The “presence” for which I would like to recover a positive meaning is not so much a presence of things to us as our presence to things, situations, and other people. Looked at from this perspective, it seems to me that presence is really all about relatedness and engagement.
This makes presence not at all a simple matter of immediately “being there”, but rather something more subtle, that comes in many degrees. For example, when I am tired, I am much less “present”. My responsiveness is narrower and shallower. I think we become more present through more active participation in a wider and deeper range of relations.
In the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, there is a related notion of attention that I have always found somewhat troublesome, because it seemed to reduce to a subjective act of will. Aristotle and Hegel instead dwell on human character as something constituted over time by deeds, rather than on any constitutive role of instantaneous willings.
On the side of a dogmatic “presence” of things to us, discussion for the past century has been dominated by Martin Heidegger’s famous claim that Western metaphysics is fundamentally a “metaphysics of presence” in the sense of what he calls presence-at-hand. He largely blames this on Aristotle’s account of time, which he takes as privileging present time over past and future time. Heidegger claims that Aristotle fails to adequately recognize the properly temporal and not just “present” dimensions of human existence.
As I understand it from afar, the basis for this claim that Aristotle unduly privileges presence is supposed to be none other than Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, or what Kant calls internal teleology. Robert Pippin provocatively connects the latter to what Hegel calls “logical movement”. I say that the things like Aristotelian ousia (“what it was to have been” something or someone) that are subject to internal teleology and logical movement also have what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity. This means they do not have identity in a strict formal sense, like mathematical objects do.
A dogmatic presence-at-hand like Heidegger imputes to Aristotle seem to me to presuppose a strict notion of the identity of whatever is supposed to be present. By contrast, a fundamental emphasis on internal teleology like Aristotle’s implicitly calls for notions like logical movement and narrative identity, which make strict identity impossible for whatever they are applied to. This seems to me to be about as far from a privileging of presence-at-hand as could be.
The Heideggerian critique of a “metaphysics of presence” is related to Heidegger’s other famous critique of so-called Aristotelian “ontotheology”. Aristotle’s Metaphysics does most certainly have a theological dimension, but my recent walk-through found little support for the most common reading that it is first of all supposed to be an “ontology”. Aristotle’s theology is better understood not in terms of a general account of being, but rather in terms of the explanatory priority of “that for the sake of which”. (See also Pure Entelechy; The Goal of Human Life.)
The Postmodern Peripatetic 