The past is prologue to the present as the present is prologue to the future. But these terms need defining, not so much the term “prologue” as the terms “past”, “present”, and “future”, for they represent the divisions of time as a framework or measure for the pinpointing of events, and so have no fixity outside the very framework they provide. The “present”, famously, is the boundary separating past from future, but the very boundary itself is notoriously shifting, for it moves as we try to state it, as in answering the question, “What time is it?”, our answer works only to the degree that we allow it to lack precision. Were we to answer, “Two o’clock”, indeed, by the time we gave the answer, two o’clock would already be past. As a practical matter, of course, our answer was good enough. But the theoretical and speculative point that it is impossible to state a present moment before that moment is past remains as the far more interesting point, ever deserving of consideration.
We need a broader notion of “present” than the instant joining past with future. The boundary of time that I would propose for the purposes of writing these pages is the lifetime of each of us gathered for the lectures to be based on these pages. As long as we, each of us, author and auditors, continue to live, we are entitled to speak of the “present”. The present, then, as I am defining it here, is the exclusive preserve of the living. The boundary of time is then the separation of the no longer living from the not yet dead, on the one side, and the further separation of the not yet dead from the not yet living, on the other side. The already dead define the past. The not yet living define the future. The not yet dead define the present.
By the device of these definitions, even though we are yet left with a shifting boundary both on the side of the past and on the side of the future, yet the interval between past and future, the present, is long enough for us to work some matters out and perhaps even contribute to what will be the heritage of the past for those future inquirers who are not yet part of our present.
Commentary
These words, delivered in the Fall of 2000, belong to the past; their author (my dissertation director), the inimitable John Deely, passed away in January of 2017. We could say, however, that they belong to the near past, inasmuch as the lives of many yet on this earth overlap with the life of Deely. By such an overlap, I mean not only the chronological sameness, but a shared living. In this way, the present of some figures has a way of living more broadly than their chronological lives. The life of an individual shared with others, principally through language, does not change the present, but it changes that individual’s present.
Put otherwise, the boundaries of time shift not only with birth and death but also through the relations that persons form with one another. For us accurately to know any time, whether of the distant past or the imagined future, the recently-transpired or what is happening now, we must know the persons, and especially the person as they form relations.
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