Karin de Boer’s Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel proposes a tightly structured and quietly ambitious thesis: that the inner unity of Heidegger’s work, early and late, can be made visible if one takes temporality as the guiding thread, and that this same thread allows a renewed, more exact account of Heidegger’s long struggle with Hegel. The book reconstructs the missing third division of Being and Time through a close reading of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, extends this reconstruction into the later writings on the history of being, and stages a systematic confrontation with Hegel’s Science of Logic and Phenomenology of Spirit. Through this threefold movement, de Boer presents Heidegger as a deeply systematic thinker whose entire project turns around the attempt to think the radical finitude of human life and of philosophy itself, and whose encounter with Hegel marks both the limit and the driving force of that attempt.
The book frames this program with a double movement of self-limitation. On the one hand, the Preface of the English edition inscribes the work into an interpretive struggle with Heidegger’s own language. De Boer carefully justifies her deviations from standard English translations, especially in those cases where Heidegger’s recasting of German words is meant to indicate rather than describe an ontological structure. She describes formal indication as a way in which a concept does not rest in its usual content, but sets the reader in motion toward an underlying structure. Her choice to translate Erschlossenheit as “primordial openness” and Entschlossenheit as “resolute openness” is emblematic: it preserves the internal relation between openness as such and its existential modification, and at the same time suits her central claim that Heidegger’s analyses always already concern modes of temporal openness. Her tentative translation of Ereignis as “the occurrence of own-ing,” and of Ent-eignis as “the occurrence of dis-owning,” already anticipates the later sections on the history of being, where being’s own movement toward and away from itself becomes the decisive theme. This translational preface, far from being a technical aside, concretizes the book’s guiding conviction: any faithful reading of Heidegger must follow the movement of his concepts away from their received meanings toward the structures they strive to disclose.
On the other hand, the Introduction sets out an interpretive method that mirrors Heidegger’s own reflective structure. De Boer begins from the conviction that reading is an act of gathering that always presupposes some unity, even when that unity is fragile and contested. She argues that in the case of “great philosophers” such unity, if it exists anywhere, must lie in a simple, underlying question that silently guides the multiplicity of texts. For Heidegger this underlying question concerns the possibility that what withdraws at first sight might be brought to light at all. De Boer formulates this as a question about the possibility and the incapacity of philosophy: philosophy belongs to life as one of its possible ways of comporting itself, yet this very way tends to conceal the finite dynamic that gives rise to it. From the beginning of his Freiburg and early Marburg lectures, Heidegger interrogates the traditional philosophical tendency to interpret the essential as that which persists as identical presence amidst change, and thereby to reduce human life to a self-identical subject. The issue that motivates Heidegger’s development is thus double: how can one articulate the essential without turning it into a stable present, and how can philosophy recognize that its own procedures repeatedly slide back into that stabilizing movement?
Hegel enters this scene as both strongest precursor and most intractable obstacle. De Boer recalls an early remark of Heidegger’s to the effect that philosophy stands before the task of confronting, in Hegel, the most powerful historical world-view in terms of depth, conceptual breadth, and experiential richness. Hegel’s speculative science already attempts to account for the dynamism of life, history, and thought through a logic of negativity and movement. Heidegger cannot simply oppose this; he must learn from Hegel how the question of life’s essential movement has been formulated at the highest level and why this formulation still fails to do justice to the radical finitude he seeks to think. Thus the unity de Boer attributes to Heidegger’s oeuvre already includes an internal strife with Hegel. The entire book can be read as an extended attempt to clarify the stakes of this strife by showing how Heidegger’s concept of temporality both emerges from within metaphysics, including Hegel’s system, and attempts to displace its basic orientation toward permanence and presence.
The first large movement of the book, collected under the heading Time and Method, retraces the path that leads from the early hermeneutics of facticity to the unpublished third division of Being and Time. De Boer emphasizes that this reconstruction is not an antiquarian supplement but the key to Heidegger’s later work. For only if one sees how Being and Time was to have passed from the analytic of Dasein to a temporally grounded deconstruction of metaphysics can one understand the later shift from Dasein to being itself as a transformation of perspective within one and the same project, rather than a break between two incompatible philosophies.
She begins by following Heidegger’s early engagement with Husserl and Dilthey. Husserl’s Logical Investigations had given Heidegger an access to rigorous description of intentional life and to the idea of a presuppositionless investigation of “the things themselves.” Yet very quickly Heidegger comes to see that an approach starting from the intentional consciousness of objects cannot adequately articulate the factical and historical character of human life. Under the influence of Dilthey’s philosophy of life and the problematics of the human sciences, he shifts his focus from consciousness and perception to life’s concrete self-relation and to the ways in which life understands itself in its own historical situation.
In this shift, phenomenology becomes hermeneutics. De Boer highlights Heidegger’s formulation of a “hermeneutics of facticity”: philosophy should retrieve life from its tendency to fall into everyday absorption in the world and allow it to understand its own being in a way distinct from objectifying knowledge. Hermeneutics here does not mean a technique of interpretation applied to texts; it means life’s own attempt to clarify its essential structures. This attempt, however, remains bound to the a priori in Husserl’s sense: philosophy still seeks essential structures, but now they belong to the finite existence of Dasein rather than to an ideal transcendental subject. De Boer stresses that this already introduces a tension: philosophy aims to describe essential structures, yet the very life that enacts these structures constantly slips into inauthentic modes, tends away from explicit self-understanding, and resists being captured in concepts. Philosophy must retrieve life from its falling, yet the falling belongs to life as such and therefore also weighs on philosophy itself.
It is at this point, de Boer argues, that Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle becomes decisive. In the 1922 manuscript on Aristotle that was meant to secure a position in Marburg, Heidegger experiments with a twofold deconstruction: he attempts first to free Aristotle’s texts from sedimented scholastic and neo-Kantian interpretations, and then to expose a limitation in Aristotle’s own basic concepts that renders them inadequate as foundations for a hermeneutics of facticity. De Boer reads this project as a crucial prototype for the later destruction of the history of ontology. Aristotle’s analysis of phronēsis and sophia in the Nicomachean Ethics and his account of motion, dunamis, energeia, and ousia in the Physics and Metaphysics are taken as exemplary sites where the Western understanding of being becomes bound to certain temporal assumptions.
In Heidegger’s interpretation, phronēsis is the form of understanding in which human life gains a concrete view of what is to be done in a particular situation, informed by an implicit grasp of its own good or eschaton. De Boer notes that Heidegger radicalizes this Aristotelian notion. He draws out the “noetic” moment in phronēsis: beyond situational deliberation, phronēsis includes an implicit understanding of the being of the agent, the “for-the-sake-of-which” that orients the whole practical comportment. This anticipates the later notion of Dasein’s understanding of being and of resolute openness toward its ownmost possibility, death. At the same time, Aristotle subordinates phronēsis to sophia, the contemplative knowledge of immobile first principles. For Aristotle, the highest mode of human existence lies in the pure beholding of unchangeable ousia, and the motion of life reaches completion in this contemplation.
De Boer emphasizes how much depends here on Aristotle’s tacit concept of movement. The basic scheme of dunamis and energeia—of potentiality and actuality—emerges from the domain of making and producing. Beings are understood in analogy with artifacts that move from an initial possibility to a completed actuality; entelecheia names this achieved condition. When this schema is generalized, the being of beings is understood in terms of completed actuality; the highest being is that which is in perfect energeia and so free of movement. De Boer notes that for Heidegger, Aristotle’s concept of movement thus already prejudices the question of being in favor of an interpretation through the lens of production and completion.
This prejudice shows itself even more clearly when Aristotle thematizes ousia. De Boer reconstructs Heidegger’s argument that the philosophical use of ousia inherits an original sense in which ousia means possessions or stable property, and parousia means abiding presence. When Aristotle uses ousia to name what something is most essentially, he understands this “what” in relation to a mode of presence that persists through change; the concept captures what is permanently there. Thus the various “ways of being” that Aristotle distinguishes—categories, actuality versus possibility, truth, and accident—are ordered to an underlying sense of being as presence. De Boer underlines that in Heidegger’s reconstruction of his own development, this insight into the temporal meaning of ousia marks a turning point. The question “what is being?” becomes the question “in what temporal horizon does being first appear as presence?”
Turning “beyond Husserl and Dilthey,” de Boer follows Heidegger as he generalizes this Aristotelian diagnosis into a critical concept of metaphysics. Metaphysics, in this new sense, is not merely a set of doctrines, but a historically entrenched way in which the understanding of being has been guided by the predominance of present. From Parmenides through Plato and Aristotle to Hegel, being is interpreted as constant presence or as identity that endures. Metaphysics remains unaware of the temporal background that allows presence to appear at all and thereby treats time as a derivative feature of beings, rather than as the horizon in which being is understood. Heidegger’s question becomes: how can one think the temporal horizon that both makes metaphysics possible and limits it, without simply repeating metaphysics at a higher level?
Here Being and Time enters de Boer’s narrative. She insists that the analytic of Dasein cannot be understood as a self-sufficient existential anthropology; it is designed to prepare the shift to this more radical question. Dasein is investigated because its existence is characterized by an understanding of being, and this understanding is to be traced to its temporal basis. The analytic of everydayness, anxiety, care, falling, authenticity and inauthenticity is thus read as a systematic preparation for a transcendental exposition of time. De Boer stresses the structural analogy that Heidegger draws between the ontological constitution of Dasein and the constitution of ontology itself: both display a primordial structure and two modifications, one in which this structure is covered over and one in which it is retrieved. This analogy will become explicit in the reconstruction of the unpublished division “Time and Being.”
De Boer’s key claim is that The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GA 24) offers a “new elaboration” of that missing division and thus allows a partial reconstruction of Heidegger’s intended argument. She carefully reconstructs the plan of GA 24: an introduction, a first part that critically examines traditional concepts of being in Kant, Aristotle, Scholasticism, and modern logic, a second part (only partially completed) on the fundamental-ontological question of the meaning of being and its basic structures, and a projected third part on the scientific method of ontology and the idea of phenomenology, which remains entirely unwritten. In the elaborated portion of the second part, Heidegger returns to the question with which Being and Time had begun: if Dasein’s understanding of being is grounded in temporality, how is the meaning of being as such grounded in a more originary temporality, which he now calls “Temporality” (with a capital T)?
De Boer shows how Heidegger here attempts to turn from the temporality of Dasein (Zeitlichkeit) to the temporality of being (Temporalität). Dasein’s temporal ecstases—Past, Present, Future—are first described as the way in which Dasein is always ahead-of-itself, already-in-the-world, and alongside beings. In GA 24, the same threefold is then taken as the horizon that allows various basic concepts of being—substance, object, actuality, validity—to arise as articulations of presence. Temporality is no longer only the structure of Dasein; it becomes the enabling horizon of ontology. The three dimensions of Temporality delimit what can show up as “being” at all. De Boer highlights the decisive move: understanding of being and being-as-understood are no longer separable, since the same temporality that structures Dasein’s understanding structures the possible articulations of being.
From here, she argues, Heidegger aims toward a further step that GA 24 only sketches: a “turn toward being itself,” in which the focus on Dasein’s understanding gives way to an attempt to think the occurrence of being independently of Dasein as starting-point. Temporality then would no longer be only a horizon of understanding; it would characterize the way in which being gives itself and withdraws, the “gigantic strife of being for itself” that both makes metaphysics possible and leads it astray. GA 24 reaches this threshold when Heidegger raises the question whether being is identical with its disclosure and whether the ontological difference itself fluctuates with temporal modifications of presence. At this point, however, the course repeats analyses from Being and Time and breaks off. De Boer reads the famous remark at the end of GA 24—that a genuine method, as it gives access to its topic, also makes itself obsolete—as a confession that the phenomenological method, grounded in Dasein’s experience, has reached its limit. The movement of thought that Time and Being was to execute cannot be carried through within the very structure it seeks to supersede.
This tension between method and subject matter leads directly into de Boer’s extended analysis of Heidegger’s method. She insists that for Heidegger, method is not an external technique appended to an independently given topic; it is the way in which the topic itself—the temporal movement of being—comes into view. In Being and Time and GA 24 this method is characterized by three interconnected procedures: destruction, reduction, and construction. Destruction takes apart the sedimented concepts of the tradition in order to uncover their original experiences and presuppositions; reduction leads the phenomena back from objectified entities to the being of Dasein; construction ventures a positive projection of ontological structures on the basis of this retrieval. De Boer shows how each of these procedures has a temporal sense. Destruction repeats the past in a way that retrieves its unfulfilled possibilities; reduction suspends the dominance of the present and opens the future of possible understanding; construction projects a possible horizon that is at once grounded in having-been and oriented toward what is still to come.
The formal indication that Heidegger attributes to key concepts—Dasein, care, temporality, Ereignis—also belongs to this temporally articulated method. A formally indicative concept is meant to enact a movement in the hearer rather than to deliver a ready-made content. De Boer underscores that such concepts aim to resist the tendency of Present to dominate; they prevent the essential from being taken as a fixed object and try to keep open the dynamic interplay of Past, Present, and Future. At the same time, she emphasizes the paradox: the more systematically Heidegger explicates his method and his concepts, the more the danger increases that they acquire the very stability they were meant to avoid. The famous admission that method tends to obstruct the progress it makes indicates a structural self-countering: thinking reaches a “ripeness” in which its own categories threaten to turn from enablers into obstacles.
It is precisely this structural self-countering that prepares the transition to the second major movement of the book, devoted to Heidegger’s later works. De Boer titles the opening chapter of this part “The Gigantic Strife of Being for Itself,” echoing Heidegger’s own expression. She now reverses the perspective: instead of asking how temporality grounds Dasein and ontology, she asks how being itself, in its history, grants and withholds its own temporal self-understanding. The threefold temporality that had structured the analytic of Dasein and the reconstruction of Time and Being now returns as a way of articulating the history of being into primordial possibility, inauthentic modification, and authentic retrieval.
In the texts from around 1930—lectures on logic, metaphysics, essence, and the concept of world—Heidegger reflects on his earlier work and cautiously introduces a new vocabulary: being as Ereignis, the “occurrence of own-ing,” and the history of being as a series of “sendings” in which being destines itself to different epochs of understanding. De Boer interprets these texts as a transition in which the focus on Dasein’s temporality is gradually absorbed into a broader conception of the mutual belonging of being and Dasein. The human being is no longer the transcendental center from which being is interrogated; instead, Dasein is understood as the place where being’s own historical occurrence comes to pass. Nevertheless, the earlier analyses remain operative: the three ecstases of time still structure the possible ways in which being can be understood and misunderstood.
The central text for de Boer’s interpretation of the later Heidegger is Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), a fragmentary work composed between 1936 and 1938 and published only decades after Heidegger’s death. She calls it the “source text” from which the later writings derive. The Contributions are composed of short passages spread like blocks in a stone quarry, without a linear argumentative progression. Heidegger announces that “the time of systems has passed”; yet de Boer argues that a rigorous and systematic line of thought underlies the fragmentation. She sees the Contributions as an attempt to execute the turn toward being itself that Time and Being had only prepared and that GA 24 had only gestured toward.
In the Contributions, the question concerning the meaning of being reappears as the projective preconception of “the occurrence of Being as the occurrence of own-ing.” Being is no longer treated as a highest genus, as presence, or even as the ultimate horizon of understanding; it is conceived as a self-differentiating event in which the essential gives itself and withholds itself. De Boer traces how Heidegger seeks to articulate the temporal structure of this event. The earlier language of “horizon” is explicitly problematized: in a marginal note to Being and Time, Heidegger remarks that this concept was supposed to be overcome in the unpublished third division. So long as being is treated as what appears within a horizon, the unity of time and being remains hidden; time functions as the framework in which being is projected, instead of being itself understood as a mode in which the essential occurs. The Contributions attempt to think being and time together, such that being is temporal in its very essence and time is nothing other than the way in which being appropriates Dasein to itself and dis-appropriates it.
De Boer emphasizes that even in this speculative language of occurrence and own-ing the triadic structure of primordial possibility and its modifications persists. In the Contributions, Heidegger distinguishes between an inception in which being first opens a site for itself (the Greek beginning), a long epoch in which this inception is obscured through the dominance of presence (metaphysics), and a possible other beginning in which being would be thought from its own temporal self-withdrawing. Each of these “times” corresponds to a different configuration of Past, Present, and Future: the first beginning opens a promise that remains unfulfilled; metaphysics narrows the clearing into Present; the other beginning would allow Past and Future to regain their force and thus release thinking from the grip of completion. De Boer interprets the Contributions as an attempt to think this other beginning without turning it into a program or a new system. The fragmentary style testifies to a discipline of self-interruption: thinking refuses to close its circle, precisely because closure would repeat the metaphysical pattern it seeks to overcome.
This discipline extends into Heidegger’s historical lectures on the first thinkers, on Nietzsche, and on Hölderlin, which de Boer treats as exemplary enactments of the new perspective. In the readings of Anaximander and Parmenides, Heidegger seeks to retrieve a pre-metaphysical experience of being that has been suppressed by later ontology, and de Boer shows how he understands these fragments through the lens of a still-unified temporality. In the lectures on Nietzsche, the culmination of metaphysics as the will to power and eternal recurrence appears as a supreme manifestation of the dominance of Present. The reflections on Hölderlin test the possibility of a poetic thinking that lets being speak without subjecting it to conceptual mastery. Across these diverse engagements, de Boer discerns the same threefold pattern: an originary possibility, an inauthentic historical unfolding in which this possibility turns into its contrary, and an authentic retrieval that tries to let the contrary revert into a new possibility without cancelling its counter-striving.
The question then arises how one can describe such a pattern without taking the position of an all-knowing narrator who surveys the history of being from above. De Boer confronts this difficulty head-on. She notes that Heidegger’s attempt to present metaphysics as a self-enclosed history of presence, culminating in the technological age, risks producing a speculative history just as total as Hegel’s, only organized around the theme of errancy rather than reconciliation. Heidegger seeks to avoid this by insisting on the essential undecidability of the movement he describes: being’s turning toward disowning may always fail to return into own-ing; the other beginning remains a possibility that might never be historically realized. Yet at the level of discourse, the narrative often regains a quasi-omniscient tone. De Boer reads this tension as structurally analogous to the tension in method in GA 24: the more clearly the pattern is articulated, the greater the danger that it hardens into a system.
It is at this juncture that the encounter with Hegel becomes unavoidable. The third part of the book, devoted to “Heidegger and Hegel,” draws together the threads of temporality, method, and history. De Boer refuses a simple comparative catalogue of similarities and differences. She takes her cue from Heidegger’s own remark that his dialogue with Hegel lies at the crossroads of finitude and infinity. In Hegel’s account, the finite is a moment within the movement of the infinite concept; in Heidegger’s, finitude marks an insurmountable limit that any attempt at totalizing comprehension must reckon with, including his own. The question thus becomes how to think a movement of thought that recognizes its own susceptibility to totalization yet continues to pursue systematic clarity.
The guiding formula of this part is Heidegger’s inversion of a Hegelian thesis. In the Encyclopaedia’s philosophy of nature, Hegel calls the concept “the power of time”: the concept, as absolute negativity, is free from temporal transience and gathers temporal determinations into the eternal present of truth. Heidegger, in his 1930–31 course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, proposes the reverse: time is the power of the concept. De Boer unpacks this inversion. For Hegel, time expresses the self-externality of the concept in nature and finite spirit; the concept overcomes this externality by grasping it as its own moment, thereby proving its supremacy over time. For Heidegger, by contrast, any conceptual comprehension already presupposes a temporal horizon and remains exposed to temporal finitude. The concept cannot place itself outside time, since its very movement of negation and preservation takes place in the temporal difference of Past, Present, and Future. This does not simply mean that Hegel “forgets” time; it means that his conception of time as something to be aufgehoben remains tied to a narrower understanding of temporality than the one Heidegger attempts to articulate.
De Boer prepares the analysis of Hegel’s own texts by returning once more to Aristotle and Kant. Heidegger’s critique of Aristotelian ousia and movement already extends beyond Aristotle toward Hegel because Hegel sees himself as continuing and surpassing Aristotle. Similarly, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics appears as a decisive step in which Heidegger both learns from and contests Kant’s account of finite knowing. For Hegel, Kantian finitude is an incomplete position that speculative philosophy must overcome; for Heidegger, Kant’s discovery of the transcendental imagination points to a finitude more radical than Hegel acknowledges. De Boer suggests that Heidegger’s retrieval of Kant’s “schematism” already indicates a conception of temporality that cannot be integrated into Hegel’s logic of the concept without remainder.
She then turns to what she sees as the heart of the confrontation: Hegel’s Science of Logic. De Boer emphasizes that Heidegger’s scattered remarks on Hegel, especially in Being and Time, point repeatedly to the Logic. Hegel’s Logic is presented as the inner maturation of metaphysics, the work in which the categories of being and essence are reworked through the power of negativity into the self-developing concept. Heidegger, however, often relays his engagement with Hegel through the lenses of Aristotle, Kant, or the Phenomenology of Spirit, and rarely offers a sustained reading of the Logic itself. De Boer addresses this gap by providing her own systematic reconstruction of the Logic, with Heidegger’s concerns as guide, and by asking what it would mean to deconstruct Hegel at this deepest level.
In her reconstruction, the Logic appears as a three-part movement from being, through essence, to concept. The first part, “Doctrine of Being,” begins with pure indeterminate being, passes through nothing, and generates becoming; categories such as quality, quantity, and measure articulate increasingly mediated forms of immediacy. The second part, “Doctrine of Essence,” reflects on the ground and appearing of these determinations; opposition, contradiction, and reflection show that beings are what they are only in a play of negation. The third part, “Doctrine of the Concept,” gathers these structures into the self-related negativity of the concept, which determines itself, particularizes itself, and returns to itself in universality. De Boer brings out how, at each stage, negativity is both destructive and constructive: it dissolves given immediacies and founds a new, more comprehensive stability.
Heidegger’s suspicion, she argues, concerns precisely this interplay of movement and stability. The highest movement in Hegel, the speculative movement of the concept, seems to turn every “not” into a resource for the enrichment of identity. Negation in the Logic always functions in such a way that the concept increases its determination and secures its own presence. The result is a form of absolute knowledge in which the history of metaphysics is comprehended as the unfolding of the concept. De Boer does not reduce this to a simple affirmation of static presence; she acknowledges the genuine dynamism of Hegel’s thought and its capacity to rethink essence as process. Yet she insists, following Heidegger, that the measure of success remains the completeness and self-consistency of the concept. Thus the movement of history, in Hegel’s scheme, reaches an end in which finitude is aufgehoben into an eternal present of truth.
The disagreement about time then takes a more precise form. Hegel’s concept of time in the Logic and the Encyclopaedia treats time as an image of eternity: time is the negative unity of being and non-being that manifests the instability of finite being; this instability is ultimately grounded in the concept, which alone is truly eternal. Heidegger’s analyses in Being and Time and GA 24, by contrast, present temporality as the condition for any understanding of being, including the understanding that produces Hegel’s own logic. The “now” that Hegel analyzes is still interpreted as a point-like present that passes and is preserved in memory; the ecstatic temporality Heidegger has in view—the unified yet internally conflicted interplay of Future, Past, and Present—cannot be fully captured in Hegel’s schema. For Heidegger, the “not-yet” and “no-longer” that permeate existence do not simply dissolve into the higher unity of the concept; they mark an irreducible finitude that determines the very movement of thinking.
De Boer, however, refuses to leave the matter at this level. She argues that the decisive difference lies in the conception of method itself. Hegel’s logic is method in the sense that the movement of the concept is the movement of truth; method is nothing other than the immanent development of the subject matter. Heidegger also denies that method is an external set of rules; he too understands method as the way in which the subject matter—being—comes into its own. Yet the structural organization of their methods diverges. Hegel’s dialectic exhibits a triadic threefoldness: immediate, negative, speculative; understanding, dialectical reason, speculative reason. Heidegger’s method also unfolds in a threefold pattern—primordial structure, inauthentic modification, authentic modification—grounded in the three ecstases of temporality.
In the 1930–31 course on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Heidegger brings these structures into proximity. He insists that the Phenomenology was originally designed as the first part of Hegel’s system, a path of experience leading from natural consciousness to absolute knowing, before being relegated to a subordinate role in the later system. Heidegger privileges this earlier configuration because it seems to retain a more immediate contact with life and history, less dominated by the formal self-movement of the concept. De Boer points out that Heidegger thereby stages his own kinship with Hegel’s most “phenomenological” work while simultaneously shielding himself from the full force of the Logic. He interprets the movement of consciousness in the Phenomenology as a sequence in which consciousness repeatedly discovers that its object is itself, thus moving beyond representational thinking toward a self-knowing absolute. This structure parallels, in a distorted way, the movement from inauthentic to authentic understanding in Being and Time.
Yet the parallel never becomes an identity. For Hegel, the culmination of the Phenomenology in absolute knowing means that the distinction between subject and object is aufgehoben; the concept has become fully at home in its world. For Heidegger, any attempt by thought to become fully at home in being would already signal a relapse into metaphysics. De Boer shows that Heidegger therefore modifies Hegel’s methodical principle: where Hegel seeks a speculative identity of thinking and being, Heidegger insists upon a permanent difference that manifests itself as the finitude of Dasein and the withdrawal of being. The threefold of thinking—destruction, reduction, construction—never resolves into a total comprehension; it remains exposed to failure and to the counter-striving of what it seeks to articulate.
The later texts on Hegel continue this line. In lectures and essays from the 1950s and 1960s, Heidegger presents Hegel as the thinker in whom the onto-theological structure of metaphysics reaches its highest self-consciousness: the absolute is conceived as the self-grounding ground of beings, both ontological and theological. Heidegger argues that this conception still treats being as the presence of what is most present, albeit in a logically refined form. De Boer traces Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s absolute is finally a “semblance of being”: the speculative unity of concept and being gives the appearance of a reconciliation in which negativity is fully integrated, but this appearance conceals the more originary event in which being lets beings be and withdraws from their mastery.
At this point de Boer allows her own voice to come to the fore more than elsewhere. She acknowledges that her interpretation of Heidegger is indebted to Derrida, especially in its sensitivity to the way in which every attempt to include the “other” in a totality leaves something outside. Yet she resists Derrida’s tendency to deconstruct Heidegger too quickly. She contends that Heidegger’s concept of temporality already introduces a structural instability into any system, including his own, and that his attempt to admit the “not” into the essential itself anticipates later deconstructive moves while retaining a systematic aspiration that Derrida does not. In a striking formula, she suggests that Heidegger’s thought can be understood as a “systematic form of deconstruction,” or even as a “speculative deconstruction” in which movement is itself the basic principle.
The Afterword gathers these threads and quietly translates them into a quasi-ethical register. De Boer states that her investigation has concentrated on the logical and formal aspects of Heidegger’s work, yet she insists that Heidegger’s attempt to think a finitude that cannot be overcome serves the more fundamental aim of understanding human existence. The insight that every movement meta logou, every venture of thinking, acting, or loving, is threatened by the very conditions that make it possible, becomes, she says, “precious” to her. The essential undecidability that follows from this—that the good can overturn into its opposite without guarantee that this can be reversed—implies that a certain uncertainty should accompany even our most confident commitments. This uncertainty does not demand paralysis; it demands a vigilance that keeps open the possibility that the other cannot be absorbed into our own projects and that what we take as secure might be undermined from within. De Boer hints that this may be the categorical imperative suggested by Heidegger’s concept of temporality: act in such a way that your acting leaves room for what escapes your grasp.
If one now steps back and considers the composition of the book as a whole, the interplay between its parts becomes more evident. The first part constructs a rigorous schema: from Husserl and Dilthey, through Aristotle and the early analytic of Dasein, to the reconstruction of Time and Being and the articulation of method. The second part takes this schema and subjects it to a displacement: the same threefold temporality is now attributed to being itself and to the history of thinking; Dasein’s centrality is relativized without being simply abandoned. The third part returns to the scene of metaphysics in its most powerful form, Hegel’s speculative philosophy, and replays the entire movement at a higher level: temporality is opposed to the concept as the more originary “power,” method is contrasted with dialectic, and the history of being is staged as a counter-narrative to Hegel’s history of spirit. Each part thus both depends on and dislodges the previous one. The early analytic is shown to be incomplete without the later history; the later history is shown to inherit its categories from the early analytic; the confrontation with Hegel exposes how much Heidegger’s project remains implicated in the metaphysical tradition it seeks to overcome.
De Boer’s distinctive contribution lies in maintaining this double focus without dissolving it into either a reconciliatory synthesis or an unstructured plurality. She gives a unified, temporally grounded interpretation of Heidegger’s work from the early Freiburg lectures to the late writings, without erasing the internal ruptures and hesitations; at the same time, she offers a nuanced reading of Hegel that does justice to the speculative power of his system while clarifying the reasons for Heidegger’s resistance. The result is a description of Heidegger’s project in which the strife between time and concept, finitude and infinity, method and history, becomes itself the essential movement. Thinking, in the light of time, appears as an attempt to follow this movement closely enough that neither presence nor absence is granted the last word, and closely enough that the failure of this attempt remains legible within its own most rigorous achievements.
Simon Gros 
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