Retrieving Heidegger's temporal realism

Abstract

AbstractEarly Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non‐sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built‐in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World‐time turns out to be a co‐production of Dasein's non‐sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature.