The present study aims to understand how temporality is the condition of possibility of that understanding-of-being which understands beings as present-at-hand. To do so, we will try to present an outline of the structure of temporality developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. The exposition of such a structure will then allow us to show how presentness—and therefore the entity that has this mode of being—can only come to the fore in a present.