Hegel, Heidegger and the Problem of Time
Abstract
The place of history in Metaphysics has never been as elevated as it was after Hegel, although Hegel was not the first to bring the issue of ‘history’ into the arena of philosophy. Hegel entered ‘history’ into the ‘substance’ and the world, holding that ‘substance’ is an essentially historical phenomenon, while History is nothing but the manifestation of the world’s spirit. Almost a hundred years after Hegel, another philosopher emerged who, in one sense, revived the notion of ‘history’ and its relationship with the Being. He altered Husserl’s non-historical phenomenology into a historical phenomenology and believed in a historical essence for Da-sein which, according to him, is the only way to deal with the truth of Being. The points of convergence and divergence between Hegel and Heidegger on history and historicity have far been the subject of a hot dispute among scholars, but the root of all these discussions, i.e. the two thinker’s approach to the concept of ‘time’, has often received little attention. This article is attempting to provide an approximate account of Hegel and Heidegger's approaches to the concept of ‘time’. Then, referring to Heidegger's critique of Hegel in the final chapter of Being and Time, we try to acquit Hegel of these criticisms, and even turn some of these critiques back to Heidegger's philosophy.