Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 66 页

the materialist concept of history with Heidegger’s definition of temporality as ‘the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been.’¹⁰⁷ From this perspective, the future of Marx and Engels’s ‘first historical act’ is originary because ‘the character of having been’ arises from it, and because as a future in the process of having been, it ‘releases from itself’ and ‘awakens’ presence as the present and the present as presence.¹⁰⁸ As an ecstasy, the future of the first historical act stands outside-of-itself because it is already ahead-of-itself, and this excess, this essential surplus, constitutes the basis of its originary power. The future of the first historical act totalises the act, such that the difference between the present and the past is unified by an understanding – a projective capacity – for the sake of which any act exists. 109

Being-towards-death secures the possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole, but in what sense does it secure temporality as the ontological meaning of this possibility? For Heidegger, the answer to this question – that through which death and temporality are inextricably tied – is the finitude [Endlichkeit] of existence. The ‘end’ within Endlichkeit is not ‘an end at which it [Dasein] just stops’ but is, as previously indicated, a ‘characteristic of temporalisation itself.’¹¹⁰ Herein lies the crucial (if largely unacknowledged¹¹¹) importance of the telos [τέλος] and teleology to Being and Time. Simply put, the teleological structure of the act is the standpoint from which Heidegger’s analyses of death and temporality come together. This structure is explicitly not the structure of the ordinary interpretation of totality and temporality. For Heidegger, the ‘end’ ofbeing-towards-the-end is the teleological end, not the chronological end. The teleological end cannot be conflated with the chronological end. Rather, the teleological end is the condition of thinking the chronological end, such that originary temporality is the condition of thinking the vulgar conception of time. As Todd Mei puts it, ‘the ecstasies of time (past, present, future) characterise the end, or the for-the-sakeof, as one that is constantly reinvoked by virtue of the temporality that being is. This is the reflective burden of finitude which, in apprehending an end, can only realise it through constant ontological movement that never finally arrives there.’¹¹² This finitude dictates that existence, facticity and falling are temporality temporalising itself, and this finitude secures temporality as the ‘originary ontological ground’¹¹³ of existence. The end is the limit which in every case determines Dasein’s ability-to-be. Finitude does not originarily give temporality meaning (in capitalism, labour-time does not originarily have value) because Dasein ‘will die one day’. Finitude is not originarily the number of years, months, weeks, days, hours, etc. that we have left to live, but our existential limit as kinetic entities, a limit which is already always there as the origin of all possible projection. For Heidegger, our limited capacity to act in the situations we find ourselves in is what first gives temporality meaning, and it is this finitude from which the quantifiable time of ‘infinite’ or ‘endless’ time derives.

¹⁰⁷ Heidegger, BT, 374. Emphasis added.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid. 374, 375, 378. On the doubled meaning of the German Gegenwart, see footnote 17. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid. 385.

¹¹⁰ Ibid. 378.

¹¹¹ Curiously, Heidegger does not openly acknowledge the fact that his rethinking of telos and teleology are at the heart of the project which is Being and Time. As we will investigate, this rethinking calls into question the relationship between action (the Greek ergon [ἔργον]) and praxis [πρᾶξις] more broadly. Take, for instance, his 1924 lectures on Aristotle, in which praxis is the ontological specification of action: ‘…we know that the being of human beings is determined in its ἔργον as πρᾶξις. This has telos [τέλος] in itself, comes to its end through itself.’ Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy [1924], trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 123 (§17).

¹¹² Todd Mei, Heidegger, Work and Being (London: Continuum, 2009), 125.

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