Heidegger again

This is about how we misconstrue time in our everyday lives and thus misunderstand what it really means to exist. We look away from death, from what must be our ultimate end, and we thus live an existence which is always looking forward to moments and yet never noticing them when they arrive (lost, as we are, in still-looking towards the future). We are constantly awaiting things, but we forget them when they come. Time is 'used up,' it is set up mentally so as to be 'filled.' Thus, when Heidegger talks about 'anticipatory resoluteness,' he's indicating an 'authentic' way of living in temporality: we are to anticipate our death, become resolute about its impendence, and thus become resolute and (in Sartrean language) responsible for our choices in each specific moment and situation. The italics below are Heidegger's; Dasein, as I explained before, is 'Being-there,' and is just a fancy philosophical way of saying 'Man.' Hope this makes sense to you:


Thrown and falling, Dasein is proximally and for the most part lost in that with which it concerns itself. In this lostness, however, Dasein's fleeing in the face of that authentic existence which has been characterized as "anticipatory resoluteness", has made itself known; and this is a fleeing which covers up. In this convernful fleeing lies a fleeing in the face of death-- that is, a looking-away from the end of Being-in-the-world. This looking-away from it, is in itself a mode of that Being-towards-the-end which is ecstatically futural. The inauthentic temporality of everyday Dasein as it falls, must, as such a looking-away from finitude, fail to recognize authentic futurity and therewith temporality in general. And if indeed the way in which Dasein is ordinarily understood is guided by the "they", only so can the self-forgetful 'representation' of the 'infinity' of public time be strenghtened. The "they" never dies becasue it cannot die; for death is in each case mine, and only in anticipatory resoluteness does it get authentically understood in an existentiell manner. Nevertheless, the "they", which never dies and which misunderstands Being-towards-the-end, gives a characteristic interpretation to fleeing in the face of death. To the very end 'it always has more time'. Here a way of "having time" in the sense that one can lose it makes itself known. 'Right now, this! then that! And that is barely over, when...' Here it is not as if the finitude of time were getting understood; quite the contrary, for concern sets out to snatch as much as possible from the time which still keeps coming and 'goes on'. Publicly, time is something which everyone takes and can take. In the everday way in which we are with one another, the levelled-off sequence of "nows" remains completely unrecognizable as regards its origin in the termpoality of the individual Dasein. How is 'time' in its course to be touched even the least bit when a man who has been present-at-hand 'in time' no longer exists? Time goes on, just as indeed it already 'was' when a man 'came into life'. The only time one knows is the public time which has been levelled off and which belongs to everyone-- and that means, to nobody.

But just as he who flees in the face of death is pursued by it even as he evades it, and just as in turning away from it he must see it none the less, even the innocuous infinite sequence of "nows" which simply runs its course, imposes itself 'on' Dasein in a remarkably enigmatical way. Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it arises? Yet with regard to the pure sequence of "nows" we have as much right to say one as the other. When Dasein talks of time's passing away, it understands, in the end, more of time than it wants to admit; that is to say, the temporality in which world-time temporalizes itself has not been completely closed off, no matter how much it may get covered up. Our talk about time's passing-away gives expression to this 'experience': time does not let itself be halted. This 'experience' in turn is possible only because the halting of time is something that we want. Herein lies an inauthentic awaiting of 'moments'-- an awaiting in which these are already forgotten as they glide by. The awaiting of inauthentic existence-- the awaiting which forgets as it makes present-- is the condition for the possibility of the ordinary experience of time's passing-away. Because Dasein is futural in the "ahead-of-itself", it must, in awaiting, understand the sequence of "nows" as one which glides by as it passes away. Dasein knows fugitive time in terms of its 'fugitive' knowledge about its death. In the kind of talk which emphasizes time's passing away, the finite futurity of Dasein's temporality is publicly reflected. And because even in talk about time's passing away, death can remain covered up, time shows itself as a passing-away 'in itself.'