"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"
About this Quote
Heidegger turns a folksy proverb into a quiet trap: "Every thing has its time" sounds like reassurance, but he uses it to unsettle the very idea that time is a neutral container we sit inside. The first move is linguistic. "We name time when we say..". suggests that time is not simply observed; it is disclosed through the way we talk, the way we parcel experience into "right time", "allotted", "remains". Everyday speech becomes philosophy's evidence: our casual timing-phrases already smuggle in an ontology, a picture of what it means to be.
The subtext is that beings are not static objects sprinkled across a timeline. They "come and go", they "remain for a time", and that temporary staying-put is not an accident added onto being; it is part of being's structure. Heidegger is pressing his signature claim: existence is temporal through and through. Even the moral-sounding "right time" is doing double duty. It hints at destiny and appropriateness, but Heidegger's "right" is less about cosmic fairness than about intelligibility: a thing is what it is only within the horizon that lets it show up, matter, and then withdraw.
Context matters. This is the later Heidegger, obsessed with how metaphysics turns time into a measurable resource (clock-time, schedule-time) and thereby misses the more primordial temporality that makes any "measurement" possible. The repetition at the end is not redundancy; it's incantation, a return that forces you to hear how much metaphysics rides inside a cliche. He wants you to notice that when we treat time as something we "have", we are already answering, without noticing, the question of what it means to be.
The subtext is that beings are not static objects sprinkled across a timeline. They "come and go", they "remain for a time", and that temporary staying-put is not an accident added onto being; it is part of being's structure. Heidegger is pressing his signature claim: existence is temporal through and through. Even the moral-sounding "right time" is doing double duty. It hints at destiny and appropriateness, but Heidegger's "right" is less about cosmic fairness than about intelligibility: a thing is what it is only within the horizon that lets it show up, matter, and then withdraw.
Context matters. This is the later Heidegger, obsessed with how metaphysics turns time into a measurable resource (clock-time, schedule-time) and thereby misses the more primordial temporality that makes any "measurement" possible. The repetition at the end is not redundancy; it's incantation, a return that forces you to hear how much metaphysics rides inside a cliche. He wants you to notice that when we treat time as something we "have", we are already answering, without noticing, the question of what it means to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Time |
|---|
More Quotes by Martin
Add to List
