There's no time like the present

how to mind the now

Mary J. Larrabee

pp. 85-111

in: John Brough, Lester Embree (eds), The many faces of time, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

Several postmodernist writers have attacked the very notion and reality of the Present.² An articulation of the Present narrowly defined and argued as derivative of the past and futural horizons of human temporality, for example, might serve the interests of the writers who tend toward absencing the Present from valid philosophical discourse. Or it might reflect a nuanced disparagement of what is present in the Present. Or perhaps it is simply a mental acceptance of the playing out of a theoretical and thus purely intellective endeavor which wishes to collapse the Present into various displaced mental constructs such as metaphor and intellectualized abstractions, that is, displaced out of fully embodied human experiencings into textual or discursive elements of what Husserl calls life-world.³

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund