The Circularity within the Linearity of Time - The Possibility in the Temporal Impossibility of Martin Heidegger.

05.11.15

Martin Heidegger is a revolutionary philosopher who coins the non-systematic existential philosophy with a metaphysical framework. His phenomenological and hermeneutic methods give birth to a new interpretation of humans’ existence and essence that is structured and rational. As the progression of his works indicates, the early Heidegger concentrates on developing an ontological account of Being while the late Heidegger shifts to establishing an existential meaning for Being. The correspondence between his ontological and existential focuses of the two phases can be seen through his different emphases on the understanding of time - its linearity and circularity - in his major work Being and Time. Heidegger describes Dasein as momentary unions of the past, the present, and the future, which form experiences for Being’s essence. The linearity of time is the underlying organizing principle of Dasein’s interactions with the world. It interlinks Dasein’s originary temporality with world-time and makes sense of the successions of everyday events. Furthermore, it stretches into the future and directs Dasein’s actions toward possibilities. On the other hand, the late Heidegger explains that the circularity of time redefines Dasein as its understanding of itself: “Becoming is Being” and “Dasein is the temporalizing of the temporality.” Time is no longer an external structure that Dasein is preconditioned to, it instead becomes Dasein’s creation. The circular structure makes our reclamation of the past and our retrieval of the ontic origin possible. As Dasein stretches along the two directions of time - pressing into the future and retracing the past - it draws a circle that encloses the linearity of individual moments. As Heidegger himself states, the beginning and the end of our existence which are “birth and death are ‘connected’ in a manner characteristic of Dasein.” It is the betweenness of Dasein that creates the movement of our existence within the circle along the linear segments, which in turn defines our essence.

Dasein lies in the heart of Heidegger’s interpretation of humans’ existence and essence. On the first level, as demonstrated in Division I of Being and Time, Dasein can be regarded as the linear segments that constitute the life circle. However, the linearity of Dasein is different from the continuous successions of events that it suggests. Instead, Dasein as linear segments denotes the finitude of the union of the past, the present, and the future, which cannot be sequentially ordered as Heidegger states, “the future is not later than having been, and having-been is not earlier than the Present.” Heidegger characterizes Dasein as the union of ecstases, which are defined to be the phenomena that stand out from an underlying unity. In the temporal horizon that we are embedded in, the past, the present, and the future are three ecstases that are outside of themselves with each other. They are elements rather than events and therefore only depend on their representations. Each of these moments can be regarded as a direction which Dasein is directed towards or a state that Dasein is in. The past, for example, is Dasein’s having-been as it is being thrown into its facticity. Correspondently, Heidegger associates the present with care and fallenness, and the future with possibility and projection. Dasein is in turn defined as the union of three ecstases as the fallen thrown projection that relates to the world. As the “ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-the-world-as-being-alongside,” Dasein with temporality “temporalizes itself as a future which makes present in a process of having been” and cares the meaning of our existence out into the world. The linear segments in the life circle represent the temporal union of the three ecstases. They form the necessary finite individual experiences from which the meaning of our existence arises.

Although temporality is not a necessary constitution for Dasein’s existence in relation to itself, it is an indispensable linkage for Dasein’s being-in-the-world. When discussing Dasein’s thrownness and fallenness, Heidegger presents Dasein as dwelling in the world. To dwell in the world is to encounter and to belong, to immerse oneself and to extract. Underlying this process of subjectifying and objectifying are two concepts of time, which Heidegger calls originary temporality and world-time. Originary temporality is the existential timeframe that does not presuppose any ordering. Instead, events are structured according to their meanings to ourselves. As discussed before, originary temporality can be regarded as the union of ecstases. OFn the other hand, world-time is the temporal horizon that structures our involvement in the world. It is a successive qualitative sequence that spans our everyday life. Dasein as being-in-the-world encounters events in terms of world-time while interpreting them in terms of originary temporality. Therefore, world-time’s linearity and continuity are the organizing principles of our experiences from which we extract the meaning of our Being. The subjectification of the world we live in presumes objectification, and it creates the first level consciousness of our involvement. On the second level, through re-objectifying our experiences back into the world and re-interpreting our obtained abstract ideas with world-time, we achieve a transcendental subjectification, which unites us and the world into a coherent entity. Our existence is defined by this transcendental subjectification as it unifies our past, our present, and our future into the fallen thrown projections we can construct. Dasein as being-in-the-world becomes the movement along the temporal horizon of world-time, transcending itself with originary temporality beyond the linear segments into an open space.

While Dasein’s “fundamental, ontological characteristics … are existentiality, facticity, and having-fallen,” Heidegger orients Dasein towards the possibilities in the future. In the opening of Division I of Being and Time, Heidegger states, “the ‘essence’ of this entity lies in its ‘to be.’” From the very beginning, Heidegger recognizes that our ability to shape the course of our life distinguishes us as humans. Facticity and fallenness are not the essence of our existence, but existentiality and possibility of the future are. Dasein thus is generated by the future and then is expanded to the past and the present. In other words, Dasein is first characterized as being-ahead-of-itself then as being-already-in-the-world and being-alongside. Interpreting Dasein with forwardness, the determinacy of our past and the necessity of our present become “a modified form of possibility, ability.” Similar to Kant, Heidegger acknowledges Dasein’s embeddedness in the world and humans’ a priori precondition to the world. He explains that since we draw our essence from our existence in the world, we are nevertheless determined by the environment we exist in. However, our involvement in the world does not imply a strict limitation. Instead, with mastery we attune ourselves to the objects and we have the freedom to alter our reactions of the attunements. Therefore, the determinacy of our existence becomes the attuned possibility of our choosing, and the necessity of the present becomes the process of our choosing. When the three ecstases of time unite, Being opens up itself towards the future. It moves along the linear segments and presses itself into the future, giving birth to the possibilities in the world that we are yet to achieve.

Deriving from the ontological structure of Dasein, the late Heidegger shifts his focus to the existential interpretation of Dasein, attempting to answer “what is the sense of being?” with his hermeneutic method. As illustrated in Division II of Being and Time, Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein can be read as suggesting that Dasein is the complete life circle itself. His idea of “these entities, in their Being, comport themselves towards their own Being” indicates the connectedness between Dasein’s birth and death. Dasein, in recognizing its death which is the impossibility of the possibility, can only be born again and exist after gaining an utter possession of its own death. Heidegger explains this concept through Dasein’s relationship with temporality: “Dasein, conceived in its extreme possibility of being, is time itself, not in time” and “Dasein temporalizes qua time its being.” Here, Heidegger reverses the temporality that he poses earlier in Division I of Being and Time and raises the paradox of the determining relationship between the past and the future. As discussed before, the future is the possibility to reconstruct the past. However, Heidegger proposes that the past is also determined by the possibility in the future. He states, “Being futural gives time, cultivates the present and allows the past to be repeated in how it is lived.” Motivated by the recognition of its death, Dasein strives to create its existence by getting ahead of itself. “In its extreme possibility” accompanied by anxiety, Dasein gets so ahead of itself that it runs through its past to create the past’s replication in the future. By doing so, Dasein is able to “confront the extreme possibility that stands before oneself in irrefutable certainty and utter indeterminacy.” The absolute control it gains in the face of death gives birth to its existence. Birth and death are thus two identical standing points with which Dasein embarks its course and “comports the sense of futurity that is the elemental nature of time.” Dasein draws its linear segments in between the unital point of birth and death, completing the life circle with its running ahead of itself into the past.

Dasein not only creates the life circle but also runs within the circle in repetitions. The circular motion that Dasein performs is equivalent to Heidegger’s concept of “fate” and “destiny.” Heidegger offers a historical interpretation of Dasein’s heritage, fate, and destiny as he expands his focus from individuals to society and community. Through active engagement with the world, Dasein situates itself within the historical background. This historical background constitutes Dasein’s heritage, which Dasein utterly accepts despite its inherent meaninglessness and contingency. Repetition is defined as Dasein receiving and acknowledging this heritage. Through repeating the heritage, Dasein discovers its fate as it admits its inability to alter the material facts and the given situations. Similarly, Dasein discovers its destiny when it realizes that it is part of the broader stream of the community to which it belong. Fate and destiny are two general forces of life that cannot be controlled or escaped from. They constitute the two basic directions in the life circle: fate as remembering the past and destiny as venturing into the future. However, fate and destiny with regard to historicity do not imply Dasein’s total submission and passivity. Instead, Dasein reveals its fate and destiny through penetrating into its subjectivity and understanding its finitude, guilt, and freedom. As Heidegger states, “Dasein's primordial historizing lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen,” the determinacy and the possibility given by fate and destiny direct Dasein’s Becoming while preserving Dasein’s making of its own history. Dasein’s free movement in the life circle, which constitutes of repetitions guided by fate and destiny, transcends Dasein to possibilities of the collective whole in the broad current of life that are beyond its individual scope.

Underlying the circularity of time is Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontic origin of Dasein. In order to address the question “what is Being,” it is necessary to inquire into the origin of Being. However, the origin of Being is unfathomable in a linear temporal framework because “[Dasein is] that Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being.” It is Dasein’s existence that poses the question of its essence. Therefore, the ontological origin of Dasein can only be interpreted within the circular temporality, in which Becoming is Being. As commentators on Being and Time focus on the phraseology “being is that in terms of which entities are already understood,” they indicate that Dasein owns a pre-ontological understanding of the world. This understanding is exhibited in Dasein’s interactions with the everyday world, and it is presupposed as Dasein’s vague intelligibility of knowing how to live. Similar to Plato’s recollection theory of knowledge, Dasein recollects its true ontic self through Becoming. At the very beginning, this Becoming is Dasein’s immersion in its involvements of the everyday world. With a consciousness attending to the underlying structure of its existence, Dasein repeats its walk on the path of existence in order to rediscover the authentic self at the origin. The ontic comportment along the path is structured by care, in which the temporal horizons of world-time dissolves and transcends itself to Dasein’s originary temporality. Temporality thus temporalizes itself and uncovers the ground of authenticity. In this hermeneutic circle, the ontic origin of Being is the authentic self which is created through care, the authentic Becoming of “ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-the-world-as-being-alongside.” The Being of such Becoming thus becomes “in each case mine.”

The topology of time proposes two models of temporality - linear and circular - that structure our existence. These two models do not exclude each other but indeed create one coherent composition: the amplification of the circle gives line segments and the piecing together of the line segments generates a circle. Interpreting our experiences of the events as line segments and the course of our life as the circle, Dasein is the circular progression as it proceeds along its existence linearly. On the temporal horizon, Dasein stretches itself along the two directions and connects its birth and death to form an unity of its essence. This construction defines Dasein’s betweenness as a movement which gives birth to Dasein’s meaning - to make something that I am not into something that I am. The enclosed circle discloses to Dasein the possibilities in a transcendental space, in which Dasein’s repetition in the life circle runs counter-clockwise. Dasein, with the utmost courage, re-recognizes and confronts its facticity with a direct gaze, penetrating the past with its sharp projection into the future through its present imaginative recreation. As Dasein’s impressions of the re-encounters fade, the temporal horizon dissolves and Dasein transcends itself into an impossible possibility. This transcendental Becoming is the new Being that Dasein creates and is.