I am perplexed by a question of tense. Suppose we live our life in a carefully constructed plan. The objective is to maximize our reputation for the sake of history. What tense are we really living in/for?
One might argue that it is certainly not the past tense. It is perhaps the future’s sense of the past.
But none of this will matter to a person who is no longer present. If, for the sake of exploration, we allow the warrant that, at the point of death, no one will care about this existence, then we might argue that nothing in the future’s sense of the past is of any consequence. In a sense, we are still living for the present. We are trying to obtain a feeling in the present.
In a sense, we are living for an illusion. This illusion acts as a placebo for our current condition.
