Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
DOI 10.1007/s11007-006-9023-4
DAVID SCOTT
Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 9316, Ocala Street, Silver Spring,
MD 20901, USA
(E-mail: topperscott@yahoo.com)
Abstract. The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the
‘‘concept’’ of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate
between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging
concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s
durée or ‘‘duration’’ in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can
argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of
Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to
the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident
the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of
Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed
by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Tempo-
rality ‘‘is’’ not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it ‘‘is not.’’
1. Introduction
The two thinkers most responsible for the revolution occurring in the
span of a decade, in which the entire Western conception of time was
overturned both scientifically and philosophically, nevertheless, seemed
only vaguely to acknowledge one another in their published work. From
the publication in Germany of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Rel-
ativity in 1916 to Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in
1927, the crisis of modernism becomes the problem of time, or rather the
problem of the temporalizing of time. Henri Bergson’s controversial
response to Einstein’s theory, Duration and Simultaneity (1923) hints
philosophically at the fundamental concerns motivating the formulation
of the problem that the physicist appears to take for granted, at least from
184 DAVID SCOTT
2. I
Without replaying all the aspects involved in the conflict between science
and philosophy and their differing justifications for confronting the
problem of time, instead, let us turn to a single event.
At a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Paris, convened ostensibly
to honor his work, Albert Einstein first met Bergson on April 6, 1922.
Bergson had only just recently published his Duration and Simultaneity.
Indeed, it was among the first attempts by an important philosopher to
come to terms with Einstein’s ideas.9 But given the remarkable phe-
nomena of the Bergson vogue10 during this period, for this reason his
intervention, more than any other, would draw attention. Still, very
reluctantly but with great anticipation from the audience in attendance,
Bergson was persuaded to extemporaneously outline his fundamental
philosophical divergences from Einstein’s theory.
Bergson’s appreciation of Einstein stemmed from the belief that ‘‘he
[Einstein] was giving us not only a new physics but also certain new ways
of thinking.’’11 This meant that what Bergson sought was compatibility
between his most important concept, dure´e, duration, and Einstein’s
theory of time. Thus, what he took to be the inducement for his
186 DAVID SCOTT
One only buys a clock to know what time it is; and ‘to know what
time it is’ consists in observing a correspondence, not between what
two clocks indicate, but between the time indicated and the
moment where one finds oneself, the event that is taking place, in
the last instance not something that is an indication of time on a
clock.19
Bergson acknowledges that these clocks ‘at the side of events’ declare
the birth of modernism, whose apotheosis is the theory of relativity. As
such, Bergson designates the clock to be as much a concept of thought as
an instrument of measurement. For what it calls for is a new conception
of temporality coordinated by the electromagnetic signal. Modernism
exists concurrently with the ordering of time.23 Simultaneity given by an
indivisible act of perception unites the event and what is indicated by the
clock. Though, likewise, the indivisibility of perception is itself condi-
tioned by the temporal ordering of simultaneity. Yet, not unrelated to
physics is its ignoring the ‘lived’ time unifying the event and what is given
by the clock, while only ever escaping the system of the sign (clock) and
the (electro-magnetic) signal.24
After listening patiently to Bergson, Einstein articulates the essential
conflict between them in terms of a question: ‘‘So, the question before us
is this: Is the philosopher’s time the same as the physicist’s?’’25 The answer
that Einstein gives is a resounding ‘‘No’’ –in that, to his thinking, the
philosopher can only ever conceive of time by the psychological reduction
of objective events, which, for Einstein, must necessarily be independent
of individual consciousnesses. In so doing the philosopher limits time to
the temporality of ‘‘mental constructions’’ or ‘‘logical beings.’’ As a
result, there cannot be any such thing as a real ‘‘philosopher’s time.’’ For
Einstein there is an unbridgeable chasm between the respective ground
demanded by philosophy and the ground presupposed by physics, most
apparent upon their respectively thinking time. And yet, defended by
Einstein in his formulating this question is his insistence on the primacy of
the physicist’s time, without questioning the very grounds which compel
his question being stated as such—the objective measurability of tem-
porality. What the physicist would seem to remain blissfully unaware of is
the nature of this making time public. Might the attitude that motivates
Einstein’s question originate from the different ways the philosopher and
the physicist read time?
3. II
In this section, let us turn our attention to the problem of the ‘‘concept’’
of the clock, as the means by which the being of time is philosophically
characterized. The thesis that we want to support, is that Heidegger fol-
lows Bergson in his describing clock time as the deficient form which
modernism gives itself as temporality. Looking at the clock and orienting
oneself toward time reduces time to the ‘now,’ our always awaiting
something (to come presently) in the present. ‘‘What is counted are the
nows.’’46 Modernity characterizes itself in terms of our measuring the
time necessary for our awaiting, as a series of nows.
Heidegger’s philosophy remains in constant negotiation with the
current of modernism. That current is the question of time. Indeed, his
later preoccupations with the invasive influence of technology on
thought, and his surprisingly belated dialogue with Karl Marx, must be
seen in a line of continuity with his discussion of clock time in Being and
Time.47 Only five years removed from the publication of Einstein’s
theory of relativity, which asserts that duration, simultaneity, and suc-
cession, the characteristics of time, are not themselves absolute prop-
erties but rather consequences of the situatedness (in terms of ‘local’
space–time) of the observer of the event, Heidegger’s Sections 80–81 in
Being and Time articulate the interstice of the physics of moving bodies,
the metaphysical significance of the rejection of absolute time and space,
and the technological implications of clock synchronization. It was the
junction of these disparate concerns directly encountered in the world
that lead Einstein to his theory. Indeed, without reducing relativity to
any one single cause, as Peter Galison remarks in his recent work,48 the
solution to the problem of simultaneity motivating the work of Einstein
and Poincaré, could only be specified in relation to a practical and
concrete problem.
192 DAVID SCOTT
time present and available for everyone. To reckon time is to feel and
suppose what the being of time means for-the-sake-of Da-sein.57
It is likewise to determine our stance toward death: that is, as some
event to be avoided, minute by minute, second by second. To reckon time
in this manner is to conceal that one is always already dying. Da-sein,
always ‘‘running ahead to its past,’’ is avoiding the constitutive indeter-
minacy ever present in every decision made that determines the way one
lives life. One cannot be anxious if one remains preoccupied with the time
of the quotidian. As a result, death is made inconspicuous, especially
when compared with the concerns of the everyday; but, this only further
bears witness to the fact that the public is always already determined as
being toward death, the extreme possibility of its existence. So, for
example, as we check things off our ‘To Do List’ throughout the course of
the day, measuring time via our recognized accomplishments, and those
things checked off the list, we thereby affirm while denying our finitude, as
if each item on the list means that we now can live on using a time that
finally is domesticated. Or, to return to Heidegger’s language, one might
say that it is only because it is already entangled in its thrownness into the
factical world (the ‘‘there’’) can human Da-sein interpret time by the
means of disclosing the time in which objectively presented ‘innerwordly
things at hand’ are encountered through the reckoning of time, existing
within-time.
Da-sein’s possibilities for being-in-the-world are subject to the changes
of day and night, in that these changes determine how it can take care of
those things objectively present at hand. An obvious example would be a
farmer, who understands the temporality of time in terms of the daily
work that she gives herself—the ‘‘time’’ of sunrise and the ‘‘time’’ of
sunset that defines the chores. ‘‘The sun dates the time interpreted in
taking care.’’58 Another might be a day trader, who despite the seeming
timelessness granted through the internet, still remains restricted by the
deadline of the stock market’s ‘day.’ The laboring body incarnates care. It
makes time flesh. In this sense, the sun acquires ‘‘handiness’’ [Zuhanden],
an instrumental significance, through its becoming eminently relevant for
the circumspect potentiality-of-being-in-the-world, that is, its making
actual Da-sein’s possibility for existence (as farmer or day trader or list
maker). ‘‘Da-sein, thrown into the world, temporalizing, and giving itself
time, takes account of its regular recurring passage.’’59 As such, time is
naturalized; that is, it becomes identified with the measurement of its
relevance for ‘‘what is to be taken care of ’’—the land, the stock market,
etc. Da-sein temporalizing time through marking its passage in the form
of cardinal number gives to itself time-as-measure, coordinating the starry
heavens above with the sensus communis (‘public sense’ of time) within:
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 195
thereby being is made equal to temporal being through the labor of taking
care.60
This dating reckons with time in designating a measurement for time
measurement: the clock according to how Da-sein must exist in the world,
but a world presented to it by means of its relations with other. ‘‘This
means that with the temporality of Da-sein as thrown, delivered over to
the world, and giving itself time, something like a ‘clock’ is also discov-
ered, that is, a handy thing that has become accessible in its regular
recurrence in a making present that awaits.’’61 The clock (the ‘artificial’
clock must be adjusted to the ‘natural’ clock to make the discovered time
accessible) provides the reason for temporality in that it grounds thrown
being-together-with things at hand.
Not surprisingly, this real and practical encountering of the handy
clock solicits Heidegger’s question: ‘‘How does the physicist encounter
time?’’ Whereas Einstein asked the question to dismiss philosophy, in
these pages Heidegger is more judicious and asks the question, not to
dismiss the physicists but to suggest that both physics and philosophy
permit an access to a shared temporalizing of temporality that diverges
only in the manner through which it is approached. If for one the concept
of the clock operates as a mathematical function, for the other the clock is
a concept, in that it is unthinkable if disconnected from the question of
being. Here we confront the distinction between time given by means of
the ‘concept of the clock,’ that is, as a representation [Vorstellung] in
which time is brought before us more generally as an object, as opposed
to the essence of being garnered from the phenomena of time-measuring.
Indeed, any consideration of being as a whole is possible only by pre-
supposing the essential inclusion of man’s use of the ‘clock’ in the dif-
ference between being and beings.62
If only by reducing time to its being, in referencing some universal
mathematical constant, the clock becomes a function that permits the
physicist to reflect and communicate. As a result, in both cases tempo-
rality determines the discovery of the factical necessity of the clock. Be-
cause of its discovery time is given (or gives itself) the instrument for
interpreting itself. By the ‘‘time taken care of in the measurement of
time’’: public time is phenomenally unveiled. In the statement, ‘‘It is time
for the day’s work’’—interpreted time has by its very nature the existential
and ontological structure of ‘‘appropriateness’’ and ‘‘inappropriateness’’:
the character of ‘‘time for...’’
To clarify Heidegger’s description let us look more closely at the
physicist’s encountering time.
In the 1924 lecture Heidegger ascribes the measuring of time to the
physicist. Measuring indicates for the physicist the ‘‘how-long’’ and the
196 DAVID SCOTT
Ascertaining what time is in using the clock, we say, explicitly or not, ‘‘now
it is such an hour and so many minutes, now it is time to.... Looking at the
clock is grounded in and guided by taking-time-for-oneself.’’74 As such,
looking at the clock orients oneself toward time as essentially a ‘‘now-
saying,’’ time, always already interpreted and articulated as an awaiting,
for making present for something objectively present. As a result, time is
temporalized through its measuring its being awaited. The presence being
awaited becomes the present standard by which measurement is consti-
tuted temporally. Time is made the means (of measurement) for making
present something objectively present. Concomitantly, Da-sein is made
present in the making present of the now.
‘‘Thus in measuring time, time gets made public in such a way that it is
encountered in each case and at each time for everyone as ‘now and now
and now.’’’75 The now is the means by which the everydayness of Da-sein
is simultaneous, what Heidegger in both his 1924 lecture and Being and
Time calls ‘‘das man’’ or ‘‘the they,’’ the ‘‘one.’’ That is, in everydayness
Da-sein is that being that one is: nameless, faceless, neutered in its falling
prey to the imperatives of publicized time, world-time. Da-sein, accord-
ingly, is the time ‘‘in which one is with one another: ‘one’s’ time.’’ The
clock that one has, indeed, every clock, shows time but only the time of
being-with-one-another-in-the-world.76
Still, though it shows the now, the making present of the public-ized
Da-sein falling prey to things at hand, the clock never shows the future,
nor has a clock ever shown the past. Yet, it is the futurality and pastness,
the coming-toward-itself and the having-been, lost into the face of the
clock that retains its existential significance for Heidegger:
4. Conclusion
In summary, my claim has been that the fundamental insight into the
nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is
that time extemporizes itself. Past, present, and future have meaningful-
ness precisely because they are the modes of the immanence of the self-
extemporizing of time (though there is no self of time). Therefore, fol-
lowing this debate, when Heidegger writes, ‘‘Da-sein is time, time is
temporal,’’83 he both supports Bergson’s criticism that Einstein ignores
the temporal beingness or ‘‘timeliness’’ of the observer, while opening up
the notion that time extemporizes itself. This is the fundamental philo-
sophical insight garnered by Heidegger from the Bergson–Einstein
encounter.84
The implications for a return to this debate are important. At its heart
lie not only metaphysical but social, ethical, and political questions rel-
evant for situating ourselves while still in the wake of modernity. One can
find a recent example in the thought of Antonio Negri. Exemplifying a
thinker who remains cognizant of the stakes involved in the debate bet-
ween Einstein and Bergson, Negri likewise remains aware as well as of the
underlying implications for Heidegger’s ontologically answering it. Negri
stresses that for Karl Marx time is given to us only as the matter of the
measurer of equivalence. Still, alongside this abstract conception of time
is the process of subjectification, whereby time itself acquires a substan-
tialized being: ‘‘to the point that time becomes the fabric of the whole of
being, because all of being is implicated in the web of the relations of
production: being is equal to product of labor: temporal being.’’85
Modernity institutes an ontology of time that absorbs the political by the
use of the concept of the temporality as given by time, now reduced to the
measuring of equivalences, which in turn determine the labor value of the
products. The value of the product subsumes the abstract (clock) time
decided by ‘‘the State’’ for determining the time-labor of the living body.
As a result, any hope for freedom or liberation is therefore possible only
by the means of a ‘de-subjectifying’ of labor, liberating the ‘‘open time’’ as
incarnated in the heretofore subjectified living laboring body. Not sur-
prisingly Negri admits the Heideggerian impulse relative to his discussion
of the being of the clock. He suggests that no theory expresses this time of
the State better than Heidegger’s thinking on the ontology of time and the
nullification of the state. ‘‘The State is care, the world of anxiety actively
lived.’’86 Negri, consequently, makes evident the social and ethical
motivations informing Heidegger’s attempt to mediate the conflict be-
tween metaphysics and science, while taking seriously Bergson’s reproach
that we live not only a cosmic life but a social one.87 Negri’s work would
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 201
no one.’’94 For Heidegger the public clock chimes the time of the nullity
of modernity.
Notes
1. Even after all this time, it remains intriguing that very little has been written about
this important encounter. From the perspective of physics this is not surprising. In
particular the biographers of Einstein, if it is mentioned at all, they see this encounter
as largely one more example of the superiority of the physicist in besting philosophy
and its dilettantish relation to science. While, from the perspective of philosophy, in
particular, Bergsonians, because Bergson came to see himself as largely losing in the
encounter with Einstein, it represents a humiliating moment. It would seem to
confirm both that the divide between science and philosophy has largely been
completed by modernism and, therefore, that the latter must no longer ever see at
itself as anything more than the mere ‘hand-maiden’ to the former.
2. This is particularly odd given the pervasiveness of authorized German translations at
this point: in 1903 Einführung in die Metaphysk appeared, in 1908, Materie und
Gedächtnis, to be followed in 1911 by Zeit und Freiheit: Eine Abhandlung über die
unmilttelbaren Bewusstseinstatsachen. In the summer 1925 Marburg lecture course
Heidegger points to his being exposed to Bergson’s work sometime between1913 and
1914. While it would not be out of the question to suggest that Ernst Cassirer’s
writings on the philosophy of science may have provided Heidegger with the inter-
pretation of the theory of relativity against which he formulate his existential ana-
lytic. One should not assume that Cassirer’s work introduces Bergson. Indeed,
Bergson rarely makes more than a circumspect appearance in his work, until later
upon his directly confronting the work of Max Scheler in 1929, and the posthumous
publication of texts written in the 1930s and 1940s in volume 4 of The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms (1995). Instead, Bergson became known in Germany, according to
Heidegger, primarily through Scheler, ‘‘who recognized Bergson and his significance
quite early, and then was influenced by him in return. Scheler was instrumental in
having Bergson translated into German. This recognition of Bergson also brought,
within Husserl’s work, the investigations of internal time consciousness, which are in
part published in his later works’’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena,
trans. Theodore Kisiel [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992], 92; Prolegomena zur Ges-
chichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe Band 20 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1975], 126. [Hereafter cited as HCT]. Therefore, we must situate He-
idegger’s introduction to Bergson within the context of his opposing Lebenphiloso-
phie to neo-Kantianism (Cf. §10, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan
Stambaugh [Albany: SUNY, 1996]; Sein and Zeit [Türbingen: Niemeyer, 1993]).
[Hereafter cited as SZ].
The fullest address to Bergson comes in Heidegger’s 1927 lectures published as Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadler (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1988) [Hereafter cited as BP]. Indeed, in these lectures Heidegger references Dure´e et
simultaneite´. Though it is beyond the purview of this paper, we would claim that
Bergson serves as both the precursor and the alternative to the Heidegger’s con-
ception of time. As the ‘mediator’ that makes visible the problem of time in any
encounter between science and philosophy that otherwise would have been obfus-
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 203
cated. Illya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers characterize Bergson in just this manner.
They write, ‘‘Bergson was certainly ‘wrong’ on some technical points’’ concerning
Einstein’s theory of relativity; nevertheless, ‘‘his task as a philosopher was to attempt
to make explicit inside physics the aspects of time he thought science was neglecting’’
[Illya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s Ultimate Dialogue
with Nature, (New York: Bantam, 1984), 301–2].
3. The response to Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity by physicists, particularly
Einstein in their first meeting, centering on his mathematical mistakes, has been
accepted to be the event that hastened the lessening influence of Bergsonianism.
Bergson himself remained conflicted about this work, denying its republication
after 1931. Still, in Le Pense´e et le mouvant, Bergson adds a long footnote (omitted
in the English translation The Creative Mind) that is a direct quote from chapter 3
of Duration and Simultaneity. Heidegger’s awareness of Bergson’s ‘failure’ is more
obviously evident in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, which Hans-Georg
Gadamer credits with being the original form of Being and Time [Hans-Georg
Gadamer, ‘‘Martin Heidegger und die Marburger Theologie,’’ Heidegger: Pers-
pektiven zur Deutung seines Werks, ed. Otto Pöggeler (Cologne and Berlin: Keie-
penheur & Witsch, 1970), 169. Gadamer’s claim and the debate subsequent to this
remark are mentioned by William McNeil in his postscript to his translation of
Heidegger’s lecture The Concept of Time: English-German Edition (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1992): Hereafter cited as CT].
4. As a result, I am taking for granted the continuity between Division One and
Division Two. I reject any notion, as it is more common than it should be, that we
can somehow separate the two, placing more emphasis on the former. I might
suggest reading Division One in the light of Division Two, as the means to clarify
more concretely its phenomenological presuppositions.
5. Paul Davies, About Time (London: Viking, 1995).
6. SZ, 328/302.
7. BP, 232/328.
8. With this we are attempting to be true to the distinction that Heidegger makes in his
later lectures (of 1937–38) between ‘historical reflection’ and ‘historiography.’ Cf.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected ‘‘Problems’’ of ‘‘Logic,’’
trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1994).
Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte ‘‘Probleme’’ der ‘‘Logik,’’ vol. 45 of the
Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main. Vittorio Klostermann, 1984).
9. A.N. Whitehead published his philosophical analysis on The Principle of Relativity
also in 1922, the same year as Bergson’s study. However, Ernst Cassirer even earlier
published, initially in 1920 and then 1921, his Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I will
return to the role of Cassirer’s mediating Heidegger’s encountering with Bergson
later in this paper. At this point I would like to claim that Bergson’s intervention
would maintain an even greater influence, particularly beyond even the borders of
France, and into Germany and the development of Lebenphilosophie of Scheler and
Dilthey, than either Whitehead or Cassirer, in a general sense, if not more partic-
ularly on Heidegger’s development of a positive response to (and not simply a
critique of) physics.
10. Bergson enjoyed remarkable popularity both inside and outside the academy
throughout Europe beginning with the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907,
waning in the 1920s after he ceased teaching at the Collège de France. There is quite
204 DAVID SCOTT
‘‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm on Absolute Time,’’ The New Bergson, ed.
John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), 66–81].
25. DS, 159; Me´langes, 1346 (my italics).
26. I would like to gratefully thank the anonymous reviewer of the original version of this
essay. The reviewer’s probing questions, rigorous analysis, and generous suggestions
served as a great impetus for my correcting the errors that plagued the previous draft.
While, I could not completely take into consideration all their suggestions, never-
theless, this section reflects this reader’s valuable intervention.
27. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans.
William Swabey and Marie Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953), 347–56. Zur Eins-
steinshcen Relativetätstheorie. Erkenntnishtheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer, 1921). Hereafter cited as ETR.
28. Heidegger’s (1997) criticism of neo-Kantianism in general and Cassirer in particu-
lar, is clearly evident in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the famous
confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in that same year (Cf.
Appendix to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). A fuller explication of the
relationship between Heidegger and neo-Kantianism lies outside the scope of this
paper. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,’’ Kant: Disputed
Questions, ed. Moltke Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 131–57. ‘Kant
und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-
Interpretation,’ Kant-Studien, 36 (1931), 1–26; Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the
Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: SUNY,
1992; Charles Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1971); Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
(Chicago: Open Court, 2000).
One must not forget that Bergson’s own philosophical development stems from his
reading Herbert Spencer, at that point considered a radical turn from the positivism
of August Comte and the neo-Kantianism of Émile Bourtroux dominating nine-
teenth century French thought. Cf. Jacques Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson
(Paris: Plon, 1959); Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New
York: Henry Holt, 1931), 356–70; Œuvres (Paris: Presses Univerditaires de France,
1970), 795–807. Hereafter cited CE.
29. According to Cassirer’s Preface to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Einstein read the
manuscript and gave it his approval.
30. ETR, 383.
31. ETR, 379.
32. ETR, 453.
33. ETR, 454, 455.
34. ‘‘It is clear,’’ Cassirer writes, ‘‘that the theory [of relativity] only accomplishes the
most definite application and carrying through of the standpoint of critical idealism
within empirical science itself’’ (ETR, 412).
35. ETR, 411.
36. ETR, 393.
37. ETR, 440.
38. One must not assume that the relative measurement given by ‘‘these temporarily
ultimate intellectual instruments’’ likewise provide ‘‘definitive expressions of the
ontologically real’’ (ETR, 358).
39. ETR, 412, 440.
206 DAVID SCOTT
53. Here we can recognize Heidegger’s later refusal of thought as ordered by technol-
ogies of information and their engendering of ‘immediacy without real nearness.’
‘‘Man puts the longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts the
greatest distances behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the
shortest range’’ (165). In a brief span of less than a page Heidegger, in his essay
‘‘The Thing,’’ establishes a route from the technology of planes, radio, and film,
which have made possible the abolition of distances both in space and time, to
man’s staring impotently into the terrifying heart of the explosion of the atom
bomb. How does Heidegger accomplish this arc of thought? These technologies
reduce distance and nearness into a uniformity in which everything is neither far nor
near. ‘‘Everything gets lumped together into uniform diatancelessness’’ (166). Any
experiencing or knowledge of nearness is lost. That is, in the reduction of distance
and nearness to only those things ‘present at hand,’ we have moved no closer to our
thinking the ‘thing qua thing’ than we have succeeded in thinking nearness. Indeed,
science, even before the explosion of the atom bomb merely confirmed it, had
already annihilated the thinghood of the thing, and reduced it to nil. How? It has
made us forget what Heidegger calls the ‘fourfold,’ that is, the thing as ‘presencing’
or gathering in one space–time, earth and sky, mortals and divinities. ‘‘The thing
things. In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Staying, the thing
brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one another. This bringing-near is
nearing. Nearing is the presencing of nearness...Nearness preserves farness’’ (177–
78). At this point, in this paper, of less importance are the particularities of He-
idegger’s support for this argument. More important is his assertion that the
‘‘fourfoldness’’ of this primordial relation, as gathered and united in the thing-ing of
the thing, gifts us with an alternate way to begin to think the being of the world. To
begin to think the nearness of the world requires letting the thing be present in its
thing-ing, a shift in attitude that renounces the imperatives to represent, to explain,
as fostered by those technologies engendering the illusion of nearness. Instead, one
appeals to what was forgotten. ‘‘The first step toward such vigilance is the step back
from the thinking that merely represents—that is, explains—to the thinking that
responds and recalls’’(Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Thing,’’ Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], 181).
54. DS, 106/193.
55. SZ, 411/377.
56. ‘‘Interest in what time is has been reawakened in the present day by the develop-
ment of research in physics and its deliberations on the fundamental principles of
the kind of apprehending and determining entailed here: the measuring of nature
within a system of space–time relations. The current state of this research is
established in Einstein’s relativity theory. Some of its propositions are as follows:
Space is nothing in itself; there is no absolute space. It exists merely by way of the
bodies and energies contained in it. (An old propositions of Aristotle’s:) Time is
nothing. It persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it. There is
no absolute time, and no absolute simultaneity either. In seeing the destructive side
of this theory, one readily overlooks what is positive about it, namely that it
demonstrates precisely the invariability, with respect to arbitrary transformations,
of those equations describing natural processes’’ (CT, 3/3E).
57. BP, 261–64.
58. SZ, 413/379.
59. ibid.
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 209
60. ‘‘In that world, nature in the surrounding world and the public surrounding world
are always discovered along with it. At the same time everyone can ‘count on’ this
public dating which everyone gives himself this time. It makes use of a measure that
is available to the public’’ (ibid).
61. SZ, 413/379–80.
62. I have rephrased a sentence taken from a much later lecture of Heidegger’s as a way to
reveal not only the continuity of his thinking of time, even after the supposed
‘‘turning.’’ Just as importantly, I would like to support the notion that the shift from
the analytic of Da-sein to the most basic question of being, attends a further opening
of the being of time: the instant the clock stops, being is audible. In the same lecture
Heidegger says, ‘‘If we need evidence that we always remain and encounter ourselves
within this differentiation of beings and being, it suffices to note that we continually
name being in our comportment toward beings when we say ‘is.’ Whether we actually
assert propositions that contain the word ‘is’ or silently busy and concern ourselves
with beings is all the same. That we must continually say ‘is’ whenever we speak
indicates that what we ‘so’ name, precisely being, wants to be put into a word, into a
word that, admittedly, we always at the same time mis-hear. This failure to recognize
the ‘is’ resembles the all too familiar and monotonous tick of the clock within the
usual sphere of everyday residing. We first hear the motion of the clock when it stands
still. In just this way we become aware of the ‘is’ and what it says when an interruption
intrudes upon speaking’’ [Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Ayles-
worth (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 37; Grundbegriffe (Frankfurt am Main: V.
Klostermann, 1981), 43].
63. CT, 4/4E.
64. ibid.
65. CT, 17/17E.
66. SZ, 414/381.
67. Quoted in Galison, 306. Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille foreground the coordi-
nating of clocks in the articulating of an imaginary that legitimates the law of gen-
eralized circulation and exchange, while concealing the real labor that makes it
function. ‘‘The World-as-Clock is a world in which everything works, in which the
activity of each of its elements is conceived of as homogenous to the law of
work....The arithmetic symbols that put a number to this real process also functions
as a representation to the extent that they construct an image of expansion in a purely
technico-financial space and likewise conceal their own implications in the work of
putting to work: the perpetual redefinition of new norms, new conducts, and new
disciplines that they render necessary through the perpetual freeing up of the new
social flows that they determine’’ [Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating
Science, Trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 193, 192).
68. Michel Harr claims that what characterizes the everyday Da-sein ‘‘is the fact that it
has no proper name: its name changes according to the work it does.’’ Work and
everydayness are identical. Indeed, those who work share everydayness and, as
such, are indistinguishable. ‘‘In its daily work Da-sein is intrinsically anonymous; it
has no identity or interiority of its own. It is essentially replaceable by others insofar
as they can perform the same tasks as it’’ (Michel Harr, ‘‘The Enigma of Every-
dayness,’’ trans. Michael B. Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations, ed. John Sallis [Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1993], 25). Might
this anonymity name time the ‘laboring body’?
69. Galison, 317.
210 DAVID SCOTT
sirer): that any experience of time outside that given as objectively measurable by
science, for instance, the philosopher’s time, is only psychological. However, Car-
nap draws a distinction between his position and the one Einstein espouses, at least
at this juncture of their encounter. Indeed, one might argue that Einstein at this
point would seem to be moving toward a position no closer to philosophy but, as
witnessed by his later writings and statements, one closer to the theological.
83. CT, 20/20E.
84. Indeed, if Heidegger is read in relation to this encounter, then one might argue that
he provides a profoundly anti-modernist conception of time as temporality that is
maintained even after his turn from ‘‘fundamental ontology’’ [Fundamentalontolo-
gie] and the analyses of the being of Da-sein, as the preparation for the
fundamental question concerning the meaning of being.
85. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Con-
tinuum, 2003), 34.
86. Negri, 89.
87. DS, 35/104.
88. SZ, 419/384–5.
89. SZ, 420/385.
90. Chapter III of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S.
Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991); Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1970), 276–316.
91. SZ, 421/386.
92. SZ, 422/386.
93. SZ, 422/386–87.
94. SZ, 425/389.
References
Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt,
1931).
Bergson, Henri, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness,
trans. by F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). Essai sur les donne´es
imme´diates de la conscience (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1944).
Bergson, Henri, Œuvres. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970).
Bergson, Henri, Me´langes. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972).
Bergson, Henri, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe.
(Manchester: Clinamen, 1999).
Bergson, Henri, ‘‘Discussion with Einstein.’’ Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the
Einsteinian Universe (Manchester: Clinamen, 1999), 154–159.
Čapek, Milič, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Revaluation. (New
York: Humanities P, 1971).
Cassirer, Ernst, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. by William
Swabey and Marie Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953). Zur Einsteinschen Relativitäts-
theorie. Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921).
Cassirer, Ernst, ‘‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,’’ in Kant: Disputed Questions,
ed. Moltke Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 131–157. ‘‘Kant und das
Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-Interpreta-
tion,’’ Kant-Studien 36 (1931): 1–26.
212 DAVID SCOTT
Deleuze, Gilles, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New
York: Zone, 1991). Le Bergsonisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).
Durie, Robin, ‘‘From Absolute Time to Relative Time,’’ in Duration and Simultaneity:
Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, ed. Henri Bergson (Manchester: Clinamen,
1999).
Durie, Robin, ‘‘Splitting Time: Bergson’s Philosophical Legacy,’’ Philosophy Today
(Summer 2000): 152–168.
Einstein, Albert, Relativity: Special and General Theory, trans. by Robert Lawson (New
York: Crown, 1961).
Friedman, Michael, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago:
Open Court, 2000).
Galison, Peter, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare´’s Maps: Empires of Time. (New York:
Norton, 2003).
Gunter, P.A.Y., Bergson and the Evolution of Physics. (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P,
1969).
Harr, Michel, ‘‘The Enigma of Everydayness,’’ trans. by Michael B. Naas and Pascale-
Anne Brault. Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: U
of Indiana P, 1993), 20–28.
Heidegger, Martin, ‘‘The Thing,’’ Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert
Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 165–186. ‘‘Das Ding,’’ Vorträge
Und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967).
Heidegger, Martin, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988). Die Grundprobleme Der Phänomenologie
(Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1975).
Heidegger, Martin, History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, trans. by Theodore
Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992). Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbeg-
riffs (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1979).
Heidegger, Martin, The Concept of Time: English-German Edition, trans. by William
McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
Heidegger, Martin, Being Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY, 1996).
Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993).
Heidegger, Martin, Basic Concepts, trans. by Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1993), 37. Grundbegriffe (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1981),
43.
Heidegger, Martin, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by Richard Taft
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997). Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991).
Heidegger, Martin, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters, ed. Medard
Boss, trans. by Frantz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern UP,
2001). Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe Herausgegeben von
Medard Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1987).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, ‘‘Bergson in the Making,’’ Signs, trans. by Richard McCleary
(Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964). Signes (Paris: Librarie Gallimard, 1960).
Murphy, Timothy S., ‘‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm on Absolute Time’’, in
The New Bergson. ed. Mullarkey John (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), pp. 66–
81.
Negri, Antonio, Time for Revolution, trans. by Matteo Mandarini (New York:
Continuum, 2003).
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 213
Pearson, Keith Ansell, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the
Time of Life. (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Poincaré, Henri, The Value of Science: The Essential Writings of Henri Poincare´, ed.
Stephen Jay Gould (New York: Random House, 2001) .
Prigogine, Ilya, The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. (New
York: Free Press, 1997).
Prigogine, Ilya, ‘‘The Rediscovery of Time,’’ Presented to American Academy of
Religion, December 1983. January 2, 2004. http://www.mountainman.com.au/
ilyatime.htm.
Rossum, Gerhard Dohrn-van, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal
Orders, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1996).
Schalow, Frank, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and
Responsibility. (Albany: State University of New York, 1992).
Sherover, Charles, Heidegger, Kant and Time. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1971).
Stengers, Isabelle, Power and Invention: Situating Science, trans. by Paul Bains
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.