Primordial Temporality and Ontological Difference

Abstract

It has become clearer for us, that it is a certain “image” (εδωλov) of Chronos, which governs both everyday language, and the history of ontology from Parmenides to Bergson. The task of “destroying the history of ontology” can be accomplished, therefore, only by repeating and interrogating its relation to the problem of time. The meaning of being is understood in the tradition as permanence and presence. Heidegger asks: “What project lies at the basis of this comprehension of being?” And answers: “The project relative to time, the projection towards time (der Entwurf auf die Zeit)..., for even eternity, taken as nunc stans is conceivable as ‘now’ and ‘persistent’ only on the basis of time” (KPM 233). But the image of time as it was fixed in the tradition corresponds to the primordial project of being as presenceat-hand. Or perhaps the primordial “project of time and the `primordial project of being” are, ultimately, one and the same project. Now, after Heidegger’s “Copernican revolution” within the hierarchy of the ways of our encounter with beings, according to the new arrangement of the ontological scene where “I care” ontologically precedes “I think,” the task to disclose the mode of temporality underlying the structures of care is urgent. The traditional treatment of the meaning of being as παρovíα or ovρíα, is only an “outward evidence„ (SZ 25) of the fact that within the scope of the ontological tradition, “entities are grasped in their being as presence; [and] this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time —the Present” (ibid.). Now it is necessary to proceed from ”outward evidence“ to a thorough analysis and cogent demonstration.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

T. S. Eliot, Four Quarters, Burnt Norton.