For the last few years I’ve begun to think that time is not what I think it is. I’ve been collecting a few clues, and in the next post or two I want to think out loud about them.
The first clue is a biggie. It’s that time meant an awful lot to Martin Heidegger, the king of ontology. Ontology is the study of Being (from the ancient Greek, te on meaning “to be” and logos meaning “study or knowledge”).
Following is a shockingly potted summary of Heidegger.
Mere metaphysics
Heidegger posited that the ontology of the last 2,000 years or so – the discussion of what it means for something to be – is not ontology at all. Rather, it’s something like “mere metaphysics,” and all such metaphysical discussions of Being fall into one of two categories:
- essentia: a discussion about the nature or character of a thing
- existentia: a discussion about the fact a thing exists.
In the first category would be all the speculations that focus on a thing’s form or material or composition or its extension in space as an explanation of what it means for that thing to be.
For example, we say a tree is a tree because it’s made of wood, rises out of the ground, has leaves, performs photosynthesis, etc. We look to its features, its nature, for an explanation of its being.
In recent science, a classic example of an essentialist conception of being would be the human genome project. Most if not all scientists, and most if not all laypersons, would assume we can now say that a human being is a human being and not, say, a frog, because we have 10,000 genomes (or whatever the number is) laid out in a certain pattern whereas a frog has only 9,999 genomes.
In the second category – existentia – is the metaphysical question par excellence according to Heidegger: why is there something rather than nothing? And various questions like that.
It’s the Romans wot did it
Heidegger sees himself as retrieving the question of the meaning of Being from underneath all this metaphysical blather of the past 2,000 years and restoring it to its rightful primacy. But what happened 2,000 years ago that buried the question?
The Romans is what. Yes. Heidegger’s unique explanation is that when the Romans colonised the ancient Greek world and attempted to latinise the ancient Greek language a whole former conception of Being was lost. The latinisation process bowdlerised, as it were, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of Being.
It corrupted it, flattened it, and ever since, we’ve been labouring under much impoverished ideas about what it means for something to be.
Pre-Socratic conception of Being
For Heidegger, the ancient Greeks — specifically, the pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides (c520 – c450 BCE) — enjoyed a completely different view of Being.
It had naught to do with essentia or existentia, but was something like an arising into presence, an arising and an abiding, a presencing. Yet so paltry is our latin-derived language, and so grooved and faded our grasp of Being, Heidegger believes the best we can do is to make an approach to this pre-Socratic conception of Being, and only then by using words in a strange and de-familiarised way.
Which is one of the reasons why his philosophy is so extraordinarily difficult to read.
Heidegger saw it as his mission to try to retrieve, even in an approximate way, this previous conception of Being.
Same or different?
The notion of retrieving a pre-Socratic idea of Being that is something like a presencing is a sort of composite view of what Heidegger was about over his long career. However, there were many sub-plots, and thousands of Heideggerean scholars have literally given their lives trying to discern which parts of Heidegger’s thought are consonant with which other parts; they’re forever playing a game that could be called “same or different?”
One of most pressing examples of this phenomenon is the question of whether the composite view of Heidegger’s mission is a corrective, maybe even a renunciation, of the view he announced in Being and Time in 1927 at the beginning of his great fame.
Being and Time
In Being and Time Heidegger announces first the neglect of the “question of the meaning of Being,” and second, that the “provisional” answer to the question is Time. That is, provisionally, what it means for something to be is Time. All of this by page 3.
The rest of the book is about testing this provisional answer; about attempting to come at the meaning of Being — at what it means for something to be — via Time. A planned second part of the book, which was never actually written, was to be an attempt to travel in the other direction: ie, to come at Time via Being.
The fact he never wrote this second part, and never again dealt so directly with Time as a kind of “horizon” of Being suggests to scholars that his views in the book were superseded.
Yet I think Time is still implied in many places in his later thinking.
For example, is not the pre-Socratic idea of Being as a kind of arising into presence, a presencing, an idea in which time is still implicated? Isn’t it suggestive of Being as an event, and is not an event a thing that occurs, and only occurs, within Time?
My view is that Time never really goes out of the picture for Heidegger, and his insight that Being and Time are implicated in a mutual relation is still sound, and intriguing to me for one.
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…..Which is one of the reasons why his philosophy is so extraordinarily difficult to read…..
Another reason could be that Heidegger didn’t know what he was talking about. Words can never catch the mystery of what he appears to have been trying to talk of. However, words are the paid philosopher’s stock-in-trade, so there it is.
Time is interesting. Like, I have this notion that when we dream, we go into a timeless dimension, hence the pre-cognitive dream.
So there could be a part of us which exists outside corporeal time. Therefore we always were, and will always be. We needn’t, then, worry about Heidegger.
You have been busy Mr P. I’ve got some reading to do. Thanks for the link to the SCUM Manifesto. I see I didn’t persuade you one jot ;)
What do you mean by a “pre-cognitive dream”?
I don’t worry about Heidegger esp now I’ve got him down in a few paras ;) Been itching to try that for years …
What do you mean by a “pre-cognitive dream”?
It’s a dream where you dream of an event, and days afterwards the event happens. This site here, which I picked randomly from a Google search, gives examples of pre-cognitive dreams.
We only hear of the sensational pre-cognitive dream. But what if it is about something innocuous, like walking into a particular shop? You have this dream but don’t remember it. A day or so later you walk into the shop you dreamed of, and think you were there before – deja vu.
If we go into a dimension where time moves hardly at all (timeless), we could, from its vantage point, see our past present and future, because it’s in a faster time dimension.
If we enter this very slow, or timeless dimension when we dream, we could see what we are going to do, and dream it. Maybe this is the dynamic of the pre-cognitive dream.
Jung said our unconscious is timeless.
If I understand what you’re saying, wouldn’t this be far more than a “pre-cognitive dream,” but something like pre-destination, period?
It’s our experience of past, present and future that is suspect. I think. Have to do a bit more thinking out loud.
Fascinating topic. I’ve long wanted a concise and easy summary of Heidegger.
That said, I have questions:
Tell us more about this bowdlerization of Greek by Latin. Does Heidegger say which Romans excised what? And why?
As best I know, the Romans adored anything Greek and sent their sons (Caesar, Octavian ….) to study there.
Also, this bit about “what it means for something to be is Time”: What does that mean?
Re the bowdlerisation of Greek by Latin … it’s not that the Romans wanted to excise or corrupt or flatten any of the Greek concepts; it’s that they couldn’t help it. Because Latin was, in Heidegger’s eyes, a far less nuanced, less supple language than ancient Greek. And in translating words and concepts from ancient Greek to Latin, the Romans lost all the richness and wonder that had been a feature of the ancient Greek. One of the concepts that suffered most in the transition was the concept of Being, ie, what it means when we say something “is”.
It may seem strange or beside the point that Heidegger should fasten on language. Like, isn’t this just a by-product or artefact? But no, that’s not the case for “later” Heidegger at least. “Later” Heidegger was part of what’s sometimes called the “linguistic turn” in 20th century Continental philosophy in which many philosophers suddenly realised that language was THE subject of study because of the following insight: the world arises in language.
Re the meaning of “what it means for something to be is Time” … well, that’s the entire contents of Being and Time. I’m not enough of a Heidegger scholar to be able to summarise his thinking on Time in the book (the subject of my thesis was his treatment of equipment and technology). But hey, being a native German speaker you could probably knock the book over in a day or two ;) My point in raising it was simply to suggest that, like me, Heidegger thought Time was not what we think it is.
Very interesting take on Latin and Greek. I studied Latin but not Greek. Latin is way more nuanced than English, so if Greek was more nuanced than Latin … God help us. What are we? Cro Magnon?
Here is the only German phrase I remember from Heidegger, a play on words:
“Wesen ist, was ge-wesen ist.”
Ie, a rhyme. Means: Being is what has been.
Geez, Heidegger made puns … who’d have known? What’s the difference between “wesen” and “sein”?
Yeh, it’s funny, isn’t it, we strut around thinking we’re this pinnacle of human development and that everything is inevitably progressing and then a philosopher comes along and says yes, relatively speaking, we are Cro Magnon ;) I had a similar feeling when I visited the Pantheon in Rome and saw the sun coming in the hole in the ceiling by which the Romans took astronomical readings and how it shone on the intricately-moulded concrete ceiling, a technique we wouldn’t be able to reproduce today. Perhaps we’re just a pale echo …
“Wesen” means something like “nature” or “character”.
“Gewesen” is the past imperfect of “sein”.
So it’s more of a rhyme/pun.
a technique we wouldn’t be able to reproduce today. Perhaps we’re just a pale echo …
And perhaps there’s a lot of human history we don’t know. Read Graham Hancock, and read…….this.
Well, I’ve just revisited this thoughtful post, after being sent here by your link on my comments. Heidegger is still a head-scratcher to me, but I’m hanging in there, with your encouragement.
So now, from what you said on my post, I gather that Heidegger also influenced (your words):
* the “slow movements,” eg, slow food, local produce movements, slow reading, etc
* the view that runs parallel with the boosterism of modern technology which is anti-technology, sort of Ludditism
* artificial intelligence
* the identification, and anxiety about the endless growth paradigm, growth for growths’ sake
* all of so-called Continental philosophy, and general philosophizing about post-modernism
* being the grit in the oyster shell of Anglo-US philosophy.
Yes, that’s my view: that Heidegger’s influence shows up in these aspects. As a philosopher he was always concerned with “being” and what it means “to be”, and in his later works he conceived of technology as a way of being (in fact, the only way of being we’ve known for rather a long time, ie, since Socrates/Plato!). In the US I think his biggest influence would be in the field of artificial intelligence and the branch of philosophy known as “pragmatism”.