"To prepare for the future is only to found the present. ...] It is only the present to put in order. What's the point of discussing this legacy. The future, you don't have to plan for it but to allow it." (St-Exupéry, Citadelle, LVI)
We talk about it in terms of diaries, pre-programmed alerts and to-do lists. Domestic, routine and flat chores. Length and speed, frenzy and pause. Whether it is in days, hours, weeks or months, it remains the same, be it the one who is walking between our fingers, the one who is already no longer. It seems to us to be more and more evanescent, like a mirage from which we wake up very often too late at the moment when the instant suddenly takes all its meaning, beating the measure of a breath that disappears.
Reality is so common to us that it is difficult for us to talk about it. There is nothing more demanding than translating into words what you think you know. In this state of affairs, the intimate link between thought and language can only be conclusive. When asked to speak of time, St-Augustin responds in his Confessions with an assertion summing up the task of philosophy (I paraphrase):"I know what time is. But when I'm asked to talk about it, I don't know what to say."
St-Augustin will explain that this difficulty stems, among other things, from the fact that although we live through him, we have reduced him to a measure - which he is not. For there to be any measure, there must be a trace. This would imply that the future has already taken place for such an assertion to be true.
The triad that composes it is well known: past, present and future, but what can we say about it, he asks, if the past is a time that is no longer, if the future is not yet and if the present that we are already talking about is no longer there?
We are led to talk about time in terms of moments, of a present moment that is always different. We know that because we experience it, the present is changing. It is this moment that passes to another and this, continuously. It cannot be a present moment that lasts without change. If that were the case, we would be out of time, that is, in eternity. What is time, asks St-Augustin, if what constitutes it is no longer, is not yet and already is not? He will reply that the future is present in the sense that it is there in the expectation that we have of it and the past is just as present in the memory that we have of it.
Throughout the ages, we have not changed our posture in the face of the constant flight of time. We try with the means at our disposal to catch him thinking naively that we are going to hold him back. The capture of the present, we do it constantly by inserting it, twitching it, facebooking it. Leaving the memory to do something else, we document the present in an external receptacle.
If we believe that this is an impetus for preserving and preserving the present, allowing us to better act on the future, we are wrong on the whole line. As Hegel so aptly put it, for there to be conservation, there must be transformation; this is what he will call the Aufhebung. This transformation of the impressions of the present so that they become memories will allow the thought to feed on them. It is thus that the canning of the past (taken literally) carried out by our memory feeds our thought to allow us to have a new view, that is to say nourished by what has been, on the present and consequently on the future. Without transformation, there is no conservation, even for memories.
The capture of the present, we do it constantly by inserting it, by tweeting it, by facebooking it. Leaving the memory to do something else, we document the present in an external receptacle."
The inscriptions that we leave on the web are made in the will to leave a memory trace for us. Who remembers all of its FB statutes, its tweets, its instagrams? In reality, by frantically documenting the present, they become hollow, stripped of their consignment nature, they have nothing, for us individually, of the trace that could happen in memory for there to be remembrance.
In order for them to become traces again, we need companies like Nexalogy to analyze and synthesize them, otherwise they get lost in oblivion. This makes us say that we are far from a "RAM" that is generally attributed to the machine we have created.
And since we have extracted the memory from our thought - making it throne in an object external to us - it cannot nourish our intelligence by allowing it to take with it the present (understand) and consequently make the possible possible. Without memory, we relegate the past to few things; inflating exaggeratedly the present, which reduces the future to short shots.
However, in order to act in time, we must find that part of memory that we voluntarily abandon in order to prepare the future by acting in the present for what it is.
