Time and Clock

Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 39:183–213 Springer 2006
DOI 10.1007/s11007-006-9023-4
The ‘‘concept of time’’ and the ‘‘being of the clock’’: Bergson,

Einstein, Heidegger, and the interrogation of the temporality
of modernism
DAVID SCOTT
Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, 9316, Ocala Street, Silver Spring,
MD 20901, USA
(E-mail: topperscott@yahoo.com)
Abstract. The topic to be addressed in this paper, that is, the distinction between the
‘‘concept’’ of time and the being of the clock, divides into two parts: first, in the debate
between Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson, one discovers the ground for the diverging
concepts of time characterized by physics in its opposing itself to philosophy. Bergson’s
durée or ‘‘duration’’ in opposition to Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can
argue, sets the terms for Martin Heidegger’s extending, his ontological analysis of
Da-sein, as human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way to
the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being of the clock that makes evident
the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is rehearsed in Division Two of
Being and Time. My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time revealed
by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time extemporizes itself. Tempo-
rality ‘‘is’’ not a being but a process that temporalizes itself, precisely because it ‘‘is not.’’
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
T.S. Eliot,
‘‘The Waste Land’’ (1922)
1. Introduction
The two thinkers most responsible for the revolution occurring in the
span of a decade, in which the entire Western conception of time was
overturned both scientifically and philosophically, nevertheless, seemed
only vaguely to acknowledge one another in their published work. From
the publication in Germany of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Rel-
ativity in 1916 to Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in
1927, the crisis of modernism becomes the problem of time, or rather the
problem of the temporalizing of time. Henri Bergson’s controversial
response to Einstein’s theory, Duration and Simultaneity (1923) hints
philosophically at the fundamental concerns motivating the formulation
of the problem that the physicist appears to take for granted, at least from
184 DAVID SCOTT
the perspective of the philosopher.1 Bergson philosophically occupies the

place between Einstein and Heidegger. So, while there is only tantalizingly
suggestive but terse textual evidence that Heidegger was cognizant of
Bergson’s intervention2; nevertheless, it would not be absurd to specify
those moments in Sein und Zeit where one recognizes Heidegger’s obvious
awareness of the cataclysmic reformulations of time and space ushered in
by the sciences and mathematics at the onset of the twentieth century.
Still, one is not necessarily speculating to suggest that Heidegger remains
cognizant of Bergson’s supposed failure.3 Of course, Heidegger’s
encountering Bergson must always be filtered through his coming to
terms with neo-Kantianism in general.
The topic to be addressed in this paper is of two parts: first, in the
debate between Einstein and Bergson, it is the clarification of the terms
and purposes which provides the ground for their diverging concepts of
time, which in turn, lays open the path for Heidegger’s reading of time
present in his own project. Bergson’s dureé or ‘‘duration’’ in opposition to
Einstein’s ‘physicist’s time’ as ‘public time,’ one can argue, sets the terms
for Heidegger extending by means of ontology, the ontic analysis of
human being-in-the-world. Second, in this the ‘concept of time’ gives way
to the analysis of the ‘being of the clock.’ What is this being that makes
evident the fundamental temporality of Da-sein? This question is
rehearsed in Division Two of Being and Time.4
My claim is that the fundamental insight into the nature of time
revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is that time
extemporizes itself. As Heidegger describes it, it temporalizes itself in its
being lived through temporally. Extemporization provides the ways for
time’s temporalizing of itself. Which is to say, that Heidegger further
validates Bergson’s characterization of time as inseparable from its being
endured, lived through. This notion of time as self-extemporizing, as
temporalizing of itself is in direct contrast to the conception of time in
terms of simultaneity, and the defining of time in terms of a sequence of
‘nows.’ In this latter sense, time remains spatially external to what deter-
mines it. This is to reduce time to a being, even if only a clock on the wall.
Time, in the former sense, exists immanently to its own horizonal process
of temporalization. I, who live in the world, and live through my body, and
in the world of consciousness through my mind, experience the extem-
porizing of time as the continuity of invention and creation, the gradual
enrichment of my existing in the world, in the past, present, and future of
being. As such, time cannot be understood to be some entity, nor is it
simply given once and for all; likewise, as Paul C. W. Davies comments,
neither are past, present, and future rendered meaningless, as they are
by the theory of relativity.5 In other words, to borrow Heidegger’s
THE ‘‘CONCEPT OF TIME’’ AND THE ‘‘BEING OF THE CLOCK’’ 185
characterization, time is ‘‘timeliness’’ [Zeitlichkeit]. Timeliness ‘‘is not; it

extemporizes itself.’’6 Past, present, future as those ‘‘ecstatic’’ [ekstatisch]
modes through which it is given, acquire meaningfulness only because they
are the means through which time extemporizes itself through the activity
of Da-sein. This is the fundamental philosophical insight garnered by
Heidegger from the Bergson–Einstein encounter. It is this insight which
will be considered in this paper. Let us, therefore, historically reflect upon
this situation as a way to frame any focusing on the specific Sections 80–81
in Being and Time, within Heidegger’s analytic of ‘‘care’’ [Sorge].
While, in Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger makes reference
to the seminal encounter between Einstein and Bergson; no where else
does it barely warrant a mention.7 However, only in Sections 80–81 in
Being and Time Heidegger provide us with the means to indirectly grasp
what is at stake in this confrontation between the physicist and the phi-
losopher. And only then might it become clear how it is fundamental for
our understanding modernism in general and the ontology of time it
presupposes. But, even more, these pages remain invaluable for our
comprehending histo-philosophically Heidegger’s own thinking of the
time of everydayness, beyond relegating the debate between Einstein and
Bergson to solely historiographical coincidence.8
2. I
Without replaying all the aspects involved in the conflict between science
and philosophy and their differing justifications for confronting the
problem of time, instead, let us turn to a single event.
At a meeting of the Philosophical Society of Paris, convened ostensibly
to honor his work, Albert Einstein first met Bergson on April 6, 1922.
Bergson had only just recently published his Duration and Simultaneity.
Indeed, it was among the first attempts by an important philosopher to
come to terms with Einstein’s ideas.9 But given the remarkable phe-
nomena of the Bergson vogue10 during this period, for this reason his
intervention, more than any other, would draw attention. Still, very
reluctantly but with great anticipation from the audience in attendance,
Bergson was persuaded to extemporaneously outline his fundamental
philosophical divergences from Einstein’s theory.
Bergson’s appreciation of Einstein stemmed from the belief that ‘‘he
[Einstein] was giving us not only a new physics but also certain new ways
of thinking.’’11 This meant that what Bergson sought was compatibility
between his most important concept, dureé, duration, and Einstein’s
theory of time. Thus, what he took to be the inducement for his
186 DAVID SCOTT
encountering the theory of relativity involved not only discerning its

unexamined metaphysical suppositions but also extending its necessary
philosophical implications.
Bergson’s negotiation with Einsteinian physics rested on the introduction
of the distinction between ‘real time’ and ‘measurable time.’ This is a dis-
tinction that is initially introduced by Bergson (1960) in his earlier Time and
Free Will.12 In this work he writes that duration is essentially the continu-
ation of what no longer exists into what exists. There is no way to separate
two instants of the ‘before’ and the immediate ‘afterward,’ and the memory
that establishes their continuity of existence. ‘Real time,’ as such, is only ever
lived, and perceived in the continuousness of its being lived. ‘‘Duration
therefore implies consciousness; and we place consciousness at the heart of
things for the very reason that we credit them with a time that endures.’’13
This time that endures, however, is not measurable, ‘‘whether we think it as
within us or imagine it outside of us.’’14 As impersonal and universal, it can
exist only insofar as it is all of a piece, endlessly prolonged from the ‘past’ to
the ‘future.’ Time becomes measurable when it is made divisible. And it is
measurable because it is space, or rather because it surreptitiously relegates
duration to spatial instants, ‘‘divisible tracks left in space.’’ Conversely, real
time as pure duration has no instants. Instants are but the ‘‘extremity of
duration,’’ the point at which duration halts. However, real time never
comes to a standstill. Always it ‘escapes in the interval.’ ‘‘Real time cannot
therefore supply the instant; the latter is born of the mathematical point, that
is to say, of space.’’15 As an act of abstraction, measurable time requires the
continuity of real time, that is, duration, and a spatialized time that describes
a line of motion that becomes symbolic of time, as time. ‘‘This spatialized
time, which admits of points, ricochets onto real time and there gives rise to
the instant.’’16
Two simultaneities are needed. For Bergson, ‘‘simultaneity’’ designates
two or more instantaneous perceptions apprehended in the same mental
act, that is, the contemporaneity of the duration of the consciousness
within which they are experienced. The simultaneity of the flow (of real
time) and the simultaneity of the instant (of spatial time) are distinct, if
constant correlates of one another. Indeed, the former is the condition for
the latter. ‘‘Real duration is experienced; we learn that time unfolds and,
moreover, that we are unable to measure it without converting it into
space and without assuming all we know of it to be unfolded.’’17 The
simultaneity of the instant is required to fix the simultaneity of a phe-
nomenon with the ‘‘clock moment.’’ Still, the measurement of time
becomes possible on condition of the mutual correspondence of these two
simultaneities, if only the measured moments singled out by them relate to
the extemporizing moments already present in an equivalent ‘‘inner
duration.’’18 Temporal character is conferred on the instant via the

duration that provides simultaneity with its ‘sufficient reason.’ The clock
is its institution: the instant-iation of time.
One only buys a clock to know what time it is; and ‘to know what
time it is’ consists in observing a correspondence, not between what
two clocks indicate, but between the time indicated and the
moment where one finds oneself, the event that is taking place, in
the last instance not something that is an indication of time on a
clock.19
Therefore, time reduced to the measurable phenomenon, according to the

philosopher, will always fail to fully grasp the temporality of time, the ‘lived
time,’ that it only always leaves in shadow as the source of ‘objective’ time.
Physics, as Bergson characterizes it, presupposes that two events, more
or less distant, belonging to the same system S, are simultaneous only
when they occupy the same moment, that is to say, when ‘‘they corre-
spond to the same indications given by the two clocks which are placed at
their respective sides.’’20 The observer and his act of perception are
completely governed by a sign-signal system. ‘‘These clocks have been set
to the same time, by a signal that can be optic or, more normally, electro-
magnetic, given the assumption that the signal takes the same route out
and back.’’21 Consequently, an observer within a separate system S¢,
moving in relation to the system S, would take his own system of refer-
ence to be stationary, while taking the system of S to be in movement. For
each observer within their respective systems of clock-time S¢ and S, what
is stationary and what is moving are relative to the respective moment as
established by clock-time that one occupies.
In his claiming that the notes sounded by the various instruments of an
orchestra are simultaneous, Bergson is asserting that ‘‘simultaneity’’ can
be expressed in two senses. First, we express our momentary perception
of the ensemble in its overall sound; and, secondly, in the individual
notes, several perceptions express the divisibility of the ensemble’s sound.
The one perception and the several perceptions are simultaneous and
co-existent. Such a simultaneity ‘‘is given intuitively, and it is absolute in
that it does not depend upon the mathematical convention, or upon the
physical operation such as the setting of clocks.’’22 It is lived as such. And
while simultaneity can only be established between two events in close
proximity, nevertheless, common sense often situates events distant from
one another as simultaneous. Yet, this distance remains relative—how
‘far’ and how ‘near’—only according to the point of view established by
the terms of comparison or the instruments or organs of perception.
188 DAVID SCOTT
Bergson acknowledges that these clocks ‘at the side of events’ declare
the birth of modernism, whose apotheosis is the theory of relativity. As
such, Bergson designates the clock to be as much a concept of thought as
an instrument of measurement. For what it calls for is a new conception
of temporality coordinated by the electromagnetic signal. Modernism
exists concurrently with the ordering of time.23 Simultaneity given by an
indivisible act of perception unites the event and what is indicated by the
clock. Though, likewise, the indivisibility of perception is itself condi-
tioned by the temporal ordering of simultaneity. Yet, not unrelated to
physics is its ignoring the ‘lived’ time unifying the event and what is given
by the clock, while only ever escaping the system of the sign (clock) and
the (electro-magnetic) signal.24
After listening patiently to Bergson, Einstein articulates the essential
conflict between them in terms of a question: ‘‘So, the question before us
is this: Is the philosopher’s time the same as the physicist’s?’’25 The answer
that Einstein gives is a resounding ‘‘No’’ –in that, to his thinking, the
philosopher can only ever conceive of time by the psychological reduction
of objective events, which, for Einstein, must necessarily be independent
of individual consciousnesses. In so doing the philosopher limits time to
the temporality of ‘‘mental constructions’’ or ‘‘logical beings.’’ As a
result, there cannot be any such thing as a real ‘‘philosopher’s time.’’ For
Einstein there is an unbridgeable chasm between the respective ground
demanded by philosophy and the ground presupposed by physics, most
apparent upon their respectively thinking time. And yet, defended by
Einstein in his formulating this question is his insistence on the primacy of
the physicist’s time, without questioning the very grounds which compel
his question being stated as such—the objective measurability of tem-
porality. What the physicist would seem to remain blissfully unaware of is
the nature of this making time public. Might the attitude that motivates
Einstein’s question originate from the different ways the philosopher and
the physicist read time?
2.1. Addendum on Cassirer26
In 1921 Ernst Cassirer publishes Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie

(Einstein’s Theory of Relativity),27 just prior to Bergson publishing Dureé
and Simultaneíte´. Though Heidegger’s own critique of Einstein’s theory
seems to parallel Bergson in its important aspects, it is more likely that
Heidegger will only read the Bergson critique of Einstein much later. In-
stead, one can speculate that his ‘Bergsonian’ critique depends instead upon
a reading of Bergson’s earlier translated works, in particular Time and Free
Will, and is therefore more likely directed at Cassirer’s neo-Kantian inter-

pretation. Heidegger’s encounter with neo-Kantianism is well-documented,
and will not be rehearsed here.28 Instead, I would like to ask why Einstein
enjoins Bergson’s analysis of the theory of relativity out of hand, while he
promotes the epistemological implications offered by Cassirer.29 Without
our necessarily ignoring Bergson’s infamous mathematical errors, we might
point to Cassirer’s designating the ‘‘epistemological motive’’30 for the
transition from the special to the general theory, presenting to critical
philosophy a problem against which it must test itself. In this regard, Ein-
stein’s theory serves as the natural logical conclusion of what Cassirer
characterizes as ‘‘an intellectual tendency characteristic of all the philo-
sophical and scientific thought of the modern age.’’31
In concluding this section I would like to briefly situate Martin
Heidegger’s temporal analytic in relation to Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian
interpretation of the theory of relativity. Consequently, if Heidegger’s
analysis of ‘clock’ time in Division Two of Being and Time shares a
certain affinity with the Bergsonian position, as I would like to claim, this
is because of their shared refusing of the neo-Kantian perspective
assumed for interpreting the theory of relativity, and its resulting char-
acterization of the being of time.
Cassirer argues that Bergson makes space and time irrelevant, insofar,
as he presents them in a manner that it remains solely applicable to
psychological and phenomenological analysis (Husserl might also be
Cassirer’s target). Since the continuum of ‘‘the pure and original ‘sub-
jective’ form of experience’’ described by Bergson remains ‘‘metaphysi-
cal’’ and, therefore, inconsequential for objectifying science, which
comprehends the physical continuum as correlative with ‘‘the mathe-
matical continuum of pure numbers.’’32 Cassirer, on the other hand,
identifies the Bergsonian position as sharing with the Newtonian con-
ception the tendency to ‘absolutize’ time and space. Though dureé reélle
in itself is not absolute, even so, ‘‘it signifies a [absolute] standpoint of
consciousness opposed to that of mathematics and physics,’’ thereby
falsely providing a norm for measuring ‘‘reality.’’ Both ‘metaphysical’
views, Bergsonian and Newtonian, ‘‘in their absoluteness,’’ remain
‘‘perversions of the full import of being, i.e., of the full import of the
forms of knowledge of the self and the world.’’33
The theory of relativity enacts an epistemological motive which is the
‘‘critical correction of the empirical concept of objectivity.’’ Kant’s critical
project, which is to say, the consideration of the foundation of knowledge
upon which the question of empirical objectivity is based, is satisfied.34
Einstein’s theory imparts the rules for determining and realizing the (non-
Euclidean) conditions under which the possibility of empirical objectivity
190 DAVID SCOTT
is possible. The theory of relativity functions transcendentally. Insofar as

it has nothing to do with the reality of space and time, ‘‘it investigates the
objective significance of the two concepts in the total structure of our
empirical knowledge.’’35 Consequently, Einstein’s theory, in Cassirer’s
reading, issues a warning against taking any one single appearance
present to a particular system as scientific truth, that is, ‘‘as an expression
of an inclusive and final law of experience.’’36 The latter only follows from
the reciprocal coordinating of the measurement as determined by
‘‘the unity of a supreme principle,—that of the universal postulate of
relativity.’’37
Most definitively Cassirer interprets the theory of relativity divorced
from ontological concerns. In the ideality of their forms as conditions for
possible experience space and time are not given ontological signifi-
cance.38 As Cassirer writes, ‘‘For their whole ‘being’ consists in the
meaning and function they possess for the complexes of judgments, which
we call science, whether geometry or arithmetic, mathematical or
empirical sciences’’39—in brief, the possibility or necessity for establishing
measurement.
If one speaks in only general terms, Heidegger’s fundamental dis-
agreement with Cassirer, at least as it concerns the theory of relativity,
involves the critical epistemological orientation which underlies the lat-
ter’s interpretation of the theory of relativity. Heidegger shares with
Bergson the ontological impetus supporting the understanding of time
not as existing thing but the being of a process that temporalizes itself.
This becomes most evident later in his Zollikon seminars from 1959 to
1969.40 Heidegger takes advantage of these seminars as providing the
means for clarifying many of the issues remaining indirectly addressed by
Being and Time, particularly concerning philosophy’s relation to the
natural sciences. So too, we follow Heidegger’s lead. His brief comments
on the theory of relativity open for us a continuity of thought with the
discussion of the being of ‘clock time’ in the next section of this paper.
Again, taking up the question of ‘‘being-in-time,’’ the fundamental
question motivating Being and Time, Heidegger in the 1965 Zollikon
seminar juxtaposes his existential analytic of human Da-sein to Einstein’s
theory of relativity. For Heidegger Einstein’s theory does not break from
the traditional (Aristotelian) philosophical doctrine concerning time, for
it never addresses the being of time, or more directly, the being-in-time,
precisely because it restricts analysis to the ‘how’ of time’s measurement,
that is, according to the ‘Now-sequence.’41 To understand the time ‘‘we
already have and how we have it,’’ necessitates our thinking-through our
enduring ‘‘ontological disposition.’’42 Heidegger and Bergson share this
criticism of the theory of relativity.43 Einstein, like his philosophical
interpreter, misread Bergson’s intention upon their assigning the being of

duration primarily to the psychological.
The ontological shift necessitated by a phenomenological interpretation
of time is one with a shift from the determination of measurement to the
analysis of human Da-sein’s temporality as the condition for clarifying the
existential-temporal constitution of meaning of Nature given to us
through measurement. In other words, the temporal meaning of mea-
surement arises as an ontological problem, for our understanding being-
in-time or duration ‘‘the foundation of our being and the very substance of
the world in which we live,’’44 sidestepped by the theory of relativity.45
3. II
In this section, let us turn our attention to the problem of the ‘‘concept’’
of the clock, as the means by which the being of time is philosophically
characterized. The thesis that we want to support, is that Heidegger fol-
lows Bergson in his describing clock time as the deficient form which
modernism gives itself as temporality. Looking at the clock and orienting
oneself toward time reduces time to the ‘now,’ our always awaiting
something (to come presently) in the present. ‘‘What is counted are the
nows.’’46 Modernity characterizes itself in terms of our measuring the
time necessary for our awaiting, as a series of nows.
Heidegger’s philosophy remains in constant negotiation with the
current of modernism. That current is the question of time. Indeed, his
later preoccupations with the invasive influence of technology on
thought, and his surprisingly belated dialogue with Karl Marx, must be
seen in a line of continuity with his discussion of clock time in Being and
Time.47 Only five years removed from the publication of Einstein’s
theory of relativity, which asserts that duration, simultaneity, and suc-
cession, the characteristics of time, are not themselves absolute prop-
erties but rather consequences of the situatedness (in terms of ‘local’
space–time) of the observer of the event, Heidegger’s Sections 80–81 in
Being and Time articulate the interstice of the physics of moving bodies,
the metaphysical significance of the rejection of absolute time and space,
and the technological implications of clock synchronization. It was the
junction of these disparate concerns directly encountered in the world
that lead Einstein to his theory. Indeed, without reducing relativity to
any one single cause, as Peter Galison remarks in his recent work,48 the
solution to the problem of simultaneity motivating the work of Einstein
and Poincaré, could only be specified in relation to a practical and
concrete problem.
192 DAVID SCOTT
When navigators or geographers determine a longitude [...] they

must without being in Paris, calculate Paris time. How do they
accomplish it? They carry a chronometer set for Paris. The qualita-
tive problem of simultaneity is made dependent upon the quantita-
tive problem of the measurement of time.49
What is that by which time as given becomes a specific scientific problem

in that only science can possible provide its solution? The clock. The great
nineteenth century problem was how one might synchronize clocks so as
to coordinate affairs between the telegraph operator, the railroad super-
intendent, the navigator, the jewel miner, the day laborer, the European
bureaucrat lost in the uncivilized wilds, who might otherwise be lost in
timelessness without the means of a shared determinate Time. Simulta-
neity as time must be defined. Not simply scientific prerogative, it became
for civilization a moral imperative. This is why in 1898, the mathemati-
cian Henri Poincaré could suggest in a paper, ‘‘The Measure of Time,’’50
originally published in the Review of Metaphysics and Morals, that
simultaneity, as the form assumed by time, was irreducibly a convention,
an agreement of measure chosen primarily for convenience. Time is a way
to mark the passage of the past in the Now. Time or rather simultaneity,
as the measuring of temporality, is defined by reading clocks coordinated
by the exchange of electromagnetic signals. In making simultaneity a
‘‘procedural concept,’’ those at the turn of the century could then take
into account quantitatively the communicated time signal when calcu-
lating the time of transmission.
No less importantly are these practical global concerns recognized to
be philosophically significant. As Heidegger claims in his 1924 lecture, ‘‘If
we achieve clarity about what a clock is, then the kind of apprehension
thriving in physics thereby becomes alive, and so does the manner in
which time gets the opportunity to show itself.’’51 Here, perhaps, we
recognize the problem that defines modernity. ‘‘Engineering common
time stood where God’s absolute time had been.’’52 Eternity as sanctioned
by the ‘theologian’s’ time passes away into being temporal. Time begins
its course toward becoming globally standardized. Clock coordination
makes public time. In the wake of the physicist’s and mathematician’s
time Heidegger must speculate not only concerning the concept of time,
just as importantly, he must also take account of this new relation
between physics, philosophy, and technology. Indeed, where Einstein
denigrates any possibility of a ‘‘philosopher’s time,’’ so Heidegger’s
everydayness of time, at least in its assumed vulgarity, must be seen as a
subordination of the ‘‘physicist’s time,’’ anticipating and deepening our
understanding his later suspicion of modernism’s technological ways of
understanding.53 Heidegger rejects the physicist’s time because he refuses

to reduce Da-sein to now-time (Jetzt-Zeit). Time is virtual to action itself.
Or, as Bergson writes, ‘‘If we have been able to replace this succession by
a juxtaposition, real time by a spatialized time, becoming by the become, it
is because we retain becoming, real duration, within us.’’54
Therefore, by necessity Heidegger institutes a phenomenological shift-
ing of orientation with his approaching time in the ‘‘taking care’’ of the
human Da-sein that interprets; whereby, time is public-ized through
the practical concerns prevailing for human lives. Da-sein reads time off the
face of the clock. The being of the clock is determined by the ‘how’ of
Da-sein’s existing; while, time is that only in ‘how’ it shows itself. Conse-
quently, the making public of time calls for orienting oneself ‘‘toward it, so
that it must somehow be available for everyone.’’55 It is this shifting
demanded by what Heidegger calls the ‘‘within-timeness’’ of being that
provides the orientation from which to acquire insight into the essence of
‘‘public time.’’ The phenomenal character of ‘‘public time’’ must be
addressed. That is to say that one must determine in what sense ‘‘public
time’’ can be said to have being at all.
In these pages of Being and Time, this shifted orientation requiring our
thinking within-time sanction our privileging Heidegger’s confronting the
contemporaneous ‘rediscovery’ of time by the sciences.56 But this is
possible only after one distinguishes the divergent uses for the clock ap-
pealed to by science and philosophy. Sections 80–81 must be read in this
light, especially insofar as these sections make concrete his earlier
description of our awareness of death (‘‘the ground of nullity’’) as making
possible the accessing of temporality.
Holding our attention in these sections are Heidegger’s phenomeno-
logical descriptions of time in its being made public. As he suggests earlier
in Being and Time, time has already made itself public in the taking care of
Da-sein. Da-sein is human being as essentially in the world. The three
structural aspects defining care: projection (existence), throwness (fac-
ticity), and falling prey correspond to the three ecstases of temporality:
future, having-been, and present. Temporality is the meaning of the being
of care (for-the-sake-of-itself). While temporality makes understandable
the articulated unity of care, it is only through and as care that tempo-
rality itself becomes comprehensible. Thus, insofar as Da-sein takes care
of time it ascribes to time a particular temporal significance for existence.
But this importance is disclosed as ecstatic and temporal through Da-
sein’s understanding and interpretation constitutive of its existence; as
such, time is carried out in the mode of a ‘‘time-reckoning,’’ whereby time
is spanned and ‘‘dated;’’ that is, time is given a periodicity that makes the
194 DAVID SCOTT
time present and available for everyone. To reckon time is to feel and
suppose what the being of time means for-the-sake-of Da-sein.57
It is likewise to determine our stance toward death: that is, as some
event to be avoided, minute by minute, second by second. To reckon time
in this manner is to conceal that one is always already dying. Da-sein,
always ‘‘running ahead to its past,’’ is avoiding the constitutive indeter-
minacy ever present in every decision made that determines the way one
lives life. One cannot be anxious if one remains preoccupied with the time
of the quotidian. As a result, death is made inconspicuous, especially
when compared with the concerns of the everyday; but, this only further
bears witness to the fact that the public is always already determined as
being toward death, the extreme possibility of its existence. So, for
example, as we check things off our ‘To Do List’ throughout the course of
the day, measuring time via our recognized accomplishments, and those
things checked off the list, we thereby affirm while denying our finitude, as
if each item on the list means that we now can live on using a time that
finally is domesticated. Or, to return to Heidegger’s language, one might
say that it is only because it is already entangled in its thrownness into the
factical world (the ‘‘there’’) can human Da-sein interpret time by the
means of disclosing the time in which objectively presented ‘innerwordly
things at hand’ are encountered through the reckoning of time, existing
within-time.
Da-sein’s possibilities for being-in-the-world are subject to the changes
of day and night, in that these changes determine how it can take care of
those things objectively present at hand. An obvious example would be a
farmer, who understands the temporality of time in terms of the daily
work that she gives herself—the ‘‘time’’ of sunrise and the ‘‘time’’ of
sunset that defines the chores. ‘‘The sun dates the time interpreted in
taking care.’’58 Another might be a day trader, who despite the seeming
timelessness granted through the internet, still remains restricted by the
deadline of the stock market’s ‘day.’ The laboring body incarnates care. It
makes time flesh. In this sense, the sun acquires ‘‘handiness’’ [Zuhanden],
an instrumental significance, through its becoming eminently relevant for
the circumspect potentiality-of-being-in-the-world, that is, its making
actual Da-sein’s possibility for existence (as farmer or day trader or list
maker). ‘‘Da-sein, thrown into the world, temporalizing, and giving itself
time, takes account of its regular recurring passage.’’59 As such, time is
naturalized; that is, it becomes identified with the measurement of its
relevance for ‘‘what is to be taken care of ’’—the land, the stock market,
etc. Da-sein temporalizing time through marking its passage in the form
of cardinal number gives to itself time-as-measure, coordinating the starry
heavens above with the sensus communis (‘public sense’ of time) within:
thereby being is made equal to temporal being through the labor of taking
care.60
This dating reckons with time in designating a measurement for time
measurement: the clock according to how Da-sein must exist in the world,
but a world presented to it by means of its relations with other. ‘‘This
means that with the temporality of Da-sein as thrown, delivered over to
the world, and giving itself time, something like a ‘clock’ is also discov-
ered, that is, a handy thing that has become accessible in its regular
recurrence in a making present that awaits.’’61 The clock (the ‘artificial’
clock must be adjusted to the ‘natural’ clock to make the discovered time
accessible) provides the reason for temporality in that it grounds thrown
being-together-with things at hand.
Not surprisingly, this real and practical encountering of the handy
clock solicits Heidegger’s question: ‘‘How does the physicist encounter
time?’’ Whereas Einstein asked the question to dismiss philosophy, in
these pages Heidegger is more judicious and asks the question, not to
dismiss the physicists but to suggest that both physics and philosophy
permit an access to a shared temporalizing of temporality that diverges
only in the manner through which it is approached. If for one the concept
of the clock operates as a mathematical function, for the other the clock is
a concept, in that it is unthinkable if disconnected from the question of
being. Here we confront the distinction between time given by means of
the ‘concept of the clock,’ that is, as a representation [Vorstellung] in
which time is brought before us more generally as an object, as opposed
to the essence of being garnered from the phenomena of time-measuring.
Indeed, any consideration of being as a whole is possible only by pre-
supposing the essential inclusion of man’s use of the ‘clock’ in the dif-
ference between being and beings.62
If only by reducing time to its being, in referencing some universal
mathematical constant, the clock becomes a function that permits the
physicist to reflect and communicate. As a result, in both cases tempo-
rality determines the discovery of the factical necessity of the clock. Be-
cause of its discovery time is given (or gives itself) the instrument for
interpreting itself. By the ‘‘time taken care of in the measurement of
time’’: public time is phenomenally unveiled. In the statement, ‘‘It is time
for the day’s work’’—interpreted time has by its very nature the existential
and ontological structure of ‘‘appropriateness’’ and ‘‘inappropriateness’’:
the character of ‘‘time for...’’
To clarify Heidegger’s description let us look more closely at the
physicist’s encountering time.
In the 1924 lecture Heidegger ascribes the measuring of time to the
physicist. Measuring indicates for the physicist the ‘‘how-long’’ and the
196 DAVID SCOTT
‘‘when’’ validating or invalidating one’s experimental determination of

temporality. If ‘a clock shows the time?’63 For the physicist it shows time
as reversible, cyclical, and iterative. ‘‘The clock provides an identical
duration that constantly repeats itself, a duration to which one can always
have recourse.’’64 Later scientists and mathematicians, after reading He-
idegger, will come to see this dependence on the clock as ironic, in that it
denies the very nature of temporality, that is, its irreversibility, even as it
would seem to define it scientifically. What the physicist would seem to
remain blissfully unaware of is the nature of this making time public. At
once, the physicist would seem to accept the public conveniences that the
clock preserves, while denying, in the name of scientific objectivity,
the existential imperatives demanded by this public time expressed in the
form of the clock, and by which it is reduced to numerically quantifying
its significance or value for the public. ‘‘All measuring of time means
bringing time into the ‘how much’.’’65
Time understood as ‘‘how much,’’ a ‘‘what-for,’’ and anchored in a
‘‘for-the-sake-of-which of the potentiality-of-being of Da-sein’’ that
makes time public, according to Heidegger reveals the ontological and
existential structure of significance or the ‘‘worldliness’’ of the world. In
other words, the world acquires a being only through its being public-
ized through a time becoming public. Time given as such to the world is
‘‘world time.’’ ‘‘It is datable, spanned, and public and, as having this
structure, it belongs to the world itself;’’66 in other words, it is signifi-
cant with respect to our projects. Insofar as Da-sein temporalizes itself
passing through this time made public, a world is, too. ‘‘World time’’ is
ontologically identified via the physicist’s defining simultaneity, the tem-
poral horizon referred to by means of the (existentiell) coordinating of
clocks. ‘‘Simultaneity is a convention, nothing more than the coordina-
tion of clock by a crossed exchange of electromagnetic signals taking
into account the transit time of the signal.’’67 World-time is the time at
one with imperialism and the informatics that makes it possible: the
time of modernism and the time of empire. Simultaneity is world-time.
Why? Simultaneity is work-time.68
Heidegger philosophically discloses the invariant ontological struc-
ture significant for Poincaré and Einstein, who define it functionally,
Taylorism and Fordism which institute it technologically, and Joyce,
Eliot, and Pound who express it poetically. All are of the time. Phi-
losophy, science, capitalism, literature convene in the span given by
world-time and characterized by simultaneity. As Galison writes,
‘‘Deeply embedded in a changing electrotechnical world that more than
at any time previously recognized the importance of choice in
measurement, standardization, and theory construction, Einstein and
Poincaré separately cracked simultaneity from its metaphysical pedestal

and replaced by it a convention given through machines.’’69 While
Heidegger would accept Galison’s historical analysis, he would, how-
ever, reject any suggestion that science ever liberated time from
metaphysics. On the contrary, in Sections 80–81 of Sein und Zeit,
Heidegger is clearly suggesting otherwise. The manufacture of the clock
completes Da-sein’s alienation from the natural, while grounding a
modernity resulting in liberating Da-sein to its experiencing other
possibilities of temporalizing time, other possibilities for time mea-
surement that are relatively independent of the day and any explicit
observations of the sky.70
Da-sein is not time. Instead, it is only already (self-) temporalizing. It is
what Heidegger refers to as ‘‘timeliness’’ or ‘‘temporality’’ [Zeitlichkeit].
Time extemporizes itself. Here we discover the fundamental insight into
the nature of time revealed to Heidegger from the debate between Berg-
son and Einstein. Da-sein is the way it lives time in all its possibilities as
such. ‘‘Timeliness extemporizes, it extemporizes possible modes of it-
self.’’71 Da-sein, through the structure of care, provides time with its
mode of extemporizing. Da-sein extemporizes or temporalizes itself,
likewise temporality extemporizes possible ways of being. Insofar as Da-
sein extemporizes itself, ‘‘a world’’ exists, that is, acquires temporal
being.72
The question that Heidegger wants to ask is what mode of the tem-
poralizing of the temporality is existentially and ontologically manifested
in developing the direction of reckoning (in terms of the simultaneity of
times) and the use of the clock. For Heidegger, whatever answer is
derivable from this question must further a primordial understanding of
the fact that time measurement—explicitly the making public of time—is
grounded in the temporality of Da-sein and its definite temporalizing of
that temporality.
The measurement of time brings about a making public of time,

so that only in this way does what we usually call ‘time’ become
familiar. In taking care, ‘its time’ is attributed to every thing. It
‘has’ it, and like every innerwordly being, it can ‘have’ it only be-
cause it is ‘in time’ in general. The time ‘in which’ innerwordly
beings are encountered we know as world time. On the basis of
the ecstatic and horizonal constitution of temporality to which it
belongs, world time has the same transcendence as the world.
With the disclosedness of the world, world time is made public,
so that every being-together-with innerwordly beings that tempo-
rally takes care understands those beings as circumspectly encoun-
tered ‘in time.’73
198 DAVID SCOTT
Ascertaining what time is in using the clock, we say, explicitly or not, ‘‘now
it is such an hour and so many minutes, now it is time to.... Looking at the
clock is grounded in and guided by taking-time-for-oneself.’’74 As such,
looking at the clock orients oneself toward time as essentially a ‘‘now-
saying,’’ time, always already interpreted and articulated as an awaiting,
for making present for something objectively present. As a result, time is
temporalized through its measuring its being awaited. The presence being
awaited becomes the present standard by which measurement is consti-
tuted temporally. Time is made the means (of measurement) for making
present something objectively present. Concomitantly, Da-sein is made
present in the making present of the now.
‘‘Thus in measuring time, time gets made public in such a way that it is
encountered in each case and at each time for everyone as ‘now and now
and now.’’’75 The now is the means by which the everydayness of Da-sein
is simultaneous, what Heidegger in both his 1924 lecture and Being and
Time calls ‘‘das man’’ or ‘‘the they,’’ the ‘‘one.’’ That is, in everydayness
Da-sein is that being that one is: nameless, faceless, neutered in its falling
prey to the imperatives of publicized time, world-time. Da-sein, accord-
ingly, is the time ‘‘in which one is with one another: ‘one’s’ time.’’ The
clock that one has, indeed, every clock, shows time but only the time of
being-with-one-another-in-the-world.76
Still, though it shows the now, the making present of the public-ized
Da-sein falling prey to things at hand, the clock never shows the future,
nor has a clock ever shown the past. Yet, it is the futurality and pastness,
the coming-toward-itself and the having-been, lost into the face of the
clock that retains its existential significance for Heidegger:
Only because Da-sein in general is as I am-having-been, can it

come futurally towards itself in such a way that it comes-back.
Authentically futural, Da-sein is authentically having-been. Antici-
pation of the most extreme and ownmost possibility comes back
understandingly to one’s ownmost having-been. Da-sein can be
authentically having-been only because it is futural. In a way, hav-
ing-been arises from the future.77
The three ecstases of temporality—‘‘having-been’’ (past), ‘‘being-ahead-

of-oneself’’ or ‘‘coming-toward-itself’’ (future), and ‘‘waiting toward’’
(present)—correspond to the tri-part structure defining Da-sein tran-
scending itself as care: as thrown (that I am factically), as a possibility
or projection (that I will be), and as fallen prey to the beings of being
within the world. Da-sein can never escape the ‘‘past,’’ its throwness, for
as long as one exists, one is always ‘‘present’’ to oneself as already
having been. Indeed, one’s possibilities of existence are conditioned by
and retained through the pastness of Da-sein’s ‘‘having been.’’ And,

likewise, one can only authentically have a past if one is already futural,
that is resolutely coming-toward one’s ownmost extreme possibility,
death. Temporality temporalizes itself in Da-sein’s ‘‘running ahead to its
past.’’ World time that belongs to everyday care, shown and preserved
by the clock, on the other hand, becomes significant because it permits
the fleeing from the ‘all too human’ future as it levels the ecstasies of
time to an endless now-time occluding an infinite future into an irre-
trievable past. The essence of ‘‘public time’’ is the ‘‘how’’ of Da-sein as
only always thrown into a world where it becomes concerned only with
those things immediately encountered. This requires an understanding
of time that is public in that it makes possible communication and the
preoccupations with the ‘‘time for...’’ work, ‘‘time for...’’ play, ‘‘time
for...’’ sleep. Heidegger warns us that ‘‘once time has been defined as
clock time then there is no hope of ever arriving at its original meaning
again.’’78
As such, Da-sein flees from its authentic existence, its anticipatory
resoluteness; in brief, Da-sein’s flight from death covers up the tempo-
ralizing of temporality. But this is, in itself, but a mode of the ecstatic,
futural being toward death. The primary ecstasis of the temporality
belonging to care is a ‘thrown being-toward-death.’79 Death, indefinite
and indeterminate, must be understood to be, in every instant, possible. A
resolutely grasped existence does not flee from certain coming of this
possibility; rather, one must remain open to its possible arrival at any
moment, in the blink of an eye. That is, as one flees death one must
necessarily move towards it, towards the understanding that time shows
itself as a passing away ‘‘in itself.’’ ‘‘Da-sein knows the feeling of time
from the ‘fleeing’ knowledge of its death.’’80 Through this understanding,
the ‘‘finite futurality’’ of the temporality of Da-sein is publicly
reflected...however, fleetingly.81
Therefore, how really surprising can it be for Heidegger that Ein-
stein would eventually express his discomfort with his own theoretical
dependence upon the ‘now-time’ implicit in his use of the clock, not
simply as a means for measuring time but as the fundamental functive
for comprehending the temporalizing of time? This confirms for
Heidegger that science and religion still retain their close kinship.
There remains a kind of iconicity in the scientific function of clock,
whereby the clock makes time eternity, even after it is divorced from
transcendence. Thus, Einstein, like George Cantor before him and
Kurt Gödel later, will come to feel that scientific description ultimately
falls short of satisfying our modern human concerns.82
200 DAVID SCOTT
4. Conclusion
In summary, my claim has been that the fundamental insight into the
nature of time revealed by the encounter between Bergson and Einstein is
that time extemporizes itself. Past, present, and future have meaningful-
ness precisely because they are the modes of the immanence of the self-
extemporizing of time (though there is no self of time). Therefore, fol-
lowing this debate, when Heidegger writes, ‘‘Da-sein is time, time is
temporal,’’83 he both supports Bergson’s criticism that Einstein ignores
the temporal beingness or ‘‘timeliness’’ of the observer, while opening up
the notion that time extemporizes itself. This is the fundamental philo-
sophical insight garnered by Heidegger from the Bergson–Einstein
encounter.84
The implications for a return to this debate are important. At its heart
lie not only metaphysical but social, ethical, and political questions rel-
evant for situating ourselves while still in the wake of modernity. One can
find a recent example in the thought of Antonio Negri. Exemplifying a
thinker who remains cognizant of the stakes involved in the debate bet-
ween Einstein and Bergson, Negri likewise remains aware as well as of the
underlying implications for Heidegger’s ontologically answering it. Negri
stresses that for Karl Marx time is given to us only as the matter of the
measurer of equivalence. Still, alongside this abstract conception of time
is the process of subjectification, whereby time itself acquires a substan-
tialized being: ‘‘to the point that time becomes the fabric of the whole of
being, because all of being is implicated in the web of the relations of
production: being is equal to product of labor: temporal being.’’85
Modernity institutes an ontology of time that absorbs the political by the
use of the concept of the temporality as given by time, now reduced to the
measuring of equivalences, which in turn determine the labor value of the
products. The value of the product subsumes the abstract (clock) time
decided by ‘‘the State’’ for determining the time-labor of the living body.
As a result, any hope for freedom or liberation is therefore possible only
by the means of a ‘de-subjectifying’ of labor, liberating the ‘‘open time’’ as
incarnated in the heretofore subjectified living laboring body. Not sur-
prisingly Negri admits the Heideggerian impulse relative to his discussion
of the being of the clock. He suggests that no theory expresses this time of
the State better than Heidegger’s thinking on the ontology of time and the
nullification of the state. ‘‘The State is care, the world of anxiety actively
lived.’’86 Negri, consequently, makes evident the social and ethical
motivations informing Heidegger’s attempt to mediate the conflict be-
tween metaphysics and science, while taking seriously Bergson’s reproach
that we live not only a cosmic life but a social one.87 Negri’s work would
then seem to be only the most philosophically important moment fol-

lowing from the Bergson–Einstein encounter via Heidegger.
To return to the strictly Heideggerian motive: The time in which
objectively present things move or are at rest is neither objective nor can it
said be to be subjective. It is always already more than a possible object as
the ecstatic and horizonal condition of possibility of innerwordly beings,
and more subjective in that it likewise serves as the condition of possibility
of the factically existing self, the meaning of which is care.88 Therefore, as
neither objectively present in the ‘‘subject’’ nor in the ‘‘object,’’ as neither
‘‘inside’’ nor ‘‘outside,’’ as ‘‘prior’’ to all things in that it provides the
condition for the possibility of this ‘‘prior-ness,’’ then might one wonder
if ‘‘time’’ as such, has any being at all.
Our asking this question takes us to the limit for describing the tem-
poralizing of temporality, in that we reach the limit of Da-sein’s ability to
theoretically conceive of ‘‘time,’’ whose nearest (‘‘vulgar’’) quotidian
understanding of time as within-timeness of things at hand and objec-
tively present, inhibits our understanding time in terms of its primordial
meaning, that is, temporality as ecstatic and horizonal.
Time initially shows itself for everyday, circumspect care in the making
use of the clock. The existential and temporal meaning of the clock is the
making present of the moving hand on the clock face that counts the
nows. ‘‘This making present temporalizes itself in the ecstatic unity of a
retaining that awaits.’’89 The clock a-waits time by making present now-
time. What is retained in the saying-now in the making present is the
previous ‘‘now’’ now past. To say the now requires, then, that one remain
open to the horizon of earlier persistent in making present.90 This requires,
as a result, that one always remains open to the horizon of past presents
in the making present of the now. After all ‘‘what shows itself in this
making present is time.’’91 And once the now-time is naturalized, that is,
made ‘‘natural,’’ time as such is lost in the useful things taken care of that
must always have their time. With this ‘‘time shows itself for the vulgar
understanding as a succession of constant ‘objectively present’ nows that
pass away and arrive at the same time.’’92 Time is reducible to the form of
an always sequential ‘‘flux’’ of nows denoting its course. Indeed, in this
vulgar interpretation of time as succession of nows, both datability
(periodability) and significance (world) are prevented from appearing
and, more specifically, their ecstatic and horizonal constitution of tem-
porality is ‘leveled down.’ Thus, it is precisely because the everyday
interpretation of time keeps itself solely in the perspective of common-
sense taking care, and understands only what shows itself in the corona of
this horizon, that these structures have to escape it.93 ‘‘One knows only
public time that, leveled down, belongs to every one, and that means to
202 DAVID SCOTT
no one.’’94 For Heidegger the public clock chimes the time of the nullity
of modernity.
Notes
1. Even after all this time, it remains intriguing that very little has been written about
this important encounter. From the perspective of physics this is not surprising. In
particular the biographers of Einstein, if it is mentioned at all, they see this encounter
as largely one more example of the superiority of the physicist in besting philosophy
and its dilettantish relation to science. While, from the perspective of philosophy, in
particular, Bergsonians, because Bergson came to see himself as largely losing in the
encounter with Einstein, it represents a humiliating moment. It would seem to
confirm both that the divide between science and philosophy has largely been
completed by modernism and, therefore, that the latter must no longer ever see at
itself as anything more than the mere ‘hand-maiden’ to the former.
2. This is particularly odd given the pervasiveness of authorized German translations at
this point: in 1903 Einführung in die Metaphysk appeared, in 1908, Materie und
Gedächtnis, to be followed in 1911 by Zeit und Freiheit: Eine Abhandlung über die
unmilttelbaren Bewusstseinstatsachen. In the summer 1925 Marburg lecture course
Heidegger points to his being exposed to Bergson’s work sometime between1913 and
1914. While it would not be out of the question to suggest that Ernst Cassirer’s
writings on the philosophy of science may have provided Heidegger with the inter-
pretation of the theory of relativity against which he formulate his existential ana-
lytic. One should not assume that Cassirer’s work introduces Bergson. Indeed,
Bergson rarely makes more than a circumspect appearance in his work, until later
upon his directly confronting the work of Max Scheler in 1929, and the posthumous
publication of texts written in the 1930s and 1940s in volume 4 of The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms (1995). Instead, Bergson became known in Germany, according to
Heidegger, primarily through Scheler, ‘‘who recognized Bergson and his significance
quite early, and then was influenced by him in return. Scheler was instrumental in
having Bergson translated into German. This recognition of Bergson also brought,
within Husserl’s work, the investigations of internal time consciousness, which are in
part published in his later works’’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena,
trans. Theodore Kisiel [Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992], 92; Prolegomena zur Ges-
chichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe Band 20 [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, 1975], 126. [Hereafter cited as HCT]. Therefore, we must situate He-
idegger’s introduction to Bergson within the context of his opposing Lebenphiloso-
phie to neo-Kantianism (Cf. §10, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan
Stambaugh [Albany: SUNY, 1996]; Sein and Zeit [Türbingen: Niemeyer, 1993]).
[Hereafter cited as SZ].
The fullest address to Bergson comes in Heidegger’s 1927 lectures published as Basic
Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadler (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1988) [Hereafter cited as BP]. Indeed, in these lectures Heidegger references Dureé et
simultaneite´. Though it is beyond the purview of this paper, we would claim that
Bergson serves as both the precursor and the alternative to the Heidegger’s con-
ception of time. As the ‘mediator’ that makes visible the problem of time in any
encounter between science and philosophy that otherwise would have been obfus-
cated. Illya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers characterize Bergson in just this manner.
They write, ‘‘Bergson was certainly ‘wrong’ on some technical points’’ concerning
Einstein’s theory of relativity; nevertheless, ‘‘his task as a philosopher was to attempt
to make explicit inside physics the aspects of time he thought science was neglecting’’
[Illya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s Ultimate Dialogue
with Nature, (New York: Bantam, 1984), 301–2].
3. The response to Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity by physicists, particularly
Einstein in their first meeting, centering on his mathematical mistakes, has been
accepted to be the event that hastened the lessening influence of Bergsonianism.
Bergson himself remained conflicted about this work, denying its republication
after 1931. Still, in Le Penseé et le mouvant, Bergson adds a long footnote (omitted
in the English translation The Creative Mind) that is a direct quote from chapter 3
of Duration and Simultaneity. Heidegger’s awareness of Bergson’s ‘failure’ is more
obviously evident in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, which Hans-Georg
Gadamer credits with being the original form of Being and Time [Hans-Georg
Gadamer, ‘‘Martin Heidegger und die Marburger Theologie,’’ Heidegger: Pers-
pektiven zur Deutung seines Werks, ed. Otto Pöggeler (Cologne and Berlin: Keie-
penheur & Witsch, 1970), 169. Gadamer’s claim and the debate subsequent to this
remark are mentioned by William McNeil in his postscript to his translation of
Heidegger’s lecture The Concept of Time: English-German Edition (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1992): Hereafter cited as CT].
4. As a result, I am taking for granted the continuity between Division One and
Division Two. I reject any notion, as it is more common than it should be, that we
can somehow separate the two, placing more emphasis on the former. I might
suggest reading Division One in the light of Division Two, as the means to clarify
more concretely its phenomenological presuppositions.
5. Paul Davies, About Time (London: Viking, 1995).
6. SZ, 328/302.
7. BP, 232/328.
8. With this we are attempting to be true to the distinction that Heidegger makes in his
later lectures (of 1937–38) between ‘historical reflection’ and ‘historiography.’ Cf.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected ‘‘Problems’’ of ‘‘Logic,’’
trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1994).
Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte ‘‘Probleme’’ der ‘‘Logik,’’ vol. 45 of the
Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main. Vittorio Klostermann, 1984).
9. A.N. Whitehead published his philosophical analysis on The Principle of Relativity
also in 1922, the same year as Bergson’s study. However, Ernst Cassirer even earlier
published, initially in 1920 and then 1921, his Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. I will
return to the role of Cassirer’s mediating Heidegger’s encountering with Bergson
later in this paper. At this point I would like to claim that Bergson’s intervention
would maintain an even greater influence, particularly beyond even the borders of
France, and into Germany and the development of Lebenphilosophie of Scheler and
Dilthey, than either Whitehead or Cassirer, in a general sense, if not more partic-
ularly on Heidegger’s development of a positive response to (and not simply a
critique of) physics.
10. Bergson enjoyed remarkable popularity both inside and outside the academy
throughout Europe beginning with the publication of Creative Evolution in 1907,
waning in the 1920s after he ceased teaching at the Collège de France. There is quite
204 DAVID SCOTT
an exhaustive secondary literature which describes the uniqueness of the Bergsonian

moment in the history of philosophy as one that ignores the self-erected barriers put
in place by philosophy, to separating itself not only from other modes of thought
and creation—art and science, most obviously—but also from the more general
interests of the public.
11. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson (Manchester:
Clinamen, 1999), xxiv; Me´langes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 57–
244 [Hereafter cited as DS].
12. In Time and Free Will, the distinction hinged upon the distinction between two
kinds of multiplicity, qualitative and quantitative. Dureé is a virtual multiplicity,
whereas temps, the quantifiable time of the physicists, is an actual multiplicity. In
both instances, actual time does not change, as either lived or measurable.
13. DS, 33. Keith Ansell Pearson identifies the failure of Bergson’s critique of Einstein
on his dependence upon his conceiving a ‘quasi-phenomenological internal-time
consciousnesses of a kind.’ For Pearson the problem of ‘lived time’ can be retraced
back to Bergson’s adopting a too restrictive empiricism; while not phenomeno-
logical in a strict sense, nevertheless, it requires that anything we conceive must be
livable and perceivable. Any other time that is not perceivable or does not have the
potential to be perceived, remains unreal and imaginary. Pearson sees this as rightly
contradicting the assertions that Bergson makes in other places (most notably ‘‘The
Perception of Change’’) where he resists the reduction of thought to the ‘‘human
condition.’’ This leads Pearson, quite naturally, to problematize the very notion of
‘‘lived time,’’ the monistic and impersonal time expressed in and through all times.
In his conception of lived time, Pearson accuses Bergson of not fully countering
Einstein’s characterization of philosopher’s time as ‘‘psychological.’’ [Keith Ansell
Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 55–65.] Of course Pearson’s critique makes sense
only if one narrowly restricts one’s reading solely to Duration and Simulateneity.
Milič Čapek’s provides a more nuanced interpretation, with his suggestion that
rather than a contradiction, we should consider this work a ‘‘certain distraction’’ in
Bergson’s thought, understandable once its psychological origin is carefully ana-
lyzed (‘‘Bergson and Einstein: The Physical World as Extensive Becoming,’’ Bergson
and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Revaluation [New York: Humanities
Press, 1971], 238–56).
14. DS, 34/102.
15. DS, 37/106.
16. Ibid.
17. DS, 43/116.
18. DS, 38/108.
19. DS, 157; Me´langes, 1344.
20. DS, 156–57; Me´langes, 1343–44.
21. DS, 157; Me´langes, 1343.
22. DS, 156; Me´langes, 1343.
23. This is the thesis put forward by Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum in his History of the
Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1996).
24. Bergson’s critique of Einstein anticipates Bohm and Hiley’s ‘ontological’ interpre-
tation of quantum mechanics, according to Timothy Murphy [Timothy S. Murphy,
‘‘Beneath Relativity: Bergson and Bohm on Absolute Time,’’ The New Bergson, ed.
John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999), 66–81].
25. DS, 159; Me´langes, 1346 (my italics).
26. I would like to gratefully thank the anonymous reviewer of the original version of this
essay. The reviewer’s probing questions, rigorous analysis, and generous suggestions
served as a great impetus for my correcting the errors that plagued the previous draft.
While, I could not completely take into consideration all their suggestions, never-
theless, this section reflects this reader’s valuable intervention.
27. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans.
William Swabey and Marie Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953), 347–56. Zur Eins-
steinshcen Relativetätstheorie. Erkenntnishtheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer, 1921). Hereafter cited as ETR.
28. Heidegger’s (1997) criticism of neo-Kantianism in general and Cassirer in particu-
lar, is clearly evident in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the famous
confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer at Davos in that same year (Cf.
Appendix to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics). A fuller explication of the
relationship between Heidegger and neo-Kantianism lies outside the scope of this
paper. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, ‘‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,’’ Kant: Disputed
Questions, ed. Moltke Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 131–57. ‘Kant
und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers Kant-
Interpretation,’ Kant-Studien, 36 (1931), 1–26; Frank Schalow, The Renewal of the
Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought, and Responsibility (Albany: SUNY,
1992; Charles Sherover, Heidegger, Kant, and Time (Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1971); Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
(Chicago: Open Court, 2000).
One must not forget that Bergson’s own philosophical development stems from his
reading Herbert Spencer, at that point considered a radical turn from the positivism
of August Comte and the neo-Kantianism of Émile Bourtroux dominating nine-
teenth century French thought. Cf. Jacques Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson
(Paris: Plon, 1959); Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New
York: Henry Holt, 1931), 356–70; Œuvres (Paris: Presses Univerditaires de France,
1970), 795–807. Hereafter cited CE.
29. According to Cassirer’s Preface to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Einstein read the
manuscript and gave it his approval.
30. ETR, 383.
31. ETR, 379.
32. ETR, 453.
33. ETR, 454, 455.
34. ‘‘It is clear,’’ Cassirer writes, ‘‘that the theory [of relativity] only accomplishes the
most definite application and carrying through of the standpoint of critical idealism
within empirical science itself’’ (ETR, 412).
35. ETR, 411.
36. ETR, 393.
37. ETR, 440.
38. One must not assume that the relative measurement given by ‘‘these temporarily
ultimate intellectual instruments’’ likewise provide ‘‘definitive expressions of the
ontologically real’’ (ETR, 358).
39. ETR, 412, 440.
206 DAVID SCOTT
40. Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters, ed. Medard

Boss, trans. Frantz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001),
45; Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle-Gespräche-Briefe Herausgegeben von Medard
Boss (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1987), 57. Hereafter cited as
HZS.
41. HZS, 57–62/74–81.
42. HZS, 63/82.
43. In the Zollikon seminar Heidegger specifically acknowledges Bergson on this point,
if only in a circumspect manner. According to Heidegger two primary questions
remain regarding how time must be understood: ‘‘First, there is the question of
priority regarding clock time and the time already given to us. Is clock time, which
we characterized as a sequence of nows, the more original time, or is it a modifi-
cation, a derivative of the time already given and about which we learned some
characteristics? The other question about being-in-time contains, first of all, a
special difficulty in that ‘in’ implies the presupposition of time as something like a
container, something spatial. Bergson, for instance, says that the time we count with
is a spatialized time, time represented in terms of space. We have yet to see to what
extent this is an error’’ (HZS, 45/57).
44. CE, 39/527.
45. There are two related though importantly divergent lines of interpretation con-
cerning Bergson’s duration. The first line grows from a more epistemological ori-
entation, taking its cue from Bergson’s Time and Free Will; it reads duration as
primarily and purely psychological. This is primarily how Einstein and, therefore,
Cassirer understand it. Indeed, many commentators (both pro/con) characterize
duration purely psychologically, and consequently the disagreement between it and
the theory of relativity is accepted on these terms. In this work Bergson quite
definitely establishes the distinction between the two kinds of multiplicity on this
basis: that of material objects, to which number is applicable, and the multiplicity of
conscious states, which is not numerical. The former is wholly spatial, and the
medium through which time can be represented. Pure duration ‘‘is the form which
the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it
refrains from separating its present state from its former states’’ (Time and Free
Will, 100/67).
However, a second line of Bergsonian interpretation of dureé has emerged, an
interpretive line which reads it ontologically rather than solely epistemologically.
Gilles Deleuze (1991), the philosopher most responsible for bringing Bergson back
into philosophical vogue, introduces this line of interpretation in his work Bergs-
onism. One might find an interpretative analogy in Heidegger’s ontological reading
of Kant. However, according to Deleuze, Bergson himself establishes this inter-
pretative option in Matter and Memory. According to Deleuze, ‘‘the multiplicity
proper to duration had, for its part, a ‘precision’ as great as that of science;
moreover, that it should react upon science and open up a path for it that was not
necessarily the same as that of Riemann and Einstein’’ (40/33). Yet, even this
possibility for thinking duration beyond solely its epistemological relevance is
present in the other line, let us say, the ‘scientific’ line. As Milič Čapek writes,
Bergson ‘‘in trying to explore the nature of psychological duration, he was reaching
a conclusion which went beyond the limits of psychology’’ (Bergson and Modern
Physics, 100). The limit of the psychological brings us to the threshold of ontology.
Bergson makes this more than clear in his developing and extending the charac-
terization of memory, in terms of the fundamental being of time-space. As he writes

in Duration and Simultaneity: ‘‘It is memory, but not personal memory, external to
what it retains, distinct from a past whose preservation I assures; it is a memory
within change itself, a memory that prolongs the before into the after, keeping them
from being mere snapshots and appearing and disappearing in a present ceaselessly
reborn, [it is a] multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation, in
order finally to rediscover basic time’’ (30/98). Duration designates the nature of
being in terms of its being a pure memory, which as such is impersonal and pre-
individual: ‘‘an impersonal consciousness that is the link among all individual
consciousnesses, as between these consciousnesses and the rest of nature’’ (DS, 31/
99). Deleuze writes, ‘‘Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous
Memory’’ (77/76). Time apprehended through duration, according to Bergson, is
precisely the self-sufficient flow engendered by the ‘‘memory within change itself,’’ a
‘‘pure’’ and, therefore, ‘‘impersonal’’ memory prolonging the before into the after
through the immanence of its own self-extemporization, a movement ‘‘ceaselessly
reborn’’ (DS, 30–1/98). Since, it is ‘‘the memory within change itself,’’ one might,
following Čapek, designate it as that element of indetermination, that disparateness
acting as genesis for change itself. Čapek reads in Bergson the necessity for an
element of irreducible contingency or indetermination. It is this element of inde-
termination which drives ‘‘true duration’’ in the continuous emergence of genuine
novelty (99). Deleuze extends this notion and reads this indetermination as the
fundamental element of differentiation motivating the genesis of novelty and,
consequently, the very essence of the e´lan vital. In this sense, this disparateness, this
difference in itself, is the very being of experiencing of time. Thus, to return to our
initial point of convergence from the first ‘psychological’ line taken for interpreting
duration, according to Deleuze, ‘‘duration is not merely lived experience; it is also
experience enlarged or even gone beyond; it is already a condition of experi-
ence’’(37/29). The second interpretative line provides the condition for the possi-
bility of the first interpretative line.
One might privilege Deleuze’s ontological reading of Bergsonian duration for no
other reason than this would permit the opening of a plane of commonality with
Heidegger’s ontologizing of Kant, as an indirect response to Cassirer’s neo-Kantian
interpretation of Bergson in his Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
46. SZ, 421/386.
47. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ The Question Con-
cerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and
Row, 1977), 3–35. ‘‘Die Frage nach der Technik,’’ Vorträge Und Aufsätze (Pful-
lingen: Neske, 1967). For Heidegger’s belated return to the thought of Marx refer in
particular to the final seminars published as Four Seminars, and translated by
Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003).
48. Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare´’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York:
Norton, 2003).
49. Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science: Essential Writings, ed. Stephen Jay Gould
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), 221.
50. Poincaré, 210–22.
51. CT, 2/2E.
52. Galison, 44.
208 DAVID SCOTT
53. Here we can recognize Heidegger’s later refusal of thought as ordered by technol-
ogies of information and their engendering of ‘immediacy without real nearness.’
‘‘Man puts the longest distances behind him in the shortest time. He puts the
greatest distances behind himself and thus puts everything before himself at the
shortest range’’ (165). In a brief span of less than a page Heidegger, in his essay
‘‘The Thing,’’ establishes a route from the technology of planes, radio, and film,
which have made possible the abolition of distances both in space and time, to
man’s staring impotently into the terrifying heart of the explosion of the atom
bomb. How does Heidegger accomplish this arc of thought? These technologies
reduce distance and nearness into a uniformity in which everything is neither far nor
near. ‘‘Everything gets lumped together into uniform diatancelessness’’ (166). Any
experiencing or knowledge of nearness is lost. That is, in the reduction of distance
and nearness to only those things ‘present at hand,’ we have moved no closer to our
thinking the ‘thing qua thing’ than we have succeeded in thinking nearness. Indeed,
science, even before the explosion of the atom bomb merely confirmed it, had
already annihilated the thinghood of the thing, and reduced it to nil. How? It has
made us forget what Heidegger calls the ‘fourfold,’ that is, the thing as ‘presencing’
or gathering in one space–time, earth and sky, mortals and divinities. ‘‘The thing
things. In thinging, it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Staying, the thing
brings the four, in their remoteness, near to one another. This bringing-near is
nearing. Nearing is the presencing of nearness...Nearness preserves farness’’ (177–
78). At this point, in this paper, of less importance are the particularities of He-
idegger’s support for this argument. More important is his assertion that the
‘‘fourfoldness’’ of this primordial relation, as gathered and united in the thing-ing of
the thing, gifts us with an alternate way to begin to think the being of the world. To
begin to think the nearness of the world requires letting the thing be present in its
thing-ing, a shift in attitude that renounces the imperatives to represent, to explain,
as fostered by those technologies engendering the illusion of nearness. Instead, one
appeals to what was forgotten. ‘‘The first step toward such vigilance is the step back
from the thinking that merely represents—that is, explains—to the thinking that
responds and recalls’’(Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Thing,’’ Poetry, Language, Thought,
trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], 181).
54. DS, 106/193.
55. SZ, 411/377.
56. ‘‘Interest in what time is has been reawakened in the present day by the develop-
ment of research in physics and its deliberations on the fundamental principles of
the kind of apprehending and determining entailed here: the measuring of nature
within a system of space–time relations. The current state of this research is
established in Einstein’s relativity theory. Some of its propositions are as follows:
Space is nothing in itself; there is no absolute space. It exists merely by way of the
bodies and energies contained in it. (An old propositions of Aristotle’s:) Time is
nothing. It persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it. There is
no absolute time, and no absolute simultaneity either. In seeing the destructive side
of this theory, one readily overlooks what is positive about it, namely that it
demonstrates precisely the invariability, with respect to arbitrary transformations,
of those equations describing natural processes’’ (CT, 3/3E).
57. BP, 261–64.
58. SZ, 413/379.
59. ibid.
60. ‘‘In that world, nature in the surrounding world and the public surrounding world
are always discovered along with it. At the same time everyone can ‘count on’ this
public dating which everyone gives himself this time. It makes use of a measure that
is available to the public’’ (ibid).
61. SZ, 413/379–80.
62. I have rephrased a sentence taken from a much later lecture of Heidegger’s as a way to
reveal not only the continuity of his thinking of time, even after the supposed
‘‘turning.’’ Just as importantly, I would like to support the notion that the shift from
the analytic of Da-sein to the most basic question of being, attends a further opening
of the being of time: the instant the clock stops, being is audible. In the same lecture
Heidegger says, ‘‘If we need evidence that we always remain and encounter ourselves
within this differentiation of beings and being, it suffices to note that we continually
name being in our comportment toward beings when we say ‘is.’ Whether we actually
assert propositions that contain the word ‘is’ or silently busy and concern ourselves
with beings is all the same. That we must continually say ‘is’ whenever we speak
indicates that what we ‘so’ name, precisely being, wants to be put into a word, into a
word that, admittedly, we always at the same time mis-hear. This failure to recognize
the ‘is’ resembles the all too familiar and monotonous tick of the clock within the
usual sphere of everyday residing. We first hear the motion of the clock when it stands
still. In just this way we become aware of the ‘is’ and what it says when an interruption
intrudes upon speaking’’ [Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Ayles-
worth (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993), 37; Grundbegriffe (Frankfurt am Main: V.
Klostermann, 1981), 43].
63. CT, 4/4E.
64. ibid.
65. CT, 17/17E.
66. SZ, 414/381.
67. Quoted in Galison, 306. Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille foreground the coordi-
nating of clocks in the articulating of an imaginary that legitimates the law of gen-
eralized circulation and exchange, while concealing the real labor that makes it
function. ‘‘The World-as-Clock is a world in which everything works, in which the
activity of each of its elements is conceived of as homogenous to the law of
work....The arithmetic symbols that put a number to this real process also functions
as a representation to the extent that they construct an image of expansion in a purely
technico-financial space and likewise conceal their own implications in the work of
putting to work: the perpetual redefinition of new norms, new conducts, and new
disciplines that they render necessary through the perpetual freeing up of the new
social flows that they determine’’ [Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating
Science, Trans. Paul Bains (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 193, 192).
68. Michel Harr claims that what characterizes the everyday Da-sein ‘‘is the fact that it
has no proper name: its name changes according to the work it does.’’ Work and
everydayness are identical. Indeed, those who work share everydayness and, as
such, are indistinguishable. ‘‘In its daily work Da-sein is intrinsically anonymous; it
has no identity or interiority of its own. It is essentially replaceable by others insofar
as they can perform the same tasks as it’’ (Michel Harr, ‘‘The Enigma of Every-
dayness,’’ trans. Michael B. Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault, Reading Heidegger:
Commemorations, ed. John Sallis [Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1993], 25). Might
this anonymity name time the ‘laboring body’?
69. Galison, 317.
210 DAVID SCOTT
70. SZ, 415/381.

71. ‘‘Zeitlichkeit zeitigt und zwar mögliche Weisen ihrer selbst’’ (SZ, 328/302).
72. ‘‘Insofar as Da-sein temporalizes itself, a world is, too. Temporalizing itself with
regard to its being as temporality, Da-sein is essentially ‘in a world’ on the basis of
the ecstatic and horizontal constitution of that temporality. The world is neither
objectively present nor at hand, but temporalizes itself in temporality. It ‘is’ ‘there’
together with the outside-itself in temporality. If no Da-sein exists, no world is
‘there’ either’’ (SZ, 365/365).
73. SZ, 419/384.
74. SZ, 416/382.
75. SZ, 417/383.
76. CT, 17/17E.
77. SZ, 326/299.
78. CT, 18/18E-19/19E.
79. ‘‘In this being-toward-the-end, Da-sein exists authentically and totally as the being
that it can be when ‘thrown into death.’ It does not have an end where it just tops,
but it exists finitely. The authentic future, which is temporalized primarily by that
temporality which constitutes the meaning of anticipatory resoluteness, thus reveals
itself as finite’’ (SZ, 329–30/303).
80. SZ, 425/390.
81. ‘‘Ecstatic and horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily from the future.
However, the vulgar understanding of time sees the fundamental phenomenon of
time in the now, and, indeed in the pure now, cut off in its complete structure, that is
called the ‘present.’ One can gather from this that there is in principle no prospect of
explaining or even deriving the ecstatic and horizonal phenomenon of the Moment
that belongs to authentic temporality from this now. Thus, the ecstatically under-
stood future—the datable, significant ‘then’—does not coincide with the vulgar
concept of the ‘future’ in the sense of the pure nows that have not yet arrived and
are only arriving. Nor does the ecstatic having-been, the datable, significant ‘on that
former occasion,’ coincide with the concept of the past in the sense of the past pure
nows. The now is not the pregnant with the not-yet-now, but rather the present
arises from the future in the primordial, ecstatic unity of the temporalizing of
temporality’’ (SZ, 427/391).
82. Rudolf Carnap writes (in a passage that says much about Carnap’s own positivism)
that, ‘‘Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He
explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man,
something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important
difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be
grasped by science seems to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. I
remarked that all that occurs objectively can be described in science: on the one
hand, the temporal sequence of events is described in physics; and, on the other
hand, the peculiarities of man’s experiences with respect to time, including his
different attitude toward past, present, and future, can be described and (in prin-
ciple) explained in psychology. But Einstein thought that scientific descriptions
cannot possibly satisfy our human needs; that there is something essential about the
Now which is just outside of the realm of science’’ (quoted by Ilya Prigogine (1983)
in his lecture, ‘‘The Rediscovery of Time’’).
Carnap seems to remain thoroughly committed to the earlier position Einstein
staked out in the debate with Bergson (thus, he shares common ground with Cas-
sirer): that any experience of time outside that given as objectively measurable by
science, for instance, the philosopher’s time, is only psychological. However, Car-
nap draws a distinction between his position and the one Einstein espouses, at least
at this juncture of their encounter. Indeed, one might argue that Einstein at this
point would seem to be moving toward a position no closer to philosophy but, as
witnessed by his later writings and statements, one closer to the theological.
83. CT, 20/20E.
84. Indeed, if Heidegger is read in relation to this encounter, then one might argue that
he provides a profoundly anti-modernist conception of time as temporality that is
maintained even after his turn from ‘‘fundamental ontology’’ [Fundamentalontolo-
gie] and the analyses of the being of Da-sein, as the preparation for the
fundamental question concerning the meaning of being.
85. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Con-
tinuum, 2003), 34.
86. Negri, 89.
87. DS, 35/104.
88. SZ, 419/384–5.
89. SZ, 420/385.
90. Chapter III of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S.
Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991); Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1970), 276–316.
91. SZ, 421/386.
92. SZ, 422/386.
93. SZ, 422/386–87.
94. SZ, 425/389.
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Continental Philosophy Review (2006) 39:183–213 Springer 2006

The ‘‘concept of time’’ and the ‘‘being of the clock’’: Bergson,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

the perspective of the philosopher.1 Bergson philosophically occupies the

characterization, time is ‘‘timeliness’’ [Zeitlichkeit]. Timeliness ‘‘is not; it

encountering the theory of relativity involved not only discerning its

duration.’’18 Temporal character is conferred on the instant via the

Therefore, time reduced to the measurable phenomenon, according to the

2.1. Addendum on Cassirer26

In 1921 Ernst Cassirer publishes Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie

Will, and is therefore more likely directed at Cassirer’s neo-Kantian inter-

is possible. The theory of relativity functions transcendentally. Insofar as

interpreter, misread Bergson’s intention upon their assigning the being of

When navigators or geographers determine a longitude [...] they

What is that by which time as given becomes a speciﬁc scientiﬁc problem

understanding.53 Heidegger rejects the physicist’s time because he refuses

‘‘when’’ validating or invalidating one’s experimental determination of

Poincaré separately cracked simultaneity from its metaphysical pedestal

The measurement of time brings about a making public of time,

Only because Da-sein in general is as I am-having-been, can it

The three ecstases of temporality—‘‘having-been’’ (past), ‘‘being-ahead-

and retained through the pastness of Da-sein’s ‘‘having been.’’ And,

then seem to be only the most philosophically important moment fol-

an exhaustive secondary literature which describes the uniqueness of the Bergsonian

40. Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters, ed. Medard

terization of memory, in terms of the fundamental being of time-space. As he writes

70. SZ, 415/381.

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