3
TIME AND BEING

becomes ensnared in a hopeless tangle of relations that have hardly been thought out.

We name time when we say: every thing has its time. This means: everything which actually is, every being comes and goes at the right time and remains for a time during the time allotted to it. Every thing has its time.

But is Being a thing? Is Being like an actual being in time? Is Being at all? If it were, then we would incontestably have to recognize it as something which is and consequently discover it as such among other beings. This lecture hall is. The lecture hall is illuminated. We recognize the illuminated lecture hall at once and with no reservations as something that is. But where in the whole lecture hall do we find the "is"? Nowhere among things do we find Being. Every thing has its time. But Being is not a thing, is not in time. Yet Being as presencing remains determined as presence by time, by what is temporal.

What is in time and is thus determined by time, we call the temporal. When a man dies and is removed from what is here, from beings here and there, we say that his time has come. Time and the temporal mean what is perishable, what passes away in the course of time. Our language says with still greater precision: what passes away with time. For time itself passes away. But by passing away constantly, time remains as time. To remain means: not to disappear, thus, to presence. Thus time is determined by a kind of Being. How, then, is Being supposed to be determined by time? Being speaks out of the constancy of time's passing away. Nevertheless, nowhere do we find· time as something that is like a thing.

Being is not a thing, thus nothing temporal, and yet it is determined by time as presence.

Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.

Being and time determine each other reciprocally, but in such a manner that neither can the former—Being—be addressed as something temporal nor can the latter—time—be addressed as a being.


On Time and Being (GA 14) by Martin Heidegger