Having time
"I have no time" is one of the most common sentences in a working week. It sounds like a report on a shortage. In January 1965 Martin Heidegger put it in front of a room of psychiatrists and asked what it actually says.
The seminars
The Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss invited Heidegger to teach his colleagues. The series began on September 8, 1959, in the Burghölzli auditorium in Zurich. Later the group met in Boss's home in Zollikon, a village on the lake. The meetings ran until 1969. Boss kept the protocols, and they were published as the Zollikon Seminars. The English edition, translated by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay, came out in 2001.
The audience were doctors, not philosophers. Heidegger chose everyday examples: a table, a clock, a noise outside the window. This page follows one of those meetings, dated January 18 and 21, 1965, at Boss's home.
Clock time
The session starts with the clock. When we read a clock, Heidegger says, we learn how much time there is. Measuring gives a quantity.
His point is that measuring comes second. To count the hours, we must already have time. The clock presupposes something it does not show. Heidegger names that something with an ordinary phrase, "to have time". Then he asks what we mean by "time" when we say "I have time" or "I do not have any time".
Time for something
He suggests starting with the negative. When I say I have no time, the time I mean is never empty. It is always time for something. Even "tomorrow" is not a blank day. It is a tomorrow in which I will do something, or something will happen.
Heidegger then states the rule in one line.
"Since all having time is having time for something, we say: Time is [temporally] significant."
— Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols, Conversations, Letters, ed. Medard Boss, tr. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 46
The German word is deutsam. The protocol explains why it is not the usual word for "signify". Time does not stand for something the way a symbol does. It points to a what-for.
A negation that is not one
Now the sentence from the working week looks different. "I don't have time to ski because I have to write an essay." Time has not disappeared. The person saying this still has time. It is taken by the essay, and not free for skiing.
So "I have no time" denies only one thing: time for this. Heidegger calls such a sentence a negation and yet not a negation. It names a lack, and a lack always belongs to something. He then turns to the doctors in the room. That thread needs a page of its own.
What the phrase shows
Read this way, "I have no time" says less about the clock than about what the time is for. The sentence hides a second half. There is time, and it has already gone somewhere.
Heidegger does not say whether that is good or bad. He does not suggest finding more time. The seminar only asks the doctors to hear the second half.
In an earlier meeting of the same series, Heidegger separated a motive from a cause, using a noise outside the window. That distinction points in a similar direction: something in the world addresses a person, and the person answers.
Existential therapy borrowed much of its vocabulary from Heidegger, including the three modes of being in the world, Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt.
What do I have no time for, and what does that say about what my time is for?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.