Summary: Being and Time (page 8)

Being and Time: the moment has now come, in this introduction, to examine the second term in the book's title. Up to now, being has been our main concern. Why does Heidegger couple time with being in the title in this way?

This is because temporality will be brought to light as the meaning of the being which we call Dasein. ¹ The essential structures of Dasein that the existential analytic reveals to us will in fact appear as modes of temporality.

The human being is a temporal being, and any attempt to grasp being starting from the human being will therefore inevitably lead us to encounter time.

The link between being and time is as follows: being can never be grasped except from the standpoint of time.

Or again: that out of which Dasein in general silently understands and articulates something like being is time.

Time must therefore be brought to light and originally conceived as the horizon of every understanding and explication of being.

In the light of the foregoing, we can better grasp why Heidegger chose to entitle his book Being and Time. It is in time that the secret of being resides.

This does not mean, however, that time is the answer to the question of being—that being simply is time. What it means is that the ground has been laid for such an answer to be obtained.

In reality, we never do get an answer to the guiding question—the question of being in general.

Being and Time is, as is well known, an unfinished work. The last section of its first part was to have been devoted to the temporal meaning of being; it was there that Heidegger should have answered the question 'What is being?' and thought through the relation between being and time.

But Heidegger did not find the resources to write it; his investigation failed to find a satisfactory direction—a difficulty to which he returned thirty years later in the Letter on Humanism.

For all that, Being and Time remains a masterpiece; its incompleteness simply lends it a tragic aspect that contributes to the legend surrounding the book.

What we actually find in this unfinished work—in the first two divisions of its first part—is a reflection on Dasein in its relation to being and to time: a preliminary and secondary question in comparison with the truly originary question of being in general, to which Heidegger never managed to return.

This task requires that we rethink the concept of time from the ground up; we cannot be satisfied with the vulgar understanding of time that has been made explicit in the interpretation sedimented in the traditional concept of time, a concept that has persisted from Aristotle to Bergson and beyond.

Heidegger sets out to show that an adequate conception of time can only rest on the notion of temporality; that the traditional, 'vulgar' conception is, surprisingly, itself grounded in temporality—and not in space, as Bergson mistakenly believes when he takes the time at issue there to be, in fact, space.

By questioning time in its relation to being, Heidegger seeks to determine the ontological meaning of time. This is an old line of inquiry: the philosophical tradition has done something similar, though in a rather naïve way. Traditionally, time has been treated as the ontological criterion by which we distinguish different kinds of beings: temporal beings (living things, and so on), timeless beings (mathematical truths), atemporal beings (the logical content of a proposition), and supratemporal beings (Platonic Ideas, God, and so on).

Heidegger, however, regards this as an ontic rather than an ontological criterion. And above all: by what right is time accorded such a privileged ontological function? Why not choose some other criterion instead? Questions of this sort had, up to now, neither been raised nor examined in any depth.

The truly originary question—what must be shown—is how the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, properly grasped and made fully explicit.

Just as Heidegger had distinguished between the 'existentiell' and the 'existential', he now draws a distinction between what is merely in time and what he calls the temporal in a strict, technical sense. 'Temporal' here designates the original determination of the meaning of being – and of its traits and modes – on the basis of time. It is therefore an ontological term, whereas 'temporal' in the ordinary sense refers only to the ontic characterisation of a being as being in time.

We can now see what Heidegger means when he claims that the fundamental ontological task of interpreting being as such therefore includes working out the 'being-temporal' character of being itself.

Heidegger is not trying to produce some brand-new answer to the question of being. On the contrary, if such an answer is to contain anything genuinely positive, this can only be by being, in a sense, sufficiently ancient – by teaching us how to think through the possibilities opened up by the 'Ancients'. In philosophy, an answer can aim at nothing more than giving fresh impetus to philosophical questioning within the horizon it has itself opened up – and that is all it can ever give.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Heidegger: A Close Reading