The qualitative element in the historical concept of time means nothing other than the condensation – crystallization – of an objectification of life given in history
Heidegger’s often-overlooked 1915 lecture, ‘The Concept of Time in the Science of History’, offers a fascinating insight into his early reflections on the nature of time and historicity. The essay hinges on the distinctions between the concept of time in natural science (particularly physics) and the concept of time in the science of history. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Dilthey, Rickert, Droysen, Ranke and Husserl, Heidegger differentiates the physicists’ recourse to time as a homogeneous, quantitative framework for measuring motion, from historical science’s conception of time as a means of accounting for human experience that overcomes the separation between past and present through lived value-relations that insist. This restitution of the present raises a number of issues: the insufficiency of chronology in itself to address history, the multiple times of historical events, and perhaps most importantly, the subject’s feeling of time as the basis for any historical sense. Such issues would be formative to the thought of one of Heidegger’s most famous students – Hannah Arendt, and her own introduction of a notion of political time in contrast to both physical and historical time. Introducing her 1954 collection of essays, Between Past and Future, Arendt quotes a short parable by Kafka. The subject is pictured standing on a road, pressed by two antagonists, one pushing him forward, one pushing him back. This offers a model for understanding the subject’s position in time, Arendt suggests: poised between the pressures of the past and the pressures of the future. Twenty years later, Arendt repeated her use of this parable toward the end of volume 1 of her posthumously published, The Life of the Mind (1978), indicating the importance of the idea to her. But interpreted in this way, the parable offers many puzzles, not least of which is this: why should we understand the future as pressing the subject back?
