I think it is upon you to say what you think the passage means, if you assert it is something other than what I say it means.

Explain, such that I understand how this is not, as it seems - powerfully evocative of Nietzsche: — counterpunch

Okay. So here is the passage:

One can, quite generally, in defining the concepts of the past, the future, and the eternal, see how one has defined the instant. If there is no instant, then the eternal appears behind as the past. It is as when I imagine a man walking along a road but do not posit the pacing, and the road then appears behind him as the distance covered. If the instant is posited but merely as a discrimen [division], then the future is the eternal. If the instant is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future which reappears as the past. This is clearly to be seen in the Greek, the Jewish, and the Christian views. The concept on which everything turns in Christianity, that which made all things new,* is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If one doesn’t watch out for this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One then gets the past not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the future (the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins).

Imagine there is no instant, that is, no "present moment" between past ad future, which is easy to do for all you have to think of is a smooth sailing of the past into the future, and is occurring now as I type. A seamless process, and one might conclude there is no present at all since to break away fromt his process, to suspend its continuity would require precisely in the suspending, that which you are trying to suspend; I mean the thought itself of a suspension is itself part of the flow. So positing a present seems a paradox.

K argues that if there is no instant/present, then actuality is lost, that is, the actual event of being there as a real agency where the past is literally unfolding before one as a process, a palpable affair. Clearly there is something to that smooth sailing, but just as clearly there is something to concrete experience that is NOT a past generating a future existence.
K argues, if there is posited a present, but the present is only a demarcation between past and future, then the future is just a replay of the past, out into an eternal vanishing point, the same as looking back at mere recollection, only into the future.
The only way to reconcile time is to bring all under the subsumption of an inclusive present; after all, it is this actuality where past and future have the possibility to be conceived at all. The actual is the present, and there are no temporal instantiations in the future or the past; or, the past is not conceived in the past, nor is the future, but both have their, say, evidential basis in the present.
Now, what Kierkegaard means by the heretical and treasonous mixture that annihilates the concept is clear: It is the positing of the past and the future as merely a running stream of events, an inviolable Heraclitean continuity with no way out. History, personal and world history, possesses no possibility for freedom and reality becomes an abstraction and the meaning of all things is trivialized. We become slaves of time.
And if you are a Christian, like K is, God, by this heretical mixture, becomes an impossible concept.

Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’. — Joshs

So, I'll field these as I see fit, though I may be a bit on the outside of the issues.
As to immediate presence, I see no alternative to thinking of the self as transformative, or an event, rather than a presence simpliciter. But calling it an event, a process, a becoming, does not make the reduction to presence any less, well, present: Presence is a place holder term for what is otherwise impossible to conceive, and so it is delivered from all characterization. Becoming and Being, these are ancient terms. What I will call the extended reduction takes the matter asymptotically toward the impossible (you know where I get this; it is Jean Luc Marion. Not his words, but he thinks like this), and language falls away.

As to the split: I claim that value cannot be conceived without an agency that receives it. I think that a perception of the color red simpliciter doesn't require a transcendental agency to receive it. There is "myness" there that brings all things under the synthetic inclusiveness of my encountering them but this does not implicate anything beyond this, and so an efficient phenomenology would have no grounds for positing a transcendental I. But then there is metaethics, the good and the bad of experience is an altogether different matter. I hold this for good reasons, but that would take another argument. Metaethics changes everything in ontology: not so much about Being as it is about value-in-Being.

“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)

To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense. — Joshs

Perhaps. I find this argument the kind of thing analytic philosophers take seriously, thinking of those Third Man arguments about Plato's forms. Regressions

For me, I have to go no further than the palpable experience joy and suffering, pleasure and pain. The hammer smashes my thumb and I take a hard, direct look at this pain as pain and ask, what is this? I conclude as Moore did: it is a nonnatural property, but then, so what. I am acutely aware of the way language disguises reality, brings such things to heel, reduces what is Other to what is the Same, to talk like Levinas.

I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception. — Joshs

This is an interesting paragraph. Note that in the following there is casual appropriations from those I read. From what I have read and thought of the issue, it is the "understanding" that not just steps between the perceiver and her object, but is part of the constitution of all affairs, cognition, affect, raw terror or blankly gazing outward as what informs the event as "that which is" in the same way that walking down the street possesses no explicit reference to streets, walking, trees and sky, yet all of these are "proximal" and such proximity in the moment constitutes what we call reality in the everyday sense: I see a cloud and having seen many clouds I can safely anticipate what will follow, and this anticipation normalizes the world; when we ask what reality is, the "sense" of normal anticipation is what is behind the question. Thus all events are mediated, pragmatically mediated, if the pragmatists have it right, and I think they do.
And yet, there is it, palpable value. Ouch! and Wow! (trying very hard NOT to trivialize experiences with mere reference language). When Kierkegaard attacks rationalists for forgetting we exist, this is what he was talking about, I would argue. The question that strikes at the heart of this is, how is it that I can understand things that are not in the interpretative functions of pragmatically apprehending objects? We don't understand them, would be the answer, but we are merely familiar with them, and we reify this familiarity, but then, this reification is exactly of this pragmatic anticipatory apprehension. I see no way to avoid this. The hyletic feels are of a piece with the interpretation.

But on the radical other hand, there is metavalue. Ouch! is bad, and this is has a very special status epistemological status as, while it is understood in the usual way, entangled in one's complex affairs, Pain qua pain is not, as you put it, differential.

I think I also claim (a thought in progress) that reality IS value, knowing full well that this sounds absurd. One has to take that Husserlian suspension of natural science very seriously.

Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects. — Joshs

Joined at the hip, or, of a piece, this taking AS transforming its object. One of the many things I have to thank Heidegger for is this. For me, this completely reconceives priorities when it comes to foundational questions. Material substance, e.g., is not a false theoretical idea, it simply is now considered equiprimordial with other context bound, taken AS, regions of interpreting the world. What rises to the fore is meaning, not so much Frege's "sense" (but then, not not this either. I am reading Ricoeur for the first time now on how narrative and metaphor make novel meanings that evolve into novel interpretative possibilities) but aesthetics and its affect. Heidegger thought poetry was an instrument of meaning making, as I've read. The question I ask is a timeless one: Is the secular taking the world AS sufficient to span the distance of nihilism.
I am sure it is not.

From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “ — Joshs

But this: the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense brings things to what Kierkegaard is telling us: the past constructs the present as a movement toward the future, and the present here is freedom, a migrating freedom of the soul. Putting aside the religious talk, K is saying the "superordinate system" is the present, the past and future are subsumed by the present, and this is confirmed by ontological authority of "existence" in the palpable engagement in the world, and mediation, the taking AS, is part and parcel of the phenomena in a given encounter, making this superordinate system a complex present.

Thanks for that glorious bit of thoughtful and engaging writing, btw. The kind of thing that helps me understand what I am trying to say.

Sorry but, with all due respect, that's fatuous nonsense. It's like saying ... 'before Mt. Sinai the long wandering ancient Hebrew tribes stayed together "by the grace of" goober without already having had prohibited Murder, Adultery, Lying & Theft'. Even if so, that wouldn't explain every other large human grouping for the prior one hundred or so millennia at minimum prohibiting the same modes of social violence without "divine permission" and yet still function more or less as cohesive peoples like the Egyptians behind the Hebrews at Sinai and the Canaanites ahead of them. "Faith" and "grace" have meaning in the context of the rest of my previous post (pace Kierkegaard), particularly, but not only, with respect to 'seven generations thinking'. — 180 Proof

I reviewed what you said earlier, and it is not wrong, just not really to the point. You are being asked to look at time as a structure of experience. Consider the various things you object to to be extraneous. It's really not about Goober at all, though Kierkegaard did think this mysterious eternal present was a dramatic break from typical thinking and di call it God and the soul, but then, it isn't a bunch of Bible beating references to Biblical passages. The analysis doesn't depend on these. Take it more as an analysis of the "event" of our Being here, and an observation that in a given event, any one will do for the content is incidental, we are moving along in a Heraclitean river of experience, if you will, but the flow of events from past through present on to the future is an essential ontological feature. We are this "flow" into the future. Kierkegaard;s thinking is that this temporal movement is encompassed by the present, the only actuality that is ever really there. After all, the past is conceived and the future is conceived, always, already, if you like, in the present.

Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept? — Possibility

Energy distribution? Neuroscience and psychology? But what is it about this that is not outdated by a century? Not regarding specific content, but regarding it NOT being empirical in nature. Rovelli does not take the matter to its foundational level if he is still talking like this. Tell me, how does Husserl figure into this?

“Life” and “now” may not be separated, if you are alive, then it is now! — Present awareness

This implies that an analysis of what it means to have life reveals the nature of what it is to be now. Explain, pls.

And God still remains a mystery — TaySan

Begs questions. God??? Mystery?? Remains??

It's Nietzsche for beginners. But it's mistaken. Human beings are imbued with a moral sense by evolution, and in fact - religious values are expressions of that innate moral sense; adopted when hunter gatherer tribes joined together - to forge a social group under a common belief system. — counterpunch

Sorry but that is not it. I mean, I'm not saying things you say here an there are all not true, but that this has nothing to do with what Kierkegaard is saying. Case in point: what do you think he means by "heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept"?

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards — S.K.

This is from Repetition. Living forwards, in its perfection, is to be a knight of faith, something K confessed he could not do. It would be to live in the eternal present AS one recalls in daily affairs. Quite an idea, eh?

Kairos (καιρός) time rather than chronological time or la durée:
What kind of ancestor (i.e. past self of future selves) will you be? In what ways today are you striving to be a 'less harmful' past self to your future self/selves (i.e. future peoples)? which invokes the Great Law of the Iroquois 'seven generations' thinking... — 180 Proof

K puts the matter in the hands of the soul's or God's prevailing over the moment, living IN grace, and he shows hw this works in the structure of time. But anyway, The Great Law of the Iroquois? This sounds like it has to do with consequentialist thinking. A knight of faith does observe ethical obligation as the driving force of our true self. One is to be above this, and goods acts issue from God's grace. It is not a propositional affair at all. It is a mode of existence, you might say.

No, we were born to pay bills, and die. — baker

No, we were born to pay bills ("the bill" we pay to be here, our work, our very weird biological embeddedness and all the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to), scream bloody hell to the sky, then die.

It's about the temporal orientation of civilisation; backward looking. Unsaid, is that we retreat, bowed from the presence of the Creator at the beginning of time, and so enter into the future blindly, and arse first!

In reality, we are not devolving from perfection in the past. We grow from animal ignorance into human knowledge over time. Hence, God is in the future - we grow to meet Him. — counterpunch

Quite right. I responded even before I read this.

To my mind, religion occurs in an evolutionary context - and may well be pointing at something real; albeit in culturally idiosyncratic manner. I don't know if God exists or not, but to my mind, God is in the future, and we grow to meet Him. — counterpunch

No wait. I do see that the passage mentions Christianity and sin. I almost forgot. But these should be considered as merely incidental. The focus is time. It is an apriori analysis of time, its past, present and future structure. Kierkegaard is not just "a religious writer" as Heidegger called him, and I am certain K made significant contributions to his thinking, as with this analysis I provide in bold print.
This eternal present encompasses past and future, says K. After all, when you are recalling or anticipating, is always IN the present, so how can an ontology of time e consider past or future without
the present. Of course, the present is elusive, hence the discussion.

Actually, he’s a theoretical physicist, working in Quantum Field Theory. — Possibility

I haven't read the entire book, but I have read "through" it and about it, and it is clear to me that he is an iconoclast to the scientific community, but what is striking is that he brings in Heidegger and Husserl, so he might be worth looking into. I say this because Husserl was famous for keeping science at bay in philosophical discussions, for science does not ask basic questions or go into the presuppositions of empirical research. It doesn't ask, what is a concept? How can we describe the experience that delivers the world to us? How is what we have before us as objects in the world actually constituted as "what we have before us"? An object is given in time, so what is the temporal structure of giveness?

Questions like these are ignored by science, which is why I don't go to the scientist for philosophical insight. They don't deal in basic questions, foundational questions. They often think they do, but they don't.

To my mind, religion occurs in an evolutionary context - and may well be pointing at something real; albeit in culturally idiosyncratic manner. I don't know if God exists or not, but to my mind, God is in the future, and we grow to meet Him. — counterpunch

religion? How is this about religion?

In the Bernau Manuscripts, however, Husserl seems to suggest that the complicated interlacing
of retentions and protentions is constitutive of primal impression. Not only is primal impression
not self-sufficient, it is a constituted product rather than something that makes a constitutive
contribution of its own. This more radical claim is expressed in Husserl’s idea that the initial
event of experience is the empty anticipation. — Joshs

Let me take a metaethical position: the interlacing retentions and protentions constituting the primal impression? Is this spear in my kidney constituted? It is as a "fact" constituted, and my talk about it, my informed awareness, but the ethical/aesthetic dimension of it, the searing pain that issues forth, registers unmediated. Experience is permeated by value, but what intrigues me is the metavalue of value, that elusive "Good" or "Bad" that attends value, making the presence of pain exceed the factual.

In short, for me, if all there were in the world were facts and the logic that rules them, then I suppose this discussion on Husserl you provide would be adequate, and presence would be reducible to some featureless qualia, the features of which bound to the interpretative contexts of before's and after's (minus the jargon of the philosophy) imposed on them, rendering presence, as Dennett put it, a nonsense term. But there is nothing that has ever crossed our perceptual path that is anything like this. There is no "redness" as such; this is just an abstraction from the fullness of experience, which is always in or of value. Anticipations are inherently "caring" anticipations. And this points directly to value, and puts the fate of the discussion of presence and existence in the hands of a metaethical, metaaesthetic analysis. I.e., what is value? What is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad?

And this presents a new discussion on contingent goods and bads vis a vis absolute goods and bads, and the sense that can be made of this.

So I am saying matter of presence rests with the matter of metavalue.

What confuses us when we seek to make sense of the discovery that no objective universal present exists is only the fact that our grammar is organised around an absolute distinction - ‘past/present/future’ - that is only partially apt, here in our immediate vicinity. The structure of reality is not the one that this grammar presupposes. We say that an event ‘is’, or ‘has been’, or ‘will be’. We do not have a grammar adapted to say that an event ‘has been’ in relation to me but ‘is’ in relation to you...

We are struggling to adapt our language and our intuition to anew discovery: the fact that ‘past’ and ‘future’ do not have a universal meaning. Instead, they have a meaning which changes between here and there. That’s all there is to it.
In the world, there is change, there is a temporal structure of relations between events that is anything but illusory. It is not a global happening. It is a local and complex one which is not amenable to being described in terms of a single global order. — Carlo Rovelli, ‘The Order of Time’

Since Rovelli is an empirical scientist, it is safe to assume that the indeterminacy of time has to do with relativity. I gather this also from the way he talks about "meaning which changes between here and there" and the lack of a "single global order" in temporal events. Am I right about this?

For Husserl and Heidegger the present is a fulfillment of a past which comes out of the future, so it is the present that is inessential rather than past and future, and eternity becomes incoherent. — Joshs

This is the piece of reasoning I am struggling with:
I see it as an argument from actuality. How can Husserlian "adumbrations" of past experience make any claim on the present actual experience if all there is to verify is cognizance in the present? I am aware of the argument: every thoughtful experience one can possibly have cannot be free of the historical constitution that delivers it. As Foucault asked: Am I not being ventriloquized by history when I speak and listen and understand and the rest?
But this annihilation of the present is an illusion, just as thinking my cat is a cat just by the calling it so. Not that it is not a cat in the everydayness of things, but to say that language and actuality are joined at the hip, bound together in meaning making as Heidegger does, leads to an incompleteness, an omission, in ontology, which is the giveness of things. I may be given the world through language and logic, but this certainly does not preclude the intuition of the giveness in the present. Of course, intuition is out of fashion because it is considered reducible to its interpretative parts, its "regional" deferential associations (Both Heidegger and Husserl use this term, I recall), but I beg to differ. The present giveness exceeds the interpretative possibilities that would attempt to own it.
There is Levinas and others in this thinking. But Kierkegaard rules here in that the past and the future are subsumed by the present's actuality, as the latter pervades both; both are IN the present. Call it a terminal "existential "trace" (though I have a way to go to really understand Derrida. Frankly, other as well).

At least you made the effort of making those questions. There are people than don't even care about what's going on around us and I think is even scary to be honest...
Trying to answer this philosophical questions in my own personal view I would say: I live in Spain but furthermore in a planet called "Earth" that is a big galaxy where thanks to randomness we the humans developed.
I don't know who I am but I know sometimes I dont like myself.
We came here because is our path and we have to do it. It is impossible just staying in home and do not do it nothig.
What the world means is upon us. First, as you perfectly said, time is one of the most tough enemies of humans, something that the Earth doesn't have. So we can start saying humans always put a lot of meaningful stuff. — javi2541997

Quite right that the earth does not have this. We impose time ON things when we encounter them, perceive them, talk about them, and so on. Does this mean what Einstein was talking about was really not space and time independent of perception? Absolutely.
But then, space and time as such are entirely uninteresting. It is what occurs in these, and this goes to our existence, not the world's. Empirical science is out the window: we make the rational categories that make science possible. We provide the caring that motivates research, and when the stars' composition is revealed through the categories we generate, the importance of this all lies within the observer, the researcher.
One has see this matter through the eyes of phenomenology. Are there "big galaxies" out there independent of the way we take up the world rationally, affectively? No. Standards of "truth" acquire a new criterion: meaning. Once meaning is at the top of the world-describing hierarchy, everything changes. Now it is not a physical universe at all that tells us truth at the basic level. It is the sorrows and joys of our existence. Empirical science Must be dethroned, and phenomenology does just this.

The passage I provide is from Kierkegaard's Repetition. If you find it compelling, we can talk.

We apprehend the past or the future by relating to it from our current position as an ongoing event, which is always changing. Lisa Feldman Barrett describes this from a neuroscience/psychology perspective, in her book ‘How Emotions Are Made’, as an ongoing prediction of attention and effort, generated by past experience and informed by an ongoing state of valence and arousal in the organism. It isn’t so much that past and future don’t really exist, but that our relation to past or future is always relative to an ongoing and variable state of the organism.

Perhaps it is the present that does not really exist, but is merely what we make of it. — Possibility

This is the position of a lot of philosophers, that the present is impossible, and this is because the very fabric of reality is time: the present is a timeless "instant" and is not an instant at all, really, for to conceive of an instant we have to have in place a notion of duration, which is a quantifiable term. So an instant is just, as K says, a metaphor, the best we can do (Wittgenstein said the same, and he was a big fan of Kierkegaard. But with W the eternal present was a piece of nonsense, but nonsense that is foist upon us, irresistible but irrational, as thus, must be passed over in silence). But it is not an instant; it is an impossible eternity: true eternity lies in this reduction. Anyway, the position is you refer to, this denial of the present, sees the past not merely flowing into, but constituting the future. Having an experience at all is to be in time, for what we call the present is, on analysis, the language, culture, concerns, caring all acquired in ones personal history, and this personalt history, of course, has its own history of evolving through the centuries. So, as the argument goes, there really is no escape from history, for the moment you even ask the question, you are always, already IN the past and this past is going to be determinative of whatever future is "made". Richard Rorty (and his pragmatist predecessors) has the strongest view on this: the Real is reducible to problem solving, even at the level of language use.
There is a LOT of philosophy about this, and it goes way back, but is it right?

This is why Kierkegaard is so important. Did we not, the brief sketch above, forget something? As K says, did we not forget that we (or objects, and everything) exist? That we are actualities and not just memories in play. Call the memory in the apperceived moment or event an interpretation, the kind of thing the understanding produces when asked the question, what IS it? The response will be an educated one, framed in language, contextualized in remembered affairs, and so on, and this is what interpretation means. But just because we have this history bearing down upon my apprehension of this cat on the sofa as I apperceive it, there is in this the actuality of the "cat thing" which is that which is be interpreted. And when we attempt to "say" what the cat IS, we find the only predicative possibilities issuing from this past of assimilated knowledge, but: these are not that thing. And we know this, but we cannot SAY this (And again, this is Wittgenstein's Tractatus claim).

One has to pull back for a moment and consider this, for we are in Kierkegaard's territory. Time dominates interpretation, NOT concrete existence. This latter is transcendental. or, as K puts it, eternal.

If you see this bit of reasoning with some understanding, then you understand a major part of existential philosophy. And I would add, Eastern philosophy as well. This "concrete" reality that is timeless, eternal, is what Meister Eckhart would call God without God. It is what Buddhism and Hinduism is all about.

Strong claims, these, but they are readily defensible.

I always recommend Carlo Rovelli’s book ‘The Order of Time’, which explores the changing view of time from ancient philosophy to post-Einstein physics, and attempts to deconstruct and then reconstruct this aspect, positing a reality consisting of interrelated events rather than objects. It also touches briefly on the notion of Eternalism as simply the way we experience reality, or the ‘container’ structure of values or potentiality in which these events interact for us. — Possibility

I read through the Amazon free pages of Rovelli, and it's not like I disagree with all he says at all, but tell me briefly what it is that he says that you find compelling. Container structure of values? Eternalism?

The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.'
I recommend his book because it offers a whole meditational reflection and I found it to be extremely inspiring. — Jack Cummins

It is inspiring. Care to take inspiration its logical end? You have to be, I'm afraid, a bit crazy to relate to Kierkegaard, because he take normalcy and turns it on its head, so that what was familiar is now alien. But no worries, as K is a bit like Descartes, and God steps in to save the day. Just when you are at your rope's end, and the world has become like Kafka's cockroach, and you are there, with your bootless cries screaming to heaven about what is going on and why we are born to suffer and die, there is the eternal present, which is God and the soul.

I like Eckart Tolle, though I haven't read much. He follows through on the tradition of Western mysticism, and I have always held Meister Eckhart in high regard. In a sermon he pleads with God to be rid of God, and this is in the epigraph of John Caputo's book on Derrida, whom he believes affirms God through apophatic philosophy. There is something to this, the idea being what really stands between an earnest inquirer and God is the language that holds belief in place in a way that one hardly even knows one's foundational views are being invisibly constructed. This is how strong the bond of language is. We live in reified language, there a house, here a cloud. What ARE these without the mere familiarity that informs us?

Time is one of the toughest challenges of human behaviour. We were born to die. Simple. Nevertheless, we the humans, are ready to fill this time making our lifespan worthy to live. I guess thinking so much about the past is not relatable because this is something we already live so we no longer need to remember this period. Also, past tend to be very dramatic and pessimistic because most of the times we don’t usually have good memories at all.
What the future holds is upon us. My opinion is trying to find something connected to happiness. This always been the main goal of humanity. We have to reinforce it.
We are lucky of speaking/debating about it because there are some people in this world that was born just with wars and violence so they do not have the right of think about future. I guess talking about time is like a privilege fortunately we can speak about. — javi2541997

Born to die. But then, it is not the dying is it? It is the caring that we die. You mention a lifespan "worthy" but what is the standard of worth? Of course, there are many answers to this, but here we dismiss incidentals and want to know about what it means to have a standard of worth at all. Something having worth is to care, so why do we care? And what is caring? This goes to ethics and aesthetics, this presence of caring, which is linked to something we care about. In the analysis above, the structure of this caring is time: I care IN time in the form of anticipation, apprehension, excitement, dread and anxiety, and, as you say, happiness, and the like. Though happiness
Thinking about the past? Here, the past is questioned as having an existence at all. One wants to know what reality is. Thought is an aggregate if the past's experiences, the language and culture, personal and historical, but these are realized only in the present, for the thought IN the past is never observed. It is only the presence that has the reality OF the past in it, evidenced by references to the past, that ever has reality in the moment of recollection. I speak language, but the past in which I learned these is never IN the remembered words, they are only IN the present moment of recollection, making recollection really a present affair after all. And the past? Simply a mode of the present.

The privilege of being free to muse, that IS something, isn't it? But it goes a little deeper. It is an ethical question at root: why are those Others forced to suffer and die? And then, you and I as well, for one day I will slip and fall into some wretched machine or they'll find an inoperable cancerous tumor at the base of my brain and I'll slip slowly into madness. No one gets out for free. The question again belongs to Kierkegaard. He asks,

Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?"

He unapologetically supported murderers and antisemites and fascists. Again, The Dasein was Hitler-compatible ... And even after the war Heidi had to be "de-nazified". :shade: — 180 Proof

That wasn't Heidegger's fault. He was unapologetic, but then it wasn't Heidegger ran the death camps. Essentially what Heidegger haters are saying is that they don't like Nazis. You don't really look at Heidegger at all.
Dasein Heidegger compatible? So is the British monarchy. So is American manifest destiny. Are you serious?

He was one of those good Nazis. Sort of like Sergeant Schultz from Hogan's Heroes. Even looked like him. He didn't see anything, either. — Ciceronianus the White

Who cares? He had high hopes for the Nazi party, but that was in 1933. Didn't know or condone what came after. Not as if he were Himmler.
And yes, there are gradients participation. Imagine yourself a member of the republican party and Donald Trump had secretly committed genocide.

The question is not which people killed the most. The question is: do you want to live in a Nazi society? If yes, you are welcome to read from Nazi philosophers and find them fascinating. If not, I would suggest to read Husserl's phenomenology rather than the arianized version of Heidegger. — Olivier5

If I were to go back in time, to "those" times, I would hate everyone's views, nearly everyone's. Blacks were Sambos, Chinamen were squinty eyed fools. But Heidegger wasn't nearly as bad as you suggest. He murdered no one, refused to post anti sematic materials while rector, didn't know how vile things were going to be, and only lasted a year at the post. Only kept his party membership to avoid persecution. His anti-Semitic statements are embedded in a general way of thinking, not hateful, but not constrained by our "postmodern" conscience which is often rather absurd.

But he considered it just an occasion bad judgment, and never publicly condemned what the Nazis had done. That pisses me off.

I have acquired an edition of Anxiety now and will proceed with it. — Wayfarer

Prepare to be irritated. He is not reader friendly. Doesn't even try to be. A lot in response to Hegel, and Hegel is ridiculous. But you don't need Hegel to read this.

One thing I would like to run by you. I looked into the Kierkegaard text you mentioned on anxiety, which actually does complement those essays I mentioned from Weber and Durkheim about the anxiety of modernity. So, a thought that occurs to me, is that perhaps eliminative materialism, and other forms of materialism, which deny free will, are actually motivated by that anxiety. This is because if you deny free will, and the agency of the individual, then the whole anxiety of modernity, the 'fear of freedom' that Erich Fromm wrote about, is solved by that. You don't have fear of freedom, because you're not, and can't be, free. Problem solved! What do you think? — Wayfarer

First, the logic is all wrong, and it actually has a name, which is affirming the consequent. We don't first theorize about freedom, then concerns, worries, fear, issue from the mere assumption. Phenomenology is descriptive, not some self fulfilling prophesy. It begins with anxiety, that is, were ARE anxious, concerned in our everyday lives. Second, materialism in this reasoning would be ad hoc: not backed by its own merits as a sound theory, but just posited for the sole purpose of refuting freedom.

Third, and perhaps most important, and certainly the most difficult, is that what Kierkegaard and his ilk have in mind is not a description of social changes creating circumstances that are anxiety producing, but a structural feature of consciousness itself, as consciousness, that is what makes anxiety possible at all. Read into the third chapter, and we will have found that K is putting Time at the center of this possibility, that is in time the past, an established body of experiences, makes claims on the future, and if we simply go along with things and never question, second guess, interfere with events, then we never are able to sin (sin and its exposition IS the point of the book). What is sin? Sin occurs when we "posit" spirit, and this means we step back from our worldly existence and exercise freedom from the regular stream of events (as animals do, as things are, predictable) that would otherwise claim us. What K is talking about here is really a very simple matter: the stopping of one's affairs altogether, then, in the wake of this, realizing that you are not simply a thing, but are free to make choices. THEN, once this distance between you and rote behavior is achieved, you stand in sin, because in this affirmation, you realize that you are really a soul, and your essence belongs to God. I think K is close to Augustine on this: sin is the absence of God.
Or something like that. Those that follow, Husserl (not so much, really), Heidegger, Sartre, et al, don't take God as an essential part of it, but K's analysis of time and freedom and the anxiety of facing an unmade future is central to existentialism.

No, you're like someone who reads only a few entries from a language dictionary but claims to be proficient in the language. — baker

No, it's not like that. You want to think of it as an historical phenomenon. To me, it is much more interesting than that. Parsecs more interesting.

If all paths would lead to the top of the proverbial mountain, then everyone would already be enlightened and all your efforts are redundant. — baker

But Buddhism gets it right. All others are trying to get where this goes, but they don't know it. The question is, what is the means of accounting for this, describing it, explaining what enlightenment is in experiential descriptive contexts. Phenomenology. Why? Because it rigorously dismisses assumptions about the way things are explained outside of the immediacy of what is simply there, the bulk of explanatory distractions.

"Without contraries there no progression" sic William Blake — Gregory

Dewey said the same in Art as Experience". Those of us who live without struggle are, I would hazard, the least substantive people there are.

I don't share your confidence in finding a unifying viewpoint amongst these different thinkers regarding the experience of consciousness.
For what it's worth, here is Sartre's statement in the Transcendence of the Ego:

We may therefore formulate our thesis: transcendental consciousness is an impersonal spontaneity. It determines our existence at each instant, without our being able to conceive anything before it. Thus each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence. There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected. And once more it is an unconscious from which he demands an account of this surpassing of the me by consciousness. Indeed, the me can do nothing to this spontaneity, for will is an object which constitutes itself for and by this spontaneity. The will directs itself upon states, upon emotions, or upon things, but it never turns back upon consciousness.
— Sartre, translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick — Valentinus

But is this not already unified as a structure of thinking distinctly phenomenological? The devil is in the details, of course, but to turn away fromt he naturalistic attitude, away from the science that popularizes its ideas through technology, toward the basis of experience that is logically antecedent to science: phenomena.
Ex nihilo? Such talk! Now that's metaphysics, there with God creating out of nothing. The mind cannot even conceive of such a thing, and in fact, makes it a point to tell us it is apodictically impossible. Existential freedom has to do with choice and possibilities, but as to what is more fundamental than choice, which is the principle of sufficient cause, it says nothing of. But absolute freedom issuing from our por soi essence is nonsense, and they say he posits this simply because he wanted to hold French Nazi collaborators accountable.
To say experience is generated ex nihilo is no way to remedy an unseen cause. Granted, the generative source (keeping in mind that it is not a brain, for this leads to circular argument, for it is a brain that conceives this brain. Only a third perspective could actually say what the generative source is, and this is nonsense, says Wittgenstein) is transcendental, but that doesn't mean it is "out of nothing".

The thing is: You're not doing your homework. I'm tired of referring you to suttas for the questions you ask. There are Buddhist answers to the questions you ask about Buddhism. But you ignore them. Forget them. Apparently, don't even think of looking to the suttas for them.

It's as if you actually aspire to keep yourself ignorant of Buddhism, so that you can keep making up your own parallel Buddhism and your own definitions of terms. — baker

Just as Kierkegaard ignored much in Christian dogma, and was a better Christian than all of them, it could be argued. It depends on what it is you think is the essence of the matter at hand. When I say if Buddha were at the time of his phenomenological epiphany exposed to contemporary phenomenology, he would affirm it, welcome it, consider it as a penetrating thought, you ignore this. Or if God's grace were explained phenomenologically to Jesus he would have tossed it into the sermon of the mount. I think this true. For phenomenology provides the genuine foundation to understanding human existence. It takes what is essentially important in all religions, spiritual practices, and provides an explanatory basis. I claim that if you follow Husserl's reduction to its logical end, you end up with what is essentially important about Buddhism: Liberation and enlightenment. Who cares about the other things/ They are incidental to this.
You disagree but do you really know what it is I am talking about? All religions, all cultural institutions, language, indeed, the entire human endeavor is really describable at the level of phenomenological ontology. The Four Noble Truths begs questions, and phenomenology has the only responses, for only here are basic questions at their most basic.

Heidegger worked in the early 20's under Husserl, along with Edith Stein. Edith thought this philosophy led straight to God and apparently sided to Kierkegaard about the reason\faith divide. Heidegger left that group an atheist, having turned his scholastic training against the movement of the ever quibbling "schoolmen" (Protestant and Catholic) and forged into territory that has yet to be fully explored. His relationship with other cultures was typically German (of its time), yet the self-called "schoolmen" of traditional China had pondered questions that latter concerned him marvelway before he was born. The Japanese took the idea of "being and nothing" in many interesting directions too, more abstractly than the Chinese. What Heidegger added to the conversation among cultures was an emphasis on time, although Hegel ("Self-Consciousness" chapter of PoS and middle section of Philosophy of Nature) and Bergson had paved the way. Heidegger in fact did give to credit to his fellow German by ending B&T on Hegel, although I never remember him talking about Bergson — Gregory

The question is why Stein goes one way, Heidegger another? What makes for the timeless indecision of philosophy is not the issues being so vague, but the vagaries of people's experiences. Some people are simply intuitively wired for existential affirmation of religion.

Yes, of course. The very name of phenomenology — a word invented by Husserl to describe his approach to philosophy — is based of the Kantian idea that only phenomena are accessible to us. — Olivier5

But the point is he does go on without self effacing disclaimers, even though Kant's "Copernican Revolution" thesis hovers over everything he did. Of course he was allowed to do this because his handling of things was done as an independent synthesis of Kant and others. Heidegger is the same, though Husserl hovers close by at times. Husserl's natural attitude obviously played a role in the das man of B&T, as well as the idea of authenticity, but then, where did Husserl get it? Of course, he read Kierkegaard and others. Time? Clearly Kant's Deduction is behind this, but no mention of Kant in the exposition of Time's adumbrations of memory in the Ideas I.( Elsewhere? I haven't read of it.)
People want to diminish Heidegger, but it can't be done. In Heidegger, the human reality lives and dies and cares and is presented in the fullness of our Being in the world. But he does not affirm the transcendental ego, as Husserl did, and it is here, at this juncture this ego makes no "appearance" that interesting phenomenology lies.

What I found most interesting in The Transcendence of the Ego by Sartre is the argument that Kant meant the "ego" could be assigned to any action at any time but that the experience comes from another source. — Valentinus

Not visiting the text right now, I think what is meant is that the transcendental unity of apperception is a functional center of all experience as it produces pure synthetic form. It is an essentially rational agency that is, of course, transcendental. Thus all judgment issues form this. Experience is also intuitive, and sensory intuitions have there source in something completely other. Noumenal "reality" has two fronts, the TUA is us, the other is not. Husserl called it hyletic. Reading Patrick Whitehead: "Hyletic phenomenology allows for ontological reversibility and recognizes the “unhuman” elements in things."

Sartre and many others were big fans of H. To my knowledge it's only Merleau Ponty who saw H. more as an usurper than as a heir to Husserl. — Olivier5

But there is The transcendence of the Ego by Sartre in which he takes issue with Husserl's generative ego, very busy as the fountain of experience. Sartre thought this compromised the unseen, which he infamously called nothingness.
Haven't read Mereau Ponty. He is on my list, along with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Sure, but my question was: does Heidegger pays his debt to Husserl in B&T? — Olivier5

Did Husserl pay his debt to Kant? Kierkegaard to Hegel? Kant to Aristotle? Heidegger to Kierkegaard? But then, no, he didn't. In the end, after Freiberg, the Heidegger's reached out to the Husserl's, and the latter told the former to go F*** themselves. It was because Heidegger sided with the Nazis, even for a brief time.
As to theory, reading Husserl's Ideas is nothing like B&T at all. Both are extraordinary.

Sartre and many others were big fans of H. To my knowledge it's only Merleau Ponty who saw H. more as an usurper than as a heir to Husserl. — Olivier5

By H you mean Heidegger. Heidegger did not pull B&T out of a hat. It is the phenomenology that Husserl gave him, and they do agree a lot. But Husserl did not encompass the whole human dasein, and if you read Heidegger's thoughts on space, time, hermeneutics, moods, das man, the Greeks, freedom, authenticity, instrumentality, ready to hand, presence at hand, and so on, you see how original he is.
Of course, I certainly haven't read all of either, so I can't speak authoritatively, only based on what I've read. But it was surprising to read Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety. There was Sartre there, Husserl here, Heidegger there, I mean this guy really laid the foundation for all of this.

Here in California christians are up in arms, saying "the Bible is under attack". They think their religion trumps safety over the current virus and they go crazy if you tell them that Jesus is not God. I told one crowd to " recall Jesus" instead of the governor. Ye they don't like me sometimes — Gregory

But consider that you put the whole matter in the arena of people with a vested interest in the status quo, whether they are simply believers or institutional fixtures, they all, all that are included in your comments, without an intellectual conscience in place well enough to think philosophically about religion. So yes, most Christians lack, well, the capacity for sound argumentation. Kierkegaard is famous for exactly this. See his Attack on Christendom. Thre is a reason he is called the father of Existentialism.
One doesn't have to be a moron or a predator to be a Christian, I suppose is the point.

Most of the saints in the Church were great sinners. They are said to be better than others because of the grace and merit Jesus gave them. Which is my main problem with Christianity: they think they are "Jesus" — Gregory

But this is just the dark side of Christianity, the only thing Nietzsche thought about. There is another side altogether.

I think Augustine was such a big sinner that he had to posit the idea of taking on Jesus's merits in order to feel clean again. I think he went to hell, if there is such a place. I don't know enough about Kierkegaard to say more than I've already had. I appreciate his influence on Heidegger — Gregory

His Confessions do sound suspiciously confessional in the extreme. I mean, confessions are commensurate with the deeds done, and he was way over the top. Popular Christianity is a huge guilt trip, especially when it comes to original sin the way Luther talks about it (see this in the Smallcald articles) as the monstrous act we all share in.
But on the other hand, and this would be Heidegger's response as well, since that time we have become trivialized by our instrumental mentality that issues from the dominance of technology. The world is now a "standing reserve" rather than a dynamic for meaning making in human life. this is why Heidegger championed poetry as a kind of crucible where our dasein creates value. German romanticism has a long history, and the essential idea is that the arts are redeeming. But the arts, I should add, are not complete.

I don't have a view that solves differences. But the difference between Lacan and Foucault strikes me as a sharp disagreement about what is happening. We live our experiences and the mirror we view them through is significant. The right thing to do is is incumbent upon understanding what is happening correctly.
Easier said than done. — Valentinus

I don't think analyses of systems of implicit power in social institutions is helpful here, and I don't know much about Lacan. But getting understanding of the "right" view is not therefore impossible because it is not easy. why do we disagree so much? Why was Quine so adamantly against Derrida? Why is there such a wide schism between continental and analytic philosophy? It is because, I claim, of the way we constituted intuitively, and the way theory clouds reasoning and experience. I read Being and Time and I knew he was right, instantly. I also knew Wittgenstein was right about his Kantian claims about the delimitations of understanding. These were platforms to build on, but foundationally, right. And Husserl's epoche, I knew instantly he understood something deeply important, the same thing Buddha knew, only the latter knew it so much better.
Others look upon the epoche and all the post Husserlian work (especially by the French) as just the 'seduction of language". But the proof is in the pudding?