Symposion, 5, 1 (2018): 77-89 Reading "On Time and Being" (1962) to Construct the 'Missing' Division III of Being and Time – or "time and Being" – (1927) Rajesh Sampath Abstract: This paper will articulate the conditions of thinking about the transition of Division II in Heidegger's Being and Time in order to imagine the architecture of the missing Division III, which never appeared in the published Part I of Being and Time (1927). The paper explores questions of temporality, historical temporality, and Heidegger's confrontation with Hegel at the end of Being and Time while enlisting the resources of his very late lecture of 1962 – "On Time and Being" – to lay down the conditions of possibility to reconstruct the missing Division III. The paper argues that this feat has yet to be adequately accomplished given 90 years that have elapsed since the publication of Being and Time. Keywords: Being and Time, Heidegger, metaphysics, ontology, onto-theology, phenomenology. Within Being and Time the leap from section 65 on ecstatic temporality to section 72 on motion to section 81 on within-time-ness and the ordinary conception of time to section 82 on the encounter with Hegel is quite daunting. To traverse this movement from an independent, speculative-metaphysical reconstructive impulse to imagine the missing Division III seems altogether impossible. But this is what we will set out to do. Our guiding clue will be the 1962 lecture "On Time and Being," which was delivered some 35 years after the publication of Being and Time.1 We are not trying to avoid the densely, 1 This is not the place to enter into the massive landscape of perspectives on the relationship between Being and Time and the 1962 lecture "On Time and Being." For that discussion, see Hubert Dreyfus' (2005) forward to Carol White's Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude, edited by Mark Ralkowksi. Ashgate: Hants, ix. For general discussions on death and time in Being and Time in relation to his whole corpus, see Critchley, Simon and Reiner Shurmann. 2008. On Heidegger's Being and Time, edited by Steven Levine. Routledge: Oxford; Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall, eds. 2007. Blackwell Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell: Oxford; Blattner, William. 2006. Heidegger's Being and Time: A Reader's Guide. London: Continuum; Dreyfus, Hubert and Mark Wrathall, eds. 2002. Heidegger Rexamined, Vol. 1: Dasein, Authenticity and Death. London: Routledge Press; Blattner, William. 1999. Heidegger's Temporal Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Faulconer, James E. and Mark Wrathall. 2000. Appropriating Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Taylor, Carmen 2003. Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Wrathall, Mark and Jeff Malpas, eds. 2000. Heidegger, Authenticity and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus. Cambridge: MIT Rajesh Sampath 78 complicated debates of what caused the demise of the project of fundamental ontology in Being and Time, the question of the Kehre, or the turning of/to the History of (the Sendings) of Being, the second attempt at Being and Time, namely the quixotic Beitrage (1936), and the final, ghostly attempt to rethink the main question throughout Heidegger's philosophical life, namely the mysterious link between being and time, namely the 1962 lecture "On Time and Being." Heidegger's genius was to avoid an uncritical metaphysical conceptualization of time in terms of the history of concepts of being while giving new breath, mystery and vision to the question of time when it is not predicated on these two classic extremes: either the paradoxes of metaphysical logic, i.e the problems of motion and change, or theological-existential-psychological fears of human mortality. He was not pursuing a solid foundation to conceive of time as some 'thing' present (essence, concept, intuition, or sign); nor was he a psychologist trying to discover a solution to the mystery of why human beings feel anxious about coming to an end, i.e. a mid-life crisis or terminal disease. Neither being in time (beings who come and go in time) nor time in being (kairos as the fulfilled or propitious time) and neither the being of time (substance as permanence) nor Press; Dreyfus, Hubert and Harrison Hall, eds. 1992. Heidegger: A Critical Reader. Blackwell: Oxford; Guignon, Charles, ed. 1993. Cambridge Companion to Heidegger Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The Genesis of Being and Time. University of California Press; Richardson, William. 1993. From Thought to Phenomenology, 2nd. Ed. New York: Fordham University Press; Barash, Jeffrey. 2003. Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, Expanded Edition. New York: Fordham University, Press; Taminiaux, Jacques. 1991. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. Translated by Michael Gendre. Albany: SUNY Press. For works on Heidegger's thought in general and the history of philosophy, see Guignon, Charles. 1993. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co.; Rorty, Richard. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Schmidt, Dennis. 1988. The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy. Cambridge: MIT Press; Steiner, George. 1987. Martin Heidegger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Schurmann, Reiner. 1987. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy. Translated by Christine-Marie Gros and Reiner Schurmann. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Olafson, Frederick A. 1987. Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press; Carr, David. 1986. Time, Narrative and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Fynsk, Christopher. 1986. Heidegger, Thought and Historicity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Gillispie, Michael Allen. 1984. Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Kockelmans, Joseph J. 1986. On the Truth of Being: Reflections On Heidegger's Later Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; Kolb, David. 1986. The Critique of Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heidegger, and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Farell, David Krell. 1986. Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press; Ricoeur, Paul. 1984-86. Time and Narrative, 3 Vols. Translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellaner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Shahan, Robert W. and J.N. Mohanty, eds. 1984. Thinking about Being: Aspects of Heidegger's Thought. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press; Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Murray, Michael, ed. 1978. Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press. Reading "On Time and Being" 79 the time of being (epochality or the sign of the times) will be our focus in this paper. The transition from Division II to Division III (which has never appeared) is like the transition from a place to a place that does not exist. Hence a creative act has to suspend any kind of historiographic impulses based on ordinary conceptions of time: a) the missing Division III was contemporaneous with the material that was presented with the rest of Being and Time (Introduction, Divisions I and II) but never came to light; b) the missing Division III is hiding somewhere or has been destroyed; c) everything after Being and Time can be appropriated and utilized to either justify the collapse of fundamental ontology or glorify the turn to language, art, and technology thereafter, which then becomes a shadow of the missing Division III's allegedly, true concerns or intentions; d) "On Time and Being" is a delayed version of the missing Division III and should serve as an ample substitute for it because it leaves open the true promise of the end of Being and Time: the passage to an-other beginning of Western philosophy will always run the risk of resuming the contents in the history of Western philosophy, which Being and Time attempted to destroy, and so such a passage should never be attempted but left in suspense to respect the true achievement of Being and Time. The possibility of metaphysics is itself a perpetual mystery and never a progenitor for an eternal concept-solution to the main question, which is the meaning of Being in general.2 Because Being and Time does not answer its last question – "Does time itself manifest itself as the horizon of Being?" – does not mean it should not be answered or cannot be answered. For it would be quite shocking that a normative response of what should or should not be takes the place of a singular ontological answer to a fundamental question, namely the meaning of Being. The italicized time...Being in the last question foreshadows both the title of the missing Division III and "On Time and Being" of 1962. So we begin with some precautionary measures as to not be weighed down with initial presuppositions that go unquestioned. "On Time and Being" is not a substitute for the missing Division III, and whether it gives us a proper orientation to appreciate the achievements and limits of Being and Time, let alone its 'failure,' is not the issue. Rather, if one were to attempt a reconstruction of the missing Division III without ever having seen any fragments or notes of it, then in fact a reconstruction of something that does not exist would have to be an original construction in its own right. If what is missing does come to light after such an independent construction is attempted, and if both texts – real and imaginary – are deemed similar in content, then this would not detract from the 2 This is how we view the legacy of postmodernism, or Derridean deconstruction specifically, which pronounces an end to the idea of an 'end of metaphysics,' any notion of an 'end' (both completion and goal) as ahistorical and hence illusory and unstable; true historicity or finitude is better conceived as deferral and suspense. See Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rajesh Sampath 80 singular, i.e. unique, attempt at such a construction. At most it would point to a parallel discovery – one that was made over 80 years ago but never saw the day and one that does appear and receives attention in its own time.3 These prognostications may appear to be hopeful wishes of a would-be attempt to imagine an independent version of the missing Division III given the waning moments, which conclude the version of Being and Time that we have had in our possession over the last eighty years. However, making clear our intention and goal will help clarify our main thesis: the creation of the missing Division III from scratch is not dependent on some a prior understanding of the relation or discontinuity between Being and Time and "On Time and Being." The question then is what is the ground by which our quest to construct the missing Division III can become intelligible? Using Heideggerean language, we can say ours is the question of the meaning of the being of the missing Division III. It is always hard to justify one's philosophical project in one's age precisely when the very question of 'age' and hence 'time itself' is at stake. One is reminded of powerful projections from Hegel such as "it is in the nature of truth to appear in its own time" (Hegel 1977, 44) and "philosophy is its own age conceptualized in thought." (Hegel 1991, 21) However, these statements have been construed either as an attempt to transcend one's time and hence let truth appear in its own time independent of human design or the failure at such transcendence and the relegation of truth to a particular age even when such a truth passes itself off as a detached universal; the first Hegel quote points to the former and the second to the latter. Yet we are not discussing how one transcends time to offer an eternal truth; nor are we succumbing to the notion that any truth or revelation is no more than the sum parts of the particular age within which it appears. Coming back to the question of the missing Division III we point to an opportunity that runs counter to many contemporary assumptions: a) the attempt to speak on behalf of a conclusion to Being and Time that could have appeared in its time is impossible now because the past in which the conclusion could have appeared is more appropriate then than it is today; b) no one actually believed then nor do they believe today that the way in which Being and Time was set up renders it possible to answer the last question about the manifestation of time if in fact manifestation is linked to an event, logos or phenomenon attached to presence and presence is derived from a 'now' – be it no longer now (past), now (present) or yet to be now (future); c) the correlation between the question of the meaning of being and the would-be answer as 'time' mistakes the one who asks the question ex nihilo with a tortured, delimited 3 This happens in science quite often; some discoveries are independent and parallel, say the simultaneous discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz, and the close proximity of Poincare's "principle of relative motion" (1904) and Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity (1905). However, in history, usually one thinker is credited for changing the paradigm and shaping the next epoch in human thought. In the cases provided here that would fall on the shoulders of Newton and Einstein respectively. Reading "On Time and Being" 81 temporalized being seeking self-reflexively the timing of one's asking; or that time is exteriorized falsely from that being requiring a separation between the meaning of being (as if it were atemporal) and the answer called the manifestation of time as if it were something other or opposite to eternal being; d) the futility of converting time into a predicate is directly proportionate to imagining the meaning of being as something other than being and hence being as past, present or future. It would appear that the prefatory remarks we offer are unceasing; in fact the temptation to continue must be resisted. In that light, let us juxtapose first section 65 in Being and Time with "On Time and Being" as we begin to weave the strands together as a silhouette of the missing Division III begins to form. The contours of a shape begin to emerge not with a comparison and contrast of what is left wanting in Being and Time and reborn in "On Time and Being." Rather, the attempt at a synthesis has to negate the continuities and discontinuities of both texts as an inter-species dialogue while superseding the presences and absences within both texts as an intra-species sublation. This way we avoid repeating any presuppositions that would lead to conclusions about "On Time and Being" filling up Being and Time or Being and Time being re-read to make clear the chronic ambiguities and spectral elisions, which abound in "On Time and Being." We must stick to our conviction about the original construction of the missing Division III in a manner, voice, force and inspiration that cannot be derived from either Being and Time or "On Time and Being." Being and Time In section 65, Heidegger reluctantly tries to move forward to the problematic of temporality to which everything prior seemed to be leading.4 But for every step he takes, he reverts back to try and ensure himself and the reader that he is not over-glossing or inadvertently simplifying his previous insights into care, resoluteness and being-towards death. He wants to make sure that the ontological meaning of Dasein's being, the latter of which is care, is not reduced to something present because the previous themes (care, resoluteness, etc.) are never ontic or grasped in common sense, transparent, experiential ways. To grasp it 'phenomenally' means it is never an object of a subject, a subject as an object to itself, any relation between a subject and object whatsoever, and certainly nothing that is present-to-hand. (Heidegger 1962, 370) Dasein's Being is Care and the meaning of its being will turn out to be temporality, which is to be 4 Although, he does give an idea of it in the Introduction: "We shall point to temporality as the meaning of Being of that entity which we call Dasein." Heidegger (1962, 38) And "time needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being." Heidegger (1962, 39) Finally, "the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time..." Heidegger (1962, 40) and "Thus the fundamental ontological task of Interpreting Being as such includes working out the Temporality of Being." Heidegger (1962, 40) Rajesh Sampath 82 discussed in depth in section 65. But the 'totality of the Dasein's structural whole' should not be lost in a mindless dissection of how all the themes hang together – guilt, anxiety, care, resoluteness, and being-towards-death – in a dramatically creative but aimless way. It is not simply tossing the dice randomly and seeing which sides turn up on the table. To answer the meaning of care (as the being of Dasein) does not mean that anything will actually appear as something that is "explicit or thematic." (Heidegger 1962, 371) At rock bottom, the meaning of Dasein's being is at stake: this is temporality. All we have at this juncture is a becoming of Dasein in its essentiality, a becoming of Dasein to itself, an occurrence which happens as 'authentic existence,' the self-constitution of this occurrence as authentically 'existentiale' (not to be confused with existentialist or psychological absurdity about the futility of living or being suicidal) and the naming of this occurrence of authenticity as 'anticipatory resoluteness.' Furthermore, the 'resoluteness' is a mode of the 'authenticity of care' and in that mode is contained Dasein's 'primordial Self-constancy and totality.'5 If we were to line up the terms, then the linkage between them becomes the main issue for discernment: Dasein becomes X essentially. This is an occurrence as an authentic existentiality. The occurrence can constitute itself as anticipatory resoluteness.6 5 Full quotation from Heidegger in the English translation: "Dasein becomes 'essentially' Dasein in that authentic existence which constitutes itself as anticipatory resoluteness. Such resoluteness, as a mode of authenticity of care, contains Dasein's primordial Self-constancy and totality." (Heidegger 1962, 370) and the original German: "Das Dasein wird 'wesentlich' in der eigentlilchen Existenz, die sich als vorlaufende Entschlossenheit konstituert. Dieser Modus der Eigenlichkeit der Sorge enthält die ursprüngliche Selbst-ständigkeit und Ganzheit des Daseins." (Heidegger 1993, 323) 6 This will be discussed further down the line when we discuss the ecstasies of having-been, making present, futural-coming-towards. Needless to say, we can anticipate what 'anticipatory resoluteness' is not based on Heidegger's previous insights in Division I and the chapters of Division II leading up to section 65. Anticipation is not the anticipation of something: for example, I am waiting to find out how I did on my exam. Resoluteness is not the unstoppable motion of a killing machine – be it man made or from nature – like a great white shark. It is not a setting out to do that which cannot be reversed. It is also not because of the law of internal necessity either (i.e. inertia – a body in motion tends to stay in motion). Rather, we must ponder the uncanny: somehow an event of self-justification occurs in which an irreducible decision to act becomes ontologically meaningful based on an inscrutable sense of ecstatic freedom; one is free not to be stymied by indecision on so many other possibilities for paths to take and free to take the path one has thrown themselves into without being determined by that path. Anticipating the unknown and resolutely driving into that anticipation without waiting for any 'thing' in particular (i.e. getting older, a moment to die, being elected president, giving birth to a child) involves a very abstract type of phenomenological bracketing; while being resolved in such an anticipation in a manner that transcends fate/destiny/determinism and the free-will divide, one is suspended from any ordinary linkages that would normally Reading "On Time and Being" 83 Resoluteness is a mode. The mode is a way of occurring and in this case it is the way of how care is authentic. Contained in the mode is Dasein's primordial self-constancy and totality. By breaking up the Heideggerean proposition into these elements we can begin to see the kind of complex, uncanny occurrence that speaks to the deepest primordial totality of Dasein's whole being, which is the authenticity of care; and this is what gets simplified in many analyses.7 The meaning of Dasein's being (care) will turn out to be temporality – specifically, the ecstatic, finite, primordial, unified, temporalizing of time's ecstasies (having-been, making present, futural coming towards).8 Before we penetrate further into the very Being of Dasein as Time-Occurrence (Timing, Timeliness, Being One's Time) let us shift to "On Time and Being." Heidegger does admit of the following: Dasein becoming Dasein essentially, authentic existence self-constituted as anticipatory resoluteness, mode of authenticity of care, primordial Self-constancy and totality contained in the mode – all of these have to be understood 'existentially' in order to reveal "the ontological meaning of Dasein's being." (Heidegger 1962, 370) It is these features that have to be retread very carefully while appropriating elements in "On Time and Being." And then we can weave in new reflections on the actual ecstasies in section 65 to depart from Being and Time and begin an exploration of unknown territory – the actual creation of what would have and could have been the missing Division III. bind the discrete event of existence and the palpable experience of time (as an unstoppable flow, a dreadful limit, an irreversible loss, or any feeling of getting old and/or losing time on a project). In other words, one is not determined by resoluteness or free to anticipate; and likewise, anticipation is not the necessity of a future holding a helpless present hostage, and resolution is not a despotic present trying to over-determine the untamed future. The relation between the anticipation in resoluteness and the resoluteness in anticipation constitutes a nexus in which the well-spring or surge of being 'anticipatory resolute' comes from within and without rather than the so-called 'agent' experiencing either one. It is an ecstatic swarming effect that drives a transcendental form of propulsion (which is neither circular, linear, nor rectilinear) so one is thrown outside of themselves in chasing a singularity called the legacy of being-there without being past, present or future. 7 This is not to dismiss any particular analysis of time in Division II, but to suggest that any speculative metaphysical constructions of the 'occurrence' is deemed inadmissible given the ontological-ontic distinction that is so fundamental to how the entire 'existential analytic' of Dasein functions in Being and Time. Heidegger is destroying the history of metaphysical attempts to conceive of time as some 'thing' or concept and thereby undoing all previous attempts to think of being as being-in-time or time as an object of either the metaphysical or scientific imagination. See the entire Introduction to Being and Time. And yet time is the meaning of the Being of Dasein. Logically however it follows that if time means being (of Dasein's being as care), then what does time mean? 8 This is what section 65 tries to elaborate. Rajesh Sampath 84 "On Time and Being" The 1962 lecture is like an aquatic work. One can swim through it but feel like they were in these waters before sensing resemblances based on past experiences of the force of the tow, the composition of the ocean bedrock and the animal and plant species that inhabit it in its marvelous aesthetic display. The lecture comes off as quasi-autobiographical where the author reflects back and takes stock of his achievements and failures, particularly in Being and Time. He leaves open room for future thinkers to try to resume the project of Being and Time but in a fresh and new way.9 In the summary to the lecture, Stambaugh states: "Being and Time is on the way toward finding a concept of time, to which that which belongs most of all to time, in terms of which 'Being' gives itself as presencing. This is accomplished on the path of the temporality of Dasein in the interpretation of Being as temporality" and "after the meaning of Being had been clarified, the whole analytic of Dasein was to be more originally repeated in a completely different way." (Heidegger 1972, 32)10 That is the key: to 'originally repeat' the whole analytic of Dasein in 'in a completely different way.' Our hypothesis is simple: the original repetition of Being and Time involves a type of movement and its self-understanding in which a reciprocal, entwining appropriation of insights in Being and Time and "On Time and Being" is required to create the missing Division III, which is then irreducible to either Being and Time or "On Time and Being," let alone their relation or discontinuity.11 The question of movement relates to the question of genesis, and 9 Heidegger says: "Whether a few will, now or later, be prompted by the lecture to think further on such matters, cannot be foreseen." This is in reference to other great novelties put forward by geniuses in different fields – that if the painter Klee, the poet Trakl, and the physicist Heisenberg were to present something new, then few would be able to say that it is 'immediately intelligible.' (Heidegger 1972, 2) 10 Also see her Introduction to the volume. Stambaugh does not accomplish this repetition in an original way in which something is revealed in a completely different manner. If anything, she pronounces the judgment that "On Time and Being" is a 'reversal' of the entire project in Being and Time. But in fairness to her, she does not speak of a simple reversal but a 'road that is complex and subtle' leading from Heidegger's early masterpiece to his mysterious later lecture: "For in the later lectures these 'concepts' (i.e. Being and time) have undergone a profound change without, however, relinquishing their initial fundamental intention." (Heidegger 1072, vii) Again, it is not our task to engage in intellectual history or enter into the philosophical debates about the relation or discontinuity between the two works. We want to stay focused on the original task of creating the missing Division III without ever having witnessed it. Hence we speak of a construction and neither a deconstruction or reconstruction. Simply put, this means we have to introduce new distinctions and terms while grounding them in our own mode of systematic philosophical reasoning the likes of which are nowhere found in any of Heidegger's published writings. Ultimately we must be sensitive and attuned to the debates about Being and Time and "On Time and Being" without necessarily submerging into them. 11 This is why we feel justified in our endeavor and do not feel the need to traverse the enormously complicated debates on the 'failure of Being and Time' and the Kehre (turn) and Reading "On Time and Being" 85 the event of revelation in response to both questions is none other than 'time itself.'12 This, however, means we cannot ignore all the cautionary measures that Heidegger offers in his lecture about those who try to think the relation of Being and time in ways other than the tradition of Western metaphysics – Being as beings which presence and time as the spatialized becoming of nows. Traditionally, Being has always been thought of by the presence of time, time has determined Being in some way, and because of Being, time is thought to 'to be' spatial or geometric – linear or circular for example. But when one takes the plunge into the radical rethinking of the relation between Being and time in terms other than the history of Western metaphysics all kinds of obscurities can arise. He asks: "Why, in what manner and from what source does something like time have a voice of Being? Every attempt to think adequately the relation of Being and time with the help of the current and imprecise representations of time and Being immediately becomes ensnared in a hopeless tangle of relations that have hardly been thought out." (Heidegger 1972, 2) Indeed the relation is what has 'hardly been thought out.' We try to put time into Being and conceive it as some type of substance that only we humans for some reason tend to feel anxious about; we think we see everything around us perishing including our individual selves (the physical feeling of getting older and the body wearing out), or the cyclical nature of disasters, or the dramatic changes in political history, which cannot be anticipated (9/11 and the 2011 Arab Spring), or a technological breakthrough (the Internet). We think time is something in us (we intuit it or feel it but cannot name it) or something outside of us (we perceive it or sense it) – like a river flowing of which we are its hapless eddies swirling through it without being able to control our own movements within its movement, let alone the movement englobing all movements, which we think is time. We are slaves to time in terms of the tenses that structure our linguistic contexts. Time haunts us in our dreams by invoking past experiences and blending them in a creative act that foreshadows future events. Often, we feel the dread of past actions, explicit or implicit guilt not about any particular event or act or decision, but the collective malaise of a period of life spent, which did not meet certain expectations for achievement. Furthermore, metaphysics has compounded the matter by instantiating a distinction that logic fails to overcome – namely being as seemingly unchanging (a stone) and becoming as change (a person getting older what "On Time and Being" has to say about those matters. See footnote one, which lists the extraordinary commentaries and philosophical analyses by at least two generations of scholars in the Anglo-American world and continental Europe. Also see Stambaugh's Summary of the Seminar. She argues how the lecture differs from everything else in the later Heidegger's seminars (art, technology, the History of Being) in that Heidegger's own thought is the subject of the seminar and not another text from the history of metaphysics (Nietzsche, Hegel or Aristotle for example). Parentheses are my insertions. See Heidegger (1972, 25). 12 This points back to the last question of Being and Time about the very manifestation of time. Rajesh Sampath 86 or the history of a presidential administration). Being – from the verb 'to be' – goes unquestioned; and on the basis of it our uncritical usage of the verb it is temporalized in an arbitrary way to speak of things that 'were', 'are' and 'will be.' Yet these precisely are all the 'imprecise' representations that for Heidegger have descended from the dawn of Western metaphysics. His novel question is to ask why did this history begin and to question its origin as something unnatural or contingent – that perhaps we could have been fashioned differently and that all historical concepts in philosophy about time and Being could have been otherwise.13 Instead of thinking about a being in time, say a chronological date of an event or the age of a person (like one of your relatives), Heidegger invites us to think of the other aspect of time. We can test whether something closer to timing or propitiousness, like kairos, when the time is ripe for something, is more appropriate. He states: "We name time when we say: everything has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Everything has its time." (Heidegger 1972, 3) Time is not a thing; nor is it the analogy or the metaphor for a spatialized flow; nor is it unchanging substance as a transcendental category (hence never an object of the empirical sense) for change or simultaneous and successive events to take place in it (Kant's first analogy of experience). Time is not the movement of ticks on a clock, the rotation of the earth on its axis or its trip around the sun.14 Similarly, Being is not a being or a thing, which has its time. (Heidegger 1972, 3) And yet we must ask the question about the 'is' which is never to be found in any statement when we say something 'is' this or that. Being is not a thing and everything has its time, which leads to the next great but perplexing question – does Being have 'its time' in a manner that is ontologically distinct from things that have their time, i.e. time for a boy to start acting like a man? By this question we are not asking whether Being (which is not the 'is' of any copula) possesses time like a landowner who owns his property. Heidegger says time is named as something allotted or appointed. When someone's time has come, they have come out in their own, 13 Similarly, one can ask as Nietzsche once did in his blistering Antichrist (1888) why truth of a particular religion took the form of a specific narrative of events regarding the life of a single human being that lived 2000 years ago, namely Jesus of Nazareth. Could the life of Jesus have been totally different and with a different outcome (not dying on the Cross or being resurrected from a sealed tomb) and still become one Person in the Trinitarian God of Christianity? If so, then how else could this truth have been presented in a totally different content and form? For dogmatic Christianity, this question is unnecessary, if not downright heretical. There is only one story and one outcome that forms the basis of the truth of Christianity and this truth is universal and necessary. If not, then there is not faith at all as Paul says. (1 Corinthians 15:13.) 14 It is certainly not derived from the scientific theory of evolution or the astrophysical time, however mysterious and complex, say the paradoxes that flow from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Reading "On Time and Being" 87 revealing the essence of who they truly are.15 Time remains; it is allotted; things happen at the right time. It is in the nature of time to remain and occur rightly. This is not equivalent to an actual physical measurement of time like a certain hour or date, say New Year's Eve.16 So how do we think about the relation between Being (the undisclosed ground that makes possible any 'is') and time, which remains and is allotted (but not like a physical event that exists) in terms of the question of Being and its (non-possessive) time? That is the question we must ask as we return back to the inner-anatomy of section 65 in Being and Time. Before we do that we must extract a few more insights from "On Time and Being": "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 beings in time." We have several distinctions here and commonalities between distinctions. For example, both Being and time are not things. Only things can be temporal – they perish or become or die and we can witness that process. Things that are temporal suffer internal mutation and transformation or can change both their content and form. Neither Being nor time falls in this category. But one caveat is that time is constant even though it passes away just as temporal things pass away within it (i.e. in one calendar year this many people died in this particular city thus affecting its census). So we have a distinction between a) time passing and remaining what it is and b) temporal beings in time that perish. Time as presence does not mean it is like any present thing to our senses or imagination. Presence is not present or ready to hand or a measurable moment.17 We also 15 One common sense notion of this is when an artist or musician is recognized at the peak of their achievement. They are in the moment and their time has arrived, one can say. 16 One can argue that the only possible being, who can be compared to this issue of time allotment and one's time has come, is the being alluded to in the statements by Jesus in the Gospels about his time. For example, we find "my time has not yet come" and "this is the hour for which I was sent" in the Gospel of John or the secret of time as in "Neither man, nor the angels nor the Son knows the hour – only the Father" in the Synoptic Gospels (Mark 13:32; Matthew 24:36; Luke 17:26). As a single substance of two natures (divine and human) the experience of time is by necessity totally transcendent given the Son's co-eternal substance and relation with the Father and yet fully human in every sense of the word – being born, living and dying in historical time – with all the anxiety and perplexity surrounding any human being that knows they are going to die. To synthesize the transcendental consciousness of knowing one's time and yet appearing in time while being before it and after it as an eternal commitment is something Hegel, for example, struggled with in the penultimate chapter and last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. But this is another matter altogether for theology and the philosophy of religion. 17 Perhaps a word other than 'presence' (and hence absence) would be more useful to avoid all the connotations that surround the term: something that has presence is tied to the dramatic ('stage presence') or that you have a real sense of a charismatic personality with all its charm, Rajesh Sampath 88 have Being and time as not things (temporal or otherwise), they share a relation, Being has its time allotted to it and time remains for it. These will be important considerations when we return to the main features we saw opened up in section 65 in Being and Time, namely the motion-occurrence-mode of authenticity, which contains Dasein's 'primordial self-constancy and totality, which in turn reveals the ontological meaning of Dasein's whole Being. This of course is hypothesized to be time itself but not as a substance, concept, intuition, phenomenon or emotional feeling, however, intangible. Hence we are back to the reciprocal relation of Being and time. "On Time and Being" pursues these reflections as well. Heidegger makes several statements, which require speculative expansion. He says that "time is determined by some kind of Being" (whereby Being is not a thing and therefore neither is time). But then he asks how "is Being determined by time?" (Heidegger 1972, 3) And then comes the big push for Heidegger: "Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former-Being-be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter-time-be addressed as a being." (1972, 3)18 It is amazing that Heidegger readily admits the limitations of his thinking and the threat of contradictions and circular repetitions. But is there a way out? Someone like Hegel would speak about one self-consciousness (say the master) and another (say the slave) becoming the other and seeing itself as the other and vice-versa in a double movement of reciprocal determination. (Hegel 1977) Is something similar occurring with regard to Heidegger's statements about Being and time? Admittedly, to construct another Division III would have to avoid the pitfalls of contradiction, redundancy and circularity that Heidegger admits to in "On Time and Being." Let us analyze his statements further. Being and time determine each other 'reciprocally' but in a way where Being is not a temporal thing and time is not a being, and only beings-in-time and time itself as passing away can be perishable. But time also has the quality of remaining itself. We must inquire into this mode of mutual or reciprocal determination and phenomenologically reduce any notions of being temporal, being in time, time as passing way entropically in force and charisma; presence is tied to the supernatural or paranormal – something is present – you can sense it, feel it or apperceive it – without identifying it exactly in tangible, material terms; presence is something that surrounds and bounds a place or space so that some things are excluded from the purity its realm (the presence of a temple); presence is the secret organizing principle of a complex event or gathering (say a national convention), which is irreducible to any particular moment or series of moments and their relations that would otherwise comprise the duration of the whole event. 18 The very next statement after that is: "As we give thought to all of this, we find ourselves adrift in contradictory statements." Reading "On Time and Being" 89 which everything tends in one direction.19 We must be extra-cautious about not presuming any immediate given sense of what it means to give and receive and give-back and all their underlying complex presuppositions. Geometric diagrams of the gift-flow will not help us. And to remind ourselves, Being is nothing temporal and time is never a being. Let us bracket the phenomenon of the reciprocal determination of Being and Time. And then we have the miraculous question of timing and if and whether Being has its own timing but unlike anything else that has its time – like something coming to an end or a person who dies or an artist who finally gets an audience. The question of timing, movement and the event of reciprocal determination will provide the clues for our re-immersion in section 65. We will be on the path of the original repetition to think Being and Time's project in a 'completely different way.' Ultimately this should and will result in the creation of the missing Division III. References: Derrida, Jacques. 1995. Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John MacQuerrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. ---. 1972. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row. ---. 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemayer Verlag. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---. 1991. Elements of a Philosophy of Right. Translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 19 Of course this means we have to reduce phenomenologically the dictionary terms of reciprocity in terms of the following typical attributions: a) state or relation derived from the Latin reciprocus; b) any type of mutual exchange in which one gives to the other not out of selfinterest but for the benefit of the other and vice-versa, which then benefits the giver and the receiver twice-over; c) contractual relations of exchange and commerce in which giving and receiving has advantages for both sides of the exchange; d)literally to receive a gift without any expectation of it and then to give something back in the spirit of benevolence and friendship whether the actual exchange of things are equal in value or quantity or not (i.e. you did something nice (x) for me and so I will do something (y) for you in which no standard or measure can equalize x and y); e) theories of excess and gift-giving where power and prestige is not based on self-accrual of wealth and interest in a form of competition that leads to great social and economic disparity in the system (say an aristocracy or class system), but rather the ability to give to the Other involves a complex circular return based on ritual and the generation of meaning (Mauss, Bataille, etc.).