Quora answer: What is time?
Time is . . . . .
Time and Being, Being and Time . . . . Heidegger wrote works by both of these titles.
Would it shock you to find out that time has no Being?
Dogen Kaigen talks about ExistenceTime.
Kant thought that he could achieve objective unity though the schematization of time. He said that it was though the unity of time that objects attained their objective unity.
This is similar to Husserl’s idea of the Noematic Nucleus being the object as phenomena seen from all sides, which is the external coherence, and the dual of the internal coherence of the essence. He said that our apperception of the essence was an intuition.
Kant said that happened though the imagination.
The basic idea is that as you move around the object and see it from different perspectives that it takes time, and one is seeing it on the background of the world horizon, so you don’t need bracketing, as in Husserl’s early phenomenology. Heidegger made use of this breakthrough in Being and Time. However, there is also essence intuition where one grasps the internal coherence of the object as constraints on its attributes directly. This takes time too but less time if you have already schematized the object.
Now Essence is suppose to be tied to the Substance of the Object, and that substance’s persistence is seen as Being. But Being is more than that, it is an illusory gloss on the object that produces an abstract idea of it, and ideas are something different from essences, which are not simple ideas. In fact the difference between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand is this difference seen as two modalities of being-in-the-world. It is the difference between Pure Static Parmenidian Being and Process Dynamic Heraclitian Becoming. But where Ideas tend toward unity via the look, essence perception tends toward totality though circumspective concern, i.e. the glance. Thus these are extreme opposites tending toward the duals of either unity or totality. Notice that the insight into totality gives one access to the essence, while insight into unity gives one access to the idea.
The nondual between these two extremes is wholeness. Wholeness is not captured by any of the meta-levels of Being. Hyper and Wild being go too far, while Pure and Process Being do not go far enough. We are speaking here of Primal Archetypal Wholeness.
Primal Archetypal Wholeness is found as nondual ExistenceTime. This means that Western philosophers never reach time, but are merely caught in the veils of Maya, Dunya, Dukkha, etc. Time isn’t. What there is of time exists only. The whole idea that Kant has that you can get the unity of the object out of the schematization of time, seems pretty far fetched, especially since he did not have the ready-to-hand as a distinction at hand.
It is only a few steps from this that leads to the idea of Heterochrony, i.e. the state of affairs With ExistenceTime that utterly destroys metaphysics.
http://bit.ly/zpwYaF