There is a limited generic similarity between Heidegger's Sein und Zeit and Saint Augustine's Soliloquies, which also reports a dialogue between two centres of himself, himself and ‘let us call it “reason”’. Reason gives Augustine guidance. Sein und Zeit is the assembled reportage of a protracted dialogue between a didactic observer-narrator and Dasein, who is not allowed to speak for himself. By contrast, that strong distinction was not at all evident in Heidegger's 1924 lecture, ‘Der Begriff der Zeit’, which was a precursor to Sein und Zeit(1927), where only the everydayness of Dasein was problematic. The observer-narrator has made himself familiar with Dasein, who may have been at first a challenging object of study. He needs Dasein in its unreformed state as a starting-point, though he intends to display his analysis of Dasein, which he has already achieved in detail, and to demonstrate for all to see how Dasein can only achieve a state of authentic existence by accepting the critical diagnostic and the radical re-orientation which he proposes. In Sein und Zeit the unreality of its conception of ‘authenticity’ arises from the concept of authenticity in ‘Der Begriff der Zeit’: ‘äußerste Möglichkeit’: not merely ‘most extreme’ but also ‘outermost’,Footnote 1 entailing that its substructuring was ignored as non-authentic, and therefore irrelevant. Where ‘reason’ was benign and sympathetic to Augustine, Dasein is shamed into accepting all that the narrator-observer prescribes for it and to reforming itself accordingly. Yet Heidegger claims that each of us as enquirer is Dasein, reserving to himself the role of observer of each of us. The programme is summarily laid out near the beginning. ‘If the question about being is to be explicitly formulated and carried through in such a manner as to be completely transparent to itself…it requires us to prepare the way for choosing the right entity for our example, and to work out the genuine way of access to it. Looking at something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing, access to it – all these ways of behaving are constitutive for our enquiry, and therefore are modes of being for those particular entities which we, the enquirers, are ourselves. … we must make an entity – the enquirer – transparent in his own being. This entity [Seiende] which each one of us is himself and which includes enquiring as one of the possibilities of its being, we shall denote by the term Dasein’.Footnote 2
At a later moment, the observer-narrator flatters Dasein's importance immeasurably: ‘Because the kind of being that is essential to truth is of the character of Dasein, all truth is relative to Dasein's being’.Footnote 3 But that is not the general impression given in most passages, which relate its failures. ‘Dasein has in every case already gone astray and failed to understand itself. In its potentiality for being it is therefore delivered over to the possibility of first finding itself again in its possibilities’.Footnote 4
I. The Observer-Narrator's Handling of Dasein in the First Part
It becomes rapidly clear in the first part, which contains a preparatory analysis of the whole, that Dasein, with its history of mistakes, is completely unlike the self-assured observer, who is totally confident in his discernment of everything which belongs to Dasein, and of his own diagnostic of the correctives which Dasein must accept. The observer is tidy-minded, while Dasein is untidy even in its absorption of basic and necessary knowledge. As long as there are observers with such penetrative powers, it is impossible to accept that Dasein is this entity which each of us is himself. Under examination, Dasein gives the continual impression of unpreparedness, of having the wrong kind of innocence which renders it passive, and being frankly helpless. Dasein could never initiate or carry out an exploration of its own basic structure, such as the self-confident observer carries out on its limp and unresisting nature.Footnote 5 For how would it describe it even to itself? But the observer is ready-at-hand with his criteria which are superior to those of the innocent Dasein. They have been evolved somewhere else within a superior reflection; the judgments of Dasein have virtually no validity. Dasein has not noticed that a rare insight into itself has mistakenly used an imperfect criterion of being, without being aware of the fact. Its being alongside itself is no more special than being alongside any being in the world of an anonymous ‘they’. It might protest and say, ‘this is myself!’, but ‘the self…is proximally and for the most part inauthentic’.Footnote 6 It needs at least to be called back to a state of consistency, which the recording observer assures those who observe with him and Dasein itself, that this does not concur with its best self, from which it has fallen away. The disclosedness which, in revealing self-distension, such adventures produce (cf. ‘thrown projection’Footnote 7) do not reveal anything worth while about its connatural potentiality for being. And yet the project seemed totally plausible: ‘Dasein, in its concernful absorption, understands itself in terms of what it encounters within the world.…[both] truth…[and] every entity is understood in the first instance as present-at-hand.…the question of whether this kind of being of truth is a primordial one…can not come alive at all’. The observer has kept in view the history of the attempts to unravel being over history, and judges that Dasein has ‘that understanding which is proximally the one which prevails, and which even today has not been surmounted explicitly and in principle’.Footnote 8
While the moods of Dasein, in which it becomes satiated with itself, heighten its sense of ‘being there’,Footnote 9 it must master its moods through knowledge and will.Footnote 10 Though these do not discover its true primordiality, this will be discovered in what is much more connected with emotions, or at least with affect, than that which ontology had historically located in intuition and reason, taken as authentic, as transcending the inauthentic emotions in their working on the senses. It had had the advantage of avoiding the charge that any change in orientation could be attributed to some blinding by the emotions.
‘Being in the world…must be interpreted in terms of the phenomenon of care [Sorge]; for the being of Dasein in general is to be defined as care’.Footnote 11 The English ‘care’, with its imprecise generality, falls far short of the German ‘Sorge’: ‘I have a Sorge– for you, or for this’ has a concernful intensity which possesses a person. And anxiety [Angst] is the indicator which leads to this discernment. ‘As one of Dasein's possibilities of being, anxiety – together with Dasein itself as disclosed in it – provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein's primordial totality of being. Being reveals itself as care’. Phenomena such as ‘will, wish, addiction and urge’ cannot be the source of care, ‘since they themselves are founded on it’.Footnote 12 Care in the sense of Sorge has a perfectly good meaning. But also basic to the analysis is the state of mind of anxiety, Angst, which is usually understand as being faulted, a defect (even if Kierkegaard is his author of preference here, along with Augustine and LutherFootnote 13). It is similar in so far as it concentrates the attention outside of itself, even ahead of itself. Both begin to display themselves as resources of what the medievals called ‘intentional’ being, to which is added a recognised but never assessed element of affect. The observer-narrator categorizes its status further as ‘pre-ontological…existential understanding [vorontologisch (in relation to traditional ontology)…existential, not existentielle Verstehen]’.Footnote 14
What is sought is the meaning of being in general, and whereas presence-at-hand reality has long been reflected on, ‘Dasein's being has remained ontologically undetermined’. Therefore that must be determined as something belonging to what is now disclosed, and its relationship to its generic analogues disclosed with it must be established: ‘we need to discuss the ontological interconnections of care, worldhood, readiness-to-hand, and presence-at-hand’, This leads to a refined conception of being: ‘being ‘is’ only in the understanding of those entities to whose being something like an understanding of being belongs. Hence being can be something unconceptualized. But it never completely fails to be understood’.Footnote 15 And so the observer brings to light from his own resources, what Dasein has achieved with its present limited imperceptiveness through logos(by which the observer understands ‘discourse’Footnote 16), with its logic in relationship to a no longer relevant existential analytic based on supposed certainties which had not found the primordial methodological basis,Footnote 17 and had certainly neither understood nor experienced it. The observer reminds Dasein of its premonitions of that basis, and interprets to it the reason for its attraction to ‘idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity’ which he characterizes as ‘fallen’, yet assuring it that even there the criterion of ‘authentic/inauthentic’ does not entail a loss of being, only the taking on of another form of being, because it has fallen away from itself, into a world which still belongs to its being.Footnote 18 Dasein has, through anxiety, ‘fled away from itself’, in a flight which can teach it (and the observer even more) something ontologically about Dasein itself.Footnote 19 For when the flight itself is understood in relationship to the basic anxiety, this anxiety individualises it: Dasein becomes aware of the distinctness between its authentic and inauthentic being.Footnote 20
The continuity between anxiety, which is a defect, and care as Sorge, which is a good quality, is not a true continuity but a kind of revelation communicated to Dasein, and the observer continues with categories and criteria which are far above Dasein's capacity: ‘we must first ask whether the phenomenon of anxiety and that which is disclosed in it, can give us the whole of Dasein in a way which is phenomenally equiprimordial, and whether they can do so in such a manner that if we look searchingly at this totality’[for which Dasein left to itself is self-evidently incapable], ‘our view of it will be filled by what has thus been given us.…[and] there is woven together in them a primordial context which makes up that totality of the structural whole which we are seeking’. And this he defines as ‘Dasein's being ahead of itself’, and in the sense of ‘itself being ahead of itself in (the world)’ together with the less perceptive sense of ‘being alongside (entities [Seienden] encountered within the world)’. The former is to be identified with care as an abounding Sorge, the latter as an abated concern [besorgen]; while the social aspect, ‘being with the Dasein-with [Mitdasein] of others, is solicitude’.Footnote 21 But care as Sorge is the ‘primordial structural totality…prior to [vor] every factical attitude and situation of Dasein’.Footnote 22
On the base of a text on ‘Cura’ from the Fabulae of Hyginus Mythographus (died 207), as worked up by Goethe for his Faust,Footnote 23 the observer notes the remark of the text's editor, that ‘‘cura’…signifies not only ‘anxious exertion’ but also ‘carefulness’ and ‘devotedness’’, and sees it, when man has been made free for ‘his own innermost possibilities’, as his perfection: ‘a state of being which is already underlying in every case’.Footnote 24 Along with this, ‘Dasein is ‘historical’ in the very depths of his being’.Footnote 25 That opens up properly our theme in Heidegger's thought, as it summarizes the first part. Overtaking the possibilities of Dasein's comprehension, and with a precision which outclasses its capacities and its connatural style of thought, he ends the first part by asking, ‘Has our investigation up to this point ever brought Dasein into view as a whole?’.Footnote 26 And he begins the second part by repeating this question, importing the traditional considerations of ‘end’ and ‘totality’, with ‘totality’ as achieved in death.Footnote 27 The ‘completed’ death of others should fill Dasein, as much as the observer, with thoughts of his own death.
The Profile of the Observer-Narrator which emerges in the First Part
The observer-narrator, who has no doubt about his superiority, has put all the questions, because he is of a completely different mentality from Dasein. Dasein could never ask itself whether it has brought itself into a view of its own wholeness. The insights into itself, their apparent presuppositions, the results of a probing into them all come from outside, from a structured intelligence whose incisiveness does not seem to proceed from care as Sorge, but from the dispositions of a practiced analyst who postulates for Dasein a ‘primordiality’ which does not correspond to his own. With his intention given over to the discernment of a gamut of hitherto undiscerned essentialities, all correctly interpretable as ‘being’, the inquirer may be excused for not noticing that while the material content of the enquiry must be taken for what it is, the formal method of analyzing it adopted by the observer is systematic by intention, except where it leaves uncommented overlappings of dispositions in order to give the impression of authenticity. Above all, and especially in the second part, it mounts an analysis with overriding, un-Dasein-like finality, ending with a comparison with Hegel's relationship between Geist and time. And during it, Dasein has been (according to the intention) reformed according to a crypto-rational structuring. For our investigation this is important, because whether the conception of time which it produces is authentically that of Dasein as it is, or hermeneutically transformed within the methodology of the observer-narrator, must become clear. By the end, Dasein has become most unlike Dasein in its original form, which has effectively disappeared from view. When later the narrator declares, ‘in every case I am myself the entity which we call Dasein’Footnote 28 it can only mean ‘Dasein has become me!’ We are reminded of the medical verdict: ‘the operation was a complete success, but unfortunately the patient has died’.
II. The Observer-Narrator's Handling of Dasein in the Second Part: Dasein and Temporality
Soon after the beginning the narrator has to face the problem of reconciling anticipation and resoluteness; it arises out of a methodology which increasingly distances itself from the original freedom of Dasein, and the imposition of a more rigorous methodology than the impressionistic reportage of the first part, in which its features appeared (whatever the observer might allege) more authentically. From now onwards the rationally ordered categories and un-Dasein-like figures of the observer gradually dominate his narration. ‘Temporality gets experienced in a phenomenally primordial way in Dasein's authentic being a whole, in the phenomenon of anticipatory resoluteness’.Footnote 29 This is a foretaste of what is to come, as ‘[philosophy] unfolds with more and more penetration both the [= its!] propositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions’.Footnote 30 And with what dutifulness!‘The laying-bare of Dasein's primordial being must be…wrested [abgerungen] from Dasein’.Footnote 31 And the narrator claims, in conformity with the methods of his own discipline, ‘we are coining the appropriate existential concepts’;Footnote 32 as he also claims now the wresting is proceeding well on his own terms, that ‘Dasein…has already understood itself’, even though it interprets itself in terms of myth or magic.Footnote 33 The observer rejects the charge that the terms of the enquiry are a presupposition, with the answer that they have not led us nowhere:Footnote 34 not nowhere, that is, according to the presuppositions of rational enquiry and analysis.
For this article we will interpret some passages about Dasein as temporal in which there is a relationship to thoughts of Augustine on the nature of time.
a) Heidegger finds Anticipations of his Treatment of Time in Augustine
Temperamentally Augustine was not a thinker preoccupied always with his inner world of thought and emotion, though his inner reflections are of the greatest interest, especially in his Confessiones. Heidegger quotes his ‘labour’ and ‘sweat’ concerning himself, despite his closeness to himself, interpreting it as his own kind of ‘ontological task’,Footnote 35 before he mentions Husserl and Scheler, and his intention of investigating ‘the question of personal being’, which they no longer raised.Footnote 36 When Heidegger wrote, Husserl's phenomenology was not fully developed, and not all of that had been published. Not that the locus of phenomenological enquiry was strange to Augustine. For him, the mind can be certain that, when, without any imaginative constructions (imaginale figmentum), it thinks that it lives, that it remembers, understands and loves itself, it is knowing itself; for then, as with the Husserlian epoche, only itself is left: ‘And if it adds nothing from these thoughts (of material things) to itself, so as to regard itself as something of the kind, then whatever still remains to it of itself, that alone is itself’.Footnote 37 Phenomenology became increasing a form of philosophical analysis, but Heidegger's thought was ontological, pursuing the task of disclosing the primordial ontological level of Dasein, and viewing everything in relationship to Dasein's ‘authentic’ dispositioning. He considered previous ontologies as now surpassed by this. He was supposedly limited to the range of this instinctive dispositioning, but, in effect, replaced it by a critique aimed at making it self-conscious, because he found this instinctive dispositioning intolerable. He had referred to Augustine's thoughts on the overtones of love in the discovery of truth,Footnote 38 as also on servile fear in relationship to ‘Angst’ and ‘Furcht’(as the contrary to love),Footnote 39 and he interprets Aristotle's ‘desire to know’ as ‘care [Sorge] for seeing’.Footnote 40 Augustine's Confessiones can be read as a sustained disclosure of his own dispositioning, often passing through pain; the ultimate release through the eventual discovery of authenticity; though, unlike the Dasein of Sein und Zeit, Augustine's Dasein was aware of its own inauthenticity,Footnote 41 and made its way forward in a dialogue deeper and truer than in words, while expressing itself very articulately in words, towards the ‘Good that beatifies’. From Heidegger's reading of Augustine, it seems not improbable that his conception of ‘fall’[‘fallen’, ‘Verfallen’] is related to a metaphor which Augustine uses: ‘labitur in minus et minus’.Footnote 42
b) Heidegger: Dasein as Totality; Augustine: the Self as Totum (Confessiones) and Tota (de Trinitate)
The first part of Sein und Zeit ended and the second part began with the desire to uncover the whole, or totality, of Dasein. This has its counterpart in Augustine's consideration of the self. The context is memory, which plays no formal part in Heidegger's analysis of the different components and aspects of Dasein. Memory is displayed in two qualitatively different approaches to self-knowledge. In the Confessiones and the Commentaries on the Psalms, memory is continually being related to the consciousness of the passage of time; the interest lies in coming to a kind of self-knowledge which is more empirical: a knowledge of one's own qualities, pursued under a moral compulsion. For this kind of knowledge there is no ending: ‘I do not grasp the whole [totum] that I am’.Footnote 43 The personalism and this sensitivity to the passage of time and its bearing on self-consciousness are quite different from the philosophical quality of de Trinitate VIII-XV. Here another genre of writing is evident: metaphysical, non-empirical, non-anecdotal, and almost timeless. Far from speaking of the disproportion of subject and object it speaks of their equality: ‘mind and its love and knowledge…when they are perfect they are equal’.Footnote 44 Augustine was certainly aware of the difference between the two approaches which, under the aspect of self-knowledge, is contained in the distinction between ‘totum’ and ‘tota’. ‘…it is absurd to claim that the mind does not know as a whole [tota] what it knows. I do not say that it knows all [totum]; but that what it knows it knows as a whole [tota]. When it, therefore, knows something of itself which it cannot know except as a whole [tota], it knows itself as a whole [totam]. But it knows as knowing something, and it cannot know something except as a whole [tota]. Therefore it knows itself as a whole [totam]’.Footnote 45 He proposed a way of bringing these two totalities together: ‘when the mind knows itself as a whole [totam], that is, knows itself perfectly, its knowledge extends through all of it [per totum]’.Footnote 46 That it should know itself as a whole makes it possible to know all of itself; the distinction into kinds of self-knowledge does not correspond to a distinction in the subject matter. As the first way of considering the memory is time-related and the second way is not, there are two ways of considering time: the first is related to duration; the second is initially regardless of duration. The distension found in duration prevents the considerable developments to the notion of time from the second which requires a point of fixity. Nevertheless with the first way there is some consideration of a relationship to a point of fixity; and with the second there is a place for distension from the point of fixity. Given the importance which Heidegger gives to the notion of time as involved in Dasein's being ahead of itself, it is surprising that his conception of Dasein's sense of time is more relatable to this latter, though he makes no reference to it as a source or having any relationship to it.Footnote 47
c) For all Heidegger's Formal Allusions to the Confessiones, there are More Significant Parallels in de Trinitate
Heidegger's references to Augustine on the question of time are to the first way, in the Confessiones. This is not surprising given the reaching forward of Dasein in its care. However, the more significant parallels are to be found in the de Trinitate, to which he makes no formal reference here. Whether this is due to concealment or to chance we do not know; the de Trinitate may be considered an impenetrable work, but surely not to a philosopher of Heidegger's quality. We shall examine his remarks in relation to these two focuses. As this conception does not coincide with the conception of time as an infinitude of nows existing potentially in a continuum, which derives from Aristotle's analysis of time, and which Heidegger considers at the end of Sein und Zeit, we shall also consider that, especially as there are textual similarities between Aristotle and Augustine about this.Footnote 48 He judged it to have no authentic relationship to time, because it could not be related to Dasein's existential dispositions, as he viewed them.
d) Heidegger: ‘The character of ‘having been’ arises, in a certain way, from the future’(v. pp. 325–6)
Heidegger argues for an authentic conception of time which is not so confined to a lamina-thin section across the flow of time (a tradition deriving from Aristotle's Physics) that a return upon itself was not possible and which, in consequence, excluded the possibility of self-consciousness. Such a view can be found in Plotinus's Enneads in the image of a dancing chorus, so concentrating on achieving the perfection of every movement that their awareness of the passage of time was non-existent.Footnote 49 The image is based on their total concentration at every moment, so intense that there is no question of reflective self-consciousness. Heidegger makes a forward- and future-orientated care a natural dispositioning such that this towardsness constitutes Dasein.
He expresses this not in Dasein-language, but in expressions used by Schelling (Seynkönnen, seiendes) which develop that universally used Aristotelian conception of potentiality, though not in the sense in which Schelling used it. ‘The meaning of this being – that is, of care – is what makes care possible in its constitution; and it is what makes up primordially the being of this potentiality for being [Sein des Seinkönnens]. The meaning of Dasein's being is not something free-floating which is other than and ‘outside of’ itself but the self-understanding Dasein itself’. That original, innocent towardsness is now thoroughly rethought and re-expressed in facilities which had emerged somewhat freely, so dense that the original experience could only be retrieved by forgetting them. ‘What makes this authentic being a whole of Dasein possible with regard to the unity of its articulated structural whole? Anticipatory resoluteness, when taken formally and existentially, without our constantly designating its full structural content, is being towards one's ownmost distinctive potentiality for being [das Sein zum eigensten ausgezeichnesten Seinkönnen]. This sort of thing is possible only in that Dasein can, indeed, come forward towards itself in its ownmost possibility, and that it can sustain this possibility as a possibility in thus letting itself come towards itself [Sich-auf-sich Zukommen-lassen]– in other words that it exists. This letting itself come towards itself is that distinctive possibility which it keeps open, is the primordial phenomenon of coming towards [Zu-künft]. If either authentic or inauthentic being towards death belongs to Dasein's being, then such being towards death is possible only as something futural [als zukünftiges], in the sense which we have indicated, and which we have still to define more closely. By the term ‘futural’, we do not here have in view a now [Jetzt] which has not yet become ‘actual’, and which sometime will be for the first time. We have in view the coming [Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality for being, comes towards itself. Anticipation makes Dasein authentically futural, and in such a way that the anticipation itself is possible only in so far as Dasein, as being, is always coming towards itself – that is to say, in so far as it is futural in its being in general’.Footnote 50 The future for Dasein must be the destined setting for its anticipations and the realisations of its potentialities. Without this anticipation, which derives from the instinctive dispositioning of Dasein in which it is supposed that its authentic (necessarily unsubstructured and unpresentialised) existence is realised, it cannot find authenticity. That authentic dispositioning must displace any residual past dispositioning and renew it, if it is to become entirely authentic: ‘Only so far as it is futural can Dasein be authentically as having been’[Dasein kann nur eigentlich gewesen sein, sofern es zukünftig ist].Footnote 51 But Dasein would cease to exist as Dasein if it could develop a capacity for such rationalisation.
e) Heidegger's Dasein Belongs to an Arbitrary Nivelage
Noteworthy is that Heidegger treats those active dispositions united together with care as constituting a complete structured whole, with the cachets of primordiality and authenticity when this is observed from a quite different structured whole of reason as it has been articulated through a philosophical tradition. There is no acknowledged continuity between them. Older ontologies which drew on tradition of subjectivity structures which articulated different levels are judged inauthentic. And there is little to reassure the rest of ourselves that our really authentic Dasein has any bearing, any influence, any relationship to a Dasein, which, given the intellectualism of the observer-narrator, we (including himself) most certainly are not. All the rest has been suppressed by a kind of epoche, while retaining from older ontologies a relationship to being, which is only circumscribed by its denial. For all of Augustine's interest in time as distension, he falls in with the tradition which conceives of a centre of the personality, characterised by reasoning and willing [=loving](and as we shall see in his de Trinitate, with remembering) such that the range of experience which Heidegger describes at one level only would touch his subjectivity-structure also at many levels, within an overall unity. Heidegger operates with a criterion of authenticity only at one level for Dasein, but in fact at many levels for himself as observer-narrator. As for his denial that Dasein's being is ‘free floating’[freischwebendes] outside all of this authentic dispositioning but ‘is the self-understanding [sich verstehende] Dasein itself’,Footnote 52 the overturning of the older presumption that such dispositioning might appear as free floating while the authentic self remains as its anchor even when it may not be consciously so, or may not even be even factually self-mastering, such self-understanding results from the imposition by the observer-narrator on Dasein of a rationalism which is alien to its nature. Whilst such an uncompromising and arbitrary nivelage is absolutely necessary to render Dasein futural [zukünftiges] in a consistent sense, it is not to be read into the thought of Augustine, as the texts of his second orientation make clear.
f) Augustine's Time as distentio, extentio, attentio
From all these considerations, time as experienced could not be the relative measure of one motion against another more regular and dependable motion, not even the fact of perduring, but only an entailment of a futural dispositioning of Dasein. Heidegger quotes Augustine as speculating that ‘time is nothing else than a distension [distentio], but of what sort I do not know, and it would not be surprising if it were that of the soul itself’.Footnote 53 It was not altogether a happy choice because Augustine goes on to say, ‘not distended but extended [non distentus sed extentus]’:Footnote 54 extended ‘towards the palm of a supernal vocation’. This entails that there must be self-extension, and that involves time, but that among the unvirtuous and unconverted there is an experience of time different from that among the converted who have received a heavenly call. One recalls the experience of psychologists that successful help results in the patients’ taking up a different attitude towards time. And such ‘attention [attentio] perdures’, and length of time is measured in its expectancy or in the memory.Footnote 55
g) ‘Affectio’ = ‘Befindlichkeit’; the Future as Seized and conveyed to the Past; Augustine's Ascent to God in the Present; the Confessiones also has a Timeless Present: the Memory in de Trinitate Extends Outside the Terrestrial Present
One regrets that a lecture of Heidegger, given in Beuron Abbey in October 1930 on ‘Augustinus: Quid est tempus? Confessiones lib.XI’, has not yet been published,Footnote 56 nor does a text exist elsewhere.Footnote 57 Some idea of its content may be inferred by Heidegger's citation of itFootnote 58 in ‘Der Begriff’,Footnote 59 where there is a striving forward described by Augustine as ‘affectio’, translated by Heidegger as ‘Befindlichkeit’.Footnote 60 Augustine also may seem to have ignored any substructuring, but only if one ignores the whole setting. This, particularly because of another thought of Augustine within the same chapter, on the relationship between past, present and future as experienced. For all his appreciation of distension and intention of the soul, Augustine accepted that there was no space of time in the present, even though everything that existed, existed only in the present: ‘that alone is which is present…but the present has no space of time’.Footnote 61 The reflections just briefly referred to provided Augustine with the factors for finding a solution for the measurement of time, which entailed the experience of the time being measured: not the things themselves are measured in time, but ‘the affectio which things make as they pass through the soul and then remains [in it]’.Footnote 62 Paradoxically the incapacity for submitting the ever passing present to measurement facilitated finding an answer to the problem which it seemed to cause. For the passage of time is essentially the seizing of what was future and its immediate transfer to the past, without any delay through an extension of the present: ‘ita raptim a futuro in praeteritum transvolat, ut nulla morula extendatur’.Footnote 63 Anticipation of the future is immediately followed by memory from within the past; anticipation draws on memory, which transmutes anticipation as it passes through the present into itself. Memory correlates experience through time. Aristotle's dictum that ‘one does not remember in the present what one experiences in the present’,Footnote 64 remains true because the experience is assessed in the memory. That is the principle, but in practical terms it comes to regarding a single continuous experience, spreading from future to the past, as a coherent parcel of time. Thinking of a vocal sound which lasts as long as the person has planned before in silence. In mid-point, ‘what has sounded has been achieved already, what remains will be sounded; and it will be completed in the following way: the present intention makes the future pass into the past, making the past grow by the diminution of the future, until by the consumption of the future all will be past’.Footnote 65
Augustine's rhetorical sense led to his expressing both sides of the present as matching: ‘Who would deny that future things are not yet? But there is already in the soul an expectancy [expectatio: not postulated as necessary for the constitution of ‘having been’!] of future things. Who would deny that things past are no more? But there is already in the soul a memory of things past. Who would deny that that the present time lacks extension, because it passes in an instant [in puncto]? But attention perdures, which transfers what will be present into absence’.Footnote 66 But his realism led him to see that there was, for all that, an accumulation of experience which grew in the memory until the expectancy came to an end: ‘the more the activity proceeds, the more expectancy diminishes and the memory is prolonged, until the whole of expectancy is consumed; when the total action is finished it will have passed into the memory’.Footnote 67 The passage is one-way: from the future into the past, with the transformation of the action from the state of being expected to its passage into a living memory effected at the advancing present. For Augustine it is represented as a linear process in which it is always disposed positively: it is attention which perdures [perdurat attentio], even if it is the confrontation of the future with the present in this attention which transfers it, irremediably, to pastness. The metaphor here represents the process not as a passage through three times,Footnote 68 but the reaching out of attention, deliberated to varying degrees, in identity with the moment alone in which what exists exists as real, in comparison with which Augustine denies its real existence before and after, in denying its measurability, but what is in the memory is measured.Footnote 69 Anticipation does not make it exist before itself, no more than consummation make it exist after itself, because both have their reality (before death) only in a present perduring through change.
But Augustine is in no doubt that spiritually there should be a deeper movement in the soul from forgetting the past to a contemplation of the delights of God in the future, ‘where I will flow into You, purified, liquefied in the fire of your love’. While God is One, ‘we live as multiple, in what is multiple, through what is multiple’; no wonder that here his ‘years pass in groans’, and ‘I am divided into times whose ordering I do not know, my thoughts and the most intimate parts of my soul shredded into tumultuous incongruities’.Footnote 70 That forgetting of the past and the ascent to God are achieved also in the passing present, as an elevation through what is to its source and crown; but that coexists with the earth-bound movement of anticipation and consummation through the present, which is the factual meeting place of two movements, which have their reverberations in the memory with its consequence in a tohu-bohu of incoherent sensations and thoughts, the heightened contrast between light and darkness producing sighs and groans for release. The conception of time in the Confessiones is not confined to a lineal extension, but does have this reference to the timeless present of which continuous time is constituted, and with its frequent imagery of the soul as extended forward into the future it is not surprising that he postulates that the soul anticipates the future, while tying it to the past, and contemplating the whole in the present;Footnote 71 Augustine's de Trinitate will postulate a memory of the present by which it is present to itself,Footnote 72 which brings the conception of time as distension to its primary interest in the timeless present.
h) Heidegger Suppresses the Limitation at the Present; the Consequences are Assimilable in his Theory
While noting Heidegger's interest in Augustine's conception of time as a distension, probably of the soul, and his failure here to notice its imperfection compared with intention (and even attention), we also see how his exclusive nivelage for Dasein would have excluded that place for an ontic now: in itself as the sole bearer of reality; as the moving contemporary limit at which reality is transmuted at its reception into a memory. The observer-narrator complains at the limitations of ontology, but the removal of those limitations entails some curious consequences. The present is the great limiter within a dynamic metaphysic. In its absence other means of limiting have to be found. So the furniture of the long accepted ontology of self-knowing is imported for Dasein. It is another imposition on the nature of Dasein as care, whether undifferentiated or assumed to be innocently and unreflectingly distended: care and its impressionistic retouchings are mobile as extending, defining Dasein primordially as uniform in its continuous existensionality, not excluding changes of direction. The self-definition through self-contraction into self-understanding is foreign to this. But that is what the observer maintains: ‘In existing, Dasein understands itself, and in such a way, indeed, that this understanding does not merely get something in its grasp, but makes up the existentielle being of its factical potentiality for being’.Footnote 73 The lack of a present point of reference tolerates a ‘futural’ orientation on which the orientation based on the reality of the ‘now’, even in apparent movement, would not permit. For Augustine the ‘now’ does not have an arbitrary existence in fact, though it may be true of it in the memory. May be the linear imagery creates the wrong impression and perdurance and the wear caused by time would be better, but the reality of the now, and its dispositioning, are inescapable, even if the imagination should reconstruct its nature incorrectly.
In self-justification for his rejection of a ‘now-time’, the observer-narrator asserts that the conventional understanding of time removes the possibility of a valuation of time which gives special significance to times (through datability [Datierbarkeit] and the attribution of particular importance [Bedeutsamkeit]):Footnote 74 at least to special times, and virtually to all times. The horizon which contains ecstatic moments [Die ekstatisch-horizontale Verfassung] gets ‘levelled out’[nivelliert], and everything is covered by the ‘common interpretation of time’. ‘The nows are cut off from these relationships, and take up an ordering as elements separated from each other, in the state of being one after another’[um das Nacheinander auszumachen].Footnote 75
i) ‘Being towards’ Characterises the Nivelage of Dasein, but the Observer-Narrator is tied to a Reference to the Conventional Dimensionality of Time, even while postulating Time as Not-Presential for Dispositioning. Yet Dasein is rebuked for its Spontaneity. In more detail, the Cost of Ignoring the Presential Now…
With the common, but for the observer-narrator misleading, image of time as linear, the future is presented in supposed objectivity as leading to ‘a ‘now’ which has not yet become actual and which sometime will be for the first time’.Footnote 76 That is a conception of futurity which deliberately excludes all dispositioning within the selected nivelage; for him it needs re-expressing in terms of the only conception of being which is authentic here. In general this is ‘being towards’[Sein zum], but the being is the being of Dasein; ‘future’ interpreted according to its German equivalent, ‘Zu-kunft’ means ‘coming towards’.Footnote 77 It is a paradoxical situation, expounded in non-Dasein language, with a non-Dasein analysis which goes behind the simple phenomenon of Dasein distending itself forwards. It is not simple forward distension from itself, but to itself: letting itself come towards itself. With a traditional philosophical expression, it is ‘a coming [Kunft] in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality for being [eigensten Seinkönnen] comes towards itself [auf sich zukommt]’,Footnote 78 the observer-narrator explains something which is hidden initially from Dasein. Towards itself? We have already examined this text in d), but let us consider it again.
If we take this expression literally, there is an initial opaqueness about the relationship between the coming and that to which it comes. Was it in one way ahead of itself, and in another way reaching out to itself yet not yet finding itself, in a state which was permanent up to the moment of its death? It would thereby define itself in relationship to its futurity. If time were an infinite series of nows, each of which could be taken as a point of reference and alignment, a never united double forward thrusting might be the explanation, especially as such a reference point would fall in with the expressed conception of potentiality, because a backwards-looking potentiality is nonsense in a progressive series of nows. There is an incoherence here which stems from a paradox intended by the observer-narrator whose explanatory analysis presumes a normal dimensionality, including the dimensionality of time. But it is an intended paradox which is not really dissolved, because his statement expresses a truth on the basis of rationally appreciated dispositioning; it remains in need of a re-appreciation for the postulated dimensionality of Dasein, because only through the suppression of presentiality can it be said to come to itself, despite its futurity, by finding itself in its futurity within its past. ‘…we do not have here have in view a “now” which has not yet become actual and which sometime will be for the first time’.Footnote 79
The account would be incoherent, however, if he had not had such a ‘now’ in view first, and then proceeded to deny it, because we understand presentiality in relationship to a rich substructure which the observer-narrator says that he denies, while he asserts the factor of potentiality which, without it, is meaningless. If, in consequence, Dasein in its nivelage cannot be represented without facilities which are inevitably taken over from its being more conventionally structured, the observer-narrator's self-imposed task is impossible. If Dasein cannot be analysed without recourse to conventionally conceived substructured dispositioning followed by its denial (in the way that a music of sustained discord is only comprehensible in relationship to a music of sustained harmony, against which it rebels), that demonstrates that these considerations could not be those of Dasein in its authentic condition. In consequence, either authentic Dasein has been annihilated, or it has been unknowingly cast out by the preoccupied observer-narrator and begun to function again independently of his mounting insensitivity. Dasein would then remain unreformed, because it would be untouched.
Yet conventional ontology is expected to accept a different dimensionality from that for which the rejected tradition of substructuring clamours, and all for what reveals itself to be, not exactly chimerical, but deficient. From the stance of a fuller familiarity with authenticity, it would be prepared to speak on behalf of an honest Dasein, whose characteristic living consciousness, not unattractive in itself, was beginning to disappear, and on whose behalf only the observer, with increasing self-assuredness, has been allowed to speak; and he has lost contact with Dasein by speaking a language which belonged neither to Dasein, nor to conventional ontology. The observer-narrator postulated it, in the language of his talk of dimensions, as ‘being Dasein authentically as it already was’[wie es schon war, eigentlich sein].Footnote 80‘Being authentic’ took precedence in all futurality, and that entails consistence with the past. Coming towards itself in self-definition, in the non-Dasein talk of the observer-narrator, expressed Dasein's existence: ‘in other words, that it exists’[das heißt existiert].Footnote 81 But what had seemed to be pure authentic dispositioning towards the future is not allowed to Dasein, because it would be limitless dissipation of itself. If it wishes to be authentic (and how could it be otherwise?), it must remain, dispositionally, united with itself and its past; its spontaneous appearances notwithstanding. Dasein must become realistic if it wishes to be mature. ‘Anticipatory resoluteness understands Dasein in its own essential being guilty. This understanding [Verstehen: substantivised infinitive!] means that in existing one takes over being guilty; it means being the thrown basis of nullity [als geworfener Grund der Nichtigkeit sein: italics as in text, indicating dispositioning]. But taking over thrownness [Geworfenheit] signifies being Dasein authentically as it already was’.Footnote 82 Any pleasure and joy which Dasein may have felt or anticipated from within an inner creativity, is curtailed by a rebuke to be serious. Conscience, says the observer-narrator, is not something which exists as occasional present-at-handness. ‘It is[»ist«] only in Dasein's kind of being, and it makes itself known [bekundet sich] as a fact only with factical existence and in it.…[It is] a universally established and ascertainable fact [Tatsache]’; that is to say, it is continuous even if not continuously apparent.Footnote 83 And it is present in no less strong a sense as a source of guilt: ‘The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality for being its self [sein eigenstes Selbstseinkönnen]; and this is done by way of summoning it to its ownmost being guilty [in der Weise des Aufrufs zum eigensten Schuldigsein’.Footnote 84 Because on inspection Dasein discloses itself as ‘that entity which we ourselves are, [which] is constituted by state of mind [Befindlichkeit: cf. ‘on se trouve’], understanding [Verstehen: it could be italicised –Heidegger-weise– as ‘Verstehen’(as also ‘Verstanden’)], falling [Fallen: cf., supra a): ‘labitur’], and discourse [Rede: cf., supra I): logos.Footnote 85
In this way Heidegger contrives, in a Dasein-like mode, but in non-Dasein-like language, to combine a moral indifference for Dasein, where we would expect onticised morality,Footnote 86 with a moralised onticism. The selected nivelage turns out, on examination, to contain multiple factors for which the metaphor ‘overlapping’ is not available, and for which ‘consecutive’ is excluded, by their dispositioning irrespective of a presential ‘now’: at the moment when the observer-narrator seemed about to give an excessive importance in Dasein to a catalysis into identity through guilt.
j) …which is yet Reminiscent of Augustine's Extension of Time into Painful Multiplicity
And yet there is an imperfect similarity here with Augustine's experience of time as extended into a painful multiplicity while he seeks above for a unity in which his sighs and groans would be stilled. But what for the observer-narrator is a deep underlying moral disquiet, is not so hidden for him and is continuous, a consequence of an illumination from the single source of beatitude and truth to which he is drawn, a state of metaphysical and moral attrition together.Footnote 87
k) For Heidegger, ‘Then’ is More Significant Than ‘Now’
A later passage in Heidegger describes the functioning of Dasein towards the future into a more contracted analytical form, though in even less Dasein-like expressions. Yet it is undeniable that for all the didactic distance between the observer-narrator and Dasein itself, its dispositioning towards a future ‘then [dann]’ is far more important than the present ‘now’, which emerges with reflection. We shall turn to the observer's existential analysis of ‘now’ in a further passage. ‘Essentially ahead [vorweg] of itself, [Dasein] has projected [entworfen] itself upon its potentiality for being [Seynkönnen] before going on to any pure consideration of itself. In its projection it reveals itself as something which has been thrown [geworfenes]’.Footnote 88 The abstractness of ‘entworfen’ and ‘geworfen’ express a kind of freedom from the thrower who can merely observe the missive, which must fend for itself as it falls, with reduced purposefulness, where it was directed, yet still characterised as ‘care’ with new objects.
‘Fall’ was morally coloured when the direction was in itself, in self-care: now its direction is external, not as a ballon d’essai but as left to itself, for better or worse and with physical-metaphysical indifference: ‘It has been abandoned to the world, and falls into it concernfully [besorgend]. As care, that is as existing in the unity of the projection which has been fallingly thrown [in der Einheit des verfallend geworfenen Entwurfs] this entity has been disclosed as [what is]‘There’[Da]’.Footnote 89 As for the deliberation that goes on in connection with actions that reach into the future, the position of Augustine in his Confessiones was related to the consideration that cosmic existence is only in the passing ‘now’, and seemed to locate it as close behind this in the memory, closely linked to the distension/intention/attention of the soul. Heidegger, as observer-narrator, does not feel constrained by a relationship to the present, because for him time relates to dispositioning which is not an extrinsic measuring of motion. The deliberation takes place within the nivelage of care. ‘As a concernful calculation, planning, watchfulness, protectiveness, Dasein always says…something will happen then, something will be settled beforehand, that that which formerly went wrong or slipped away will be remedied now’,Footnote 90 Here ‘now’ is not ontological because it can refer to a futurative present or a reportative past.
l) Dasein ‘has’ its Time as Stretched Out, According to What is Demanded of It
With the existential realities cut off from the traditional categorisation which belongs to other levels, time will be experienced in relation to Dasein's dispositions. That excludes its understanding itself ‘in a continuously enduring series of pure nows’. Rather it will be understood in terms of how Dasein, ‘in a manner corresponding to its current existence, ‘has’ its time’(which is, the observer-narrator says, like ‘losing’ time, a revealing very current expression). In such a relationship, time is not reducible to these nows, but is ‘stretched out’. (He had called the phenomena of temporality: ‘the future, the character of having been, and the present, the ecstasies of temporality’.Footnote 91) He finds the word ‘Augenblick’ to be more appropriate to express the present than the infinitely refinable ‘Now’[jetzt].Footnote 92 It means ‘a short space of time’; when a German wishes to say ‘just a moment’, meaning ‘wait a little!’, he says ‘Augenblick!’ It looks to the future, with the relationship to what had been future and now is past: ‘such a making present of the situation does not take precedence, but is held in the future in the process of becoming past’[in der gewesenden Zukunft gehalten]: in relationship to a stretched-out time, connatural and belonging to Dasein alone. Which he characterises further: ‘Existence through such a moment takes on time as a destined complete outstretching, in the sense of the appropriate and proper persistence happening with the self’[Die augenblickliche Existenz zeitigt sich als schicksalhaft ganz erstrecktheit im Sinne der eigentlichen, geschichtliche Ständigkeit des Selbst]. ‘Destined’ because ‘it is what the situation demands of it’.Footnote 93
Dasein can respond to passing demands without the self-conscious appreciation, which the observer-narrator makes in its name, and consistently with the conditions he has laid down for its nivelage. It echoed Augustine's speculation in his Confessiones, that time was a distension and probably of the soul, not within things which were experienced, measuring them from within this distension as they passed.Footnote 94 But its functioning is more like that of the memory in Augustine's de Trinitate, which Heidegger may not have studied, and to which we now turn.
m) Augustine's Memory includes Present and Future; its Dispositioning is not Nivélé, but Reposes on an Authentic Substructure
In his de Trinitate Augustine touches on time indirectly in so far as he considers the memory. Already in his Confessiones he had described the memory as distended into the future: ‘[In] my memory…is everything that I have ever perceived…except the things which I have forgotten. In it I meet myself as well.…[From them] I can make a surmise of actions and events and hopes for the future; and I can contemplate them all over again as if they were actually present. If I say to myself…‘I shall do this or that’, the picture of this or that particular thing comes into my mind at once’.Footnote 95 In his de Trinitate he proposed that the range of the memory from its connatural preoccupation with the past and its anticipations of the future would include a memory of the present. He alleged some lines from Virgil that ‘‘Ulysses did not forget who he was’…what else did he mean to be understood than that he remembered himself? Since he was present to himself, he could in no way remember himself unless the memory stood in relationship to things present’.Footnote 96 A number of commentators have noticed this extension to the normal conception of memory.Footnote 97
That Augustine is unconfined to Heidegger's nivelage entails that the soul is not viewed only in relationship to its initial dispositioning according to his arbitrary conception of authenticity. The passions enter into the dispositioning towards the future, but the will lies behind the impulse [nutum]. ‘…if what we call strength, therefore, is made up of an impulse from the soul, the mechanism of nerve sinews and the weight of the body, it is the will that supplies the impulse which is considerable stimulated by hope or courage, but retarded through fear and much more through desperation (for fear, provided there be some hope, usually increases strength)’.Footnote 98 Augustine views the interior dispositioning not as detached from such a substructure, fully real and human: and who could seriously doubt that only thus is human authenticity fully mobilised?
n) Memory and Substructure in de Trinitate
Augustine's interest in the memory in de Trinitate is primarily in the memory of the self, as he sets out one among a number of human subjectivity structures in which to display the soul as an image of the Triune God – at the point where he has no longer Arianism in mind but the humanly participated triadic hypostases of Plotinus and especially Porphyry.Footnote 99‘If we betake ourselves to the inner memory of the mind by which it remembers itself, and to the inner understanding by which it understands itself, and to the inner will by which it loves itself, where these three things are always together at the same time, and always have been together at the same time, from the moment when they began to be, whether one thought of them or whether one did not think of them’.Footnote 100 The self-knowing in the memory knows itself – as a whole: ‘totum’– without delay, immediately. It is within the temporal process: ‘The human mind has been so formed that never does it not remember itself, never does it not understand itself, never does it not love itself’.Footnote 101 In this structure, which can be extended enneadically, the memory of the self is the centre which contains the rest: ‘For not only is each one comprehended by each one, but all are comprehended by each one. For I remember that I have a memory, understanding and will; and I understand that I understand, will and remember; and I will that I will, remember and understand; and at the same time I remember my whole memory, understanding and will’.Footnote 102 Self-knowing and self-understanding are the condition of the knowledge and love of anything else: ‘if the love by which the mind loves itself ceases to be, then the mind will also cease love at the same time; likewise, if the knowledge by which the mind knows itself ceases to be, the mind will also cease to know at the same time’.Footnote 103
o) For Augustine Authenticity is Sought in Complete Integrity, with Human Longing Passing through the Interior of the Soul to God, its Giver
The soul of Augustine was in constant search of its own authenticity, and of God: ‘I would know myself; I would know You’.Footnote 104 Instead of distending itself in its memory and trying to find its authentic self there, it looked inside himself, undistended and deeper than all distensions to find a source of stability. As a result of this authentic self-searching, it would seem that the sense of time altered with his concentration on internality, with increasing awareness of time from the limitation which it imposed on the rise of his spirit, rather then its lack in the self-externalisation of Plotinus's dancing chorus. With the fullest substructuring, it would provide a more authentic dispositioning in time than the evanescent dispositioning in one nivelage, arbitrarily described as ‘authentic’. For Augustine this inner unity was a search which revealed to him that he was in fact waiting on a higher, divinely authenticated unity which came from the rise of such an integrated subjectivity structure to God: only that could bring the servant of God into the unity which he desires. And so he waits ‘until you reform me with integrity’: ‘donec me reformes ad integrum’.Footnote 105
III. The Minimal Bearing on this Question Provided by Heidegger's Earlier and Later Works
The publisher's assertionFootnote 106 that his ‘Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft’(1916) has an ‘anticipatory form’[Vorform] of that of Sein und Zeit must be accounted as an exaggeration. It contains a distinction between the ‘homogenous time’ of physics and the ‘qualitative’ distinctions of different historical periods, which contain ‘the thickening out [Verdichtung]– crystallisation – of a given objectivation of life [Lebensobjektivation] in history’. Troeltsch's assessment of Augustine is mentioned here,Footnote 107 The same volumeFootnote 108 contains his doctorate dissertation, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus(1916), with ‘Bedeutung’ standing for ‘significatio’, which, while basically a logical ordering, was extendable to giving a variable temporal quality to even small parcels of time.Footnote 109 He quoted HusserlFootnote 110 who had found the concept important. In his Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens,Footnote 111 his ‘Augustinus und der Neoplatonismus’(1921 lectures) produces a passing reference to the de Trinitate.Footnote 112 It contains a detailed phenomenological interpretation of the text of Confessiones X.Footnote 113 Of significance for our purpose is his rejection of the need to choose between the powerful but abstract interpretations of Augustine in terms of cultural history (Troeltsch), dogmatic history (von Harnack) and the history of science (Dilthey).Footnote 114 Instead of supposing a question of theology or philosophy, we need to see how even our present age was determined in its precise factical life from the historical relationship found between Augustine and neo-Platonism.Footnote 115 A fact which drove Heidegger away from those massive speculative productions to look closely at the text. In his Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion(1920–1 lectures) in the same volume, a similar realism produces the judgment that ‘Dasein longs not only for an overall meaning, but a concrete meaning: a different meaning from that of the past culture, a new meaning which rises beyond that of its earlier life’.Footnote 116 This wish anticipates the insistence on authenticity within the supposed concreteness of Dasein's nivelage in Sein und Zeit, as also the originality of its dispositioning within those conditions. To gather together here the scatter of numerous other anticipations in these writings of the figure of Sein und Zeit is here impossible. The ending of his detailed examination of Augustine's text for the support from citations in isolated passages belongs also to this experiment in speculation, whose origin is in this simple idealism, in the monologue whose essential rationalism derives, incongruously, from an older rigour.
Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Footnote 117 is regarded, after Sein und Zeit, as his second main work. He gives some references back to the earlier work, but any assertion of a continuity with it would gain a limited conviction; the dispositioning of Dasein is quite absent. It is not as though the earlier observer-narrator had triumphed, because he was concerned to rationalise Dasein's dispositioning according to his own reconstruction of Dasein's functioning. Here the concern is that of the whole of being, but being as known: ‘the bringing of being [as actively functioning in its own mode] again out of the truth of being [which lacks that functioning]’[Die Wiederbringung des Seienden aus der Wahrheit des Seins].Footnote 118 Again, he uses this pairing of expressions for being found in Schelling, with a higher valuation for ‘Seienden’, but in a different sense. The ‘truth of being [Sein]’ is the truth as known, but with an initially indifferent knowing. The book sets out a procedure by which the establishment of Seiende can take place. What is in view here is more like the programme of Hegel: not exactly according to that perceptive insight of its now forgotten coiner, ‘Ding muß Denken werden’: ‘thing must become thinking’, but ‘thing, already in thinking, must become, in being known, of the same grade of being as the thinker’. That is the meaning of the parenthesised part of the title: ‘Ereignis’–‘Er-eignis’: ‘making one's own’[eigen = own].
Alluding to the etymological root of the word for ‘poetry’: poiein(to make), he calls on man, as ‘measuring up to being which is there’[da-seinsmässig] to effect ‘a turning back of the truth of being into Da-sein itself’,Footnote 119 because as ‘one who creates by thinking [denkerisch Schaffender]’, ‘the seeker after Seyn is, through his ownmost excess of researching force, the poet who establishes [stiftet] Seyn’.Footnote 120 A part of this ‘creative’‘bringing again’ of this ‘being abandoned to need’ into the strength of ‘necessity’ is ‘the founding of time-space’[Gründung des Zeit-Raumes],Footnote 121 as the ‘play of time and space of the Da’[Zeit-Spiel-Raum des Da],Footnote 122 where being, as Seienden, is as much ‘Da’ as with man as Dasein in Sein und Zeit. And in this play, time-space is seen as the source-abyss [Ab-grund]‘springing from and belonging to the essence of truth which was intended as the construction of reverie and enchantment (fated for) the Da’[als das so gegründete Entrückungs- Berücksgefüge (Fügung) des Da], ‘finding determination as ‘now’ and ‘here’’.Footnote 123 The ‘now’ was completely rejected for time in Sein und Zeit, and here there is no more dispositioning in time, because time-space arises together from a single source. Without normal dimensionality, the structuring intended for the Beiträge would be impossible. Time is no more an ecstasy, regardless of space; it is not a special distension in itself. They are originally united together in the truth of the thinking which belonged to the mind. ‘Time-space is the subjectivised chasm of subjectivity's sweeps reaching from what belongs to itself to what attracts it extrinsically, between the isolation of being [Sein] and its allurements (the trembling and pulsation of being itself!). Near and far, being without content and disburdening, élan and hesitance: all of these should not be considered according to the conventional conceptions of time and space, but the other way round, the concealed essence of time-space lies in them’.Footnote 124 The conventional conception of both time and space is admittedly marked by the subjectivising in the evident style of Kant. This subjectivising has replaced the wilful subjectivising of unreformed Dasein and of rationalised Dasein in Sein und Zeit(the latter with its cryptic appeal to the conventional conception).
That Heidegger's thought does not follow Kant's into the accidentality of appearances is clear from what he had said in a previous passage about ‘Wesen’. This has a real existence, if nuanced: ‘das Seyn west’, such as can be understood of ‘Gewesen’ and ‘Anwesen’. In this work he proposed the existence, in the closest identity with the Wesen, of ‘Wesung’: so that in the act of making the Wesen its own [‘Er-eignes’]in Wesung, there is ‘that single élan of Seyn and Dasein, in which neither is a separate pole, but they make up that élan itself, as the expression of what is most inner to the Wesung itself’[[Wesung nennt] was sein Innerstes zum Wort bringt, das Er-eignis, jenen Gegenschwung von Seyn und Dasein, in dem beide nicht vorhandene Pole sind, sondern die reine Erschwingung selbst].Footnote 125 For the Wesen, the Wesung is ‘the process which happens to the truth of Sein’[das Geschehnis der Wahrheit des Seyns]. ‘The Wesen as Wesung is never only conceptualised in advance, but is only grasped in the time-spatiality of truth and their respective rescuing [Das Wesen als Wesung ist nie nur vor-stellbar, sondern wird nur gefaßt im Wissen der Zeit-Räumlichkeit der Wahrheit und ihrer jeweiligen Bergung].Footnote 126 That identity-in-difference of Wesen and Wesung has completely forgone the claim made by the observer-narrator of Dasein for the acceptance of its special domain, for which it claimed true authenticity. Heidegger had invoked Saint Augustine in Sein und Zeit only because he had detected experiences in his thought which seemed to anticipate his own, and for which he no longer wished to make a case.
