CONCERNING EMPTY AND FUL-FILLED TIME

CONCERNING EMPTY AND fUl-filLED TIME·

HANS-GEORG GADAMER

Emeritus Professor, University of Heidelberg

The experience is well known which
Augustine describes in the 10th Book
of his Confessions, when he says that
he understands precisely what time is
when he does not reflect upon it. But
as soon as he directs his attention to it
and wants to say clearly what time
really is, then he is completely non-
plussed. ,This famous description of
the problem of time in the introduc-
tion of Augustine's analysis appears to
me to be the prototype of all genuine
philosophical perplexity. Self-conceal-
ment in the thoughdessness of what is
self-evident is like a great resistance,
which is unconquerable because of its
lack of that with which philosophical
thought and its desire to comprehend
constantly have to contend. To con-
ceive what· is self-evident is a task of
peculiar difficulty. It is a matter of
presenting what is evasive because it is
constantly behind one. The behind-
the-back experience of such an evasion
is the source of the intrinsic uneasiness
of philosophical knowledge. Evasion
and non-appearance in themselves al-
ways have the greater obtrusiveness
and conspicuousness, as opposed to the
dependable existence of what one is
accustomed to. For the philosopher,
however, such an evasion has a special
structure. It is a withdrawal into what
is self-evident, a perplexity which is
continually being renewed, which is
named by one word, problem, and
which is taken over from the dialectical
situation of conflict. The great funda-
mental questions of philosophy all have
this structure: they do not allow them-
selves to be held at bay in a way which
makes possible an unequivocal answer
to them. They seem to evade the grasp
of our concepts and nevertheless con-
tinue to attract in their evasiveness. To
be attracted by something which re-
tracts itself constitutes the basic move-
ment of philosophical interest. This
attraction-retraction calls into question
the conceptuality in terms of which one
inquires. We can indeed say: the
philosophical problem is a question
which one does not know how to
"raise."
Such is also the case with the prob-
lem of time. We are greatly perplexed
when we attempt to say what time is,
because in virtue of a self-evident pre-
conception of what is, what is present
is always understood by that preconcep-
tion. The traditional Greek concepts
have conceptually hardened this pre-
supposition. The perplexity in which
thought has become entangled is that
time appears to have its sole Being in
the 'now' of the present, and, never-
theless, it is just as clear that time, pre-
cisely in the 'now' of the present, is
as such not present. What now is, is
always already past. It seems incom-
prehensible how one is supposed to
comprehend what is past, as that which
no longer is, and what is future, as
that which is not yet, in terms of the
being of the 'now,' which alone exists,
in such a way that the whole "is" time.
The dimensionality of time does not
seem to be master of the concept of the
being of the present, which deter-
Hans-Georg Gadamer is Professor Emeri-
tus of Philosophy at the University of Heidel-
berg. He is editor of Die Philosophische
Rundschau. Among his many books are
Wahrheit und Methode and Kleine Schriften
I and II.

* Delivered in June, 1969, in Heidelberg, Gennany, at a colloquium honoring Heidegger's

80th birthday. Subsequently published in Die Frage Martin Heideggers, ed. Hans Georg
Gadamer, Carl Winter, Universitaetsverlag, Heidelberg, 1969. This is a limited publication
sponsored by the Heidelberger Akademis der Wissenschaften. Translated by R. Phillip
O'Hara,
77

E. G. Ballard et al. (eds.), Martin Heidegger in Europe and America

© Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands 1973
 HANS-GEORG GADAMER
mines Greek thought of Being. Augus-
tine's great achievement was precisely
to sharpen this perplexity of thought
and then with his own spiritual depth
of experience to show that a mode of
reflexive human experience is reflected
in the dimensionality of time. To be
sure, he thereby follows the reawaken-
ing and new interpretation of Platonic
thought in late antiquity. But the hier-
archy of Being which is developed in
the thought of Plotinus and in that
of his followers - that the intelligible
world descends to the material world
via the "soul" and implies that all
time has its true place in the "soul"-
is transposed by him into his own in-
dividual experience. This reinterpre-
tation occurs when he conceives the
distentio animi as the soul's stretching
forth toward the future and ultimately
toward the redemption from temporal-
ity by divine grace. The soul's stretch-
ing forth, its collecting itself out of
the dispersed multiplicity which re-
sults from corruption through curiosity
-this is the point of truth in which
Augustine feels superior to the diffi-
culties of Greek thought, even if he is
not able conceptually to achieve this
superiority.
In truth the question whether time
has reality at all is not simply the leg-
acy of Greek thought, but rather is a
problem which is raised again and
again from the subject matter itself,
and it is a question which accompan-
ies thought through the whole tradition
of Western philosophy. Is there such
a thing as time? Aristotle already
touches on this question when he re-
marks that the designation of time,
which he considers as the reckoning of
motion, the counted sequence of nows
in which motion is unfolded, implies
the being of reckoning souls. For him
that certainly does not mean that time
is less real than, say, ''place'' ( T&''II'O~ )
or that it exists and occurs only in hu-
man apprehension. Such a conse-
quence, however, forces itself to the
fore: just as each counted number
is only real by the counting of the
78
human spirit, so time also does not
appear to be simply real, and only ap-
pears as time in the experience of man.
In the famous theses indexed in Paris in
the year 1277, it occurs as one of the
reprobate false teachings that time is
nothing real (in re), but exists only
in apprehensions. It seems to be an
unavoidable speculative temptation to
raise this question: is there really
time? Or is the way in which one
thinks that which really is as in time
bound to the specific finiteness of con-
sciousness, and is time, therefore,
(alongside space) an a priori subjec-
tive form of intuition as Kant teaches,
or in whatever way? Probably every
thinking person succumbs to the temp-
tation, contra what is really the case,
to think of time as something which
can be conceived as suspended. This
temptation is stronger regarding time
than place; which, in view of what is
present, itself appears present and
thereby appears to have an incontest-
able reality. Greek conceptuality seems
simply to formulate that which cor-
responds to all human experience of
Being.
These speculative impulses have ab-
solutely nothing to do with the mod-
em scientific concept of time. For in
science no assertion concerning the
reality or illusion of time is made at
all. The scientific concept of time
functions simply as that which maker
possible temporal measurement and
the quantifying observation of process-
es of motion. When Newton uses the
famous expression of absolute time
which flows constantly, he simply ex-
trapolates that which is demanded by
the immanent conditions of temporal
measurement. To be sure the problem
of time has from time immemorial
been most closely connected with that
of temporal measurement; connected
so closely, in fact, that the problem of
temporal measurement appears actual-
ly to diminish and replace the problem
of the being of time. In any case the
independence of time from what is
supposed to be measured in time is a