Consider a football game that has no time limits. Would such a game be worth playing? Certainly not. Scoring a goal would not add to any slightest excitement because any goal would then just be like any other. Only the game’s restriction in time makes stadiums roar to any happening on the pitch – from a mere tackle to a yellow card, eventually to a goal. Time is therefore the essential ingredient for a football game to become eventful and exciting. Even more so, the football game itself is its own time, yet at the same time it is more than that. Each part defines the other mutually and makes one whole – a meaningful football game. Without the time allocated to it, there would be no game at all because a game in itself requires having a beginning and an end.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger applies this thinking to the game of life itself. In his major work Being and Time human essence, the identity and meaning of life are ultimately derived from the passage of one’s own time. A hard to imagine idea of his is that human beings don’t live in time, they are time itself. For example, there is no external time outside the football game itself because the only time that matters for it is its allocated 90 minutes. The same goes for human beings – there is no external (clock) time in which we live because we constitute our own time in the end. The clock is just a coordination mechanism, but it is not time. If it were, we wouldn’t be concerned with it because the clock marches on forever: it is our own time however which is running out.
Without its restriction in time, there wouldn’t be such a thing as ‘life’ at all because the meaning of the word life in itself already entails being ‘not death’, just like light can only be light if it is surrounded by darkness. Time is the light that illuminates the stadium during the game at night – nobody notices the light itself but there is no game without it. When we watch the game we are fully immersed in what is happening on the pitch, yet it is the passage of time lurking in the background that gives the whole show a meaning and a purpose.
