The Clearing of Time: Heidegger on Temporality, Being, and Language

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a sustained philosophical examination of Martin Heidegger’s concept of temporality [Zeitlichkeit] first developed in Being and Time (1927) and traces its development and transformation into Heidegger’s later philosophy of language and poetry. The argument proceeds in the following three veins. The first movement reconstructs Heidegger's existential analytic in Being and Time, showing how temporality constitutes the ontological meaning of care through three ecstases — future, having-been, and present. The second movement follows the Kehre from present ecstasis to presencing, where Heidegger replaces the existential-temporal structure of Dasein with Es gibt and diagnoses Gestell (technological enframing) as the epochal threat to authentic disclosure of Being and language. The third movement reads Heidegger's lecture courses on Hölderlin's Andenken and Der Ister as the site where temporality is enacted in poetic now. The thesis concludes by asking what new understanding of existence, time, and language becomes possible once they are understood not as external frameworks but as the medium through which Being comes to matter originally.