Relation to oneself· Existence
Living in the present
Axis: Temporal orientation — Toward which dimension of time should we orient our life: the present, the future, or the past?
Only the present belongs to us: carpe diem, seize the day. Rather than losing ourselves in regrets or expectations, wisdom consists in fully inhabiting the moment and savoring what is here.
Movements 1
Stoicismexplicit
Stoicism calls for inhabiting the present, the only time we possess: the past is no more, the future not yet, and one can lose only the moment one is living. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that each person lives only this fleeting instant, and that consenting to it fully suffices for the good life.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, III, 10 · Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Philosophers 9
Marcus Aureliusexplicit
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
Senecaexplicit
The common lament over the shortness of life rests, according to , 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)
Camusexplicit
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 and the actor in .
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Don Juanism"
Michel de Montaigneexplicit
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 but without a system. The last word of the 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"
Schopenhauerexplicit
Only the present is real: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and whoever lives in expectation of a future happiness always lives 'later,' deferring his life. The very form of existence is a present without extension, a moving point on which the task is to stand rather than to flee ahead.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. V
Show inferred positions (4)
Zhuangziinferable
The sage dwells in what arises at the instant and "travels in the single breath" of the present, without projecting himself into designs for the future, which belong to the forced action he rejects. Unlike , more turned toward restoring an original state, Zhuangzi stresses the mobility of the flux and adherence to the metamorphosis under way: a thin ground of return to the before distinctions remains, but the accent falls on the espousal of the present.
Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher) · Zhuangzi, ch. 2
Nietzscheinferable
and command us to love the moment enough to will its eternal repetition: the weight falls on the fullness of the affirmed present. A share of project remains, since the is a task to accomplish, but Nietzsche devalues the excess of historical memory that paralyzes action.
The Gay Science, §341 · On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, §1
Laoziinferable
The Taoist sage dwells in the present moment and the flowing course, without projecting himself into designs for the future, which belong precisely to the forced action he rejects. Yet there remains an orientation toward an original state to be recovered, the Dao before distinctions, which lends his thought a strand of memory-return. The future as project is all but absent.
Dao De Jing, ch. 16 and 64
Rousseauinferable
In the Reveries, Rousseau describes those moments when, with neither past nor future, the soul suffices to itself in the pure « feeling of existence ». Happiness lies neither in the project nor in memory, but in full presence to the moment and to nature. This prizing of the lived present will inspire the Romantic sensibility.
Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Fifth Walk
Characters 1
Meursaultexplicit
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
Argument
- Look closely: the past is no more, the future is not yet. The first lives only in memory, the second only in expectation, and neither has any place but our mind. Only the present is real; it is the only time in which we can act, feel, live.
- Yet it is almost always elsewhere that we lodge our life: in regret for what was, in worry over what is coming. We endlessly defer living to a later time which, once it is the present, will likewise be spent preparing the next.
- To come back to the present, then, is not heedlessness, it is to stop absenting oneself from the only time that is real. said it long ago: life is quite long enough for whoever knows how to inhabit it, and the wise alone live fully, because they possess their present instead of spending it chasing the future. There lies a stable peace, , which depends on us alone.
Therefore So wisdom is to bring one's life back to where it takes place: not to scorn tomorrow, but to stop sacrificing to it the only day we ever have, today.
See the pageObjection
- Grant that only the instant is real. It remains that a human life is not lived as a series of unconnected points: it is understood as a story, with a past it answers for and a future toward which it strains.
- Everything that makes an existence worthwhile presupposes it. A promise binds a future self; love is measured by its duration; a character, a work, a friendship are built over time. To reduce life to the instant is to dissolve the herself, who is someone only because she holds together across time.
- The consistent presentist would have to give up promising anything, counting on tomorrow, recognizing himself in yesterday. But no one lives that way: even the one who preaches living in the moment makes plans, keeps loyalties, remembers.
Therefore So the pure present is not enough to carry a life: there must be a thread linking the instants, and that thread is already to project oneself and to remember.
See the pageObjection
- Living in the present, we are told, frees us from regret and expectation. But the instant, by nature, does not last: barely tasted, one must already move on to the next.
- This race from pleasure to pleasure, from one high point to the next, looks all but identical to what called : not rest, but a restlessness that keeps us from being alone with ourselves.
- Lacking a thread that ties its days together, the presentist risks a life without depth: a succession of vivid, quickly forgotten instants that gather into nothing, no work, no lasting bond, no memory.
Therefore So to inhabit the present alone may not be peace, but another flight, a gentler one: the flight that dodges depth instead of dodging boredom.
See the pageMemento mori: remember that you will dieHabitAttested · Stoicism and Epicureanism
Remember that you will die, to make this day denser.
Stoics and Epicureans urged keeping death in view, not to dread it but to make the present denser. Recalling that time is limited sorts the essential from the trivial and disarms the fear of missing out. Today it is a remedy against procrastination and the endless postponement of what matters.
Unlock the practices
The step-by-step routine is part of Premium access: a modest contribution that supports and encourages the development of Philoscopia. Everything encyclopedic stays free and open source — this only opens the actionable practices.
Discover Premium accessAlready unlocked on another device? Sign in to restore it.
The present taskStanceAttested · Marcus Aurelius
Perform each act of life as if it were the last.
set himself to perform each act with all the seriousness and he could muster, freed from yesterday's memory and tomorrow's worry. To hold this stance is to bring the mind back to the present task alone: neither scatter nor haste, but one thing at a time, done fully. You stop carrying at once all that was and all that will be, and the act gains in rightness what attention gives it.
Unlock the practices
The step-by-step routine is part of Premium access: a modest contribution that supports and encourages the development of Philoscopia. Everything encyclopedic stays free and open source — this only opens the actionable practices.
Discover Premium accessAlready unlocked on another device? Sign in to restore it.
The reverie walk: the feeling of existingExerciseAttested · Jean-Jacques Rousseau
As long as one feels existence, it is enough to feel that one exists to be content.
In the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, walks alone, without aim, and lets the soul rest in the pure « feeling of existence », with neither past nor future. The practice takes up the gesture: a slow walk, with no destination and no screen, where one stops planning and comparing and opens to the simple sensation of being there, alive, among things. A counterweight to the hurried life and to the that keeps us forever in the gaze of others.
Unlock the practices
The step-by-step routine is part of Premium access: a modest contribution that supports and encourages the development of Philoscopia. Everything encyclopedic stays free and open source — this only opens the actionable practices.
Discover Premium accessAlready unlocked on another device? Sign in to restore it.
- PrescriptiveExistential Thought experimentWould you live it again?
A demon offers you to relive your life, identical, endlessly: would you want it? The test reveals whether you truly inhabit your time, rather than hanging it on tomorrow or mourning it as yesterday.
the time of a life - PrescriptiveExistentialLiving, or preparing to live
We keep deferring living to a future that, often, never comes: life flows away while we prepare it. Yet if we project nothing, if we give up every goal, do we not lose what gives existence a direction and an impetus?
the time of a life - DescriptiveIs there a present to stand in?
The instant is a razor's edge: the past no longer is, the future not yet, and the present itself has no duration. Does "seize the day" then rest on an illusion, or is lived time a continuous flow that ceaselessly carries the past into the present?
the present instant