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becomes accessible. It is an access definition or access characterization. The type of definiendum is determined by the manner of the sole possible access to it: the counting perception of motion as motion is at the same time the perception of what is counted as time.
What Aristotle presents as time corresponds to the common prescientific understanding of time. By its own phenomenological content common time points back to an original time, temporality. This implies, however, that Aristotle's definition of time is only the initial approach to the interpretation of time. The characteristic traits of time as commonly understood must themselves become intelligible by way of original time. If we set this task for ourselves it means that we have to make dear how the now qua now has transitionary character; how time as now, then, and at-the-time embraces brings and as such an embrace of extant things is still more objective and more extant than everything else (intratemporality); how time is essentially counted and how it is pertinent to time that it is always unveiled.
The common understanding of time manifests itself explicitly and primarily in the use of the clock. it being a matter of indifference here what perfection the clock has. We saw how we had to convince ourselves in looking at the employment of clocks that we encounter time as we count in following a movement. What this means more specifically, how it is possible. and what it implies for the concept of time—we did not ask about all this. Also, neither Aristotle nor subsequent interpreters of time posed this question. What does it mean to speak of using a clock? We have made clear the Aristotelian interpretation of time in regard to the employment of clocks but without ourselves offering a yet more exact interpretation of that employment. For his part Aristotle does not interpret the use of clocks, doesn't even mention it, but presupposes this natural mode of access to time by way of the clock. The common understanding of time comprehends only the time that reveals itself in counting as a succession of nows. From this understanding of time there arises the concept of time as a sequence of nows, which has been more particularly defined as a unidirectional irreversible sequence of nows one after the other. We shall retain this initial approach to time in terms of clock usage and, by a more precise interpretation of this comportment toward time and of the time thus experienced, advance toward what makes this time itself possible.
What does it mean to read time from a clock? To "look at the clock"? In using a clock, in reading time from it, we do indeed look at the clock but the clock itself is not the object of our regard. We do not occupy ourselves. for