Heidegger’s philosophy has been interpreted as an absolute historicism, unable to point to
a unhistorical standpoint from which history can be judged upon. K. Löwith, for instance,
has indicated that the cause of this difficulty is to be found in the conception of time:
whereas, in Greek thought, time was considered only as a manifestation of the essence, in
modern thought time has the tendency to become the essence itself, as that which fulfills
itself in time, up to Heidegger’s identification of being and event. What is interesting in
my critique is that the conception of time is strictly interwoven with a specific way of conceiving
justice and, broadly speaking, ethics. In Plato’s philosophy, justice as measure corresponds
to a cyclical and even retrogressive conception of time, the one enounced in the
myth of Chronos, in the Politikos. The modern conception of time, spiritualistic and biologistic,
is instead cyclical and irreversible, cumulative: its most significant expression is Hegelianism.
The existential conception of time, instead, is neither cyclical nor cumulative.
By commenting on Heidegger’s Anaximander’s Saying, I wish to show the possibility of
conceiving temporality as disjunction (injustice) and only as such capable of producing justice
– which I understand as a new possibility of meaning that does not exclude, but carries
within itself, emancipation. An ethics of the present developed on the basis of this conception
of time – which Heidegger has not completely endorsed – would then be an ethics
which accepts as its own ground the discontinuous, yet inventive, dimension of time.
