Writing the Missing Division Three of Heidegger’s Being and Time

This paper will attempt to write - as an imaginatively risky venture - the ‘missing Division Three’ of Part I of Being and Time (Heidegger 1962, p. 64). This means we will pick up, literally, where section 82 of Chapter VI of Division Two of Being and Time ends, namely Heidegger’s consequential contrast between Hegel’s culmination of the history of Western metaphysics and Heidegger’s notion of ‘primordial, ecstatic, finite, unified, authentic temporality’ (1962, p. 380) as the modality of the ‘temporality of temporalizing world-time’ (1962, p, 486). Furthermore, only because of the ‘existential-ontological’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 487) construel of temporality can anything like ‘history appearing as historizing within-time’ (1962, p. 486) become possible. Heidegger struggles, arduously, to differentiate his entire effort leading up to this penultimate section 82 of Division Two of Being and Time from Hegel’s attempt to think about the relation between ‘spirit and time’ (1962, 480), particularly in ‘Absolute Knowing’ the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977, pp. 487-488). Heidegger argues that Hegel presupposes the ‘ordinary understanding of time, albeit in its most radical conception’ (1962, p. 480), as a spatialized, infinite, irreversible, linear flow of nows (past as no longer now, present as now, and future as yet to be now), which is derived from Heidegger’s articulation of a more ‘primordial, finite, ecstatic temporalizing of temporality as a process’ (1962, p. 377). Furthermore, this descends from Aristotle’s first breakthrough inquiry into time in his Physics (Heidegger, 1962, p. 479-480) However, in contrast to Heidegger’s characterization of Hegel, particularly ‘absolute knowing’ as the last chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, in section 82, we will argue for the following thesis in its multilayered dimensions. 

To architect a new division three within Part I of Being and Time, which never appeared, we must revisit Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1977). But this is not a return to Hegel or Hegel studies (Kojève, 1947; Hyppolite, 1946; Taylor, 1977). Rather, in an interrelated meta-movement, we will traverse the following sections of Divsion Two: section 65 of Chapter III on ‘ecstatic temporality’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 377); section 66 on ‘Dasein using its time’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 381) and the ‘arising of within-time-ness - as basis of ordinary conception of time - from the primordial temporalizing of temporality’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 382); section 69 on the ‘whitherings of the temporal ecstases as horizontal schemas’ in which schema is different (Heidegger 1962, p. 416); the underdeveloped problems of ‘being-towards-birth’ in section 72 of Chapter V (Heidegger, 1962, p. 425) and the distinction of ontological movement (‘Bewegtheit’) vs. spatialized ontic motion in itself or motion of a thing (‘Bewegung’) [Heidegger 1962, p. 427]; the linkage between ‘historizing’ (‘Geschehen’), ‘destiny’ (‘Geshick’), fate’ (‘Schicksal’), and the ‘moment of vision’ (‘Augenblick’) in section 74 (Heidegger 1962, pp. 436-437); and the problem of ‘repetition’ and the ‘steadiness as the temporality of the repetition which is futurally in the process of having been- a temporality which has already been stretched along’ in section 75 (Heidegger 1962, 443). Section 75 concludes hastily with cryptic remarks that everything up to that point about the ‘enigma of Being’ is really that of ‘motion’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 444) as an occurrence/’Geschehen’ (Heidegger 1962, p. 441).