Marx and the Concept of Historical Time

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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In short, this problematisation of teleology is Heidegger’s systematic deconstruction of action, activity and the act. Despite the fact that historicality has yet to be examined, we can schematise this deconstruction with the following diagram:

¹¹³ Heidegger, SZ, 311 (BT, 277).

¹¹⁴ This diagram shows the unequivocal dependence of historicality on temporality in Being and Time.

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A couple of notes about this diagram. First, it transforms what Heidegger refers to as a ‘derivative time’ (wherein the priority of the future still holds)¹¹⁵ into a logic of derivation which extends across the entirety of Being and Time. This is a tripartite structure of existential derivation whose model is the ‘degeneration’ of originary temporality into world-time, and world-time into ordinary time¹¹⁶, but as a structure it is not reducible to time. Second, to be faithful (for now) to Heidegger, the vertical and hierarchical orientation of derivation in this diagram is better imag(in)ed on a horizontal and non-evaluative plane, consistent with the idea that time (originary temporality, world-time and ordinary time) is the transcendental horizon for ‘any understanding whatsoever’ of being.¹¹⁷ Consequently, authenticity and inauthenticity are written across the entire structure. Originary temporality is not the sole domain of authentic temporality; namely, originary temporality ≠ authentic temporality. After Blattner, originary temporality in Being and Time is ‘modally indifferent’ to authenticity and inauthenticity: ‘authentic temporality is merely one mode of originary temporality.’¹¹⁸ Hence world-time and ordinary time are not necessarily inauthentic. Strictly speaking, it is possible that world-time and ordinary time can be taken hold of as Dasein’s ‘own’ in such a way that they become ‘an existentiell modification of the “one”’ which ‘frees the other in his freedom for himself.’¹¹⁹ Conversely, originary temporality repeatedly loses itself in the one and becomes ‘completely fascinated by the “world” and by the Dasein-with of others in the “one”.’¹²⁰ For Heidegger, a binding identity between one form of time and one existentiell mode of being, a fixed identity between, say, ordinary time and inauthenticity, flattens the essential difference between the ontological and the ontic because it immobilises – it absolutises – Dasein’s relationship to its own being. But what explains the convergence between one form of time and one existentiell mode of being? What mediates their relationship, such that there is, as there is in Heidegger, an ‘originary and authentic temporality’ and an ‘ordinary and inauthentic time’? How do we account for the fact that the temporal relationship between the originary and the authentic, and that between the ordinary and the inauthentic, has the capacity to change? These questions, which Heidegger does not address, refresh the larger problem of the relationship between the ontological and the ontic in Being and Time, a problem only intensified by the fact that Dasein is ‘ontically distinctive’ because it is ontological.

¹¹⁵ Heidegger, BT, 378.

¹¹⁶ William Blattner, ‘Temporality’, in A Companion To Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 318. See Heidegger, BT, 383, where degeneration is linked to the notion of ‘springing-from’.

¹¹⁷ ‘Our provisional aim is the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being.’ Ibid. 19. This is an understanding of time as that which exceeds and transgresses (from the Latin transcendere) as well, as previously mentioned, as limits, surrounds and encloses (from the Greek horizein). This is Dasein as a ‘transcendental horizon’: ‘Dasein’s selfhood does not imply a substantial centre from which the transcending movement is supposed to start, but is, on the contrary, founded upon transcendence itself – as the condition of its very possibility.’ Françoise Dastur, ‘The Ekstatico-Horizonal Constitution of Temporality’, in Martin Heidegger: Critical Assessments, Vol. 1, Philosophy, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992), 174. Heidegger’s transcendental horizon is indebted to the temporalising structure of ‘transcendence in immanence’ in Husserlian phenomenology, from which Nancy’s idea of art as ‘transimmanence’ equally departs. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses [1994], trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 34-5. ¹¹⁸ Blattner, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, 99.

¹¹⁹ Heidegger, BT, 168, 159.

¹²⁰ Ibid. 220.

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These questions lay the groundwork for an investigation of how the materialist concept of history problematises Heidegger’s deconstruction of the act, an investigation whose origin converges with the problem of the origin [Ursprung] in Being and Time. Schürmann’s work is the crucial point of departure. It demonstrates that the classical relationship between thought and action is essentially inverted in Heidegger: the mantle traditionally assumed by thought passes over to action. For Schürmann, this inversion does not just reground ontology in action, but in so doing renders any distinction between thought and action anarchic because the tension at the heart of Heidegger’s practical a priori releases the origin and the originary from the restrictions of ‘the philosophical principle’.¹²¹ Schürmann traces this release by way of a complex genealogy of the origin. First, he examines the causal and teleocratic dimensions of the kinetic notion of archē [ἀρχή], internally defined as inception and domination over that to which it gives rise, and as the source of the end [telos] which structures both poiêsis (setting to work in order to produce a sensible object) and praxis (setting to work as an end unto itself). He fails, however, to identify the basic temporal makeup of archē: telos provides the futural standpoint from which temporal unification occurs, a unification which is only actual as the past in the present. Archē is the past (cause, inception), yet it is a past which is only intelligible from within the present action it dominates.¹²² Second, Schürmann follows the translation of the Greek archē into the Latin principium through Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as a First Principle and Leibniz’s Monadology. What is at stake here is how the ‘first from which’ things arise does not represent time forgotten – as Schürmann maintains – but time immobilised, an ossified time under the command of the past as absolute subject, be it in the figure of the princeps which confers an essential order or the law of the principium which grounds logic and truth. The philosophical upshot of this is that action – whilst still within time – cannot be figured as an implicitly temporalising concept. ‘At the close of that epoch [Latin philosophy]’,

¹²¹ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 95-6. According to Schürmann, this is an ontological, epistemological and historical release which simultaneously sunders the boundaries between ontology, epistemology and history.

¹²² This is the temporal logic of archē: ‘In Aristotle, where the origin is understood in the context of human making, the elements of inception and of domination in archē balance each other. Production is a becoming over which telos reigns, perceived from the start as archē.’ Ibid. 110.

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Schürmann notes, ‘the principium becomes a law of the mind…a first truth conceived by reason and formulated as a premise.’¹²³ For Schürmann, this is the philosophical and historical context that Heidegger’s conception of beginning [Beginn], inception [Anfang] and the origin dismantles.¹²⁴ Beginning and inception are categories which cut across Heidegger’s critical engagement with the metaphysics of presence. Beginning entails an inchoate movement that signals the precondition of thinking, whereas inception recovers the Presocratic idea of being seized by and responding to an experience, one which brings forth a dynamic constellation of sensation, speech and thought. The Ursprung – the ‘primal leap’¹²⁵ – is phenomenologically simultaneous with and yet ontologically prior to Beginn and Anfang. For Schürmann, this priority of the origin comes through two co-constitutive questions: the question of ‘ontology originarily’, which is the task of Being and Time, and the question of ‘origin ontologically’, from which presencing as event – and with it Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis – emerges.¹²⁶

The problem with Schürmann’s scheme is not the questions themselves but the fact that Being and Time is not held accountable to the question of the origin ontologically. This should not come as a surprise. The origin as such is not thematised in Being and Time. At the start of the second division, the ‘originariness’ [Ursprünglichkeit] of an ontological Interpretation (as opposed to interpretation as the existential working out of an understanding) is loosely defined in relation to the unity of Dasein’s structural whole, but this definition does nothing to mitigate – actually it exacerbates – the fact that, strictly speaking, there is no concept of the act in Being and Time. Dasein is phenomenologically presented as the ontological basis of temporalisation, but nowhere is it ontologised qua action and the act. The lack of an ontological concept of the act in Being and Time, a lack which dictates that the phenomenological ontology of Dasein implicitly stands in for this concept, is synonymous with the lack of an ontological concept of the origin in Being and Time. The consequences of this are diverse. For one thing, it consigns the philosophical status of the ‘equi-originary’ [gleichursprünglich] to a descriptive seriality. Being and Time is a serial text like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: the ‘equi-originaries’ of

¹²³ Ibid. 106.

¹²⁴ ‘…the task is crucial if acting – life – is to be disengaged from teleocratic as well as principial frameworks; if deconstruction is to set free from beneath archē and principium an origin less compromised by command and domination; and if in the final analysis the question of acting comes down to complying with that more elusive origin.’ Ibid. 121.

¹²⁵ ‘To originate something by a leap, to bring something into being from out of the source of its nature in a founding leap – this is what the word origin (German Ursprung, literally, primal leap) means.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ [1935-6], trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 75.

¹²⁶ For Schürmann, ‘many of the misunderstandings concerning Heidegger are explainable by the exclusive attention paid to his effort to raise the ontological question originarily, without noting his simultaneous effort to think the origin ontologically.’ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 128-29. Ereignis is a concept of the later Heidegger, after the so-called ‘turn’ [Kehre].

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Dasein are successively added on top of one another. Being and Time is not a systematic text, such that the equi-originary denotes constitutive relations between different domains of what is originary. It is difficult, therefore, to conceive ofthe originary within ‘originary temporality as something else than an internal derivation ofworld-time and vulgar time. Yet this is exactly what Heidegger expects of us. Originary temporality is intended to grant us access, as earlier indicated, to ‘something like being’.

But if there is a single aspect of Heidegger’s failure to thematise the origin and the act which stands out more than any other, it is the impoverishment of the philosophy of history. Proceeding from the standpoint that the analysis of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole has to this point been overdetermined by being-towards-death, that the ‘end’ which is Dasein’s beginning – its ‘birth’ – has been overlooked, the penultimate chapter of Being and Time introduces the existential and existentiell dimensions of the ‘happening’ [Geschehen] and the historicality [Geschichtlichkeit] of Dasein. For Heidegger, happening is the movement [Bewegtheit] of existence (not the motion [Bewegung] of something present-at-hand) which defines the way ‘in which Dasein is stretched along and stretches itself along’¹²⁷ between its birth and its death, whereas historicality is the structural name of this happening. Historicality introduces nothing new to Dasein’s temporal character. It ‘merely reveals what already lies enveloped in the temporalising of temporality’, and is ‘at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality.’¹²⁸ The relationship between temporality and historicality essentially follows the relationship between understanding and interpretation: historicality is the interpretation of the temporality of understanding. Historicality does not influence the three ecstasies of originary temporality in any particular way, which is as much to say that history does not shape the ontological constitution of time in any particular way. The philosophical scope of historicality is accordingly limited to the elaboration of the existentiell possibilities (and solely authentic existentiell possibilities at that) of being-towards-death. The extent to which historicality has bearing on the existential analytic of Dasein is already established by originary temporality. Dasein’s fate is consequently ‘that powerless superior power which puts itself in readiness for adversities’¹²⁹ and its destiny is thus the instantiation of its being-with, the co-happening of the community and the people, both of which enable Dasein to hand down factical possibilities to itself which have-been-there. This is for Heidegger the meaning of repetition, whereby the ‘peculiarly privileged position’ of the past (having-been-there) appears in the historical.¹³⁰ Yet historical repetition does not unseat the priority of the future, since it is only being-towardsdeath which enables repetition in the first place.

¹²⁷ Heidegger, BT, 427.

¹²⁸ Ibid. 428, 434.

¹²⁹ Ibid. 436.

¹³⁰ Ibid. 438.

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Historicality, this thesis maintains, does little else than aggravate the problem that the act and the origin are ontologically sidestepped in Being and Time. Historicality offers nothing in the way of a response to the unavoidable problem that history constitutes for the ‘one issue of radical phenomenology’ (being as time).¹³¹ History qua historicality is not an ‘originary ontological ground’ in its own right, thus there is no sense in which a concept of the ‘historical origin’ might be constructed out of Being and Time. At an existential-ontological level, it is temporality, not historicality, which is originary in Being and Time.¹³² This dovetails with the overriding issue that, as Adorno puts it, ‘the structure of historicality…only offers an apparent solution to the problem of the reconciliation of nature and history.’¹³³ As referenced in the introduction, ‘authentic being-towards-death – that is to say, the finitude of temporality – is the hidden basis of Dasein’s historicality.’¹³⁴ Yet if authentic being-towards-death is nonrelational and in each case mine – if the anticipation of death is unavoidably anti-social – then Dasein has no mediated externality to it at all, such that the difference between the individual and the historical end – the difference between individual and historical temporalisation – is completely flattened. In Marx, the difference between an individual and historical temporality is mediated through nature, whereby an individual act (the social production of the means of life from the standpoint of the individual) is neither immediately nor immanently historical, but only leads to historicality (the historical individual) because it is necessarily mediated through nature. This is important, because it demonstrates structurally – historically – that historicality cannot be an immanent dimension of individual temporalisation (this despite the fact that Heidegger restricts historicality to the working out of individual temporalisation). The individual and its historicality must each be mediated by an exteriority, and it is precisely the historically changing character of this exteriority – of nature – that comes to the fore with Marx’s (underdeveloped) concept of the social individual. The social individual is a normative concept in Marx: it is historically produced as what it ought not to be. It is thus indissociable from a historical ontology of communism. This is the sense in which, after István Mészáros, only a ‘truly’ social individual realises the ‘complete personality’ [Gesamtpersönlichkeit] of the human: ‘the realisation of “Gesamtpersönlichkeit” necessarily implies the reintegration of individuality and sociality in the tangible human reality of the social individual.’¹³⁵ However, it is not just the individual’s alienated powers which are reappropriated in communism, but so too something like historicality itself, such that individuals become historical for the first time: they relegate the ontological status of all previous history to ‘pre-history’. The social individual not only fulfils its own concept in communism; it also becomes an authentically historical individual for the first time. The point here is that Heidegger’s concept of authentic historicality de-historicalises its own condition of possibility (temporality), whereas Marx’s concept of the social individual does not (capitalism). In Schürmann’s terms, historicality does not release the origin from the restrictions of ‘the philosophical principle’. Ultimately, what Heidegger and Schürmann cannot avoid is Adorno’s accusation that historicality ‘immobilises history in the unhistorical realm, heedless of the historical conditions that govern the inner composition and constellation of subject and object.’¹³⁶

¹³¹ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 127. The history which constitutes a problem for being as time cannot be ‘the project Heidegger pursues after his Kehre…[which] crystallises in the question, how does presencing become history? How does it, as event, condition all that can occur?’ Ibid. The retroactive insertion of a historical origin qua Ereignis into Being and Time is not the answer.

¹³² Heidegger uses the expressions ‘originary happening’ (435) and ‘originary historicality’ (438) in Being and Time, but these are strictly confined to the existentiell level of authentic resoluteness and fate.

¹³³ Theodor Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural-History’ [1932], trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, in Telos 60 (Summer 1984), 115. For the sake of consistency, ‘historicity’ has been replaced by ‘historicality’. ¹³⁴ Heidegger, BT, 438.

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Two points follow from this which bring our dialogue with Heidegger to a close. First, his conception of historicality bypasses the philosophical importance of birth [Geburt] as an unsurpassable existential-ontological limit of Dasein.¹³⁷ ‘Being-towards-birth’ (a neologism which Heidegger never uses) is not established as a necessary aspect of being-towards-thelimit which, as is the case with being-towards-death, grounds the historicalising possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole. Birth is characterised as the other ‘end’ of Dasein’s ability-tobe-a-whole, but it is quickly subsumed by death.¹³⁸ The priority of death over birth is secured by the immanent relationship between birth and the ‘connectedness’ of Dasein’s life, whereas death is (for Heidegger) irreducible to life. Yet despite his frequent use of qualifying quotation marks, Heidegger does not develop an existential conception of ‘birth’, ironically foreclosing the possibility (to be consistent with the logic of derivation in Being and Time) that birth qua biological reproduction – hence the temporality of biological reproduction – might somehow figure in the phenomenological ontology of Dasein. From the standpoint of the limit, there is no sense in which birth constitutes a ‘pure facticity’ analogous to the pure possibility of death; no sense, in other words, in which the past might moderate the originary ontological power of the future. ¹³⁹ In general, it is clear that Heidegger’s neglect of birth is indissociable from the problem that the origin represents for his analysis of historicality. Yet the integration of beingtowards-birth need not invalidate his reworking of the teleological structure of the act. There is no reason why the act cannot be structured by more than one unsurpassable limit which grounds the possibility of Dasein’s ability-to-be-a-whole. If anything, birth adds an additional dimension to being-towards, further radicalising Dasein’s situatedness and further solidifying the ontological importance of the limit. Despite the fact that birth is an ‘irreducibly past possibility’¹⁴⁰ which can never be re-actualised, it is also – in both its biological and existential registers – an originary component ofthe historical future. It is an end that conditions the very possibility of Dasein’s historical repetition, the very possibility, that is to say, that Dasein can ontically and ontologically reproduce itself.

¹³⁵ István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation [1970] (London: Merlin Press, 1986), 269. The problem with Mészáros’s account is that the social individual as such is conceptually opposed to the isolated individual in capitalism. He does not recognise that the isolated individual in capitalism is a socially isolated individual, no less a social individual than its (speculative) counterpart determined by communism.

¹³⁶ Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E.B. Ashton (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 129. The incommensurability between the temporality of Dasein [Zeitlichkeit des Daseins] in Being and Time and the ‘Temporality of Being’ [Temporalität des Seins] in Heidegger’s later work is not unrelated to this. Namely, the analysis of historicality paves the way for attempts to think a transition from Zeitlichkeit to Temporalität. Consider John Sallis’s search for ‘another time’: ‘the move to an analytic of Temporalität would be an advance to a form of time that would be more originary than the originary time of Dasein. It would be an advance beyond the time that the existential analysis establishes in its identity with Dasein, an advance beyond the time that would be sheltered in what was once called the soul, an advance toward another time.’ John Sallis, ‘Another Time’, in Appropriating Heidegger, ed. James E. Faulconer and Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183. The search for what Sallis calls ‘uranic time’ devolves into mysticism: ‘Could the sheer radiance of the sky, its pure shining, the radiant shining that is the sky, ever be mistaken for something at hand in the narrow human world? Then, neither could the time it gives be assimilated to Dasein’s temporality. And then, one would need to say that the time given by the sky, this uranic time, is, in a way both remote and wondrous, another time.’ Ibid. 189.

¹³⁷ Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s account of natality in The Human Condition (1958) and the category of vita activa (labour, work, action) which underlies this account, Ricœur suggests that ‘…the silence of Being and Time regarding the phenomenon of birth…is surprising. Should not this jubilation be opposed to…an obsession of metaphysics with the problem of death…does not the anguished obsession with death amount to closing off the reserve of openness characterising the potentiality of being?’ Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting [2000], trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 357.

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This leads to a second – and even more ontologically basic – problem with Heidegger’s philosophy of history. At the heart of the lack of a sustainable concept of the act and the origin in Being and Time is a systematic lack of a concept of need. This lack is all the more glaring because there is an unacknowledged yet undeniable dependence on a discourse of need which cuts across the existential analytic of Dasein. On Heidegger’s own terms, Dasein needs the world: its very possibility of existence, its very understanding ability-to-be, is absolutely impossible in isolation from being-in-the-world. The a priority of the world is beyond dispute. Yet this foundational need is only thematised in passing: we ‘need’ the ready-to-hand when it is understood to be missing, when it has become the ‘un-ready-to-hand’; the temporality of circumspective concern confers meaning to our ‘everyday needs’.¹⁴¹ There is exactly one passage in Being and Time, included in Heidegger’s analysis of the ‘temporal problem of the transcendence of the world’, which expresses the ontological centrality of need: ‘Dasein exists for the sake of an ability-to-be of itself. In existing, it has been thrown, and as something thrown, it has been delivered over to entities which it needs [es bedarf] in order to be able to be as it is – namely, for the sake of itself.’¹⁴² But what are these entities which Dasein needs? What structures the relationship between Dasein and the world as a relationship of need? The answer, in short, is the ready-to-hand. The ontological structure of the ready-to-hand grounds Dasein as an entity already always in a certain practical relation to a particular world. The ready-to-hand defines being-in-the-world as a practical relation, and it is precisely this relation which differentiates the ready-to-hand from the present-at-hand.¹⁴³ As Mark Okrent puts it, ‘the whole difference between the ready-to-hand and the extant is that to be an extant being of a certain type is to be capable of effects that make no reference to potential ends.’¹⁴⁴ What the ready-to-hand draws attention to is the fact that the existential analytic of Dasein does not just rethink the teleological structure of the act through the end of praxis, but that the end of the act is defined by an indissociable connection between praxis and poiêsis. Dasein’s being is praxis, as Franco Volpi and others have demonstrated¹⁴⁵, but it is equally poiêsis (from the standpoint, that is, of the production of necessary objects for use, not the objects themselves). Heidegger’s philosophy of time implicitly registers this. As Blatter reminds us, there is no difference between the ‘world-time now-structure’ and the originary present within originary temporality: the former is embedded within originary temporality as one of its three ecstasies (the ecstatic present offalling).¹⁴⁶ Yet Heidegger’s philosophy of history explicitly rejects this. As previously alluded to, Heidegger declares that the ‘ontological structure of world-historical happening’ (the happening of worldly entities other than Dasein which are historical) must be excluded from ‘the ontological enigma of the movement of happening in general.’¹⁴⁷ This is an exclusion which – not without irony – conditions Schürmann’s insistence that ‘ontology originarily’ and the ‘origin ontologically’ are inseparable. It is an exclusion which contradicts Heidegger’s claim that historicality is just the ‘concrete working out’ of originary temporality. Yet the problem is not contradiction as such, but rather the specific ahistorical – or better, the specific de-historicalising – a priority of the world which this contradiction reveals.

¹³⁸ In repetition, Dasein’s birth ‘is caught up into its existence in coming back from the possibility of death (the possibility which cannot be surpassed)…’ Heidegger, SZ, 516 (BT, 443). Simply put, Dasein can ‘catch up’ with its birth – but not its death – in anticipatory resoluteness.

¹³⁹ Were it to be developed, the ‘pure facticity’ of birth would need to be theorised in relation to the factical domain of being-towards-death, which is to say the particular limit specific to each and every act.

¹⁴⁰ Consider the temporality of this passage by Lisa Guenther: ‘I suggest that a rigorous distinction must be made between the originating possibility of birth and all the other possibilities granted to me at birth, in order to mark the ontological distinction between the unrepeatable, deeply passive, and irreducibly past possibility of birth, and the heritage of repeatable possibilities given to me at birth. What is at stake in this distinction? On one hand, understood strictly as an ontological limit, birth grants me the sheer possibility of existence; on the other hand, and at the same time, birth grants all the traditions, practices, languages, and other possibilities that together form a heritage that is received but must also be chosen.’ Lisa Guenther, ‘Being-from-others: Reading Heidegger after Cavarero’, Hypatia 23:1 (January-March 2008), 106.

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¹⁴¹ Heidegger, BT, 103, 403, 407.

¹⁴² Heidegger, SZ, 482 (BT, 416).

¹⁴³ As previously discussed, the ready-to-hand is an entity whose being is constituted by any assignment or involvement within-the-world. It is not defined by being a tangible object in space, but rather by its practical relation to the world.

¹⁴⁴ Mark Okrent, Heidegger’s Pragmatism: Understanding, Being and the Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 87. ‘Extant’ is Okrent’s translation of vorhanden, viz. the present-at-hand. Despite its general indifference to the philosophical problem of history, the American pragmatist reading of Heidegger has gone a long way towards enriching the philosophical potential of the ready-to-hand.

¹⁴⁵ Franco Volpi, ‘Being and Time: A “Translation” of the Nicomachean Ethics?’, trans. John Protevi, in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore J. Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 195-212. See, in addition, Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and London: The University of California Press, 1993), chapters 5 & 6.

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