Living from a past toward a future

What you will work out

• Reconstruct why Heidegger looks to temporality for the unity of care.
• Distinguish his future, having-been and present from three positions on a clock.
• Explain how retrieving an inherited possibility can differ from repeating a former arrangement.
• Assess the move from a situated life to a people’s destiny, including what it leaves ethically unjustified.

A past at work in a present activity

Imagine Samira preparing an exercise for a class she teaches, in the same room where she was once a pupil herself. Looking at an old worksheet, she remembers where she used to lose the thread. She changes the instruction and leaves more space for a response.

Several dates belong to this small scene: a lesson years ago, this afternoon’s preparation, a class already planned. Put them in their correct order, and something is still left to explain. The earlier difficulty matters to Samira now because of the teacher she is trying to be, and the worksheet shows up as something to improve within that concern. Her past, her possibilities and what she encounters are already bound up in a single activity.

Samira’s afternoon is a way into Heidegger’s question about temporality. In lesson 04, care named the unity of being ahead of ourselves in possibilities, already delivered into a situation, and involved with what we encounter there. How do those aspects belong together? Do we first have a self and then add a past, a future and some present occupations? Or does that account already assume the unity it is supposed to explain?

Heidegger takes the second possibility seriously. In §§63–64 of Being and Time, he asks how his interpretation has gained access to Dasein as a whole, and why its selfhood should be understood through care. A self cannot simply be installed beneath the activity as a thing that persists unchanged: that would give us something to which experiences happen, while leaving the structure of existing unexplained. §65 then asks what makes care possible as an articulated whole, and temporality is his proposed answer.[1]

The question asks more than whether a person’s history influences a decision. Heidegger wants to know what it takes for someone to exist from a situation toward possibilities at all. His interpretation starts from the anticipatory resoluteness examined in lessons 05–06, a way of existing that he takes to disclose care especially clearly. We should therefore keep two questions in view: does temporality illuminate care, and is this the right starting point for revealing it? Samira’s preparation gives us a case to examine, not proof in advance that every life fits the proposed account.

A future already involved

Ordinarily, the future means what has not happened yet: the class is scheduled for later. Heidegger uses future in a more basic sense, for the way Dasein comes toward itself in its possibilities. What someone can be already enters into how that person exists.

Being a teacher is not simply a condition Samira expects to acquire when the clock reaches a certain hour. She is living that possibility as she prepares, notices a difficulty and changes an instruction. Finishing the worksheet can complete a task, but it cannot finish being a teacher. The possibility gives direction to what she is doing now without guaranteeing how she will act later or settling who she must go on being. Other possibilities involve companionship, rest or enjoyment, not an achievement to be completed. Futurity is no requirement to organize a life around a career or an ever more ambitious plan.

None of this makes prediction or planning unreal. Samira may expect a certain number of people and plan enough copies; such expectations concern things that may happen. Heidegger is looking at the self-understanding within which making those plans matters, at what she is doing with her life in teaching. An event still to come and a way of existing toward a possibility can belong to the same activity without being the same feature of it.

Having-been names the corresponding relation to what one already is. Samira did not produce the language she teaches in, the school she attended or the circumstances in which she first learned, and she brings skills she has acquired and difficulties she has lived through. These do not merely occupy an earlier place on a timeline; they belong to the situation from which she now acts.

Remembering the worksheet’s difficulty makes one part of that relation explicit, but having-been is broader than recollection. We can speak a language we learned without recalling when we learned each word, and we can question an inherited expectation without becoming people who were never formed by it. Taking responsibility for what we have been does not require endorsing everything that formed us. Nor does this responsibility give everyone the same resources to act: Samira’s preparation still depends on time, materials, other people and what her body permits.

The present, in this account, concerns encountering what the situation offers or requires. The worksheet is there to be revised; a cramped space for writing stands out as a difficulty. Heidegger’s term for this aspect of encounter is making present, although he often reserves that expression for its inauthentic mode and calls the authentic present the moment. Both terms concern how something is encountered within an involvement. The future, having-been and present belong to one way of being engaged.[2]

Why three moments will not do

Suppose we tried to rebuild the scene from three separate pieces: an image of Samira as a pupil, another of the worksheet now and a third of a later class. Setting them side by side would not explain why this past matters to this preparation. We would still need the relations through which the current task is hers and the earlier difficulty bears on what she is doing.

For Heidegger, care is possible because existing already has this temporal unity. Being ahead of oneself is grounded in futurity; thrownness involves having-been; involvement with things requires a present. We can distinguish these without treating them as independent parts to be joined later. He calls them the ecstasies of temporality, and the word here has nothing to do with an unusually intense feeling: it means that existence stands open beyond an isolated now, toward possibilities, toward what it has been and toward a situation.

This temporal unity is not reserved for authentic lives. §68 distinguishes different ways in which the future and the other temporal aspects are lived. Someone absorbed in whatever currently promises success still exists toward possibilities from a situation; what changes in authenticity, on Heidegger’s account, is the way a person takes over this structure. The earlier lessons’ distinction between existence and one way of owning it therefore still holds.

Heidegger nevertheless gives the future a special role. In anticipatory resoluteness, someone takes up what they have been in the light of possibilities owned as finite, without treating an established identity as a guarantee, and that orientation also lets the present situation be encountered. This is not a sequence of steps, with a future first, then a return to the past and finally an arrival in the present; each aspect belongs to the whole unity. The priority is explanatory, not chronological. It cannot make tomorrow happen before yesterday, or make the past whatever someone chooses to say about it.

The account leaves measured time in use. We can measure Samira’s preparation, date the worksheet and investigate the physical processes involved. Heidegger argues that ordinary time has an existential source, but demonstrating that larger claim would take more than the distinctions introduced here. And when he says that primordial temporality is finite, he does not mean that physical time stops when someone dies; he explicitly allows that time goes on. The finitude concerns the existence being interpreted, not a newly discovered boundary of the universe.

The priority he gives anticipation still deserves examination. His strongest reply is that facing the limit of one’s possibilities breaks the assumption that an established identity can secure itself once and for all. It can reveal how one must live from a situation without becoming a finished thing. Yet why should anticipation of death show that relation most clearly? Could sustained attachment, learning with others or keeping a shared practice alive reveal how past, present and future belong together? Lesson 05 left two things in dispute: the interpretation of death and mortality, and the privileged role of anxiety. A useful account of temporal unity does not by itself resolve either dispute.[3]

How far can time be separated from chronology?

William Blattner sharpens the distinction by separating the direction of an activity from its position in time: a possibility can organize who someone is without determining what that person will do tomorrow. He calls this feature Purposiveness, and he calls the already situated character of existence Alreadiness. These are terms in his reconstruction, not replacements we need to memorize.

Blattner draws an analogy with grammar. Sentences can locate something in time, but they can also present an activity as ongoing, completed or directed toward a completion. He warns, though, that wordplay and grammar cannot establish an ontological conclusion. The analogy is meant to help us notice something about existing; a language’s vocabulary cannot prove Heidegger right.

There is a difficulty, too. Samira learned before she taught; a task takes time; a possibility can stop being available. Can the direction of her activity really be understood independently of earlier and later? Blattner himself ends the subsection with a question about whether Purposiveness can be isolated from the ordinary future.

A reply can point to what a prediction leaves out. Knowing that a class will take place tomorrow does not tell us what being its teacher means to Samira. Conversely, her taking up that possibility now does not predict that she will teach tomorrow: the class might be canceled. This supports a distinction between a way of existing and an expected occurrence. It does not yet show that the first can be understood without temporal succession, or that succession can be derived from it. A critic can accept the distinction and still contest the explanatory priority.[4]

A life that has already begun

§72 returns to a problem that the focus on death might have hidden. A life has a beginning as well as an end; how does it extend between them? If Dasein were real only in a succession of present instants, the past would have vanished and the future would not yet be there. Adding those instants together would not explain the life whose instants they are.

Heidegger calls the temporal extending of a life its happening, or occurrence. Historicality names the constitution that makes such a history possible. We are historical before we become the subjects of a biography or take an interest in a museum. We live from circumstances and possibilities already handed down, and the ways we take them up belong to what happens next.

None of this erases the event of birth or denies that an earlier event is over. It distinguishes being a person born into a world from possessing a past object that one occasionally visits in memory. Samira’s schooling cannot happen again, yet it can still belong to how she is a teacher now, and her response to it may continue one practice while breaking with another.

An old object shows the distinction from another side. In §73 Heidegger considers equipment preserved from an earlier world. A household object can remain physically present after the network of use to which it once belonged has passed away. Its historical character is not simply its age or the damage it has accumulated; it refers us to a way of living in which it had a place. An intact object may preserve evidence of that world without keeping the world itself intact.[5]

We can therefore ask two questions about a tradition: what happened, and what possibilities did that history leave? Taking up an inheritance need not begin with explicit historical research. But claims about what happened need evidence, and an appealing possibility cannot license changing inconvenient facts. Nor need we reduce a tradition to whatever arrangements once prevailed: a capacity to deliberate together may be carried forward while an old restriction on who could speak is repudiated.

Retrieving a possibility

In §74 Heidegger asks where resolute existence gets its definite possibilities. Anticipating death does not supply a list of worthwhile occupations or commitments. Dasein must find its possibilities in the world into which it is thrown, a world already shared with others; even a break with current convention takes place among inherited ways of understanding.

He calls an explicit return to an inherited possibility retrieval, also translated as repetition. We do not first become historical when we undertake such a return; it is one way of taking up a historical existence we already have. What is retrieved is a possibility of existence, not a former situation reproduced in every detail, and Heidegger explicitly distinguishes this return from making what once occurred actual again. He also gives it the capacity to answer back to what the present treats as its past; the relationship can include repudiation.

Think again of Samira’s worksheet. She can carry forward the possibility of teaching something worthwhile while rejecting one way of presenting it. Keeping the exercise unchanged would be one response to its history; rewriting it can be another. We need not call either response authentic merely because it preserves or alters the sheet. The example clarifies the difference between using an inheritance and reenacting an arrangement, but it does not establish which inheritance ought to be used.

This suggests a strong reply to the charge of simple traditionalism. Heidegger does not imagine authentic choice as an escape from history into an empty freedom, but depending on inherited possibilities need not mean obeying their current custodians. A tradition can contain neglected alternatives, earlier conflicts and resources for criticizing its dominant form. Even a demand to abandon an institution can make sense through the history it contests.

The reply has a limit. Showing where a criticism becomes possible does not establish that it is justified. An inherited possibility might be cruel; an institution’s longevity might record the success of coercion; a new interpretation might preserve the same exclusion under a more generous description. Retrieval needs judgment, and its vocabulary alone has not supplied the grounds for that judgment.[6]

Belonging and fidelity

This account of retrieval brings us back to the contrast between our two interpreters. Piotr Hoffman places the emphasis differently from Blattner. He reads the confrontation with a finite life as bringing a person back to a determinate history and cultural situation; in his account, the past becomes salient through the anticipation of a life that can end. He makes anxiety central to the passage from evasion to an authentic appropriation of that history, and his discussion culminates in fidelity to a heritage and in the tension between individual existence and a historical community.

Hoffman goes further. He describes heritage as accepted in its contingency rather than submitted to detached justification, and he connects authenticity with loyalty to one’s historical past. This is a consequential step in his reconstruction, and it invites an objection. Recognizing that no one begins outside history need not exempt a tradition from criticism. The objection is not that a person could choose to have no origins; it is that acknowledging an origin and endorsing its claims are different acts.

Blattner’s emphasis on taking a possibility back and Hoffman’s on fidelity thus expose different pressures within the same problem, and neither reading closes it. We need an account of historical belonging that can explain both continuity and a warranted refusal of what has been handed down.[7]

Whose inheritance becomes a destiny?

Heidegger’s own development of the argument is more politically charged than the worksheet suggests. He calls the resolute taking over of an inherited yet chosen possibility fate. Here the term does not mean that a script has made every decision for us, yet it leads into a stronger collective account.

In §74 he moves from fate to the destiny of a community, and specifically of a people. This destiny, he insists, is not merely an aggregate of separate individual fates. Communication and struggle enter into its realization, and a generation supplies the shared historical setting. Later in the same section, his account of retrieval includes choosing a hero. These terms belong to his account of authentic historical existence, and replacing them with the friendly language of cooperation would conceal what needs examining.

The earlier account of being-with already requires some connection with shared history: Samira did not invent teaching, language or the criteria by which an explanation can be corrected. But depending on shared intelligibility does not establish a single people whose destiny ought to command its members. The move to that stronger unity raises questions that the fact of social dependence cannot answer.

Who gets counted as part of the people? Which histories become its inheritance, and which are treated as interruptions or intrusions? Who selects the hero, and what happens when someone refuses the proposed example? These questions concern how a collective account distributes authority. A story that calls itself shared can still silence those whose work made the shared world possible.

The best available reply draws on the openness of retrieval. An inheritance need not consist only of the victors’ institutions. Recovering a suppressed challenge could alter what the community understands itself to be, and a participant might answer the inherited possibility by refusing the present demand made in its name. Nor can any account of historical situatedness make a person responsible for having originated every condition in which they act.

A further reply is that Heidegger explicitly limits the existential analysis: it does not decide what a person should concretely resolve to do. An account of the conditions of choice need not be a complete ethical theory, and its failure to supply a moral rule would not, by itself, refute everything it says about historical existence.

The difficulty is that the account does more than acknowledge a neutral historical background. Its description of authentic existence gives a privileged place to fate, a people’s destiny and struggle, and then leaves us without sufficient grounds for telling an emancipatory retrieval from an exclusionary mobilization. Each can describe itself as recovering an authentic possibility. Lesson 06’s gap between owning a decision and making a morally defensible one now reappears at the level of a collective future, and the collective language makes the need for an answer more pressing, not less.[8]

This gives us reason to examine Heidegger’s later political commitments in relation to the philosophy. It is not a deduction of those commitments from every claim about care or time, and the absence of such a deduction does not make the language politically harmless. What we have identified is a specific question: what happens when historical belonging is made to bear the authority that ethical justification would have to earn?

Application: the meeting hall

Imagine a town restoring an old meeting hall. Earlier generations used it to debate common affairs, but its admission rules excluded some residents on grounds of ancestry. The restoration keeps the hall available for public deliberation, and the town replaces the old admission rules so that residents formerly excluded on that basis can enter and take part.

Explain how this could be a retrieval of an inherited possibility rather than a reenactment of the past, distinguishing what the restoration continues from what the changed rules repudiate. What ethical reasons must be supplied beyond saying that the hall belongs to the town’s heritage? Would preserving the building, changing the rules or calling the project authentic settle the judgment? Consider, too, whose history the town would need to include. The case says nothing about the participants’ motives. You may read the answer without writing a response; no personal disclosure is required.

Full explanatory answer

To see how the restoration could be a retrieval, begin with the difference between the hall’s physical survival and its historical meaning. The two are connected but not the same. Conserving the building’s fabric can preserve an old object; keeping the hall available for public deliberation takes up a possibility of collective life associated with that object. The project concerns what the town may become through using the hall, from a history it did not create anew. Past, present and future belong together in the restoration without being three episodes whose order alone explains the project.

What the restoration continues is the possibility of deliberating about common affairs; what the changed rules repudiate is the inherited exclusion. Retrieval could consist in carrying that possibility forward while refusing the exclusion. Reenactment, in the relevant sense, would reproduce the former arrangement, including who was permitted to enter. The town need not restore the discriminatory rule for its renewed use of the hall to have historical continuity, and changing the rule does not make the earlier exclusion something that never happened.

Beyond heritage, the town needs an ethical reason. A defensible reason for rejecting the old restriction begins from the equal standing of residents in matters that concern them: ancestry by itself gives no adequate reason to exclude some of them from deliberating about those affairs. Equal standing is a premise of this assessment. It does not follow merely from the hall’s existence or its age, and it is not a conclusion contained in the words inheritance, retrieval or authenticity. Calling the older arrangement traditional would explain something about why it persisted without defending its justice.

Historical continuity should also be described accurately. The earlier arrangement did not embody equal admission; exclusion belonged to its rules. We are given no founding charter and no history of an earlier, more inclusive period, and it would be misleading to invent one so that the reform could pass as a simple return to an original ideal. The town is preserving a practice in a changed form and repudiating a feature of its actual past. It may judge that feature wrong without claiming that all inherited practices are worthless.

Whose history is preserved matters to this judgment. An account told only from the standpoint of admitted members could conceal the experience of residents whose exclusion helped define the hall’s public. Records or testimony about that exclusion would be relevant, but the case does not supply their contents, so we should not invent them. Including those histories could change the town’s understanding of what restoration requires. The new rule is one identifiable change, not evidence that every barrier to participation or every consequence of exclusion has been remedied.

Nor can we certify the participants’ authenticity. They may have varied reasons for supporting the project, and none has been specified. More importantly, even sincere ownership of an inherited commitment would not settle its moral worth. People defending the old restriction could also appeal to heritage and destiny, and their appeal would still need to answer the objection to exclusion. The same demand for reasons applies to the reformers’ decisions about whose interests count and how participation works.

The town in this case has chosen restoration, but historical situatedness alone would not have required that choice. A community could have reasons to abandon an inherited institution, to preserve the building as evidence of its harms or to hold its common deliberation elsewhere. Those would be different proposals, each requiring its own assessment. The possibility of repudiation must remain open even when a practice, and not merely one of its rules, is at issue.

So preserving the building, changing the rules and calling the project authentic would each leave the judgment unsettled. The example permits continuity and repudiation together, and a defensible answer need not endorse Heidegger’s whole account of temporality to make sense of that relation. It should explain how a past supplies possibilities for present action, then assess the reasons for taking up some and rejecting others. The historical connection makes the project intelligible; the ethical argument must still be made.

Toward the next lesson

The question of what historical belonging can authorize now turns back on a thinker who put his own claims about historical existence to political use. The next lesson examines Heidegger’s Nazism and antisemitism, keeping different kinds of evidence apart and weighing competing interpretations. It asks what those commitments reveal about particular philosophical claims, without granting the work a blanket exemption or reaching a verdict in advance on every question the study has raised.

Sources and limits

[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (SUNY Press, 2010), §§63–65, for the question of care’s unity. §§63–64 supply the methodological context and the discussion of selfhood; §65 asks about the meaning and unity of care. The available EPUB contains damaged text. Joan Stambaugh’s unrevised Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (SUNY Press, 1996), p. 298 in the publisher-authorized preview, independently supplies the bounded discussion of the meaning of care used here. Its page numbers belong to that different edition, not to the revised EPUB. Samira is an original teaching example.

[2] Being and Time, §65, with §68’s introduction, its complete subsection (a) on understanding and its closing paragraphs on temporal unity, for the future, having-been and present. The unrevised Stambaugh (1996), p. 301, corroborates the distinction between the temporal aspects of care and a sequence of earlier and later states. Only pp. 298 and 301 of that edition were read for this lesson; pp. 299–300 were not available in the preview checked. No missing phrase has been reconstructed from commentary, and no complete alternate §65 or German collation is claimed.

[3] Being and Time, §65 and the bounded §68 passages specified in note 2, for the distinction between temporality and one authentic mode of temporalizing. §65 expressly separates the finitude of primordial temporality from the question whether time continues after someone’s death. This lesson does not reproduce the full later derivation of ordinary time. Its challenge to the priority of anticipation continues the objections developed in lessons 04–05.

[4] William Blattner, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide, second edition (Bloomsbury, 2024), chapter 5.vi, “Temporality,” from its heading on p. 178 through the closing study question on p. 189, with notes 40–59, for the distinction between the direction of an activity and its position in time. The grammar analogy and the terms Purposiveness and Alreadiness belong to his reconstruction. His quotations use Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation with declared alterations, not Stambaugh and Schmidt’s. The works by Comrie, Sheehan, Remington, Rödl and Kosman cited in his discussion and notes have not been directly read for this lesson, and neither have the Aristotle and Sartre texts he discusses.

[5] Being and Time, complete §§72–73, including §73’s continuation across EPUB files, for historicality and the old object. These sections distinguish historical existence from an aggregate of experiences and explain the historical character of surviving equipment through its former world. Heidegger’s references to Dilthey and others do not supply a direct reading of their works. The claim about a tradition’s neglected alternatives is an application developed in this lesson, not an empirical finding about a particular community.

[6] Being and Time, §74, read completely with §§72–73, for retrieval. The available revised translation uses “repetition” for Wiederholung in this passage; its translator’s introduction also explains the choice “retrieval.” This lesson uses retrieval to keep the distinction from reenactment clear. The passage explicitly denies that the former actuality is simply to be produced again, and it includes a response that renounces what is treated as past in the present. The damaged sentence about anticipation in the section’s opening argument is neither quoted nor made an interpretive hinge.

[7] Piotr Hoffman, “Death, time, history: Division II of Being and Time,” in Charles B. Guignon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006), the complete “Time and History” discussion, which begins partway through p. 232 and ends on p. 240, with note 8, for his account of heritage and fidelity. This continues the earlier portion read for lesson 05. His stronger account of anxiety and fidelity is reported as an interpretation. The references in his note to his own work and to Guignon’s do not count as direct readings of those works. Setting Hoffman beside Blattner is the lesson’s own comparison, not a report of a documented exchange between them.

[8] Being and Time, §74, especially its movement from fate to destiny, community, a people, communication and struggle, and the discussion of retrieval and a hero that follows. The ethical questions and the fictional hall are this lesson’s own reasoning, not a claim that §74 already supplies an inclusive political ethic. Political biography and notebook evidence require the separate source work of the next lesson. Earlier limits concerning damaged passages, bounded alternate translations and mediated notebook evidence remain in place.