II. The First Movement: Two Grammars of the Past

Temporality Seen Through Different Lens

Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash

There are two things we can say about what is past. We can say: it is gone. Or we can say: it is, in the way that the future is not yet.

Heidegger insisted that these are two different sentences — not stylistically but ontologically. Vergangenes is the past as chronological loss: the moment that was and is no longer, that recedes as we speak of it, that chronology records and stores as if thereby saving it from oblivion, but in fact only archives it. Gewesenes is something else entirely: the past as Gewesenheit, beingness, one of the three ecstasies of concern that in Being and Time constitute the temporal structure of Dasein.

This is not a past that has ceased to be — this is a past that is as if it were, not behind us but is a constitutive layer of what we are as we walk, think, worry.

Simply put: Vergangenes is what we have lost. Gewesenes is us.

Frankl did not invent this distinction — he received it on the back of a photograph and recognized in it something he already knew from a completely different tradition. From the camps. From the clinic. From an experience that was not philosophical but forced philosophy.

His operationalization of this distinction goes a step further than Heidegger would ever have taken — and it is a step that changes everything. Frankl argues that the past, precisely because it is irreversible, becomes the most secure form of existence. The paradox is intentional: what cannot be repeated cannot be taken away either. Every lived moment that passes from Vergangenes to Gewesenes becomes indelible. Stored. Secure in a way that the future can never be secure.

Heidegger would recognize this structure — but he would not value it. For him, Gewesenheit is not a consolation or a repository of meaning. It is the existential fact of being thrown, Geworfenheit — that we are always already thrown into a situation we did not choose, that we carry the past not as a legacy but as a burden that is us. Authenticity does not come from the past being certain, but from its being accepted without illusions.

This is where the divergence begins. Both speak the same grammar — Vergangenes/Gewesenes — but from that grammar they draw different conclusions that lead them in opposite directions. Heidegger remains consistent with immanence: the past is constitutive, but it does not give meaning. Meaning is not a category that belongs to his analytics of being. Frankl, on the other hand, builds an entire therapeutic and existential architecture from the same structure: if the past is irretrievably stored, then every moment carries responsibility and possibility. Transience is not the enemy of meaning — it is its mechanism.

Here a question arises that Frankl does not explicitly ask, but which his text constantly provokes: who or what preserves what is stored? If the Gewesenes is indelible, in what? Heidegger does not answer this question — and does not want to answer it. He closes this space with a philosophical consistency that borders on stubbornness. Dasein is its former, but there is no one who preserves this former from the outside. There is no cosmic memory, no transcendent receptor, no continuity that transcends death.

Frankl leaves this place open. Not out of carelessness or tact — but because his experience did not allow for closure. The man who went through Auschwitz and came out with logotherapy did not come out with proof of God. He came out with the conviction that meaning is not a projection — that it is discovered, not constructed — and that this conviction does not need metaphysical guarantee in order to function clinically and existentially.

This half-open place is the one around which the others begin to gravitate.

Jung fills it with psychic content: The Gewesenes that cannot be taken away is in the collective unconscious, in the archetypal memory that transcends individual life but does not transcend the psyche. Tillich fills it with the unconditional: that which is in a way that the future is not yet, is because it rests on a foundation that is not conditioned by either the transitory or the impermanent. Fechner fills it with cosmic content: consciousness is a continuum that remembers, and what was conscious continues to be on a level that our usual ontology cannot describe.

Gadamer stands aside and describes the mechanism: understanding always already presupposes what it tries to understand. Gewesenheit is not a problem to be solved — it is the horizon within which any solution can even be formulated.

None of them closes the question that Frankl’s text leaves open. Each closes it partially, from its own angle, enough to show where its limit is.

This is the gravity of the constellation: not agreement but a common orbit around the same hole in the argument.