Time in Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reading

Abstract

Heidegger’s concept of time in Being and Time emerges in critically engaging with his predecessor’s intellectual legacy. At the same time, however, his revolutionary idea of temporalty arising from what he calls a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology is worth further scrutiny. Therefore, the following pages concern, first of all, investigating how Heidegger critically revises Kant’s and Hegel’s idea of time to propose his ecstatic temporality, by which he declares that the meaning of being is primarily conditioned by its temporality. What he calls fundamental ontology has the task of understanding being in terms of its temporality. To clarify this task, this paper focuses on Heidegger’s perspectival shift in understanding care from existential to ontological analysis. In doing so, it critically examines the process in which care is not fundamentally grounded in the self as much as in temporality. Lastly, this paper attempts to evaluate how Heidegger interprets public consciousness of time as it makes itself available in everydayness based on notions such as “datability” and “public time.” Heidegger’s emphasis on “punctuality” is significant as it is intended to criticize the linear notion of time reflected in Hegel’s concept of time and space. This paper wishes to remain loyal to reading Being and Time, except for a few cases if necessary.