of presentness (beingness) in phenomeno-
logical appearance. Thus, while the tradition, from Plato through Husserl, had
been clear about the beingness of beings (the givenness of what is given), it had
overlooked the question of the giving of givenness itself: how absence, held open
but never controlled by man's transcendence, allows the presentness of what-
ever appears: presence-by-absence, pres-ab-sence.
The historicity which Heidegger claims for Dasein is not primarily a matter of
tracing the history of thought but one of deconstructing that history in order to
find its primal event: man's thrownness into, or appropriation by, the ever-
receding dimension he calls lethe, which makes the revealedness or givenness
(aletheia) of beings possible. That event remains the one and only topic of
Heidegger's thought from beginning to end, whether he calls it the time-fraught
"meaning" of beingness or its self-opening "truth" or its dynamic "place." We
might call it the "kinetic determination of givenness" in an interplay of "recess"
(self-withdrawing lethe) which claims "excess" ( Daseins transcendence) for the
sake of "access" (the givenness of beings) . Such a unique conception of time as
kinesis remains foreign to Husserl's studies in internal time-consciousness. It is
entirely at the service of asking how givenness is given: the "Being-question."

Being and T ime says that we must understand and do phenomenology

not in its actuality but in its possibility. The real maxim of phe-
nomenology is not the "principle of all principles" but the maxim "To
the issue itself!" But if we think about this maxim phenomenologically,
the question arises: What is the issue for philosophy? Is it conscious-
ness? It remains to be asked: By what route do I get at an answer to this
question? Can I decide this question purely from myself in my own
egological intuition? Or does this reflection necessarily have a relation
to history [Geschichte], not just an historiological relation but an his-
torical [geschichtlicher] one? For the history of thought is not just a
bunch of differing opinions from the past but rather contains the claim
which is made on us to pose the same question again and again, the
question about the Being of beings. From this there follows the larger

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question which I emphatically claim to be phenomenological: If
throughout its whole history metaphysics certainly speaks of the Being
of beings in the various transformations of idea, energeia, actualitas,
monad, objectivity, Absolute Spirit, absolute knowledge, Will to Power
-then in terms of what is the essence of Being to be determined?
The first impetus toward this question hit me during a long-standing
occupation with Aristotle, my first guide being Franz Brentano's dis-
sertation On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle ( 1862 ) . The ques-
tion which bothered me more and more was this: What is the de-
termining unity in these several senses? What does "Being" mean? The
other impetus toward the development of the "Being-question" came
from the insight that the Greeks think of Being as presentness, in con-
junction with aletheia , i.e., unconcealment. As I pondered this thought,
especially when in the meanwhile my way of seeing had been trained in
phenomenology, I succeeded in taking the question a step further. In-
asmuch as a characteristic of time manifests itself in presentness and
the present [in Anwesenheit , Gegenwart] 9 must not the meaning of
Being receive its determination from time? Meanwhile, it became evi-
dent that the determination of time in philosophy since Aristotle had
been carried out from the standpoint of Being as presentness. What is
in time is always the now; the past is the no-longer-now, the future is
the not-yet-now. The traditional notion of time proved to be inadequate
for the attempt to discuss the relation of Being and time. My question
about time was determined from the question of Being. It went in a
direction which has always remained foreign to Husserl's investigations
on internal time-consciousness.

NOTES

1. This text first appeared in Phänomenologie - lebendig oder tot? ed. Helmu
Gehrig (Karlsruhe: Baderna, 1969), p. 47, under the title "Ueber das Zeitverstän
nis in der Phänomenologie und im Denken der Seinsfrage." The volume was pu
lished under the auspices of the Catholic Academy of Freiburg in commemoration
of the thirtieth anniversary of Husserl's death. An editor's note to the German te
says that the statement is to be taken together with Heidegger's contribution to t
Festgabe for Hermann Niemeyer that has since come into English as "My Way
Phenomenology," in Martin Heidegger, On ' Time and Being / trans. Joan Stam
baugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 74-82. The translators expre
thanks to Mrs. Elfride Heidegger and to the Catholic Academy of Freiburg for pe
mission to bring this text into English.
2. Husserl Archives, R. Ill Walter 20. VI. 19.

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