History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena / Edition 1

by Martin Heidegger

Overview

Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1925, an early version of Being and Time (1927), offers a unique glimpse into the motivations that prompted the writing of this great philosopher's master work and the presuppositions that gave shape to it. The book embarks upon a provisional description of what Heidegger calls "Dasein," the field in which both being and time become manifest. Heidegger analyzes Dasein in its everydayness in a deepening sequence of terms: being-in-the-world, worldhood, and care as the being of Dasein. The course ends by sketching the themes of death and conscience and their relevance to an ontology that makes the phenomenon of time central. Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation premits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the development of Heidegger's thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253207173
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	01/13/2009
Series:	Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	577,825
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Theodore Kisiel, Professor of Philosophy at Northern Illinois University, is co-author of Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences and translator of Heidegger and the Tradition.

Read an Excerpt

History of the Concept of Time

Prolegomena

---

By Martin Heidegger, Theodore Kisiel

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1985 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-32730-7

---

CHAPTER 1

Emergence and Initial Breakthrough of Phenomenological Research

§4. The situation of philosophy in the second half of the 19th century. Philosophy and the sciences.

We must first get a clear sense of the history of phenomenological research as it emerged from the historical situation of philosophy in the last decades of the 19th century. This situation in turn is determined by the transformation of the scientific consciousness in the 19th century which took place after the collapse of the idealistic systems, a transformation which affects not only philosophy but all sciences. This transformation allows us to understand the way in which a fresh attempt was made in the course of the second half of the 19th century to bring scientific philosophy into its own. This attempt came about in the tendency to grant the particular sciences their independent right and at the same time to secure for philosophy its own field in relation to these sciences. This leads to a philosophy which has the essential character of a theory of science, a logic of the sciences. This is the first distinctive feature of the philosophical renewal in the second half of the 19th century.

The second is that the renewal takes place not in an original return to the matters at issue but by going back to a historically established philosophy, that of Kant. Philosophy is thus traditionalistic; it assumes a well-defined complex of a well-defined line of questioning and thus in turn comes to a well-defined position toward the concrete sciences.

The scientific situation around the middle of the 19th century will be characterized only in terms of the main features relating to the manner and scope of the renewal of philosophical science. It is defined in all the sciences by the watchword empirical facts, as opposed to speculation and empty concepts. The prevalence of this watchword has many causes, first of all the collapse of the idealistic systems. The sciences brought their full weight to bear upon the empirical domains, and in fact upon the two domains of the historical world and of nature, even then becoming dissociated from one another. On the whole, the dominant force operative in philosophical reflection at the time took the form of an arid and crude materialism, what was then called the world view of natural science.

The historiological sciences generally dispensed with any philosophical reflection. In their overall intellectual orientation they lived in the world of Goethe and Lessing. But what alone mattered, what was decisive for them, was concrete work, and that meant the propensity toward facts' Accordingly, the first task to be carried out in history was to disclose and to secure the sources. This was accompanied by the cultivation of philological criticism, the technique of interpretation. The interpretation of the subject matter, what was then called the 'reading' of the material given in the sources, in its methodological direction and its principles was left to the particular mental-set of the historian; the reading varied according to the impulses operative in him. These were diverse; since the seventies they were essentially nourished by politics. This was paralleled by a trend toward cultural history. This confluence erupted in the eighties into a discussion over whether history is cultural history or political history. No headway was made in the area of fundamentals since all the means to do so were lacking. But it indicates that the basic relationship of the historian to his objects was uncertain and was left to general considerations which were cultural and popular in nature. This condition still prevails today, even if the two are now brought together under the title of history of the spirit. Historical sciences thus concentrated strictly on their concrete work, where they have accomplished important things.

The natural sciences of that time were defined by the great tradition of Galileo and Newton. Most notably, the domain of the natural sciences was expanding into the physiological and biological sphere. Thus, on the heels of the physiological, psychic life entered into the horizon of inquiry of the natural sciences. It entered first through those areas most closely associated with the physiological, through life as it expresses itself in the sense organs. To the extent that psychic life is explored by means of the methods of natural science, such an exploration is a psychology of the senses, sensation, and perception, and is intimately associated with physiology. Psychology became physiological psychology, as Wundt's major work shows. Here domains were found in which even psychic life, mind, could be disclosed by the investigative means of natural science. One should also keep in mind that the task of psychology then, under the influence of British empiricism (and going back to Descartes) was conceived as a science of consciousness. In the middle ages and in Greek philosophy, the whole man was still seen; inner psychic life, what we now so readily call consciousness, was apprehended in a natural experience which was not regarded as an inner perception and so set off from an outer one. Since Descartes the concept of psychology, in general the science of the psychic, is altered in a characteristic manner. The science of the mental, of reason, is a science of consciousness, a science which arrives at its object in what is called inner experience. Even for physiological psychology the approach to the theme of psychology is from the start taken for granted. Its conception was given a purely external formulation by way of a contrast: not a science of the soul as a substance but of the psychic manifestations of that which gives itself in inner experience. Characteristically, the natural sciences, in their methodological import, here entered into a domain which was traditionally reserved for philosophy. The tendency of a scientific psychology is to transpose itself into the domain of philosophy itself, indeed even to become, in the course of further development, the basic science of philosophy itself.

a) The position of positivism

All the scientific disciplines are dominated by positivism, the tendency toward the positive, where "positive" is understood in terms of facts, and facts are understood in terms of a particular interpretation of reality. Facts are facts only if they can be enumerated, weighed, measured, and experimentally determined. In history, facts are those movements and events which are in the first instance accessible in the sources.

Positivism is to be understood not only as a maxim of concrete research but in general as a theory of knowledge and culture. As a theory, positivism was developed concurrently in France and in England through the work of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill. Comte distinguishes three stages in the development of human existence: religion, metaphysics, and science. The stage of science is now in its initial phases. Its goal is a sociology developed by the methods of natural science into a general theory of man and his human relations.

John Stuart Mill conceives positivism philosophically as a universal theory of science. The Sixth Book of his System of Deductive and Inductive Logic deals with the logic of the moral sciences, which was the old name for what we call historical science or human science. This English-French positivism soon found its way into Germany and in the decade of the fifties initiated reflection in the philosophy of science.

Within this movement of positivism in the sciences themselves and positivism as a philosophical theory stands Hermann Lotze, to some extent all by himself. He kept the tradition of German idealism alive and at the same time tried to give the positivism of the sciences its due. He played a noteworthy transition role not without significance for subsequent philosophy.

b) Neo-Kantianism—the rediscovery of Kant in the philosophy of science

In the sixties Mill's Logic was known far and wide. The possibility of an investigation of the structure of the particular sciences offered the prospect of an autonomous task for philosophy while at the same time preserving the inherent rights of the particular sciences. This task recalled Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which itself was interpreted as an exercise in the philosophy of science. The return to Kant, the renewal of Kantian philosophy, the founding of neo-Kantianism all take place from a very particular line of questioning, that of philosophy of science. This is a narrow conception of Kant which we only now are again trying to overcome. This reflection in the philosophy of science and the return to Kant also exposed a fundamental omission in prior philosophy of science. In considering the second major group of empirical sciences alongside the natural sciences, namely, the historical disciplines, philosophy of science found itself confronted with the task of supplementing the Kantian endeavor with a "critique of historical reason." This is how Dilthey formulated the problem already in the seventies.

The rediscovery of Kant, with a very pronounced bias toward philosophy of science, was first concentrated upon a positivistic interpretation of Kantian philosophy. This work was done by Hermann Cohen, the founder of the so-called Marburg School, in his Kant's Theory of Experience. One can see from the title just how Kant is fundamentally regarded: theory of experience, experience understood as scientific experience as it was concretely realized in mathematical physics, thus a theory of the positivism of the sciences oriented along Kantian lines. To be more exact, this philosophy of science is carried out as the investigation of the structure of knowledge wholly within the Kantian horizon, working out the constitutive moments of knowledge in the form of a science of consciousness. Thus, even here, in the philosophy of science, there is a return to consciousness, in line with the trend in psychology. Even though consciousness became a theme in scientific psychology and in epistemology in completely different ways, it nevertheless remained and until now has remained the tacit thematic field of consideration. It is the sphere which Descartes, in his pursuit of very particular objectives, made into the basic sphere of philosophical reflection.

c) Critique of positivism—Dilthey's call for an independent method for the human sciences

In the Sixth Book of his Logic, "On the Logic of the Moral Sciences," J. S. Mill sought to carry the method of the natural sciences over into the human sciences. From his early years, Dilthey saw the impossibility of such a transposition as well as the necessity of a positive theory of the sciences drawn from the sciences themselves. He saw that the task of understanding the historical disciplines philosophically can succeed only if we reflect upon the object, the reality which is the actual theme in these sciences, and manage to lay open the basic structure of this reality, which he called life. It was in this way, from this positively novel and independently formulated task, that he came to the necessity of a psychology, a science of consciousness. But this was not to be a psychology fashioned after a natural science nor one invested with an epistemological task. Its task is rather to regard 'life' itself in its structures, as the basic reality of history. The decisive element in Dilthey's inquiry is not the theory of the sciences of history but the tendency to bring the reality of the historical into view and to make clear from this the manner and possibility of its interpretation. To be sure, he did not formulate the question so radically. He continued to operate in the interrogative ambience of his contemporaries. Accordingly, along with the question of the reality of the historiological sciences, he also discussed the question of the structure of knowledge itself. This line of inquiry was for a time predominant, and the text, Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), is essentially oriented toward a philosophy of science.

d) The trivializing of Dilthey's inquiry by Windelband and Rickert

The initiatives of the Marburg School and of Dilthey were then taken up by Windelband and Rickert, who leveled and trivialized them and twisted their problems beyond recognition. In other words, inquiry understood as the theoretical clarification of science is reduced by this school to an empty methodology. The structure of knowledge itself, the structure of research, of the access to the realities in question, are no longer investigated, much less the structure of these realities. The sole theme is the question of the logical structure of scientific representation. This is carried to such an extreme that in Rickert's philosophy of science the sciences under study are no longer even recognizable. Mere schemes of sciences are laid down and taken as basic. This distortion and trivialization had the dubious consequence of covering up the authentic meaning of Dilthey's inquiry and rendering its positive effect impotent to the present day.

But the positive element in Dilthey's endeavor is its tendency toward the reality which the historiological sciences thematize. Because of this line of questioning, Dilthey holds an outstanding place within philosophy in the second half of the 19th century; likewise because, in contrast to the Marburg School, he stayed clear of a dogmatic Kantianism and, with his proclivity for radicalism, sought to philosophize strictly out of the matters themselves. To be sure, the weight of the tradition and the philosophy of his contemporaries proved to be too powerful for him to remain true to his special bent and to keep it on a sure and steady path. He often wavered. There were times when he viewed his own work purely in terms of the traditional philosophy of his time, which was moving in a completely different direction. But time and again the elementary instinct of his own way of questioning broke through. This insecurity indicates that he never found his own method or a true formulation of the question. At any rate, his sally into the authentic domain in the face of traditional inquiry remains decisive. This can only be appreciated if we free ourselves from the traditional standards prevalent nowadays in scientific philosophy, if we see that what is decisive in philosophy is not what characterized scientific philosophy at the end of the 19th century, namely, the battle of trends and schools and the attempts to bring one standpoint to prevail over another. It is not decisive, in philosophy, to deal with the things once again by means of traditional concepts on the basis of an assumed traditional philosophical standpoint, but instead to disclose new domains of the matters themselves and to bring them under the jurisdiction of science by means of a productive concept formation. This is the criterion of a scientific philosophy. The criterion is not the possibility of constructing a system, a construction which is based purely on an arbitrary adaptation of the conceptual material transmitted by history. Nowadays, a tendency toward system is once again stirring in philosophy, yet it is devoid of any sense that would be dictated by an in-depth treatment of the problems. The tendency is purely traditionalistic, like the renewal of Kantian philosophy. Now, one merely goes beyond Kant to Fichte and Hegel.

e) Philosophy as 'scientific philosophy'—psychology as the basic science of philosophy (the theory of consciousness)

To summarize: In the middle of the 19th century a well-defined scientific philosophy gained prevalence. The expression 'scientific philosophy has a threefold sense. This philosophy characterizes itself as scientific:

1. Because it is a philosophy of the sciences, that is, because it is a theory of scientific knowledge, because it has as its actual object the fact of science.

2. Because by way of this inquiry into the structure of already given sciences it secures its own theme which it investigates in accordance with its own method, while it itself no longer lapses into the domain of reflection characteristic of the particular sciences. It is 'scientific' because it acquires its own domain and its own method. At the same time, the method maintains its security by its constant orientation to the factual conduct of the sciences themselves. Speculation aimed at world views is thereby avoided.

3. Because it seeks to give a foundation to the various disciplines which are directed toward consciousness through an original science of consciousness itself, a psychology.

Neo-Kantianism has, it is true, launched a very strong opposition to psychology regarded as a natural science. That has not prevented the elevation of psychology to the basic science of philosophy both by the natural sciences themselves (Helmholtz) as well as through philosophy. If knowledge is an act of consciousness, then there is a theory of knowing only if psychic life, consciousness, is first given and has been investigated 'scientifically,' which means by the methods of natural science.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from History of the Concept of Time by Martin Heidegger, Theodore Kisiel. Copyright © 1985 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

PUBLISHER'S FOREWORD TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION, xiii,
Introduction The Theme and Method of the Lecture Course, 1,
§ 1. Nature and history as domains of objects for the sciences, 1,
§ 2. Prolegomena to a phenomenology of history and nature under the guidance of the history of the concept of time, 5,
§ 3. Outline of the lecture course, 7,
PRELIMINARY PART The Sense and Task of Phenomenological Research,
Chapter One Emergence and Initial Breakthrough of Phenomenological Research, 13,
Chapter Two The Fundamental Discoveries of Phenomenology, Its Principle, and the Clarification of Its Name, 27,
Chapter Three The Early Development of Phenomenological Research and the Necessity of a Radical Reflection in and from Itself, 90,
MAIN PART Analysis of the Phenomenon of Time and Derivation of the Concept of Time,
FIRST DIVISION Preparatory Description of the Field in Which the Phenomenon of Time Becomes Manifest,
Chapter One The Phenomenology That Is Grounded in the Question of Being, 135,
Chapter Two Elaboration of the Question of Being in Terms of an Initial Explication of Dasein, 143,
Chapter Three The Most Immediate Explication of Dasein Starting from its Everydayness, the Basic Constitution of Dasein as Being-in-the-World, 151,
Chapter Four A More Original Explication of In-Being: The Being of Dasein as Care, 251,
SECOND DIVISION The Exposition of Time Itself,
EDITOR'S EPILOGUE, 321,
GLOSSARY OF GERMAN TERMS, 325,