Temporal orientation

One can be stripped neither of the past, which is no more, nor of the future, which is not yet: what we lose in dying is only ever that indivisible point, the present instant, the same for the man who dies old and the man who dies young. From this Marcus draws the deflation of posthumous glory, since those who might remember me will die in their turn, and the concentration on the task at hand, to be carried out as if it were the last. This meditation on transience, more insistent in him than in any Stoic, summons us not to enjoy the moment but to inhabit it worthily.

Meditations, II, 14 · Meditations, III, 10 · Meditations, XII, 26

The common lament over the shortness of life rests, according to On the Shortness of Life, on an accounting error: we have not been given little time, we waste a great deal of it. The argument shifts the problem from fate to use: the preoccupied, slaves to a thousand engagements, have never lived, for they keep deferring their life to later. Only the present is properly ours, the past being fixed and the future uncertain; to claim one's time as one defends a possession is to stop squandering it and to begin, at last, to live.

On the Shortness of Life, I-III and XIV (we squander time) · Letters to Lucilius, I (claim your own time for yourself)

Deprived of transcendent meaning, absurd man bets on the quantity of experiences rather than their quality or any future project: to exhaust the present, to multiply lived moments. This is the presentism exalted through Don Juan and the actor in The Myth of Sisyphus.

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Don Juanism"

Our unhappiness, Montaigne observes, comes from never inhabiting the present: we wander ahead of or behind ourselves, fearing the future and regretting the past, so that we forget to live the hour at hand. Wisdom reverses the effort: not to project oneself nor to hoard, but to "enjoy one's being loyally", to savor fully what presents itself, like Epicurus but without a system. The last word of the Essays is no longer "to learn to die" but to learn to live, that is, to return to the present that fear of death steals from us.

Essays, I, 20, "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die" and III, 13, "Of Experience"

Everything that occupies and fulfills Meursault holds within the instant of sensation: swimming with Marie, the cigarette smoked beside the coffin, the Sunday spent watching the street from the balcony. When his boss offers him a post in Paris, he declines it with no project or ambition, judging that one never really changes one's life. Deprived of that present, he uses memory only to kill time, a sign that he had lived until then with no recourse to any future or any past.

Part I, chapter 5: the refusal of the Paris post · Part I, chapter 2: Sunday on the balcony, pure presence to the street scene · Part II, chapter 2: the inventory of his room's memories to fill time

A being without essence cannot be defined by what it already is, only by what it reaches toward: existence is project, a thrust toward a future it has to be. Heidegger names this structure being-ahead-of-itself, and Sartre takes it up: it is the aimed-at future that retrospectively illuminates the past and gives it its meaning, not the reverse. The primacy of the future thus sets the movement apart from the wisdoms of the present such as Stoicism or Epicureanism, for whom living well is gathering the instant: here, to live is to project oneself and never to coincide with oneself.

Being and Nothingness · Heidegger, Being and Time

Odysseus's existence is structured by a single project that gives it sense and direction, the return, to which he subordinates years, pleasures and detours. Yet this project is wholly turned toward the restoration of a past: to regain his rank, his wife, his son, to set his fathers' house back in order. The great traveler is no man of the present or of novelty: he strains forward in order to re-establish what once was, binding the drive of the project to the memory of his origin.

Odyssey (the return as the end of ten years of trials) · Odyssey, XVI-XXIII (the recognitions of Telemachus, Eumaeus, Eurycleia, Penelope)

Confucian time is oriented toward the past as a model: reviving the old to understand the new is the master's way. Studying the Ancients, the rituals and the odes transmits a wisdom to embody; the future counts less as a project to invent than as a continuity to preserve. This is an orientation of memory and transmission.

Analects, II, 11 (reviving the old to know the new) · Analects, VII, 19 (a man fond of antiquity, untiring in his study)