The philosophical observation made here by Rick Roma is in its own way a familiar one, but it occurs in an unusual context for philosophical reflection. Reading his lines alone on the page, we may hear them as though delivered in soliloquy or as simply giving personal expression to a paradoxical vision of life: we never find it where it is, but only where it was or where it might be in the future. It would be natural to hear him as simply thinking these thoughts out loud, especially as the reflection on life and time turns to the question of our fears and our relation to loss. But Roma's words and the whole unwinding philosophical reflection that follows are in fact prepared and directed at a particular audience and toward a particular end. Roma is in the business of selling real estate and these words are part of his opening gambit as he seeks to soften up a potential buyer, James Lingk, whom he has just met in a bar. Lingk listens, not only because Roma is a charming and compelling figure, but because the philosophical story about time and loss he tells rings true for him and has a certain appeal. It is a tune he can follow, and it also seems to offer a perspective on life beyond the unsatisfying life he that knows: the absorption with lost chances and the anxious uncertainty about tomorrow. Anyone can find their own lives summed up in such a description and ask themselves why. If all our life consists in looking forward or looking back, then what is the point, where is life itself? And it's not just that the reality of life itself seems elusive from this perspective, but also that the looking forward we indulge in is so much in fear and the looking back is so much in regret or a sense of loss. In this way it can seem that not only do we flee the present reality, but we do so in favor of pointlessly tormenting ourselves with what are mere phantoms. There must be another way. We must be making some basic mistake about life here. So Lingk is receptive to the story and Roma is counting on this receptivity. He is offering Lingk a way out of a familiar trap we construct for ourselves and encouraging in him a different relation to risk, loss and the meaning of the present moment. However, throughout the delivery of his philosophical discourse, Roma himself is operating under a different relation to time, one which could be summed up in the maxim ‘Always be closing’. And from that perspective what he is focusing on is for Lingk, on his part, to seize the moment and sign.Footnote ²

In this lecture I want to consider one strand in a familiar philosophical critique of how we inhabit the temporal dimension of our lives. The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (anxiety toward the future, regret toward the past, etc.) and as illusory because they involve the failure to appreciate the primary reality of the present. Insofar as the diagnosis presents our suffering as dependent on the illusion, we will naturally be open to being free of both. The restricted point I hope to make in this lecture is that while there are certainly ways of being occupied with past or future times that we have reason to criticize, both as forms of suffering and as ways of losing perspective on our ongoing lives, such criticism cannot base itself on any metaphysical claim to the singular or exclusive reality of the present. The task of developing useful forms of describing and assessing the different ways we can go wrong in temporalizing our lives is hindered rather than helped by the suggestion that our concerns with the past and with the future are as such forms of attachment to the Unreal.

Many philosophical reflections on our relation to time take their first bearings from the fact of transience, the passing of time, and the loss of what passes from the present into the past. Our boundedness to time is seen as emblematic of our basic finitude and dependency, our unavoidable relation to loss and impermanence. Within our individual lives time continually passes, and our lives themselves pass and reach their ends, while the time of the world goes on without us. If we are necessarily time-bound creatures, then we are vulnerable to the uncertainties of the future and the losses that go with the fact that our present lives are continually slipping into the past, where we will never recover them. Various familiar kinds of therapeutic philosophy (in both Western and Eastern traditions) present themselves as offering a perspective that we can take on life, that places us outside the hazards, accidents and dependencies of life. A common idea is that the more we can conceive of what really matters in life as something purely internal to ourselves, the less we will see ourselves as hostage to fortune. A form of wisdom presents itself as the recommendation of a perspective on ourselves according to which, for what really matters in life, we cannot be affected by good or bad luck, or the contingencies of external events, or other dependencies. If it is true that there is some basic mistake here in our many attachments to the ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’ the philosopher may be seen as bringing us good news since so many of these forms of attachment are experienced as forms of suffering or loss. Life without these forms of illusion can seem both wise and attractive. The critique of forms of attachment to what passes or what is yet to come can be seen as belonging to philosophical traditions that understand human flourishing in terms of self-sufficiency and immunity to the accidents of fortune.Footnote ³

There is no doubt that our everyday forms of temporalizing our lives are liable to various distortions and infirmities, that our investments in the past or the future can be driven by the compulsion to turn away from the present and thus lose perspective on our lives as they are escaping us in time. In response to this we are sometimes pictured as making a kind of metaphysical mistake in our attachments to the Past and the Future, a mistake about reality and a mistake about what we essentially are. The redeeming thought being offered to us here, however, is that from the right perspective on our lives, we can live without real loss, the loss that comes with temporal existence, with the fact of transience, either because the present moment is the only reality there is, or because the right perspective on our lives is a perspective outside of time itself, where there is no risk of change or loss.

Here are two representative, and quite wonderful, philosophical expressions of the idea that an emotional attachment to the past (or the future) is a form of attachment to something essentially unreal, and is something indulged in at the cost of failing to live in the only reality we actually have, which is that of the present moment.

Here we see a classic version of the conflict between the Philosopher and the Ordinary Person. Here the Philosopher looks on the human spectacle of people absorbed in the Past and eagerly awaiting or fearfully anticipating the Future. And the Philosopher wishes to point out that all of this, the anticipation and the absorption, rests on a fundamental mistake. For the Present alone is real, and hence all this ‘wandering in times that are not ours’ is illusory, and is the way that we miss the only life, the only reality that is ours: the Present. From this perspective, the human propensity to ‘wander in the times which are not ours’ means not only that we fail to find happiness in life, but that we in some sense fail to live our lives at all, since we experience them as always behind us or before us, and never present to us, here. The emotions relating to the past and future are often precisely the target of the philosophical perspective just described (useless regret, disabling anticipation or fear), but these emotions and their place in our lives can profitably be seen as challenges to the coherence of the philosophical perspective on the temporality of our lives that is recommended in the passages just quoted.Footnote ⁴ I have in mind two particular challenges. One is the reply that there simply is no form of human life or human happiness that is concerned exclusively with the present, without the concern with the future basic to being a creature who plans and acts and learns from previous experience. The life of an agent is a life lived in time, and that means orienting itself with respect to the full spectrum of past-present-future. Secondly, we may challenge the metaphysics underlying the philosophical perspective on time illustrated above. For both Pascal and Schopenhauer take for granted that the Present has some exclusive claim to be real, whereas the Past and the Future are the no-longer Real and the not-yet (and perhaps never to be) Real. What I will suggest, however, that this thought of the exclusive reality of the Present is itself an illusion of perspective, that the difference between the Present and the Past does not line up with the metaphysical distinction between the Real and the Unreal (or the True and the False), but rather that the distinction between the Real and Unreal, the True and the False has equal application within the Past and Future, as well as the Present; that is, that the distinction between the Real and the Unreal, or the True and the Fictional, is a distinction we make within all the different temporal perspectives themselves, and not a distinction that privileges one temporal perspective over the others. I'll be returning to this.

***

Before moving on, I want to briefly mention the interest of the comparison between what Pascal says about our relation to other temporal perspectives, and what he says about our relation to other personal perspectives. He suggests a parallel in how we concern ourselves with other times (other than the present tense) and how we concern ourselves with other people, specifically with how we imagine ourselves to figure in the thoughts of other people.

This passionate concern with how we are perceived by other people is something that Pascal sees as a form of vanity, an attachment to something imaginary, as a corrupted form of the emotional concern we have with how we appear to others, how we imagine ourselves to be seen by others, rather than with how we are in reality, ‘in ourselves’. In the case of vanity, it is not simply that we take an interest in lives or perspectives other than our own, but that we value our own lives through the imagined perspectives of others on whom we hope to make a good impression. We ‘live an imaginary life in the mind of others’. It is ourselves and our own lives we remain concerned with here, but only as we imagine them to be seen by some other person, or by others in general. Both in our concern with the Past or the Future and our concern with how we may appear to others, Pascal sees an attachment to something illusory, something purely imaginary, that substitutes for a proper concern with our real life, with the Present or with our Reality ‘in ourselves’ rather than the appearance we make on others.

In each of the passages from Pascal we are described as failing to be content or satisfied with what is truly real or truly ours. We flee from the real and create an imaginary existence for ourselves. Just as we inveterately dream of a future we may never live to see or long for the return of a past we can never reach or have any effect on, in the same way we flee from attention to our poor selves as we actually are and attach ourselves to a mere phantasm, a substitute image we create of ourselves and then try to treat as real. Actual reality is devalued in favor of mere appearance; the image of honor or truthfulness means more to us than honor or truthfulness themselves. And the criticism is not just that we ceaselessly ‘adorn and preserve this imaginary existence’ but, more perversely still, we attach ourselves to this image insofar as we take ourselves to have produced this image in the minds of other people, so that we can behold this image we have created reflected back to us and occupy ourselves with it all the more. It is our imaginary lives that we live out in the eyes of others. But the full vanity and futility of this maneuver is shown in the fact that not only do we cling to an image of our own creation, but this attachment somehow gains support and confirmation from seeing it reflected back to us from the (imagined) responses of others where we have installed it. But any support gained from appearing to shine in the eyes of others should not survive the awareness that it is we ourselves who installed that image there, which throws into doubt whatever confirming role the independence of the other could be playing, insofar as the whole thing is our creation. And, on the other side, insofar as the independence of the other is preserved and thus could potentially play a confirming role for our self-image, we have perversely sought to place this self-image somewhere where we ourselves can never find it, behind the veil of the inscrutable other whose genuine impression of us we can never really know. The ‘imaginary life in the mind of others’ we labored to produce remains as out of reach for us as our knowledge of the future and as beyond our ability to affect any change as the past itself.

***

The philosophical temporal critique from Pascal, Schopenhauer and others can be put in the following form:

As living suffering human beings we have a tendency to live in the Past, we fantasize about the Future, we dwell in unrealized Possibilities, and we thereby miss our lives. And I have suggested a parallel with the similar critique in Pascal of living an imaginary life in the eyes of others. This critique of our concern with how we are seen by others is a critique of Dependence as a failure of Autonomy: We slavishly live in the eyes of others, adopting an external perspective on our own lives, and thereby fail to have a self that is actually one's own. The parallel with the critique of our attachment to the Past or Future is that in both cases we are said to live our lives in Appearance or mere Imagination rather than in Reality.

Both critiques gain their force by being presented in metaphysical terms, that is, in terms of a contrast between Reality and something else, something unreal: the Past, the Future, the merely Possible, mere Appearance. But, given the starkness and absoluteness of the opposition between the Real and the Unreal, the philosophical critique seeks to present itself in terms of what is conceivable, what is possible to do, what makes sense to do and what doesn't. We are told that the only Reality is the Present Reality, and hence that, of course, you can't literally ‘live in the past’ or ‘live in the future’. You can only live in the Present. And similarly, you can't literally see yourself through any eyes but your own, think any thoughts but your own; nor can you actually live in a world of Appearance rather than Reality. The Real Present World is the only world you have to live in.

This moment, however, is a critical point for the critique itself, for it begins to raise a question about just what the criticism is supposed to be of how we live our lives, just what we're supposed to be doing wrong. By the terms of the critique itself, there simply is no such thing as actually doing the impossible thing it seems to be convicting us of: ‘living in the past’, ‘seeing through the eyes of others rather than our own’, ‘living in a world of Appearance rather than Reality’. These are not genuine possibilities for anyone. So the Philosophical criticism cannot be: we are wrong to live in the Past rather than the Present, for on the Philosopher's own view there just isn't any such thing as actually doing that. The Present just is the only reality. In which case the criticism in question cannot be accusing the Ordinary Person of doing that. If this is right then, should we see the philosophical critique instead as saying that we make the mistake of believing that we could or do, literally, ‘live in the past’ etc.? Is the critique telling us that we are making this sort of metaphysical mistake, and are thus guilty of a kind of logical incoherence in our lives? That is, perhaps the critique is not that we actually do this impossible thing of ‘living in the past’ or actually living ‘in the eyes of others’, but that we make the mistake of thinking that we can, and of attempting to live this way. We think we can literally live in the past, although in reality, of course, we can't. This is how we mistakenly understand our own lives.

However, for this criticism to stick, we would have to be convinced that we really are making such a metaphysical mistake, that somehow we, the common folk, thought we could literally live in the past rather than the present, that we really could see ourselves through eyes other than our own, etc.. And here we might reply in our own defense: We have been given no reason to think that we actually do understand our own lives in terms of these blatantly incoherent aspirations. What we do think, for instance, is that we care about what happened in the Past, just as we also care about such ‘mere possibilities’ as what might have happened but didn't. We also care about how we may figure in the thoughts of certain other people, or to other people in general, we try to imagine how we might seem from this other point of view. These are among our ordinary objects of concern.

So far this does not describe any metaphysical mistake we are making. It just describes various different forms of thought and concern that we engage in. Our ordinary forms of thought include such forms as the Present Tense, the Actual, and the First-Person point of view, but they also include other complementary temporal categories like the Past and the Future, and they include other modal categories of thought relating to the Possible as opposed to the Actual, and the forms of thought expressed in third-person and second-person discourse, rather than the first-person forms. When we think about the last Presidential election (the Past) and the next Presidential election coming up (the Future), we are using these ordinary temporal forms of thought, and when we do so we are not forgetting that the Past is the Past and the Future is the Future, and that neither of these is to be confused with the Present moment. Making temporal distinctions like that is just what these different temporal categories enable us to do. The crucial point, I think, is this: Thinking about something in the past, even dwelling on some past event, is not the same as thinking of it as though it were the Present, or as taking the place of the Present. Instead it is just using the ordinary temporal categories as they are meant to be used – at this point there doesn't seem to be any mistake in question.

What about the idea of reality, and the thought that the Past and the Future are not real , and hence it can't make any sense to give any importance to them, to concern ourselves with them, to think about them in any extended way? Here again, it is not in fact easy for the Philosopher's Critique to show that there is any mistake involved in our ordinary forms of thinking and caring about things in these terms. For when I think back, for example, to seeing my friend last year, who lives far away, and how I would like to see him again this coming year, but for that to be possible I'll have to start making plans now – in all of this I'm not thinking about last year's visit as if it were today. I am not losing but gaining temporal perspective here, thinking about that visit as belonging to the Past. And as far as Reality goes, I'm thinking of it as something that happened in the Real Past, and not the Imagined Past, or the Merely Possible Past. Those are quite different things. What really happened in the Past is not the same as a dream, or something fictional or wholly Unreal, but rather has the kind of Reality that past events have that really happened, as opposed to those that might have happened but in fact didn't. Similar considerations apply to the modal thought that I might possibly be able to make a visit next year if I make some other change. To think that thought, and to be concerned with that possibility, is not at all to think of that possible happening as though it were really happening now. There is no confusion of the Actual with the Merely Possible here. In thinking these thoughts and being concerned in these ways I am using the logical category of the Possible in just the way it is meant to be used.

So it is not clear that the Philosopher's Critique can support itself by appealing to the exclusive metaphysical Reality of the Present. Instead, we see that the distinction between the Real and the UnReal, or between the Real and the Imaginary, has equal application to the Past and the Future too. Truth and reality do not line up on the side of the Present as opposed to Past or Future, but are (like the false or the imaginary) forms of assessment that apply equally within the different temporal dimensions. There is a perfectly legitimate notion of Truth or Reality that applies to what really happened in the Past, as opposed to what didn't really happen, or what I wish had happened instead. The notion of what is really happening in the Present applies to the Present, and the notion of what really did happen in the Past applies to the Past. As far as reality or truth goes, they are on a par. They just belong to different temporal categories, and we already knew that.Footnote ⁵

At the same time, Schopenhauer and Pascal do have a point of course. There are certainly better and worse ways of living in time, and surely we can recognize something of ourselves in the pictures presented by Pascal and Schopenhauer. There are confused and self-defeating ways of living our lives in time, or in how we concern ourselves with how we appear to other people. We have the descriptions in Pascal and Schopenhauer of familiar ways that someone can get absorbed in the Past or the Future and thereby lose the Present that is constantly slipping away. These are familiar wrong ways of living out our lives in time. But at the same time we lack clear ways to describe the right way to live out our lives in time, to temporalize one's existence. If, as I have been arguing, we deny the metaphysical terms of the Philosopher's Critique, and deny that the Present has exclusive claim to Reality, then we are acknowledging that temporalizing our lives, living them out within the different temporal categories, is unavoidable for us. The question then will be not how to escape from Time, but how to develop vocabularies and forms of thought for distinguishing the better and the worse among the ways in which we necessarily live out our lives in time.

***

The thought that the appeal to a category of ‘reality’ can provide the basis both for a critique of and a solution to the failed ways in which we temporalize our lives produces a mirage of stability, in which we shift between two incompatible and equally uninhabitable perspectives. ‘Living in the moment’ may seem an option both wise and attractive until we begin to reflect that any actual present moment is too thin, too brief, to genuinely concern us, too narrow and impoverished to contain our familiar forms of finding meaning in life. By comparison with the immediate present moment, the Past is the great expanse of everything that ever happened, the good, the bad, the fulfilling and the tragic. And as we move on in time the Past just keeps getting bigger. All the people we have cared about and all their stories are there; the whole factual story of human life on earth. Hence it is not hard to see how this realm of the past would occupy our attention and be the object of our deepest and most complex emotions. And although we know much less about the Future than we do about the Past, it is still the focus of our hopes and fears and we cannot but project ourselves there imaginatively from our lives so far. By comparison with the vast regions of the Past and the Future, what really is the ‘present moment’? How thin a slice of time must it really be in order for us to be true to the injunction to withdraw our attention to Past and Future and truly live in the only genuine reality there is, the living Present, uncontaminated by either the Dead Past or the Unrealized Future? It seems that under the pressure to be serious about this metaphysical demand we would have to shrink our focus of concern from this year or this week or even this hour or minute and try to invest ourselves fully in this fleeting moment, a point without extension, which is therefore very difficult if not impossible to focus on. And at this point in the argument the supposedly metaphysically superior reality of the Present, the firm point that we started from, begins to look much less secure. We began thinking we were going to finally retain our grip on what is most solid and real, and cease ‘wandering in times that do not belong to us’, and now this solid ground of the Present moment begins to seem indiscernible, not a place where we could actually live.

Rebounding from the imaginative effort to find all of life's importance in the exclusive reality of the Present, we may shift to embracing the equal reality of all the different moments of one's life, and spread our concern indifferently along all of them. Here the thought that ‘All times are equally real’, would be interpreted as meaning that there is no reason to differentiate our concern between the Past, Present and Future. On this view the advice takes the following form: Think of your life as all one great expanse, containing all of your life events, all of them equally real, existing at different points in the timeline of your life. From this perspective it might be argued that you have no reason to be concerned with one part of it more than another simply because it is located somewhere different along the great time-line of your life. They are all parts of your one real life. Hence if you once lived through a period of high hopes that were later dashed and ended in disaster, be glad you had that happy period of high hopes. It still happened, it is still part of your life, as much as it ever was.Footnote ⁶ And conversely, if you once had a painful accident which you are glad to have recovered from, when you said ‘Thank goodness that's over!’, there is no real reason to feel relief now, or even at the time of your recovery, because after all, all that suffering is still ineradicably a part of your life experience. The painful event is there forever, lodged in your biography.Footnote ⁷

But of course this perspective on one's life seems no less unreal; as hopeless as dwelling exclusively in the vanishingly brief moment of the present. And neither of these perspectives on Time seem to make sense of the possibility and the actual fact of real hope or real loss in human life and our ordinary responses to loss. It does not seem possible to make sense of something like ordinary grief within the terms of this critique, and indeed it does sometimes seem to be the point of the Philosopher's critique to convince us that grief or regret are irrational, and that from a proper perspective on our lives we will come to see this and thus be free of such potentially devastating emotions. This is where the therapeutic guise of the metaphysical critique is most seductive. This critique is on the one hand a criticism of our ordinary lives, and on the other hand the promise of a more liberating or consoling perspective that is available to us if we would only take it.

Yet, while acknowledging that doing so would be a radical break with our ordinary ways of living and thinking we may still want to demand that the course of therapy being offered not simply begin by finding our ordinary temporal responses unintelligible. For instance, we may think of someone who is very attached to his grandmother, the person who sustained him through various crises, but to whom he was occasionally thoughtless or even cruel. When she dies he goes through a period of intense grief, and regret for the love he failed to show her when she was alive. Now she is gone and won't come back. Can he console himself with the thought that, from the perspective of Eternity, the period of her life on earth is just as real as it ever was, that nothing has really changed, that her existence on earth is just located in different period that no longer includes the present? Would he be wrong to reject that thought as simply irrelevant to the importance of what he is experiencing? With certain forms of loss, especially when they concern other people, we are strongly inclined to refuse the promise that we could live without grief, either by forgetting the lost person altogether, or by adopting an atemporal perspective on the person's life from which we see that his or her brief time on earth is a real as it ever was, and hence nothing essential has changed now that this life is entirely in the past and no longer in the ongoing present.

If the preceding arguments are on the right track, we seem faced with the collision of the following two thoughts: On the one hand, we argued that it is false to claim that only the Present is Real, because I claimed that the Past is an equally legitimate category of thought, not a form of fiction or illusion, and that within thought about the Past there is its own familiar distinction between the Real and the Unreal, between what Really Happened and what didn't really happen. In this sense, there is no exclusive claim to reality attaching to the Present. On the other hand, we should not think that this claim means that there is no essential difference between the Present and Past and the Future, or that it doesn't make a crucial difference to our proper forms of concern whether something or someone is part of the present or belongs now exclusively to the past. Of course we concern ourselves with the Past and the Future differently from how we concern ourselves with the Present. To understand such concepts at all is to understand the applicability of such forms of concern as planning for tomorrow today and taking steps now to realize those plans, and to understand that the forms of concern available to me regarding the past are quite different. If my grandmother is no more, I am not making a metaphysical mistake to still concern myself with her, but nor does this concern with her, that very person, mean that I am losing sight of the fact that she is not here now, and will not return in the future. I thus recognize that some of the forms of concern toward her that I previously took for granted are no longer open to me. This can be a difficult adjustment, in many cases never completely accomplished.

There is room for ordinary truth and falsity about the Past just as there is about the Present, and we are not wrong to concern ourselves with both dimensions of truth and falsity, reality and unreality. But it doesn't follow from this that the forms of concern are, or could be, or should be, the same. It may be true that there is a distinction between the Real and the Unreal, the true and the false, with respect to all the different times, but all the same they are still different times, and as a living person I am located differently with respect to them.

And of course all of these considerations do not yet even take into account the fact that there's something essentially misleading in thinking of the different temporal dimensions as separate worlds at all, as we sometimes speak of the world of the past, the world of the present and the future. Despite what may seem natural in the metaphors, we have reason to resist seeing these mutually implicated temporal dimensions of reality as comprising different worlds one might inhabit or exclusively concern oneself with because after all, as we might put it, it's the present which eventually becomes the past, just as the past we look back on now was once the future. That is, today, the very day we are having now, will soon be the past and we will speak of all it contains as yesterday. This very present day is the sort of thing we may have dreaded or looked forward to in the future, when we were situated in some previous time, and it is this same present day that (assuming we live to see tomorrow) we will look back upon as belonging to the past. So these temporal categories cannot represent metaphysically distinct worlds if one of them (the future) becomes the other (the present), which then becomes yet another (the past). This is not the behavior of distinct ‘worlds’ but is rather the structure of a system of mutual dependencies of significance. The very reference to ‘worlds’ or ‘realms’ is in place when we mean to speak of completeness or self-sufficiency. (Here the idea of a ‘realm’ assumes a political or territorial understanding and gives it a metaphysical significance.) But as categories or forms of experience ‘past’, ‘present’ and future are not independent or self-sufficient. The past and the future are not separate worlds, but rather temporal categories which form a system together, like yesterday, today and tomorrow. You simply can't have one without the other.

And this fact that these temporal categories form a system together, that they are part of one temporal form of understanding the world and our own lives, and that they are what they only in relation to each other, is yet another reason for thinking that this philosophical temporal critique I have been examining, this idea of the exclusive reality of the present can't be right, that it must be confused. For in telling us to acknowledge the exclusive reality of the present, the critique presents things as though the category of the present were some freestanding category, one that we could make sense of all by itself and apart from its systematic relations with the other temporal categories of the past and the future, as though we could have a concept of today that wasn't part of a system that included the concepts of yesterday and tomorrow as well. According to the line of reasoning developed here, this very thought doesn't make good sense. In thinking about our relation to time, we have to take the different temporal categories as a whole, therefore we can't think of today or the present moment as some freestanding category with an exclusive claim to reality. (It makes no more sense than the idea that we could only have the temporal idea of ‘before’, without a complementary idea of ‘after’.)

***

Employing these temporal categories is not just a matter of having certain thoughts or representations (as important as that is), for it is also true that we concern ourselves with these categories in various ways: we may regret what happened in the past, or be anxious that the very same thing will happen again in the future. Or, combining the temporal and the modal: we may desperately hope that it may yet be possible to make a difference so that we don't make the same mistake that we made before in the future. I urge these thoughts upon myself, and act upon them, so that later in the future I could hope to live without the regret that I feel now for what I did before.

That is to say: it is not just that our language enables us to think thoughts in temporal categories, but in ordinary life we occupy ourselves with these dimensions of reality, in various different ways they concern us deeply. Another way to put it would be that it matters to us to get these things right, rather than wrong, just as it matters to us to get things right about our immediate present experience. There is truth about the Past and Future just as there is truth about the immediate Present, hence there are better and worse ways of orienting ourselves with respect to the temporal dimensions of life just as there are with respect to the non-temporal dimensions.

We live out the temporal forms of existence just as we live out the immediate Present. This is inevitable for us as human beings. An Existentialist thought is that a person necessarily orients herself in various ways to the temporal dimensions of her life. There is no such thing as a person who simply lacks any relation at all to her past or her future. Even the person we describe as ‘living as though there is no tomorrow’ is thereby expressing a particular orientation toward the temporal dimension of her life, say, an attitude of reckless indifference to the future. A similar idea can be found in certain Existentialist writers, about the forms of thought which relate us to other people: one necessarily relates oneself in various ways to the fact of other subjectivities, and how we may appear to them, even if that is in the mode of avoidance, isolation or engulfment.

We said there are better and worse ways of living out the temporal dimensions of one's life. And as we have seen, there are familiar names for some of the worse ways, familiar terms of criticism: a life consumed with nostalgia or regret, a life of anxious or hopeful anticipation; and with respect to other people and how we appear to them we can describe a life defined by vanity, status-seeking, deference to idols, competition with rivals. But it seemed that we don't have clear names for what are the better or the right forms of living out the temporal dimensions of our lives, or the right forms of thought and concern with respect to our imagined place in the minds of others.

I've been emphasizing that these temporal forms of thought are not in themselves either good or bad, right or wrong, anymore than logical forms of thought such as negation or the conditional are themselves either right or wrong. They are forms of thought which the fact our being linguistic creatures make both possible and unavoidable for us. A temptation that we see expressed in Pascal and elsewhere is to look at the familiar ways in which we go wrong in living out the temporal dimensions of our lives, and in living out the forms of thought about how we figure in the thoughts of another person, and to conclude from this that these very categories must be forms of illusion. And we have seen how this thought takes an explicitly metaphysical form in Pascal and others: these very categories must be forms of illusion because the only Reality is in the Present and the Actual, the only available perspective on one's own thought and life is one's own perspective, and not that of another.

I have argued that this thought itself represents a confusion: when we think thoughts about the Past and the Future, and when we concern ourselves in various ways with these dimensions of existence, we are not thereby confusing the Present with the Past, but are simply thinking of the Past as Past, and the Future as the Future. And as for the idea that the Present has an exclusive claim on Reality, I have argued that this is not true either. The distinction between the Real and UnReal has perfectly direct application to the other temporal categories just as it does with respect to the Present. There is the difference between what really happened last year and what we merely imagined happened last year.

The idea that the only Reality is the present moment begs the question against the ordinary coherence and serviceability of the temporal forms of thought, which have their own ways of drawing the distinction between truth and falsity, reality and appearance. The metaphysical argument from Pascal and others encourages the thought that, since these other forms of thought are really forms of illusion, the right perspective on the world, and on one's own life, must be one that is outside of these categories altogether: thus, a perspective on one's life wholly outside of time, either restricted to the present moment, isolated from past and future, or a wholly atemporal perspective from which all times are equally present, and objects of concern in exactly the same ways. The idea of such a possible perspective on life can be seen as a specifically consoling illusion in that it promises to show us that loss and transience are themselves unreal, because the very temporal categories in which we experience something as lost are unreal, and our forms of concern with things lost is a mistake because it is a form of concern with something perfectly unreal, illusory.

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It plainly does matter to us whether some bad thing is looming ahead or is safely behind us, just as it matters to us whether some beloved person is someone that we will see again in the future, or someone whose life is over now and whom we will never see again. That difference matters to us as well, and human life would be unrecognizable without these differences in our temporal responses. Neither the exclusive reality of the present moment, then, nor a kind of temporal neutrality across all times make any sense of actual human life, even though, as we've seen, sometimes it's precisely such a perspective that's recommended to us as a way to solve the problem of life. Neither the idea of the exclusive reality of the present or a kind of temporal neutrality across all times makes sense as a relation to one's own life. Rather than either of those perspectives, what we want is to be able to situate ourselves in time, just as we situate ourselves with respect to other people. I am one person among others, and I also live at a certain point in time. I orient myself from that perspective, both to other people and to the other times of my life. I'm living at a certain ‘objective’ time, a certain point in the history of the world, and that's one timeline. And I'm currently located at a certain specific point in my own particular life. That's another timeline, a much shorter timeline, unfortunately. But I'm always located at a particular point there as well, older than last year, younger than I will be next year.

So I project myself forward in time, from a certain point in objective historical time and from a certain point in the finite time of my particular life. This is what I mean by situating oneself in time, as opposed to either exclusive concern with the present or concern that is neutral with respect to past present and future. In living, I project myself forward in time from here, from today, and I look back, and I recollect my past life from here, and not from some neutral atemporal standpoint. This is what situating myself in time must mean. The very orienting of oneself in time takes place within the temporal flow of one's own life and the time of the world in which that life takes place. And because I'm constantly moving forward in time, I don't stand outside the stream of time and observe it from the bank of the stream; rather, I am this cork floating downstream along with everyone else. Because I'm constantly moving forward in time, I'm constantly at a layered point in the timeline of my life. Because of that, just what I can recollect of my life itself changes over time. As I grow older, as I accumulate more past, my past keeps building up. There's always more of it available to me, more as a possible object of recollection and concern, pleasure and regret. And at the same time, of course, as I move forward in time, there's less of my particular future available to me at every moment. But this shrinking personal future is unlike the ever growing past that I can survey, that's always getting larger. For unlike my ever growing past that I can survey, I don't in fact know just how much less of my personal future is now available for me to project myself into. I can't survey that in the same way that I can survey the past, either my personal past life or the past of objective history in general. So that's yet another way in which I must, in living out these temporal categories, relate myself differently to the future than to the past. So since I'm situated at a particular moment in my ongoing life, I now have a particular past to reflect on, more than I had yesterday, not as much as I will have tomorrow. To be situated in time means to live one's life forward from a certain moment in the history of the world, and also a certain moment in the span of one's particular life; and it is from that moment that one orients oneself toward what now counts as one's past and what can now still count as one's future.

Schopenhauer captures something real when he says that the scenes of our life resemble pictures in rough mosaic which can only seem beautiful (or even intelligible) when viewed from some distance. But as with the viewing of actual mosaics, to say this does not discredit the more distant perspective from which we can see the pattern produced. It just tells us where to stand when we look, if what we want to see is not the individual tiles but the picture they make. And Pascal captures something important too in how the incessant anticipation and preparation to be happy can tend to make happiness itself unreachable. But he is wrong to see our various attachments to the past and to the future as examples of ‘wandering in times that do not belong to us’, for they all belong to us, and we belong to all of them equally, while we relate to them differently.

The forms of meaning and attachment that define human life as we know it and care about it belong to the finite temporality of life. They are not available from an exclusive focus on the perspective on the present moment or from a perspective outside of time altogether. In the attempt to understand and conduct our lives as we find them, the restriction to either of those perspectives would only make sense only if being living creatures were accidental to our existence.