In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 463
ies. Reacting to challenges arising mainly from the institutionalization of
new technologies, philosophers were concerned with inventing new patterns
of time-coordination in the everyday sphere, but they were also
struggling to find a new philosophical coordination between past, present,
and future. [see Present = Past (Infinitude), Present vs. Past]
Heidegger's idea to invert the classic relationship between historical
time and existential time, by deriving historicality from the essentially
temporal character of Dasein (instead of subordinating existential time
to historical time), has become one of the most influential motifs of his
book: "In analyzing the historicality of Dasein we shall try to show not
that this entity is 'temporal' because it 'stands in history,' but that, on
the contrary, it exists historically and can so exist only because it is
temporal in the very basis of its Being. "92 How exactly historicality is
supposed to emerge from the temporality of Dasein is described in a
dense passage which brings together a number of the previously developed
key-concepts and which, at the same time, resonates with many of
the nonphilosophical discourses of 1926. In its first part, this passage
focuses on the future and the past:
If Dasein, by anticipation, lets death become powerful in itself, then, as
free for death, Dasein understands itself in its own superior power, the
power of its finite freedom, so that in this freedom, which "is" only in
its having chosen to make such a choice, it can take over the powerlessness
of abandonment to its having done so, and can thus come to
have a clear vision for the accidents of the Situation that has been
disclosed. But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially
in Being-with-others, its historicizing is a cohistoricizing and is determinative
for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historicizing of
the community, of a people. Destiny is not something that puts itself
together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another
can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. 93
Instead of associating the future with understanding and the past with
different states-of-mind, as he had suggested in the context of his structural
analysis of Sorge, Heidegger's vision of historicality assigns death
(the most individual experience) to the future, whereas fate, as materialized
in the collectivity of a people (Yolk) is linked with the past. [see
Individuality vs. Collectivity] In their interplay, the newly defined future