Time & Perspective Quote by Martin Heidegger

Heidegger’s move here is a grammatical jailbreak with philosophical stakes. “Being is” sounds like a clean little statement, the kind of thing logic can file away as a predicate: subject, copula, done. Heidegger refuses that comfort. By shifting to “there is Being” and “there is time,” he’s trying to make language register what his project in Being and Time keeps insisting: Being and time aren’t just items in the world that can be affirmed the way we affirm a fact. They’re the condition that any “is” relies on in the first place.

The subtext is a critique of the metaphysical reflex that turns everything into a thing. When we say “time is,” we smuggle in the idea that time exists like a chair exists - present-at-hand, sitting there, waiting to be described. Heidegger’s “there is” (his famous es gibt, literally “it gives”) hints at something less possessable: an event of disclosure, a giving of intelligibility. Being and time “show up” as horizons that make appearing possible, not as objects that appear.

Context matters: Heidegger is writing against a tradition that treated Being as the most abstract, self-evident concept, and time as a neutral measuring line. His syntax tries to break that spell. He wants us to feel, almost physically, that the world doesn’t start with propositions; it starts with a lived opening in which things can matter at all. The phrase is philosophy as defamiliarization: a small linguistic twist that forces the reader to notice the machinery of “is” humming underneath ordinary thought.