On Time and Being

by Martin Heidegger

On Time and Being charts the so-called "turn" in Martin Heidegger's philosophy away from his earlier metaphysics in Being and Time to his later thoughts after "the end of philosophy." The title lecture, "Time and Being," shows how Heidegger reconceived both "Being" and "time," introducing the new concept of "the event of Appropriation" to help give his metaphysical ideas nonmetaphysical meanings. On Time and Being also contains a summary of six seminar sessions that Heidegger conducted on "Time and Being," a lecture called "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," and an autobiographical sketch of Heidegger's intellectual history in "My Way of Phenomenology."

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

84 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every academic philosopher should read this text, but its usually glossed over or completely ignored by phenomenologists... the simple reason I say this is that Heidegger gives a deconstructive "Definition" of phenomenology that would probably shock most academics who build their careers on "Schooling - Phenomenology..." He says... "Phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestations remains a mystery." (p.82 My Way of Phenomenology).... Interesting!

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short and nice summary/introduction to Heidegger done by Heidegger himself. Also, it is one of the few Heidegger's writings where he is talking about himself - instead of a past thinker or some other topic. Basically, here he is reinterpreting “Being and Time” within the framework of the Event of Appropriation – change in this thinking labeled by others “the turn”. His take on early Greeks and Aletheia, Plato, metaphysics, truth, science, Hegel, phenomenology and Husserl, technology, cybernetics and so on appear in this book. Here is one of the core passages: “All metaphysics including its opponent positivism speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of his presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence. No outward appearance without light – Plato already knew this. But there is no light and no brightness without the opening.”

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book as an introduction to Heidegger from what books I've read so far. It lays the real basis for a lot of his other thoughts from 'Being and Time's' temporality to "Building, Dwelling, Thinking's" terminology and development of projecting. The book is also brief, the two main essays are twenty five pages each. The ever long winded Heidegger can't go too far.

If you read a lot of late Heidegger (post metaphysics) you won't find any surprises. If you're looking to give Heidegger a try this isn't a bad place to start. I think it was Quentin Meillassoux who said this was the place start and to read Heidegger backwards. I think whoever said it is on to something. "Being and Time" would have been a lot easier if I'd started with later Heidegger.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indispensable for thinking through Heidegger's a-metaphysical thinking of Ereignis. The opening lecture by Heidegger, "On Time and Being," is an excellent example of the prepratory or transitional thought that seeks to bring forth the granting-concealment through the co-respondent thinking of Being-historical thought or Besinnung.
The second piece is a summary of a handful of seminars that followed the lecture, which provides some interesting questions on the aforementioned thinking - though it is rendered somewhat superfluous due to our access to the Beiträge.
The work rounds out with another lecture, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," which connects the elements of the thought of the first lecture with Heidegger's larger project of the Destruktion of the history of Metaphysics, acting as a sort of brief contextualization for the first lecture in its transitionary saying.
Finally, the work ends with Heidegger's look back on his introduction to phenomenology. While it may seem like an unrelated addition at first, the piece actually fits well, as it speaks to how Being-historical thinking emerges out of a radical thinking of phenomenology (this may of course all be in retrospect, and not directly be as clear as Heidegger makes it out in the concluding sentences, but it is at the very least evident how the work in phenomenology and the phenomenological method opened Heidegger onto the path that led him to the thinking of Being and Time and beyond).

I finally got to read this in preparation for writing a paper on phenomenology and Being-historical thinking, and would highly recommend it to any with interest in Heidegger at any stage of his thinking. As stated above, it is an invaluable little resource.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

yo this has gotta be mandatory reading for any Heidegger syllabus

an intellectual brochure / amuse bouche of his main works and essays

“Philosophy is ending in the present age. It has found its place in the scientific attitude of socially active humanity. But the fundamental characteristic of this scientific attitude is its cybernetic, that is, technological character. The need to ask about modern technology is presumably dying out to the same extent that technology more definitely characterizes and regulates the appearance of the totality of the world and the position of man in it.”

[mahatmanto · Rating 3 out of 5]

ini salah beli.
pengennya sih beli yang 'sein und zeit' itu tapi kenanya yang ini. ya udahlah...
dan ternyata ini memang pengantar untuk ke mahakarya di atas.
sama-sama mbingungi... perlu pihak ketiga untuk mengantarkan ke sana [halaaah...]

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

What would have been a triumph and the second part of Being and Time if the latter project had not collapsed. What do you write about and how do you do philosphy after the "end"? Heidegger will show you, since he cannot tell you.

[Selim · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Varlık ve Zaman’ ı tartışmaya açarak kaçınılmaz olarak ‘Zaman’ ve ‘Varlık’ üzerine düşünmeye itiyor Heidegger. ‘Zaman’ ve ‘Varlık’ hakkında sorular sorarak bağlantılar ve köprüler kurarak ilerliyor kitap boyunca. Kavramlar arası ilişkilere dair açıklamalar yorucu olmaktan öte aydınlatıcı bir niteliğe bürünüyor.
Heidegger “ ‘neden böyle’ den söz edilmez. Sadece ‘öyle’ denebilir” dedikten sonra Goethe’den şu alıntıyı yapıyor, “ Nasıl, ne zaman ve nerede? Tanrılar sessiz kalır. Öyleyse tutunun ‘çünkü’ ye ve ‘neden’ ini sormayın.”

[Ian Morel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not going to pretend like I actually understood this book. I would say I understood 50% of it. From what I did get I couldn't help but think that Heidegger was on to something. I am not sure I can even say what that "something" is but... it is interesting.

I can't seem to really grasp what he means by "Appropriation". If anyone has helpful insights into that I would super appreciate an explanation.

2.8/5

[Michael Ledezma · Rating 5 out of 5]

The CLEAREST exposition of being and time, and how they permeate each other in order to hold open the openness which we call human spatiality. This essay is HUGE. So much more going on the second time around. Perfect in every way. So psyched to read Heidegger again.

[Murat Girgin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felsefenin kör kuyularına atan, sonuna kadar çıkacağımın ümidiyle okutan bir eser. Felsefenin türev ve integral boyutunda kaldığı, sonunda anlamayıp “carpe diem” ve “fihimafih” diye bildiğimden şaşmam dedirten kitap. Kendi zihin ve derinliğimin yetmediğime kanaatle bitiriyorum.

[Regina Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nervously smoking in corner and trying to figure out who screwed my brain.

[CR · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" for its ability to put certain historical perspectives (or perhaps, heuristics) into words.

[S.M.Y Kayseri · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger engaged in a complex phenomenological journey to demonstrate that the Being of man possesses time as its horizon. In this collection of essays, Time and Being reversed the inquiry; how time as the horizon also constitutes the Being of Man in temporality?

Time has often been known as a linear series: the now, the now-of-the-past and the not-yet-now. Yet one may ask whether the now-of-the-past and the not-yet-now can exist at all without the presence in the now synthesizing them?

Heidegger challenged this essentialistic conception of time, which treats time as a thing existing dependently from the Being of man. Instead, he argued that the notion of time only made sense through the presence of the being who lived through it, through time. Conceived in this way, time is not a separate entity, but rather a mode of Being, exerting itself with its presence.

For an example, I am here now. In 10 minutes, I will be in the room. Between now and the 10 minutes, there’s nothing over “there” at the “10 minutes. Only when I arrived “the room at 10 minutes” finally makes sense, but then when I arrived, the “room in 10 minutes” becomes the “room in now”. The “10 minutes” is not something existing independently by itself, but rather a point of referent I project my “presence” to be there.

This understanding correlates with the findings of Carlo Rovelli in his book The Order of Time, that time is not a fundamental features in the universe, but rather a relational one. There is no single shared “now. Even though I see the stars in the “now”, the stars themselves might have ceased existing for hundreds or thousands of years.

But why, then, do we still “feel” time? It is not because time is something external like the raindrops splattering at our face, but because we are the face who feels changes from the raindrops. According to Rovelli, we do not experience time like we find something tangible like something found upon opening a box. We experience time through entropy; something hot becomes cold, from hunger to the warmth of satiety, from the springy body of youth to the fatigued body of late years. All of these examples of entropy are felt by us because we experienced it. There’s simply no atomistic time.

In relation to psychiatry, it explains why in patients with mania, they would have racing thoughts, talkativeness, reduced need for sleep and increased goal-oriented activity. These are not merely symptoms occurring in time; they are expressions of accelerated lived temporality, thoughts experienced too quickly, sometimes even simultaneously.

Ordinarily, we experience some contemporaneity with others who are experiencing more or less the same set of entropy; spending a lazy afternoon with pur loved ones, living in a country with more or less the same macrocosmic conditions. We call this as basal contemporaneity.

But because time is relational and lived, the manic patient lost its synchronization with the lived experience of the others, and enters into an acceleration, where their lived experience is condensed and intensified rather than others. For the depressed patient, it would be the complete opposite; he experienced retardation of time- one experience stretched to infinity, rendering psychological and motor retardation, corresponding to his retarded lived time.

The psychotic, on the other hand, instead of retardation and acceleration, but fragmentation of lived experience. Instead of coherent series of lived experience constituting a linear experiences A—>B—>C, with each of the A to C can further subdivided to its smaller but linear unit, e.g. A1, A2 etc, the psychotic experienced A3–>B6–>C18.

Memory is not a mere static repository of past experiences. We do not retrieve the past separately like taking a file in the cupboard, we re-experience it. Can you name a memory which upon recollecting it, you do not also experience it? So the psychotic would also include the lived recollection in his fragmented sense of time, so his sense of experience can be not just A3–>B6–>C18, but also a jumble of A3–>B6C5–>C18A6 and so on. And this would yield the kind of fragmented experience experienced by the psychotic.

If we are to accept Heidegger’s theory idea of time as relational, and thus each of it are lived presence, thus abnormal experiences can be understood as disturbances of presence in temporality, rather than merely as disturbances occurring within an objective, external time.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A COLLECTION CONTAINING TWO LECTURES, AND OTHER MATERIAL

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was an influential and controversial German philosopher, primarily concerned with Being, and phenomenology---who was widely (perhaps incorrectly) also perceived as an Existentialist. His relationship with the Nazi party in Germany has been the subject of widespread controversy and debate [e.g., 'Heidegger and Nazism,' 'Heidegger and the Nazis,' 'Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany,' 'Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism,' etc.]

The translator said in the Introduction, “‘On Time and Being’ contains Heidegger’s lecture on ‘Time and Being’ together with a summary of six seminar sessions on that lecture---a lecture on ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ and a short retrospective piece on Heidegger’s relation to phenomenology.”

Heidegger says in the first lecture, “What prompts us to name time and Being together? From the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, Being means the same as presencing. Presencing, presence speaks of the present. According to current representations, the present, together with past and future, forms the character of time. Being is determined by presence as time… But is Being a thing? Is Being like an actual being in time? IS Being at all? If it were, then we would incontestably discover it as such among other beings. This lecture hall IS… We recognize the illuminated lecture hall at once and with no reservations as something that is. But where in the whole lecture hall do we find the ‘is’? … Every thing has its time. But Being is not a thing, is not in time … Being is not a thing, thus nothing temporal, and yet it is determined by time as presence. Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.” (Pg. 2-3)

He goes on, “Anything of which we can say ‘it is’ is thereby represented as a being. But Being is not a being. Thus the ‘esti’ that is emphasized in Parmenides’ saying cannot represent the Being which it names as some kind of a being… we can paraphrase [esti] by: ‘It is capable.’ However, the meaning of this capability remained just as unthought, then and afterward, as the ‘It’ which is capable of Being. To be capable of Being means: to yield and give Being. In the ‘esti’ there is concealed the It gives.” (Pg. 8)

He says, “Insofar as there is manifest in Being as presence such a thing as time, the supposition mentioned earlier grows stronger that true time, the fourfold extending of the open, could be discovered as the ‘It’ that gives Being, i.e., gives presence. The supposition appears to be fully confirmed when we note that absence, too, manifests itself as a mode of presence. What has-been which, by refusing the present, lets that become present which is no longer present, and the coming toward us of what is to come which, by withholding the present, lets that be present which is not yet present---both made manifest the manner of an extending opening up which gives all presencing into the open. Thus true time appears as the ‘It’ of which we speak when we say: it gives Being. The destiny in which It gives Being lies in the extending of time.” (Pg. 17)

He suggests, “Insofar as the destiny of Being lies in the extending of time, and time, together with Being, lies in Appropriation, Appropriating makes manifest its peculiar property, that Appropriation withdraws what is most fully its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought in terms of Appropriating, this means: in the sense it expropriates itself of itself. Expropriation belongs to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation, Appropriation does not abandon itself---rather, it preserves what is its own.” (Pg. 22-23)

In the second lecture, he observes, “Philosophy is metaphysics. Metaphysics things being as a whole---the world, man, God---with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being. Metaphysics thinks beings as being in the manner of representational thinking which gives reasons. For since the beginning of philosophy and with that beginning, the Being of beings has showed itself as the ground. The ground is from where beings as such are what they are in their becoming, perishing and persisting as something that can be known, handled, and worked upon. As the ground, Being brings beings to their actual presencing. The ground shows itself as presence.” (Pg. 55-56)

He states, “All philosophical thinking which explicitly or inexplicably follows the call ‘to the thing itself’ is already admitted to the free space of the opening in its movement and with its method. But philosophy knows nothing of the opening. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the opening of Being. The … light of reason, throws light only on openness. It does concern the opening, but so little does it form it that it needs it in order to be able to illuminate what is present in the opening. This is true not only of the philosopher’s METHOD, but also and primarily of its MATTER, that is, of the presence of what is present.” (Pg. 66)

This small book will be of keen interest to those studying Heidegger and the development of his thought.

[Roy Kenagy]

RK FT01 DISCUSSED IN ABRAM SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS

[Marcelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

que duro pega la kehre

[Steven Fowler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joan Stambaugh, one of Heidegger's last students, has done a nice job with this text. This work is the English translation of 3 of Heidegger's later lectures given in the 1960's including the lecture from which this book takes its title. In addition to the other two lectures there is a summary of students notes from the title lecture. It is significant that Heidegger chose to name this lecture after the unfinished section of his Being and Time. While it is not the section of that work that would have been included had Heidegger finished it in the early 1920's as opposed to the early 1960's, it demonstrates that the journey Heidegger was on philosophically didn't change from the basic question of being in spite of his hesitantly self-proclaimed Kehre or turning. As such this book is a "must read" in conjunction with Heidegger's early work as a "lantern" helping his readers to follow his journey from his break with Husserl to his focus on language.

[J.T. Therrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heidegger signals his fundamental metaphysical shift when he reverses the terms from his seminal Being and Time to Time and Being. To appreciate this change in direction, one needs to have read Heidegger's journey through metaphysics.

In Time and Being Heidegger comes to the conclusion that dasein is ontologically a temporal being.

Anyone familiar with Heidegger's fourfold ontology and/or with his previous metaphysics will immediately recognize the significance of this later philosophical position.

[Sunblinding · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's giving Being.

[caemi · Rating 4 out of 5]

sustancioso, un buen bocado para el intelecto pero un poco indigesto para el mío. Lo releeré porque no me he enterado ni de la mitad.

[Santos DeBarros · Rating 3 out of 5]

What I did understand was fascinating.