A Sense of Time: Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on the Temporality of Life

The phenomenon of movement in the broadest sense appears to be essential to any and every understanding of life. And this would seem to imply that all life is constituted by temporality as its very condition. Yet does this entail that everything that lives also has a sense of time? Aristotle in several places writes of a “sense of time”; yet it is only certain living beings, not all, that possess this sense of time, he claims. Nietzsche gives us the famous image of the grazing cattle that are completely absorbed in the moment and, having no sense of time, are completely content. Heidegger, in the context of the issue of affection, identifies as a crucial problem the question of “whether and how the Being of animals is constituted by a ‘time’,” yet it is a question that he deliberately neglects to pursue in his most detailed analyses of animal life. In this essay I explore some of the stakes in the question concerning a sense of time, with reference to the three thinkers mentioned.