In my ever-continuing random thoughts on how the most ephemeral and hard-core philosophical topic can be approached and defined, Martin Heidegger has been a frequent guest in my notebook.
In Being and Time, Heidegger actually posed the idea by revealing it as a threefold condition of Being in his theory of Dasein[1]: “Time, the present and the notion of the “eternal”, are modes of temporality and temporality is the way we see time.”[2] This approach is very different from, what he calls the “mistaken” view of time as being a linear series of past, present and future. Instead, for Heidegger time is an ecstasy, an outside-of-itself of futural projections (possibilities) and one’s place in history as a part of one’s generation.[3] Possibilities then, are integral to our understanding of time; our projects, or thrown projection in-the-world. That is what absorbs and directs us. Futurity, as a direction toward the future that always contains the past – the has-been – is a primary mode of Dasein‘s temporality. Therefore, and to my great appreciation, Heidegger argues that we experience the world first and foremost through our involvement in it, not through our reflective consciousness of the world.
[1] Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. William Blattner (trans.). London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
[2] Heidegger, 2008: p. 17.
[3] Heidegger, 2008: p. 17.In my ever-continuing random thoughts on how the most ephemeral and hard-core philosophical topic can be approached and defined, Martin Heidegger has been a frequent guest in my notebook.
In Being and Time, Heidegger actually posed the idea by revealing it as a threefold condition of Being in his theory of Dasein[1]: “Time, the present and the notion of the “eternal”, are modes of temporality and temporality is the way we see time.”[2] This approach is very different from, what he calls the “mistaken” view of time as being a linear series of past, present and future. Instead, for Heidegger time is an ecstasy, an outside-of-itself of futural projections (possibilities) and one’s place in history as a part of one’s generation.[3] Possibilities then, are integral to our understanding of time; our projects, or thrown projection in-the-world. That is what absorbs and directs us. Futurity, as a direction toward the future that always contains the past – the has-been – is a primary mode of Dasein‘s temporality. Therefore, and to my great appreciation, Heidegger argues that we experience the world first and foremost through our involvement in it, not through our reflective consciousness of the world.
[1] Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. William Blattner (trans.). London, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
[2] Heidegger, 2008: p. 17.
[3] Heidegger, 2008: p. 17.