ABSTRACT

Jacques Derrida's description of Being and Time as a 'breakthrough' would rest on the insistence that temporality be no longer conceived in an accidental external mode, as a medium 'in which' entities happen to be or into which they have 'fallen'. Martin Heidegger demands an interrogation of the 'vulgar' concept of time as set forth in metaphysics from Aristotle to Henri Bergson. The temporality that constitutes Dasein is the mode in which entities are opened to its circumspection as being-there. Temporality has no substantial identity, it is merely an interweaving of the 'future', the 'having been' and the 'present' as ecstases of time. The future 'has a priority in the ecstatical unity of primordial and authentic temporality'. Heidegger grants the future to be the 'primary phenomenon' of temporality. A prior disclosedness of the future constitutes 'understanding' as a 'fundamental existentiale' of Dasein.