Time & Perspective Quote by Martin Heidegger

Heidegger is trying to break a habit so ingrained it feels like common sense: treating Being as a kind of ultimate object and time as a container everything sits inside. The line performs a philosophical judo move. It grants reciprocity - Being and time "determine each other" - then immediately blocks the two lazy exits. You cannot reduce Being to a timeline (as if existence were just events stacked in sequence), and you cannot reify time into a thing (as if it were another entity alongside chairs, planets, or even minds). Each temptation is a symptom of what Heidegger thinks Western metaphysics keeps doing: turning what makes intelligibility possible into an item within the inventory of the world.

The subtext is polemical. Heidegger is arguing against both the scientific picture that treats time as measurable quantity and the traditional ontological picture that treats Being as a highest being (God, substance, essence). His phrasing is deliberately prohibitive, almost legalistic, because the reader wants to slip back into familiar grammar: nouns, properties, causes. He won’t let you. The payoff is that "time" becomes less a clock-reading and more the horizon that makes anything show up as meaningful at all, while "Being" becomes less a mysterious super-thing and more the ongoing disclosure in which entities can appear.

Context matters: this is the engine of Being and Time’s project, where Dasein (human existence) is the site in which Being is understood, and that understanding is irreducibly temporal - structured by thrownness, projection, and finitude. Reciprocity here isn’t symmetry. It’s a refusal to let either term become a metaphysical idol.