Metaphysics of Presence

In Deconstruction, the metaphysics of presence is consideration (challenging) of the usually unchallenged assumption that is the privileged (and so present) idea by various means such as attending to the dependence of the idea on its opposite, on the trace, to use Derrida’s term, of that which is not present or attended to. There is always such dependence, Derrida would say, because all language is a system of relations.

The term is also used in a related but different sense to refer to considerations of the nature of the present or presentness in Continental phenomenological and existentialist philosophy. E.g.: Husserl: All our ideas about time spring from our experience of the present. That conscious experience is characterized by being intentional, by being toward something. We typically recognize three kinds of time: scientific, objective, Newtonian time, which we think of as being independent of ourselves and as independently verifiable; subjective time, in which events seem to move slower or faster; and phenomenological or intentional time, which is the fundamental experience on which the other concepts of time are based, from which the other concepts derive because the phenomenological present includes not only awareness of present phenomena (the present), but retention (awareness of that which is not present because it no longer is—the past), and protention (awareness of that which is not present because it is about to be). The present is intentionality toward phenomena before us here, now. The past present intentionality toward phenomena that are not present but are with us and so must be past (that’s where the definition ofpast comes from). The future is present intentionality toward phenomena that also are present but are not with us (as the past is) and so must be the future, which will be (that’s where the definition of future comes from). Therefore, in their origins in our phenomenological experiences, the future and the past are parts of the present, conceptual phenomena held in the present, alongside actual phenomena, as phenomena no longer present and not yet present.

Heidegger: Husserl had it all wrong. It’s the future, not the present, that is fundamental. We are future-oriented temporalities by nature, essentially so. Our particular type of being, Dasein, or being-there, is characterized by having care (about its projects, its current conditions, about other beings)—about matters as they relate to those projects. Our being is characterized by existence, thrownness, and fallenness. Existence,which is future-looking, is the most fundamental of the three. Existence is potentiality for being; it is a “project,” projecting itself on various possibilities. In its thrownness, Dasein always finds itself in a certain spiritual and material, historically conditioned environment that limits the space of those possibilities. As fallenness, Dasein finds itself among other beings, some of which are also Dasein and some of which (e.g., rocks) are not Dasein, and it has, generally respectively, “being-with” them or “being alongside” them. “Our sort of being (Dasein) is being for which being is an issue.” So, our present is always oriented toward the future.