This is the form of understanding things that, in diverse philosophies of history, has held sway until today. But this approach has not taken those philosophies much beyond what Hegel conveyed to us in his study of mechanical and chemical processes.

It is clear that up until the time of Hegel such positions were acceptable. However, to continue with them after his explanations denotes, at the very least, a kind of intellectual shortsightedness for which it would be difficult to compensate simply through historical erudition. Abenhazan points to doing as a distancing of oneself from what we could call “placing oneself before,” or the Heideggerian “being-already-in (the world) as being-together-with.” Insofar as its existence, all human structure is projection, and in this projection the existent play with their destiny.

If we put things in this way we would have to offer an explanation of temporality, because it is the comprehension of temporality that would allow us to understand the pro-ject, the “placing oneself before.” This sort of exegesis is not incidental but unavoidable. There is no way to understand how temporality occurs in events, that is, how they gain temporality in a conception of history, other than by including the intrinsic temporality of those who produce these events. Thus, it is useful to agree: Either history is an occurring that reduces the human being to an epiphenomenon, in which case we can speak only of natural history (unjustified because among other things it omits human construction), or it is human history (among other things capable of explaining construction of all sorts).

For my part, I hold to this second position.

Let us review, then, what of significance has been said regarding the theme of temporality.

Hegel has illustrated for us the dialectic of movement but not that of temporality. He defines temporality as the “abstraction of consuming,” locating it along with “place” and “movement” following the tradition of Aristotle (particularly his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the chapter “Philosophy of Nature”).

Hegel tells us that the being of time is the now. And inasmuch as the now is a “no longer” or “not yet,” it is, consequently, like a non-being. If we take the “now” from temporality, clearly it becomes an “abstraction of consuming.” But the problem persists, inasmuch as “consuming” itself takes place in time. Moreover, we cannot understand how, as he later explains, from the linear placing of infinite nows it is possible to obtain a temporal sequence.

Negativity, which relates itself as point to space, and which develops in space its determinations as line and surface, is, however, just as much for itself in the sphere of Being-outside-of-itself, and so are its determinations therein, though while it is positing as in the sphere of Being-outside-of-itself, it appears indifferent as regards the things that are tranquilly side by side. As thus posited for itself, it is time. (cited by Heidegger in Being and Time, Section 82, H 429)Tr.2

If we put things in this way we would have to offer an explanation of temporality, because it is the comprehension of temporality that would allow us to understand the pro-ject, the “placing oneself before.” This sort of exegesis is not incidental but unavoidable. There is no way to understand how temporality occurs in events, that is, how they gain temporality in a conception of history, other than by including the intrinsic temporality of those who produce these events. Thus, it is useful to agree: Either history is an occurring that reduces the human being to an epiphenomenon, in which case we can speak only of natural history (unjustified because among other things it omits human construction), or it is human history (among other things capable of explaining construction of all sorts).

For my part, I hold to this second position.

Let us review, then, what of significance has been said regarding the theme of temporality.

Hegel has illustrated for us the dialectic of movement but not that of temporality. He defines temporality as the “abstraction of consuming,” locating it along with “place” and “movement” following the tradition of Aristotle (particularly his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, the chapter “Philosophy of Nature”).

Heidegger tells us that both the naive as well as the Hegelian conceptions of time, sharing as they do the same perception, occur through the leveling and covering that hides the historicity of the being-there, for whom the passing of time is not, at bottom, a simple horizontal alignment of “nows.” This involves, in reality, the phenomenon of turning the look away from “the end of being-in-the-world” by means of an infinite time that for all intents and purposes could not be, and as a consequence could not affect the end of the being-there.27 In this fashion, temporality has until now been inaccessible, hidden by the common conception of time that characterized it as an irreversible “one after another.”

Why cannot time be reversed? Especially if one looks exclusively at the stream of “nows,” it is incomprehensible in itself why this sequence should not present itself in the reverse direction. The impossibility of this reversal has its basis in the way public time originates in temporality, the temporalizing of which is primarily futural and “goes” to its end ecstatically in such a way that it “is” already towards its end.Tr.3

So it is only starting from the temporality of the “being-there” that one can comprehend how mundane time is inherent to temporality. And the temporality of the being-there is a structure in which past and future times coexist (but not side by side as aggregates), and the latter exist as projects or, more radically, as “protensions” necessary to intentionality (as Husserl taught). In reality, the primacy of the future explains the being-already-in-the-world as the ontological root of being-there. This is, of course, of enormous consequence, and affects our historiological investigation. Heidegger himself says:

The proposition “Dasein is historical,” is confirmed as a fundamental existential ontological assertion. This assertion is far removed from the mere ontical establishment of the fact that Dasein occurs in a “world-history.” But the historicality of Dasein is the basis for a possible kind of historiological understanding which in turn carries with it the possibility of getting a special grasp of the development of historiology as a science.Tr.4

With this, we find ourselves at the level of the pre-requisites that must necessarily be unveiled in order to justify the emergence of the science of history. 

Basically, we have returned from Heidegger28 to Husserl, not with respect to the discussion of whether or not philosophy can be a science but instead with regard to whether an existential analysis based on phenomenology is capable of giving a foundation to the science of historiology. In any case, the charges of solipsism already raised against phenomenology by Heidegger turn out to be inconsistent, and thus the temporal structurality of the being-there confirms, from another perspective, the immense value of Husserl’s theory.

In: Historiological Discussions, Silo,

Chapter 3: History and Temporality, 3.1 Temporality and Process

Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)