All of which must be relativized to a specific attitude of a specific subject within a specific spatiotemporal configuration who has a specific history of conscious and subconscious experiences, and so on. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

So you relativize ethical good and bad, right and wrong, not to individual tastes, attitudes, moods, and general dispositions, but to a multitude of "selves" within the composite historical ethical agency. I suppose this is the logical consequence of taking Mackie's view. I mean, if objective ethics in the fabric-of-the-world sense he speaks of is out the window, then there are no standards at all can hold any ethical judgment accountable apart from those actualities that produce judgment that are causally immediate, that is, unmediated. Is it ethically defensible for Raskolnikov to murder the old lady? Of course, but then, which Raskolnikov are we referring to, for prior to his poverty he was just a starry eyed student who has not yet been so darkly driven. How many of him are there? And it is not diachronically determined, but synchronically as well, for the at any given time, Raskolniknov is a composite of dispositions the compete for relevance and application.

How does one ever make a determination as to what an ethical agency is when the concept is so fleeting and disjointed? It seems you pin the metaethical question, what is the nature of ethical goodness and badness? on unpinnable actualities.

I don't understand this objection. What exactly do you mean by "refuse to reckon with"? I consider stimulus events such as objects or events that elicit a sensory response when a detectable change to the energy in the surrounding environment is registered by the senses. A stimulus triggers our nervous system whenever sufficient changes in the environmental energy is detected. These changes in the environmental energy act as information inputs insofar as they affect the level of voltage across the cell membrane of the neuron. This is called a change in the membrane potential of a neuron.

The membrane potential of a neuron is the difference in electrical charge between the inside and the outside of a neuron. This difference in electrical charge is due to the unequal distribution of ions between the inside and outside of the membrane. Ions are atoms that have lost or gained electrons and as a result either have a negative or positive charge.

A few of the ions that play an important role in the membrane potential of a neuron are positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions which are more prevalent on the outside of the cellular membrane when the neuron is at rest. Also while at rest, there are positively charged potassium ions and many other negatively charged ions prevalent on the inside of the cellular membrane. At rest, the inside of the cellular membrane is mostly negative with the outside of the membrane mostly positive.

The inside membrane potential is regulated by a protein mechanism, which disproportionately influences which ions travel through ion channels. It uses energy to pump positively charged sodium ions out of the cell and pump negatively charged potassium ions into the cell. For every two sodium ions pumped out of the cell, three potassium ions are pumped into the cell which is how the inside of the cellular membrane maintains its overall negative charge.

An action potential is a momentary reversal of membrane potential which is the basis for electrical signaling in neurons. A stimulus event causes an influx of positive ions to enter the inside of the cell and once a threshold is passed, a sudden, fast, transitory and propagating change of the resting membrane occurs in the form of a nervous impulse. These impulses carry information in the form of a sensation to which we attach meanings to. These meanings are in constant fluctuation as well and can even develop enough differences over time to change the overall patterns of our perceptions.

The thing is, the energy of a stimulus event can be measured and reproduced so to enable us to test how a subject will respond to the same stimulus energy. And, what all the data points to is that while a physical stimulus event can be measured in such trials with a constant variable of energy, the subjects neuropsychological response and subsequent sensory perceptions and associated attitudes, on the other hand, will vary. It then seems likely that no source will produce the same response from us and that our experiences at the most fundamental level are arbitrary. If a stimulus event is held objectively constant, whatever information stored in such energy becomes distorted as it processes within the receiving subject. It seems as if the lighted match transmits a regularity of data which is uniquely processed into meaningful information through it's integration in the contexts of a complex system of dynamic neuropsychological structures tethering the mereology of individual conscious experiences that we identify as ourselves. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

No. I mean to take the lighted match event phenomenologically. In fact, all of your above begs phenomenological questions. Certainly not that it is wrong, but it does not go to basic questions. At any rate: observe the scorching flesh as an empirical scientist would observe a slab of rock, studying it for its parts and their classifications. All you bring out is there, but then once this is exhausted, there is the pain, that is, pain simplicter. This is the metaethical "real" that is the material foundation for ethical attitudes and judgment. This is irreducible. (Not that the language used to talk about it is irreducible, but the injunction not to apply a flame to a living finger is. Wittgenstein would have agreed. He would just refuse to talk about it.)

it is necessary to realize that linguistic expressions are but signals that semantically refer to a unique frame of reference to an experienced event in the absolute context in which it was experienced as it occurred. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

I can respond to your thoughts if you give me an account of what "absolute context" means.

Now I also take your point that you believe that we are the highest level of intelligence below God. "The crown of creation." That unlike the caterpillar, we have no level above us. — fishfry

You use the caterpillar as a model for us? And these references to Darwin pin you to the very mundane scientism you deny. Caterpillars do not give us an analysis of the structures of thought and experience. Do you really think you can infer from an insect's world to ours? And why bother? We only rely on analogies when we have no actual conditions to examine, and in our case you have the actual conditions our existence to observe. Evolution will tell you nothing of the qualitative events that may or may not confirm foundations of religion.
This talk about levels above or below is just general speculation. Ask rather: what IS there in framework of experience that gives rise to religious ideas that is not part of the incidental features of our making?

Did you read my caterpillar story? Caterpillar on a leaf on a branch on a tree in a forest knows what to eat and what wants to eat it. It knows night from day, when to sleep, when to forage. It knows in its DNA that it will someday transform into a butterfly. It has an ontology. But it can't know about the tree, the forest, the earth, the solar system, the quarks and gluons, and so forth. By analogy that's the situation we're in. We may well not be at the top of the intelligence scale. Gotta go finish eating my leaf now. — fishfry

The point is missed. The very conditions of your accepting the actual terms of your limitations, all this talk about caterpillars and inherent boundaries of knowing, is itself imposed by the standards of normalcy you internalized when you were a child. Were it otherwise, and the lines drawn were not so rigorously established, perhaps in a world open to greater possibilities, you would be able to see terms like god, spirituality, redemption, divinity and the like actually have an existential underpinning that is simply structurally ignored in a science oriented world like ours. Remember, empirical science, I gather from your thinking, rules not just what you believe, but what you will not believe.
This doesn't make popular ideas of theism believable, but it does change the conversation, from, say, Jesus' ascension to heaven to talk about metaethics and human interiority.

Finally, I do not have the arrogance or self-importance to imagine that I could ever be personally possessed of the answer — fishfry

But where did that imposition of a limitation come from? I would suggest that you and everyone else is endowed with a suppressed intuitive ability to engage the world at a much deeper level, and it is the philosophy of our age, the positivism, the privileging of science and technology, the disillusionment with public religions, and so on, that create the line you think is uncrossable.

I am a militant agnostic. It's unknown. It's unknowable*. What's for lunch? — Joe Mirsky

But "it" is not a thing without parts, that is, it bears analysis. The trouble with agnosticism is it resignation the foundational issues as being impenetrable, as if language simply runs out in the exhaustive account of a popular religion. No. This is just the beginning. God? Jesus being the truth, the light and the way? Salvation? Redemption? these kinds of questions go to the implicit substance of religion, the actualities that are there, in the giveness of the world which constitute what the religion is really about.
Religious metaphysics is not about invented problems. It is about problems inherent in everyday life, but are unspoken, even taboo.

I appreciate critical feedback so long as arguments are provided. — Cartesian trigger-puppets

As I see it, your "index" of references constitutes an endless search of grounding, any proposition that can be conceived being duly contextually contingent upon other conditions, and those still deferring to others. Such is the plight of coherence theory: an endless stream of inquiry and deference (and difference?). And correspondence's indefensible claim about some foundation is no more than a metaphysical vacuity.

But all this is undone by the absolute that lies embedded in the world, and this is metavalue. Our entanglements in our affairs are complex, but value as such is unassailable, not defeasible in any conceivable way. It may be morally defensible to torture based on some utilitarian justification, but this would be a contingent justification, and does not touch the "giveness" of the experience of being tortured. No context can touch this.

I do not know what the pain of a lighted match on my finger IS, and language cannot give this to me. this is why Wittgenstein turned his chair to the wall when ethical discussions turned to foundational talk. A don't really agree with this "passing over in silence" about such things, though. Levinas puts ethics as first philosophy, freely acknowledging the metaphysics ethics presents.

All moral subjectivists refuse to reckon with that lighted match.

You treat an emotion quantitatively, as if it were a principle of stability or instability that is either sufficient or isn't. But then, an emotion is only incidentally stabilizing or otherwise. Taken qualitatively, an emotion is simply as it appears to be and its "mystery" is unanalyzable, irreducible. Granted, emotions are like beliefs, where in the latter doubt always moves towards belief, wants to be settled, so here, there is this drive for emotional stability. But the interesting questions is, what is the nature of this toward which we are inclined? Simply THAT we are so inclined is vacuous.
Then the matter turns to love and hate and pride and regret and so on. Mechanical interpretations of these is where evolutionary theory seems go, and it is right, but only as far as its concepts can grasp the matter. the most interesting thing about emotions, however, is their actuality, their concrete realization. What is this?

As N said, every philosophy is a kind of specious autobiography. That might also not apply in all cases, but from one existentialist to another, it appears particularly suitable. — ernest meyer

But then, it may be that one biography exceeds another here as it does in all regards. I may not be able to do math like Quine could, but I don't think Quine had an inkling as to what K was talking about, nor an inkling as to what Meister Eckhart was talking about. Some are tone deaf while others receive the aesthetic of music naturally; but then, when one does acknowledge this aesthetic, is it merely a localized "perspective"?
Is mathematics speciously biographical? Of course not.

“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.” — Joshs

The key term here would be that of semantic unity, which, too, is under erasure. I think Caputo thinks that since Derrida thinks the apophatic nature of the trace cancels even itself and conceptualization is out the window, any and all thinking is under erasure, when the erasure is complete, there is an existential residuum which is the basis for positing God: the noncontingent Good, the Bad. I say what the erasure cannot touch is metavalue, which of course, is a concept, but the signified in this case "speaks" aconceptually: a lighted match on one's finger is very different from a "being appeared to redly". What remains after analysis has exhausted the event of the former is, again, an existential residuum
The present, according to Kierkegaard is certainly not some radical sliver of time that escapes erasure, but an infinitely overarching actuality that subsumes time; and this is logically unassailable, for it is founded on faith. This is the absurd in Kierkegaard. It does not endorse silliness, as has been claimed by some, because it is based (somehow, loosely) on the reasoning above.
Still thinking......

Honestly, perhaps it cannot be defined. But does it help you to know that the Vedic Mystics already knew that the Earth's diameter on the equator is 8000 miles. Long before it could be measured. — TaySan

Well, it's an interesting fact, but no it doesn't help. "I don't know" does fall short of the mark for discussion. Tell me more.

One element that has not been mentioned as yet in this discussion of The Concept of Anxiety is how the "single individual" is the one who has to face the prospect of the "eternal." The limit to psychology often mentioned in the book is directly related to the "inward reserve" needed to be the one who can make a choice.

The "generational" inheritance of sin described at the beginning is related to a model of the good parent who helps their child deal with this element. The book is a manual of religious education along with whatever else it may be. — Valentinus

The single individual? Pls elaborate, if you would. How is it related to model of the good parent? And, inward reserve?

“Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which according to the old belief stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday.” — Antony Nickles

That stair can be a very strange place, depending on the individual. Some experience a powerful alienation from all things and familiarity itself is lost. One has a sense of being two selves, the daily rote self, and then, this uncanny presence which cannot identify any longer with this. This is played out in phenomenology as a central theme, and it is considered a structural feature of our existence.
Obviously, there is philosophical opposition to this. I can only conclude that we are all put together differently for reasons impossible to fathom.

"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?" — Antony Nickles

He really nailed it. But the confidant (in Repetition) who was so confused by his affections and what to do, this hardly makes the case, does it? It is the "impossible" cases that drive one to top of a mountain raising a fist to oblivion in hopeless outrage, cases like pneumonic bubonic plague and the like. Language nullifies such things, everything, really, which is part of its job, to reduce the world to a manageable totality. We are not aware that this is happening, of course, but common speech reduces that world to its level. But then, to follow Emerson, walking along a bare common, "glad to the brink of fear" we see there are two sides of this. The Manichean way was to give horror and delight equal place, and there is some truth in this, but this is a quantitative equality. Qualitatively, the differences are stark and clear.
The point being that K doesn't quite penetrate to the heart the "metaethical" discussion of this outrage.

The past simply continuing into the future, the abstraction of our self from this moment "annihilates the concept" as K says. The word is dead, and we are quiet (our life is, desperately). But there is an instant which makes all things new; when time is full (of possibilities Wittgenstein might say). We may need to be adverse to expectation (Emerson), convert our interest in our concepts, atone for the unspoken, redeem our judgments--to give them new life and power over our present deliberation. It is we, at this moment, that are responsible, now, before we define our life with our culture, our expression, our action. When duty calls us, we must answer for our current state, beyond our (past) knowledge, or suffer the sin of that lost chance. If we are to say our original sin was the creation of the past--our desire for certain knowledge of it--then our Eden is the sight of the sun at the top of Nietzsche's ladder, at noonday as Emerson says. — Antony Nickles

That is nicely put. Keeping in mind that people don't live an abstraction, and there is a "fullness" in getting married, raising a family, even going shopping, and K's thought is that these things are not to be abandoned, but "sin" is doing all this, taking the world AS all of this, with no foundation in the" eternal", and what is this? This has to be played out in its cash value, for we are not dealing with a "sliver of time" between past and future, but an encompassing presence of God (not to put too fine a point on it), and then the question goes to what is "given": what is there about being glad to the brink of fear, or being tortured horribly? These are the kinds of questions that loom large, for we are no longer on familiar ground as our world is cast in high relief upon eternity, that is, what language has so tamed is now unleashed and its true nature becomes clear: These are not localized affairs, as empirical science would have it, for we have made a "qualitative" movement beyond the "naturalistic attitude" (Husserl's term) and the boundaries that would otherwise localize them are undone.
But then, this also de-localizes the qualitative natures of (ethical) good and evil, and "ontic" presence is now ontological (these kind of language I lift from Heidegger. Ontic refers to our lived lives in everydayness while ontological refers to the structure of Being. But we are not in Heidegger's world here; we are in Kierkegaard's, or, at least hovering around this). So the conclusion seems irresistible: The Good really is the Good in an absolute moral way. Moral realism is the much derided term in modern philosophy. But now the question progresses further, how is this to be understood? In utility? In a rational good will (Kant's deontology)? Both of these beg the question, what is all the fuss about? Reason is an empty vessel and utility is measuring magnitudes and qualities of the Good, but what is the Good?
My point in all this is to get to this one point, around which I claim all philosophy tends, implicitly The good and the bad, in the ethical/aesthetic sense, are intuitive actualities: taste that chicken cordon bleu, falling in love and be enraptured by all things (for to be in love is to love all things in one's gaze indiscriminately; Walt Whitman's poetry is founded on this idea, his "tallying the world"), the pneumonic plague, i.e., palpable meaning is an actuality not confined to the boundaries of finitude.

And so is the "eternal present" ever-present? or, if it is, is it that we are only at times aware of it, or have the opportunity to rise to the occasion of it? Not that we may not be brought up at any time by society for our action or inaction, but are we to be held to the grindstone by ourselves at all times (as if every second was subject to sin, our grief endless)?

This leads me to also comment on your question: "Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL?" We could say the past is outside of our self: knowledge, language, culture. And the future is the implications and consequences and judgments from that past. Our default aspect to the present is unrecognized consent, complicity, blindness, inattention, alienation. We fail to shake off our lethargy (or apathy) when our moment arrives. That is to say, the past and the future are ALL that exist; before we are thrust (drawn) into the present to face our eternal, if yet unconnected, unlived, self (Emerson speaks of a "next" self). — Antony Nickles

Emerson, the three I's: I, eye, aye! Reading his famous Nature is always inspiring, and philosophers don't take him seriously because he is kind of a crank romantic idealist. But then, so am I, though I think in different terms. Nietzsche really liked him because he was an iconoclast, rejecting dogmatism and orthodoxy, inviting us to be a "transparent eyeball" which I take as the dramatic reductive move to Kierkegaard's eternal present. I think if you walk with Emerson in the woods and leave behind the interpreted world, the past and the future disappear. Now, this gets us to the big issue in phenomenology, which is, even though you are not explicitly thinking of anything at all, there is still "the world" there before you, and you know it, and what allows this comfort of knowing is the past, or rather, it is the past to future event, and it is argued that there is no "in between" for this is just impossible: to grasp what the present could BE would require a medium outside the past to future, but this would be to posit something beyond the conditions of positing itself, beyond language, and language is the understanding's structure. This eternal present is after all, only as good as sense can be made out of it. Eternal??
Of course, this is the kind of argument that stands in way of positing anything that is not discursive in the positing, and K is doing just this. But is he? As I see it, the present is not constrained by the past into future at all, and K's framing of the idea holds the key that at once allows the present to sustain positioning the past and the future within this. We cannot, as he says, forget that we exist. Existence IS the present, he is arguing; to Be is to be now, and this makes the past a now actuality. And history is a now actuality, to recall is to recall now. To anticipate is to anticipate now. All roads' analyses lead to the present, and, as K says, not positing this, not realizing this, is our distance for God, God being the actual, inevitable existential embodiment of the Good; after all, we have admitted above that the Good we realize in the everyday affairs we have is no longer localized. The question about the Good that remains is the hierarchy of the Good, which is the basis from K going after concupiscence.

I meant flow as in 'the trend' — TaySan

That doesn't help. If you don't side with the atheists, the believers, or anyone else you mentioned, the "trend" certainly isn't going to be a step up. What trend? What is it that everybody is thinking in this trend that you find so important?

Why is the eternal present God, rather than God-sin as the inseparable poles of every present? — Joshs

Why is this not God-sin? But this begs the question, what is God?

As for sin, speaking for K, I would say, first, there is no "every moment" as this quantifies the present. (He does speak of "the instant" but this is what makes K so frustrating, because he does reconcile apparent contradictions, but one has to read the full context of what he says to see this). All there IS, is the present, and for us, the temporal world contained therein. Sin is knowing, positing, spirit, which as I understand it is an existential qualitative movement out of daily affairs (culture, our "inherited sin") and into a kind of "pure" present, and I think of this purity as not unlike what Kant did with reason: In our entangled affairs, as we live through them, we recognize nothing of the structures of reason in judgment and thought, but turn toward these, in analysis, one comes to see at a higher order. Only here, the higher order is existential, non discursive; the "movement" is nondiscursive, though getting there is--obviously, one has to think.
As to how God and why it is privileged over God-sin, K would say things like, through God lies redemption, making for the fullness of time, but the fullness of time being the instant as the eternal, as the Bible says. But I leave K (who has been accused of endorsing silliness) here. For such fullness, I turn to the Buddhists and the actuality of intimated "ultimate reality" as the Abhidhamma puts it. Ultimate reality is only meaningful in the intuited way it is apprehended, and here, one has to put aside or "suspend" critical judgment that pounces on such a thing. This is why philosophers like Levinas speak so cryptically about "the ideatum that exceeds the idea" and others are intent on whittling down time to the present to some primordial intimation, but end up talking around it, not about it, for this is the best that can be done.
After all, what is falling in love, phenomenologically, looking at the "thing itself"'; and what is pain, in the same manner? This is not a matter for thought's adumbrations; it is transformational, cannot be spoken, yet they are the principle features of Being Here, that is, all these terms subsume. Talk about God is talk about value, and this ushers in a discussion about metaethcs, metavalue.

Something I wrote on Caputo;
“to maintain a faith in experience as a fluctuation between moments of agential intending is to believe that one is `justified' in locating discrete moments nameable abstractively as God, faith, justice, transcendence opposing themselves to discrete moments identifiable as injustice, evil, nihilism. Caputo wants to argue that the `trace' does not knock out the name of God, but Derrida's trace does knock it out, or rather, splits it in two by preventing there simply being such a thing as a temporary (even if just for an instant) semantic unity nameable as God, love, transcendence, justice, liberation.” — Joshs

I'll have to look through Caputo for this. Off hand, this "for an instant, semantic unity, nameable as God, love...." is an instant outside of the apophatic annihilation of all such instants. Such terms, in the reductive attempt, are the last to go. But then, it may very well be that, if K is right, the closer one gets to "eternity" the more philosophy falls away, and one can be a butcher, an accountant, but live AS these in the eternal present. Like Abraham.
It does not in the end come down to time, or any analysis of anything. Philosophy is really a search for value, which is what God is about: a consummation of this search.

Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. — 3017amen

It occurred to me that I really didn't address this: Heraclitus 's world of flux, one has to ask, why is this exclusive of affirming the present? WE are the ones who look at the stream on time as a logical succession, but the term "stream" belies this, for it possesses no boundaries at all. The law of the excluded middle is a positivist's way of misapprehending the world entirely.

Sure, no worries Constance. K makes the point of both phenomena occurring from within the human condition, hence is emphasis on dread. (Logically, it breaks the rules of excluded middle.) Our existence is such that without However, it seems when discussing that which is present, the question becomes how big is that sliver of present(?). — 3017amen

Note that the ideas I set forth here is not exclusively an attempt at weaving textual agreement, which is what academics hold so dear. I explore, appropriate freely.

The impossible present. Heidegger accused Husserl of trying to walk on water in his impossible affirmations of "things themselves" but that really is the way this idea works: The way to make this plausible is first to remove the standard concept of time from our imagination, for this is a quantitative abstraction. And the law of the excluded middle only has application here where the past and the present are mutually exclusive. This logical attempt to bring the world to heel is exactly what K opposed, but on the other hand, I think he does not violate it at all since a quantitative temporal order is not existential, but pragmatic, I would call it reified pragmatics, the measurements we impose on the world, then take them AS the world.
This being "without past and present, cognition could not exist the way it does" is, K is telling us, the wrong way to look at this. There is only ONE actuality, and this is the eternal present (which IS eternity; See Wittgenstein, a big fan of K. He draws on K in his Tractatus), and we live in this and only this, but we do it AS we live in a temporal world, making the temporal world and all of our ordered thinking and engagement mere constituents of the eternal now. This is, I claim, exactly what the Buddhists are talking about when they say one does not achieve Buddhahood, but only realizes that one, to borrow from Heidegger, always, already IS this. For K, to "posit spirit" is to posit sin, for in this positing one realizes that what we call time is possessed by the eternal present, which is God, the soul.

Using simple English, to be human is to be an action verb--human Being. Time is required for our existence. Things are constantly moving, changing, et.al . as required to sustain life. Eternity (no time) seems unimaginable. However, in theory, Einstein said it was possible, out there... . — 3017amen

Tricky. Realizing the eternal present subsumes time is to become aware of sin. Early on in K's Concept of Anxiety, he refers to the child and her wonderment and free adventurous spirit as being indicative of this radical movement, prior to which there is no sin. I am moving toward the realization that the idea that "no time is impossible," is wrong minded. Of course, we can talk like this vis a vis past, present and future, but "positing the spirit" is to pull away from normal discourse, not just in thought, but existentially, and indeed from all that creates separation from God: culture. Hereditary sin is to live in devotion to culture, to live, as Tillich put it, as if the institutions we created were our ultimate concern.

Einstein theorized an a world prior to positing spirit, what Husserl called the naturalistic attitude. Certainly nothing wrong with this, but it is pre-sin. (Btw, the term 'sin' here is not, as K tells us, the Lutheran concept of the foulest deed imaginable, but a kind of Augustinian absence of God. This is my take on K).

Too, in the aforementioned Platonian sense, we get to play with eternity from time to time. Whether it's through the phenomenal humanistic experiences that we engage in, or from experimenting with mathematical entities... — 3017amen

The sense you refer to, I can't say I remember. But K is critical of the Greeks, here and especially in Repetition. The idea of Platonic recollection in Meno makes the past rule the present, to put it one way. Repetition is to live in the eternal present such that the past 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.

The reason concepts of time were at issue around 1859 is that Darwin published Origin of Species that year, in turn based on a geological concept of time - that proposed a hugely ancient origin of the earth and lifeforms fossilized in rock layers. — counterpunch

No. K was responding to Hegel. At any rate, K died in 1855. Aristotle is behind this. See 3017amen's:
https://youtu.be/vh-IW9Y1htA

Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/ — 3017amen

Excellent link. This is from The Concept of Anxiety, a seminal work. As you read through this text you find Sartre, here, Heidegger there.
I wasn't being very careful. In a sense, K argues that past and future do not exist, because the only way they do exist is in the present. We live in time, I would argue, such that past and future are subsumed under the present, or, rather, such that our experience of the past moving into the future is a reality in the giveness of the presence. The past is a dimension of our worldly giveness, and once spirit is posited and we leave the aesthetic moment to moment existence behind, we come to see that even when the past and the future stand before us, there is really only a true ontology of the eternal present.

He is devilishly difficult to get right, for me, at any rate, because he is so playful. Playful geniuses are hard to read because their thinking is so idiosyncratic.

Well christendom, the new testament has given the revelation that God or Allah is love. But since most of humanity cannot accept this simple fact I choose to say God is a mystery.
Because philosophers want to discuss God and love. And worshippers want to idolize God and love.
And atheists want to deny God and love. And politicians want to regulate God and love. And artists want to paint God and love. I just go with the flow — TaySan

I don't know what that means until I know what you think the flow is.

The past is just a measurement taken from “now” to as far back as one wants to go and the future is a measurement forward. However, life itself, does not exist in the past or future, but only in the “now”. — Present awareness

Well then, you sound like a Kierkegaardian. the trick is to become a knight of faith, which is to live in the present and embrace the past and the future in this lived present. I think Buddhists do this, or try to; I mean, if you meditate effectively, you find, on the one hand, you are still you and your constructed personality is still there informing you of the world and its details, but on the other, the past and the future anticipations the past imposes are all realized in the present, and you live both in the eternal present and in the world of daily affairs. You could be a butcher, an accountant, and no one would know that you have mastered the world and live in God's grace.
K thought this was beyond his abilities.

But I’ll leave it there until I have looked more into Husserl in particular. — Possibility

Okay. I would genuinely like to know. Some of Husserl is very accessible, like Cartesian Meditations and others. Ideas get rather technical, but it is here I think you can see how phenomenology works. I haven't read Logical Investigations. On my list.

Ok. I think it's more than that, Constance. Time is the structure of co-existence, and I've sketched that. My response deliberately calls mere "experience" into question which you don't seem willing to consider. Look what idealism – yes, (proto)existentialism is idealism-in-action – has done to the secular West in the last century or so as it's dovetailed into "doing me" "my truth" "not real until I experience it" consumerism. "The leap of faith" is now nothing but the faith in leaping. Is Kierkegaard 'subjective time' remotely relevant today? I could be way off-base but I don't think so. — 180 Proof

But cultural relevance hardly matters here, and more than it would matter for quantum physics. Alas, if people take idealism seriously, something might happen, a loss of confidence in the the objective claims of science, or, an excessive concern about the self. In the end, a loss of Christian faith may be responsible for a degradation in human values. So is this a reason to argue for Jesus?
Not is it relevant? Rather, is it true?
But then, idealism NEVER has had this kind of power. The closest I can think of is in the 50's when beatniks actually tried to read Heidegger, sat around in cafes like Dharma Bums questioning existence.
And I certainly do not think consumerism can be tied to idealism, as if consumers could even begin to fathom the Copernican Revolution of Kant. But if you care to sketch out how you think this is the case, I would like to hear it.

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.