Heidegger: We Are Time Unfolding (and our Time is Finite)

When I was growing up, there was a children’s TV show called Bernard’s Watch in which a child named Bernard had a pocket watch that could stop time. Whenever Bernard clicked the watch’s dial, the world would freeze, as would everyone in it — everyone, that is, except for Bernard, who could still move about freely.

Bernard would use his watch to get out of relatively low-stakes scrapes, like avoiding being late for school, or quickly running back home to fetch (or, more scandalously, complete) his forgotten homework.

But the real allure of the show was the mysterious physics at its heart, and the imagined possibility of experiencing it for ourselves. What would I do, if I had Bernard’s watch?

In the decades since the show aired, that’s not the only question with which I occasionally find myself preoccupied.

If Bernard had actually stopped time, then how did his life continue? How were the cells of his body operating? How was he breathing the (presumably frozen) oxygen molecules? Did Bernard’s watch grant him access to some deeper metaphysical timeline that continued to move forward and support him, even as the more local timeline of Earth remained frozen?

If German philosopher Martin Heidegger kicked back with a few episodes of Bernard’s Watch, I imagine he’d share my concerns about its central claim: if Bernard was really stopping time, then how did he continue to proceed linearly?

One of the fundamental ideas in Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus Being and Time is that our popular conceptions get time all wrong. Time is not this big container that we flow through, that we could conceivably stop with a watch. Nor is time a resource we have, or some quality that is added to us.

For Heidegger, time is absolutely fundamental to our way of existing in the world. In fact, a better way to think about it is that we simply are time. I do not merely observe the seconds ticking away; I am the seconds ticking away. My being can exist only in and as time. If time stopped, so would my existence.

The only way Bernard can exist is as a temporal being, as someone moving unceasingly from past to future. When he stops his watch, he may stop the temporality of others, but he cannot stop his own; if he did, there would be no show. He can never stand ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ time, because human existence fundamentally is time unfolding.

So Bernard’s watch isn’t really a time-stopper; it’s more of a mass freezing device he’s somehow exempt from. The clock of his life necessarily continues ticking.

Putting the thorny metaphysics of a children’s TV show to one side, there is a starker aspect to Heidegger’s reconceptualization of time. Yes, we are time unfolding; but the crucial point to recognize about this is that one day we will stop ticking.

Our being is time, and this time is finite. This is what we need to understand about time: we are the seconds ticking away, and the seconds are going to stop. Bernard won’t be there to start our particular instance of time back up again, and nor will anyone else.

It’s easy to be quite flippant here. Yeah yeah, we’re all mortal. I know I’ll die one day. You only live once and all that.

Heidegger thinks we need to better grasp the reality of our finitude. He recasts human existence as ‘being-towards-death’, because no matter what we do, the void waits to wipe it clean: we are not progressing towards a grand finale, we are free falling towards erasure. Death is the lurking obliterator, the perpetual possibility of impossibility.

None of this is supposed to be morbid, by the way; it’s a mere statement of fact, something Heidegger thinks it’s worth trying to make sense of. When we face up to our condition, he notes,

death reveals itself as that possibility which is one’s ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped…

Thus for Heidegger death is personal (no one else can face it for us), it negates all our relationships (no one else can face it with us), and it cannot be outdone by any of our mortal projects (it is the great annihilation of all meaning and possibility). Furthermore, death is certain and always impending.

It’s tempting to flee from this rather bleak finality. We often act as if we are not constantly projecting forward to death’s horizon. We convince ourselves we’ll still have time later.

Yes, later: that’s when I’ll really start living. You should see how amazing my life is going to be later. When I’ve earned this amount of money, when I’ve moved into this kind of house, when I’ve become famous and adored by all. That’s when I’ll be in the right space to start living.

But if like Havi Carel I was told I only had a few years left to live, the prospect of death would bulldoze such complacency. I’d suddenly have to face up to the reality of my limited time.

Heidegger wants us to realize that this death sentence is not hypothetical: it looms over all of us, every single day. Rather than deny or passively await death — responses which only perpetuate patterns of inauthenticity — Heidegger thinks we should actively anticipate it.

When we genuinely grasp ourselves as finite temporal beings, we can release ourselves from the illusions of the anonymous ‘They’ (i.e. the traps of convention), and discover what really matters to us. As Heidegger puts it:

[a]ntipation reveals to Dasein [the human being] its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself… in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the ‘they’...

In other words, the anxiety we experience on facing up to the true weight of death illuminates all the utter rubbish that fills our lives, and also provides us with the energy with which we can cut through it. Nothingness will soon descend. We should put up with bullshit — society’s, other people’s, our own — not one moment longer.

Every second is irretrievable: understanding this should whip us into finding what we value and immersing ourselves in it, while we still can.

Of course, accepting our finitude may grant urgency, but it doesn’t guarantee wisdom. The great irony that perhaps overshadows Heidegger’s work on authenticity is his affiliation with the Nazi party in 1930s Germany — he was drawn into the dominant ‘They’ of the time. While he later described his affiliation as the greatest stupidity of his life, he never apologized, leaving a permanent stain on his philosophical life and career.

I don’t think this invalidates the value of keeping our mortality in mind, however. Beyond urgently revealing to us what matters, awareness of our finitude can also bring a kind of relief.

This is the premise behind Oliver Burkeman’s brilliant meditation on mortality, Four Thousand Weeks​: we will never get everything done, because we physically can’t. There isn’t time. The magical destination we strive towards, the place where we’ve finally achieved everything, where we’ll at last be able to lie back and enjoy life: this place doesn’t exist. Outside of nothingness, there is only — and there only ever will be — the limited now.

Rather than lament or resist this limit, Burkeman points out, another option is to relax into it: to accept it for what it is. We cannot do it all. So take the pressure off: release yourself from needing to achieve what it is physically impossible to achieve. Instead, with impermanence in mind, try to show up more fully for what you care about most; nothing else is required.

Trying to elude the limited now is a bad habit of which I am often guilty. But bad habits can be corrected. If I can stop biting my fingernails, then perhaps I am also capable of disrupting my routine deference to the mythical future.

This being, this time will end, and there is no special watch that can pause or extend it. This is how it is. Without time’s passing, I couldn’t exist. I couldn’t breathe in, breathe out, hear laughter, say I love you. Rather than fret over the closing horizon, rather than deny the coming erasure, try to focus full-heartedly on the time I am.

What do you make of this analysis?

• Does Heidegger’s reframe that we are time resonate for you?
• Do you live with death in mind?
• Or is facing death not quite as liberating as Heidegger or Burkeman suggest?

To inform your answers, you might enjoy the following related articles:

• Why Death is Nothing to Fear: Lucretius and Epicureanism
• Epicurus On Why Death Should Not Concern Us
• Heidegger On Being Authentic in an Inauthentic World
• Havi Carel on the Philosophy of Illness: Is Good Health Necessary for a Good Life?
• Amor Fati: the Stoics’ and Nietzsche’s Different Takes on Loving Fate
• On Living Meaningfully in a Vast Universe: Robert Nozick
• Thich Nhat Hanh on Healing the Wounds of the Past
• Michael Cholbi on Grief, Identity Crisis, and What We Learn from Loss
• What is Existentialism? 3 Core Principles of Existentialist Philosophy

Get one famous philosophical idea in your inbox each Sunday

If you enjoyed this article, you might like my free Sunday breakdown. I distill one piece of wisdom from philosophy each week; you get the summary delivered straight to your email inbox, and are invited to share your view. Consider joining 23,000+ subscribers and signing up below: