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Resumo

To have personal and collective pasts and to posit individual and collective futures are aspects of what it means to be human. Our past is who we have been, and the future is fundamental to imagining who we will become. However, in order to have either past or future we need a stable present, the space of our everyday lives. In contrast to one understanding of time, I want to suggest that 'the present' is a substantial and relatively unproblematic aspect of the human world, produced and reproduced in language, in the institutionalized here-and-now, in the physical environment, and in the co-presence of embodied human individuals. Since these are also deeply implicated in identification, time and identification are probably best conceptualized together, the one a key to understanding the other. This further suggests that, since identification is arguably a diagnostic characteristic of 'human being' and 'human nature', the well-worn distinction between 'social/cultural time' and 'natural time' is problematic.

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