Heidegger mentions the theory of relativity in Being and Time (SZ, footnote to p. 417). In effect he dismisses the impact of relativity on the problem he is discussing because his subject is not the measurement of time. He mentions the interesting idea that astronomical phenomena create a background for the human creation of time.
Heidegger mentioned relativity theory before this – in his 1915 habilitation lecture, where he also argued that Einstein dealt with measurements of time rather than time itself. His most sustained early critique came later – in his 1924 lecture "The Concept of Time," where he explained that renewed interest in time was largely due to Einstein, but maintained that "the theory of relativity leaves the concept of time untouched." Heidegger saw nothing there.
During the last three decades of his life (mid-1940s to mid-1970s), Heidegger wrote and published a great deal, but there is no mention of Einstein. His later work shifted away from the concerns of SZ toward reinterpretations of pre-Socratic philosophers and "the history of being."
Heidegger delivered a lecture long after SZ – entitled "Time and Being," at the University of Freiburg, in 962, which was his most direct return to the themes of SZ. This lecture does not engage with Einstein or relativity theory at all. Instead, it attempts to think about time and being in a "non-metaphysical" way, moving away from the terminology and framework of SZ.
The scholarly consensus is that Heidegger maintained his original position throughout his career: physics deals with the measurement and calculation of time (what he called "clock time"), while philosophy must investigate the more fundamental questions of temporality and the lived experience of time. Overall: he never reconsidered or deepened his engagement with the actual content of relativity theory after his early critiques in the 1910s-1920s.
Heidegger missed something enormous here – something like missing a mountaintop right next to you. The idea that "clock time" might actually illuminate rather than obscure the nature of lived experience and human being is an inversion of Heidegger's dismissal – one that proves itself immediately if one pursues the argument.
The self is both a synchronization scheme (in spacetime, ST) and a continuous adaptation function (in phase space, PS). This emerges with contemporary work in neuroscience and cognitive science – which Heidegger could not have known – seeing the brain as a predictive processing system – as constantly integrating information across timescales, from millisecond neural firing patterns to long-term memory consolidation. The self is an ongoing temporal integration process, stitching together disparate events. At the same time, the self is roughly the learning process modifying itself in response to prediction errors. This odd dualism – physical and thermodynamic – is exactly the self that Albert Einstein was working on and developing at the same time that Heidegger was dismissing his ideas.
Relativity theory doesn't just offer a "measurement" of time. It fundamentally reconceives the relationship between time, space, and observation. The observer-dependence of simultaneity, the relativity of temporal ordering for spacelike-separated events, the unbreakable connection between time and causality – these are not just matters of clocks (or devices of any kind) but touch on the very structure of experience and being-in-the-world that Heidegger envisioned.
There’s a deeper irony: Heidegger emphasized "thrownness" and our embeddedness in a world not of our making, yet he dismissed this revolutionary knowledge which teaches us precisely about the temporal structure of the world. Seeing human being and in the context of its "local error landscape" — the fluctuating gradient descent through possibility space – could have enriched Heidegger’s ideas about time, Being-towards-death, and authentic temporality.
Did the phenomenological method constrain him from engaging seriously with mathematical physics? Was it a kind of disciplinary territorialism and blindness? Perhaps it was his evident antisemitism. Heidegger’s understanding of scientific thinking was profound, as one can see in What is a thing? and his various unpackings of Kant. A revolutionary himself, he was also a human being with very ostentatious faults. My explanation is from Prospect theory, Stanovich, and the idea that even superb intelligence does not protect one from even base biases.
Heidegger's antisemitism was perhaps not incidental to his thought – the Black Notebooks reveal how deeply woven it is in his philosophical worldview, particularly in his characterization of "calculative thinking" and technological modernity as expressions of a supposedly Jewish worldlessness. The objectivity of science is interpreted through the history of a despised other. His misunderstanding at this level of his own ideas is pitiful – comic – a continuing shame.
The Stanovich point is that high intelligence and sophisticated reasoning don't immunize people against motivated reasoning or ideological blindness. In fact, intelligence can make one better at constructing elaborate justifications for biases – however fanciful or despicable. Heidegger could perform brilliant phenomenological analyses of Kant and Hegel and Aristotle, yet his framework systematically devalued certain modes of thought – mathematical, scientific, technological – at the service of his own small-mindedness, racism, and sick devotion to antisemitic ideology.
The self is a synchronization mechanism (in ST) and an adaptive process (in PS) – these ideas have phenomenological resonance. Einstein's relativity reveals something about the observational structure of reality itself: the relativistic observer, embedded in spacetime, making measurements that depend on his or her own frame of reference – the home coordinate system –this result has phenomenological depth – it partly explains unbridgeable subjectivity itself.
Mathematical-physical accounts and the phenomenological accounts are not rival explanations – they are more like complementary descriptions at different scales and levels of analysis. The "microsecond stitching" and the "existential projection toward death" are both real aspects of temporal being.
Philosophical genius does not guarantee wisdom – our frameworks for understanding can be simultaneously penetrating and blind.
Different scales and levels of analysis – I see it as a kind of mistaken question, like trying to connect temperature with the action of electrons.
Just as temperature is a macro-level property that emerges from but isn't reducible to individual electron movements – and asking "which electron has the temperature?" is a category error – so is making the same mistake when we try to directly map relativistic or quantum time onto phenomenological temporality – yet these are different approaches to the same experience.
Temperature makes perfect sense at the thermodynamic scale. It's real, measurable, and causally powerful. But it's not a property of individual particles; it's a statistical feature of large ensembles. Similarly, lived time – the "stretching" of a boring afternoon, the compression of an engrossing conversation, the directedness of care and projects – operates at the scale of conscious, embodied experience. Clock time and phenomenologically relativistic time operate at different scales entirely. This is interesting in itself – it support’s Husserl’s account of the phenomenology of time consciousness – i.e., the deconstruction of the unitary present.
The mistake isn't in either description – but in assuming they must directly connect or that one must be more "fundamental" than the other. Heidegger was right that physics doesn't capture phenomenological time, but wrong to dismiss physics as merely "calculative." Einstein was describing something real about the structure of ST, even if that structure doesn't appear in first-person experience the way Heidegger's care-structures do. It emerges more from inference.
As the self operates across timescales – microsecond integration, moment-to-moment adaptation, long-term self-modification – the phenomena suggest that these levels can be coherently described without requiring reduction. The neural synchronization at millisecond scales, the phenomenological now-moment, the narrative arc of a life project – these are all temporal phenomena at distinct levels of organization. They are differential equations in ST and PS.
Heidegger and naive scientism made the same error from opposite sides: assuming there must be one "true" account of time. This is exactly the point that Einstein’s work makes evident.
Einstein -- in my thinking -- is the figure who makes it impossible to ignore our own 'coordinate system' involvement in the 'objects of experience.' The strictly positivistic philosophy from the Vienna Circle made is a complementary error, in dismissing metaphysics. Einstein chided Russell on this point … he thought Russell’s embarrassment about having to do metaphysics showed that he did not really grasp yet what is going on in philosophy and scientific inquiry.
Einstein, often claimed by the positivists as their champion, actually understood something they missed: that relativity theory doesn't eliminate the observer or reduce everything to measurement – it makes the observer's coordinate system constitutive of physical description itself. The "view from nowhere" becomes impossible – not because we lack the right instruments, but because the structure of spacetime itself is observer-relative.
This is why Einstein's disagreement with Russell is so telling. Russell and the Vienna Circle wanted to purge philosophy of metaphysics, to reduce everything to logical analysis of observational statements. But Einstein recognized that his theory required metaphysical commitments -- about the nature of simultaneity, about what counts as "real," about the relationship between mathematical structure and physical reality. You can't simply read these off empirical data; they involve interpretive frameworks – without which, they vanish.
The coordinate system isn't a distorting lens to be polished away—it's intrinsic to what we can know and say about the physical world. This insight should have been – and is now – a gift to phenomenology. Heidegger wanted to show that people are always already embedded in a meaningful world, that their perspectives are constitutive of experience. Einstein demonstrated that this is true even for physics – for the interpretation of physical reality. This is a world in which nothing ‘matters’ – from Heidegger’s perspective – yet even this world, the world of complete objectivity, is fundamentally, observer-dependent – as it were, human – not just raw content, but content that is logically and causally implicated in the process that discovers it.
Had Heidegger engaged seriously with Einstein, he might have found not a rival but a kindred insight: that no god's-eye view exists, that all knowing involves a standpoint, that this result does not make knowledge arbitrary or merely subjective – that perspective is essential to "worldhood." Perhaps he would have engaged with Einstein’s result that – running invariant across all coordinate systems – different observers can translate unerringly between frames, finding invariants that hold in all and for all perspectives. Truth is what survives translation – not just the ‘uncovering’ created in the jump to language – not just the local truth trying to prop itself up as universal – as the "history of being" -- obscurantism and weak argument.
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