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Time for Hegel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Stephen Houlgate
Stephen Houlgate*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Abstract

In section 82 of Being and Time Heidegger calls Hegel's account of time ‘the most radical way in which the ordinary [or vulgar] understanding of time has been given form conceptually’ (BT 480). For Heidegger, in the vulgar conception ‘the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”; by contrast, Dasein's own “ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future (BT 479). Hegel's problem, it seems, is that he has no time for the future.

As Heidegger explains in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time, Dasein is futural because it is essentially possibility — ‘the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past (CT 12). That future pastness is, of course, Dasein's death. Dasein is thus oriented towards the future because it is being-towards-death — the death that is certain to come, one knows not when.

The vulgar interpretation of time represents a flight both from Dasein's death and from its futural temporality, since it places the present at the centre of concern. Time, for the vulgar understanding, is simply ‘a sequence of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ (BT 474). The past and future are thus understood to be no more than the now that is no longer or is not yet. The future in particular is hereby distorted: for it is not thought to be the certain though indeterminate possibility in relation to which our present existence is first constituted, but is conceived as present existence that is yet to come.

Type
Miscellenea
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 27 , Issue 1-2: number 53/54 , 2006 , pp. 125 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2006

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