Abstract
This paper will attempt a careful reconstruction of Heidegger’s (1962) reading of the ‘time-spirit connection’ in section 82: “A Comparison of the Existential-ontological Connection of Temporality, Dasein, and World-Time, with Hegel’s Way of Taking the Relation between Time and Spirit” (p. 480) of Chapter VI: “Temporality and Within-Time-Ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Time” (p. 456) of Being and Time.
We know that Heidegger (1962) tried strenuously to differentiate Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit from his own Dasein-analytic. Heidegger’s task is reveal “the ‘concretion’ of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil temporality as that which makes such existence possible” (p. 486). Heidegger (1962) critiques Hegel for claiming that ‘Spirit falls within time’ (p. 486), and therefore the Hegelian enterprise does not question from either these two polls: the standpoint of fundamental ontology or engage in a unique destruction of the history of metaphysics. Presumably, Heidegger’s Being and Time would be the first attempt to achieve such a feat, which means Hegel needs to be cast within that very history of metaphysics and as its summation that Heidegger seeks to destroy. But Heidegger does not speak of an ‘aufheben’ or sublation/supersession within, of, and as dialectics. He then, counter-intuitively, appropriates Hegel’s term ‘Spirit’ and claims that it ‘exists’ as the ‘primordial temporalizing of temporality’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 486). There is more than meets the eye in these consequential moments at the end of Being and Time whose significance for twentieth-century continental philosophy would be monumental.