July 25, 2021

Timeliness and the Historicity of Commitment Part One - Heidegger's Concept of Timeliness

One of my charges against a legalistic conception of morality was that explicitly undertaken commitments are usually embedded in a social context rather than occurring “out of the blue”. From a legalistic view, such actions are without internal relations to one another. Against this I hold that such commitments are not merely events that happen to take place in a person’s life but rather episodes in their biography. This means that they relate to both, past and future episodes in a way that gives all those episodes meaning.

I want to take a closer look at the implications of the historicity claim, how it relates to the social embeddedness of moral actions, and what it means to say that the undertaking of a moral commitment is not simply an occurrence in someone’s life but rather an episode in their biography. I will do so by drawing on Heidegger’s notion of timeliness (“Zeitlichkeit”).

Heidegger introduces his discussion of the nature of time by asking what we do when we look at the clock.1 His answer is that, in a sense, we do not really engage with the clock itself. We look at something beyond it that the clock, insofar as we relate to it as a clock, indicates: time. But Heidegger does not stop here because there is a further point to be made. He points out that when we look at the clock in order to access time, we do not really care about time. We care about how much time is left to do something. The way time is given to us, Heidegger says, is always “time for” or “time to”. (See p. 366f.) As a consequence, temporal expressions such as “now”, “back then” “later”, etc. are indexicals but they do not address (“ansprechen”) something like indexicals such as “this” do. Rather they express (“aussprechen”) something, namely there-being’s relation to that for which time is. When I say “this window over there”, I am addressing the window. When I say “now”, I express my relation to the text I am writing in this very moment. I am expressing that now is time to write the text. I am therefore relating to something which is here, which is present with me. I am making it present or presentifying (“gegenwärtigen”) it.

The same holds for temporal indexicals that express relations to the past. When I say “this morning”, I am relating to, for instance, this morning when I got up and made coffee. When I say “later”, I am relating to later when I’ll have lunch. When I relate to a past event or action, I am keeping, or preserving (“behalten”) it, whereas when I relate to a future event or plan, I am anticipating (“gewärtigen”) it. Because the mode of preserving expresses a notion of “no more” and the mode of anticipating expresses a notion of “not yet”, there is an element of presentifying in every instance of preserving and anticipating. (p. 367)2

This leads Heidegger to reject a concept of time as an endless sequence of infinitesimal points. Our experience of time is not that of leaping from one point on an axis to the next, instead past and future are always present with us in the mode of preserving and anticipating. In anticipating, I am relating to my can-be (“Seinkönnen”). In saying “later when I’ll have lunch”, I am expressing the fact that I can be the kind of person who has lunch. In anticipating what I can be and acting on that anticitpation, I am approaching myself.3 Similarly, in preserving the past, I am preserving my having-been (“Gewesensein”) a certain someone. When I say, “this morning when I had coffee”, I am expressing my having been someone who has coffee.

Heidegger says that the having been of a person is essential to who they are because there-being always already has been. I am who I am in virtue of who I have been. Even if I deny my past or distance myself from it, I am preserving it in a certain way because I only can deny my past if it happened in the first place. In the sense that what I can be is in an important way dependent on what I have been, the past as the having been of someone is an essential part of the future: I am currently a PhD student of philosophy. I can (and hopefully will) be a Doctor of philosophy one day. I can only be a Doctor of philosophy one day because I have been an undergraduate student of philosophy before. Moreover, I have been a undergraduate student of philosophy because I can be a Doctor of philosophy.

There-being is essentially constituted by its timeliness. The timeliness of there-being is not simply the fact that there-being takes place in or moves through time, it is the fact that there-being presentifies itself as its own having-been and can-be. My past and future are always here (or now) with me. And, as we will see in the next part, it is precisely because of this that my actions and especially my explicitly undertaken moral commitments are not isolated occurrences that can be assigned to points on a temporal axis but episodes of a biography that gain their meaning from their relation to the timelily constituted life.