Cont Philos Rev (2012) 45:597–602

DOI 10.1007/s11007-012-9238-5

BOOK REVIEW

Book Review: Joan González Guardiola. Heidegger y

los relojes (Heidegger and the Watches)
Fenomenologı́a genética de la medición del tiempo (Genetic phe-
nomenology of time measurement). Madrid: Encuentro, 2008

Marta Jorba

Published online: 6 December 2012

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

A good way to present a philosophical book is to reconstruct the inner logic that
explains and justifies the tasks developed in it. I will begin saying that the book
departs from Heidegger’s work examination on ‘‘ordinary time.’’ The relation the
author establishes with Heidegger is manifold, as we will see, and its description
will help the reader to have an idea of the parts of the book and their connections.
The first two parts develop the genesis of time measurement, which is the way Joan
González deals with the task that Heidegger had already indicated but left out in his
main work. In Heidegger (1972), talks about the possibility of a more ‘‘originary
inmersion’’ (‘‘ursprüngliches Aufgehen’’) of the primitive Dasein into the
phenomena, and introduces the task in § 80 to carry out a ‘‘further investigation’’
(‘‘weitergehende Untersuchung’’) about the relation between the number in the
historic becoming, the world’s astronomically calculated time and the temporality
and historicity of the Dasein. These two possibilities of investigation are not
developed in Heidegger’s thought, and we should mention that the question of the
relation between the elements of the second task is not a secondary question at all in
his work, as he himself says in § 80, but a central one. It is in this sense that the first
two parts of the book can be seen as a complement to Heidegger’s work with respect
to the theory of ‘‘ordinary time.’’ Heidegger and the Watches has a third part that
deals with Heidegger’s interpretation of the ordinary understanding of time and
criticizes it on the base of the achievements gained in the first two parts.
The theory of time measurement developed in the book has two main topics: the
calendar and the watch. The first part is devoted to the genesis of the sense of
calendar in its different forms and the second part describes the genesis of the sense

Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project
FFI2010-16049 and by the FPU Program of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science. I would like
to thank Francesc Pereña for his valuable comments on some aspects of this review.

M. Jorba (&)
University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia
e-mail: jorba.marta@gmail.com

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of watches. We can describe the calendar and the watch differently but they are both
ways of dealing with time which share the element of measurement. The logic of
these two parts is the following: from an initial definition of the calendar and the
watch, the author carries out a very accurate phenomenological investigation which
proceeds by bracketing some everyday assumptions about calendars and watches.
One example is the idea that the watch is the machine used to measure short unities
of time—hours—whereas the calendar would be the extension of these measures to
larger unities. This idea vanishes quickly when the author points out that we find
calendars much earlier than any system similar to a clock understood as a machine.
A phenomenological genesis of the sense of time measurement should avoid
preconceived ideas like this one, as Joan González explained in the book: ‘‘[the
social scientist] tries to fit the phenomena to the previous categories that are typical
of a science; categories which are often accepted without any phenomenological
investigation regarding their legitimacy letter, as for example the distinctions
between circular and lineal time, qualitative or quantitative, regular or arrhythmic,
etc.’’ (p. 32)1. The purpose of these first two parts is not, thus, to establish how the
structure of societies and human cultures vary with respect to the modes of
temporality which we externally attribute to them, but rather to clarify which is
the variation that introduces in the relation between being and time the fact that the
chronometric attitude has been constituted from a being such as the calendar and the
watch.
This purpose, together with the cultural obstacles we find to get the sense of time
measurement, is a justification for the need to look back to history, precisely to that
moment in history in which both concepts appear in a sufficiently delimited way.
This would provide us with the ‘‘natural concept’’ of the calendar and the clock. The
sense of time measurement has evolved in very complicated ways since the first time
that humans were aware of the interval between day and night. If we just analyse the
meaning of our current concepts of calendars and clocks it is easy to overlook
interesting senses inherited from the history of these two entities. All this has a place
in the genetic character of the investigations: ‘‘A historic meditation’’ in a Husserlian
sense is needed, and not an ‘‘hermeneutic of facticity, to state a theory about the
constitution of the calendar temporality’’ (p. 54, footnote 22). The methodology finds
here its justification in the ‘‘thing itself’’, following Husserl’s famous methodological
dictum ‘‘back to the things themselves’’ (Husserl, 1901/1913).
The project of the genesis of time measurement could be realised with different
philosophical methods, but the author chooses precisely Husserl’s latest method,
genetic phenomenology. Resorting to history doesn’t allow us to know directly what
is the sense of the watch or calendar; It is rather that we are aware of the fact that we
already have some preconception of what kind of things they are (we are wearing
watches and using calendars in our everyday life), so that it is only from their
problematization as daily objects that they can relevantly appear beyond its
everyday character. Husserl (1936/1954) describes the movement of the phenom-
enological meditation which the author follows in this way:

1
All the quotes from the book are my own translation.

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‘‘Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and backward in a

zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay. Relative
clarification on one side brings some elucidation on the other, which in turn
casts light back on the former. In this sort of historical consideration and
historical critique, then, […] we nevertheless have constantly to make
historical leaps [historische Sprünge] which are thus not digressions but
necessities’’ (Husserl, 1936/1954, § 9, 1).
From the analysis of the relation between humans and the measurement of time
we can get, according to the author, a phenomenology of the life world. It is the
application of this method to a particular region of being which provides an
‘‘applied phenomenology,’’ in front of the phenomenological founding principles
that Husserl and Heidegger basically established and discussed.
It is worth pointing out that these two parts have to be differentiated from
Husserl’s work on inner-time consciousness, also developed in the latest period of
his thought. The purpose of this book lies beyond Husserl’s interest in understand-
ing our consciousness of time and the temporality of consciousness itself, but tries
to do applied phenomenology by dealing with the history of the sense of time
measurement in relation to our way to understand time itself and to conceive and
organize the world temporally. To my knowledge, a project of this kind has never
been done before, and this shows the originality and the innovation of these first two
parts.
The genetic phenomenology applied to time measurement proceeds in the book
as follows. First of all, the author makes a phenomenological interpretation of the
‘‘primordial night’’ and its meaning in the mythology and the customs of archaic
people, and tries to show empirically (from the anthropology) the anteriority of the
moon’s (monthly) measurement of time with respect to the sun’s (annual)
measurement of time. To demonstrate this structure, it is necessary to phenome-
nologically interpret nocturnal space and the role of the full moon in this space
(symbolically and perceptually). From this interpretation it is possible to give a
phenomenological definition of the calendar as the ‘‘superposition of cyclic
structures of repetition of variable periodicity which permits a horizontal orientation
in time’’ (p. 79). This formal definition requires the study of the evolution of the
material conditions of human life that conduce to a complexity in the elements that
configure the cycles: the sun, the stations, the fields, the menstruation, the
migrations, etc. The display of this complexity makes it possible to delineate a
definition of a year as the unity of all cycles. In this process described by the author,
the possibility of the ‘‘homogeneous hour’’ doesn’t appear until the creation of the
mechanic clock, in the 14th century. Here again the author prevents us from an
everyday assumption: the homogeneous hour doesn’t come from the desire of
imposing a disqualified time in the intramundane events. The reason why the
mechanic clock was created was the reproduction of the movement of the cosmos.
This explains the lack of exactness in the time measurement of intramundane
events. The genesis of the exactness of time measurement doesn’t come from the
earth but rather from the sea. As the author successfully shows, transoceanic
navigation supposed a challenge to calculate with precision the longitude of

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meridians, which in turn needed an exact calculus of time. This was reached with
the clock of John Harrison, in the mid-eightieth century. But it is not until this
calculus is transported to the earth that we find a multiplicity of problems that are
finally solved with the constitution of the Greenwich time as a disqualified time. The
relevant phenomenon in this constitution is what the author calls ‘‘mundialization.’’
This is described as an increase of the ‘‘being-in-the-displacement’’ as a mode of
being in the world. This mundialization implies an increase of the ‘‘no-places’’ and
‘‘no-times,’’ which are those places and times in whose origin there has been no
mundanization of being. Joan González presents the ‘‘mundanization of being’’ as
follows:
‘‘to overcome the interpretation of being as ‘‘there is’’; it means to gain ground in
neutrality under the form of which being often manifests itself’’ (p. 237). The
interpenetration of no-times and no-places will lead to the genesis of the new space–
time of the ‘‘universalization,’’ which is characterised as the coexistence of only one
space–time with the features of both, as it is detailed in the book.
This has been only a sample of the genetic phenomenology the author develops
in these two parts. The brief ‘‘philosophical history of time measurement’’ we have
outlined allows the author to criticize Heidegger’s conception of ordinary time in
the third part. Joan González’s investigations show that not only the genesis of time
measurement has an interest in itself, but also the results obtained in his genetic
phenomenology applied to time measurement are philosophical tools to criticize
Heidegger’s comprehension of ordinary time and time measurement in everyday
life.
In the twentieth century there have been many philosophical criticisms to
chronometric time, but the author takes distances from these criticisms in order to
make his own criticism, specifically to Heidegger. To begin with, the author
assumes that Heidegger’s association between the ordinary comprehension of time
and measured time. This association is based on the analysis of the textual uses of
Heidegger’s courses of the twenties that we find at the beginning of the third part.
The author tries to show that the only way to interpret Heidegger’s concept of
ordinary time—if we want to preserve the continuity with the courses of the
twenties—is to think that Heidegger refers to measured time when talking about the
ordinary comprehension of time. The point of the criticism is to question
Heidegger’s description of the experience of ‘‘wearing a watch’’ as it is described
in Heidegger (1975). As the author sees it, Heidegger doesn’t pay sufficient
attention to the historicity and variation of the surrounding world and prefers an
existential formalization based on the daily constituted behaviour of the Dasein with
respect to the watch. His investigations try to show how the sense of the originary
experience of time measurement is not constituted as a derivation of the everyday
comprehension of time as ‘‘time-for’’ (‘‘Zeit, um zu’’), but rather its originary sense
presents itself as that which carries out a ‘‘mundanization of being’’ with respect to
the neutrality of the ‘‘there is’’ (‘‘es gibt’’). The comprehension of time as ‘‘time-
for’’ is not originary but constituted, and constituted precisely on the base of time
measurement. This thesis is precisely the inversion of Heidegger’s one: the relation
between measured time and ‘‘time-for’’ makes the first a particular and instrumental
case of the second. If the originary meaning of ‘‘time-for’’—understood as the

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mundanization of being with respect to the neutrality of the ‘‘there is’’—is

incorporated in the phenomenological theory of time measurement, then it is
possible to describe the temporality of the ‘‘proper everyday life,’’ which features
are described in the last part of the investigation. With this temporality, it becomes
visible what the author pretends to show in the whole book: there is nothing
‘‘ordinary’’ in what Heidegger calls ‘‘ordinary comprehension of time’’.
We see then that the Heideggerian interpretation of ordinary time in the third part
of the book required the study of chronometric temporality in the first two parts.
Now that we have this panoramic view of the book, it is time to highlight some
important aspects of it. Regarding the first two parts, I would like to make three
considerations. Firstly, although the investigation on genetic phenomenology is
wide and well-informed, it perhaps lacks something important: a reference to the
work as it was conceived in the latter part of the eightieth century and beginning of
the ninetieth century since the industrial revolution. The point would consist in the
role time measurement took when the chronometer entered the factories and they
somehow forced a strict timetable on its workers. Whereas in the agricultural age
time was measured according to the rising and setting of the sun, workers in the
Industrial age measured time according to their punch cards. The is a fact that may
be incorporated in the history of the sense of time measurement. This reason is that
the concept of time changed substantially at this point in history and from then on
the metaphor ‘‘time is money’’ constitutes an accurate description of the relation
between humans and their surroundings. The genetic phenomenology could be
completed, then, by an investigation of this period of history and the importance of
the change in the conception of time measurement.
A second aspect to consider, as a positive achievement of the author, is his
remarkable capacity to create new terms when it is required by the phenomenon,
following a phenomenological and, specifically, Heideggerian tendency. It is not
always easy to find the adequate concept to describe some facts or events nobody
has described before. Some examples are words we have already presented:
‘‘mundialization’’, ‘‘universalization’’, etc. They are neologisms for which the
author gives precise definitions and explanations.
Finally, I would like to stress another positive point as a third consideration. The
first two parts of the book show the easiness with which the author moves himself
among information within empirical sciences such as anthropology, sociology,
psychology, etc., as well as the adequate way in which he uses the sources of
mythology, the history of technique and science, religion and literature. A quick
look at the bibliography will make it plain. An interdisciplinary work like this can
be very stimulating and useful for researchers coming from different scientific
fields. The book also avoids falling in a dispersion of materials and information and
maintains the philosophical purpose clearly defined. It should be noted, however,
that at some point an explanation or discussion of the relation between genetic
phenomenology and empirical sciences is missing, as Francesc Pereña, the presenter
of the book, points out. It could have been helpful for the reader, because it would
have elucidated what is precisely at work in the book. Nonetheless, this is not the
aim of the author and probably another whole new book will be needed to develop
this question.

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With respect to the third part of the book, a fourth comment will be helpful for
the reader. The heideggerian theory that ordinary interpretation of time is one of the
pillars which supports Heidegger’s philosophy, for it is not only one of the recurrent
topics we find in the whole of his work but a major one. Thus, if the critique is
successful, the author has an important point to make. However, as the author
himself acknowledges, it is not an immanent critic, because it needs the husserlian
genetic method to reach its results. This makes the critique somehow oblique. The
author doesn’t ignore that the features of the heideggerian conception of ‘‘ordinary
time’’ have sense in his whole ontological project, which is not the theoretical
framework of genetic phenomenology. A certain incommensurability is thus present
in his criticism. Despite this fact, the author looks for discussion in the area that both
projects have in common regarding this topic.
As finals remarks, I should stress that these investigations are of general interest
for everybody, for it is a book that talks about the lifeworld and its history, which is
the world and the history of everyone of us. The measurement of time is not
something strange to our lives but it is at the centre of almost (if not all) our
everyday activities. The critical apparatus, the multiple footnotes and the amount of
different information show the depth with which the author handles the question of
time measurement in this work of genetic phenomenology. It is in this sense that
although Heidegger plays a significant role in the work, the title can not really
capture the richness of the book’s content. For all I have said, I think it is worth
reading and studying this original and new contribution to phenomenology and
philosophy in general.

References

Heidegger, M. (1975). Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. GA Band 24, Klostermann.

Husserl, E. (1901/1913). Logische Untersuchungen. Zwieter Teil: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie
und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Halle a. d. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1901; 2nd ed. in two parts, 1913.
Husserl, E. (1936/1954). Die Krisis der europäischen wissenchaften und die transzendentale Phänome-
nologie. Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologische Philosophie. Biemel (ed.). Den Haag: Martinus
Nijhoff.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

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