καιρός, momento justo, momento auspicioso, momento propício

Theodore Kisiel situates the 1922 treatise in the context of Heidegger’s early lecture courses on Aristotle in part 2 of his study The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, 221-308. Heidegger’s analyses of the kairos in Aristotle are also crucially informed by his readings of the kairos in early Christianity; in particular, the 1920/21 course “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion” (G A 60) is important here. (See Kisiel, 149-219.) This course centers on the meaning of early Christian eschatology as documented in St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians. In Pauline eschatology, Heidegger emphasizes, the eschaton is not afuture event, and parousia does not have the sense of “arrival” or “presence” found in Greek, Platonic-Aristotelian thought (GA60, 98ff.). The kairos of the parousia – the Augenblick, as Heidegger translates it (GA60, 102) – is experienced only in an eidenai that implies an already having seen one’s own having come to be (genesthai) (GA60, 93-95). It is a knowing experience of the radical finitude and uncertainty of one’s being before the unseen God, a “wakefulness” of factical existence. (For an excellent and insightful account of this course, see Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s ’Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’ 1920-21,” The Personalist 60, no. 3 (July 1979): 312-24. John van Buren, in The Young Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), provides a rich account of Heidegger’s interpretations of the unsettling eschatology of the kairos in “primal Christianity,” as opposed to the eschatological prophecy found in later Christian and Scholastic thinkers under the influence of Greek philosophy and its prioritizing of the theoretical, contemplative life. See part 2 of his study, chapter 8 (157-202). See also Van Buren’s discussion of the kairos in Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle (228-34). In connection with the theoretico-scientific approach to history, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 211-38. Otto Pōggeler’s Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963) is still an important resource for understanding Heidegger’s theological background. See also Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger (Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1988).) Heidegger’s readings of primal Christianity thus suggest a very different experience of the kairos from the sense of “fullness of time” or “fulfiled time” in later and modem Christianity. (Cf. Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Thomte (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980); also the essays by Paul Tillich, “Kairos,” and “Kairos und Logos,” in Kairos, ed. P. Tillich (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1926). For an overview of the diverse philosophical and theological meanings of kairos, see M. Kerkhoff and E. Amelung, in Historisches Wōrterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter L· K. Gründer (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 667-69. Kerkhoff’s essay “Zum antiken Begriff des Kairos,” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 27, no. 2 (1973): 256-74, gives a rich and detailed overview of the history of this word.) Nevertheless, Heidegger does not simply read the early Christian sense of the kairos that he finds in St. Paul into Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Rather, it is surely Aristotle (mediated by Luther, and, of course, in conjunction with Husserl) who first provides Heidegger with the phenomenological eye and conceptuality with which to analyse the temporality of the kairos in a manner attentive to “the things themselves.” (MCNEILL, William. (The Glance of the Eye. Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory.->http://93.174.95.29/main/AD776C3A9B379A369018F0BCE25A0F7A) New York: SUNY, 1999, p. 45)

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καιρός: «instante», «momento». (NB, p. 42 (ἔσχατον (eschaton)); GA60, pp. 98-105, 106-110 (παρουσία (parousia)), 150 (καιρός); GA61, pp. 137, 139; GA63, pp. 57, 101; GA22, p. 312; GA19, pp. 52, 364; SZ, p. 409 (instante = fenómeno originario de la temporalidad, kairós.) (LHDF)