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The preparatory analysis in the previous post reached the preliminary conclusion that our being is care. Heidegger goes on to conclude later that our being is time, or more specifically ecstatic temporality. This is the main topic of the second half of the book. It’s very technical and I’d be a fool to attempt the same level of commentary as I did for the first half. But I can at least provide a brief summary.
The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős used to say that colleagues “died” if they stopped doing mathematics. If someone really did die, he said that the person “left” us. Heidegger has similar verbiage. He uses the word “death” [Tod] or “being-towards-death” to refer to a way of being in which we reflect on our fragile existence and how it could end at any moment. The mood of anxiety brings death to the surface for us. The physical end of our life he calls our “demise” [Ableben]. We care about our being because our “death” is always a reality for us. Therefore, anxiety and death are grounded in care. Heidegger refers to something he calls “anticipatory resoluteness” as “the being toward one’s ownmost, eminent potentiality-of-being” (325). This is Heidegger’s way of saying that in rare moments we come face-to-face with the reality that we will die. We have two choices when anxiety prompts us to see death. We can flee from it inauthentically and go back to the everyday conformity of the others in the world. Or we can become resolute and choose our possibilities knowing full well that our demise will close off all possibilities.
Our potentiality of being occurs in time. But not an ordinary concept of time. Since the ancient Greeks, time was always divided into three parts: past, present, and future. Aristotle compared time to a flowing river where each moment came at us from upstream, passed before us, to then quickly recede downstream and out of sight. This is a view in which time is an infinite series of moments. But there is another view of time that goes back to Augustine (and Plato before him). Augustine sought to reconcile the human experience of time with God’s eternal experience of time. Augustine reasoned that for God there is no past or future, but an eternal being in the now or the moment. There are theological advantages to this idea having to do with omniscience but I’m not going to get into it here.
Heidegger borrows from Augustine to expand on his idea of eternal (or primordial) temporality. Temporality has a threefold structure that maps his ontology onto the idea of eternal time: being-toward-death (future), having-been thrown into the world (past), and being-together-with (present). Heidegger calls these three structures “ecstases” (singular: ecstasy) which is a Greek word that means “to stand outside the self.”
As I mentioned in the post on care, we project ourselves forward and make goals for ourselves. We are always “ahead of ourselves” in the world. We are thrown from the past into a future with little more than a moment [Augenblick] in which to reflect and get our bearings. Ecstatic (or primordial) temporality is not ordinary time. It’s past, present, and future that is unified into actual possibility, that is, possible ways for us to be in an Augustinian eternal moment:
“Coming back to itself, from the future [zukünftig], resoluteness brings itself to the situation in making it present. Having-been arises from the future in such a way that the future that has-been (or better, is in the process of having-been) releases the present from itself. This unified phenomenon of the future that makes present in the process of having-been is what we call temporality” (326).
Heidegger concludes that temporality is the ground of our being and the meaning of care (436). The book is unfinished. Heidegger never gets to the being of being. He ends with this question: “Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?” It is left for the reader to ponder.
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