The Order of Time

* There is something extremely interesting about the fact that this observation by Reichenbach, in a fundamental text for the treatment of time by analytical philosophy, sounds so close to ideas from which Heidegger’s reflection stems. The subsequent divergence is enormous: Reichenbach searches in physics for that which we know about time in the world of which we are part, while Heidegger concerns himself with what time is in the existential experience of human beings. The two resultant images of time are completely different from each other. Are they necessarily incompatible? Why should they be? They explore two different problems: on the one hand, the effective temporal structures of the world that reveal themselves to be progressively more threadbare as we widen our gaze; on the other, the foundational aspect that the structure of time has for us, for our concrete sense of “being in the world.”