The dimension of time has attracted human mind since ever. Time is a key manifestation of the estrangement characterizing modern existence. With time we confront a philosophical enigma, a psychological mystery, and a logical puzzle. Spengler declared that no one should be allowed to ask what time is. Empirically it is difficult to reveal the flow of time, since no instrument exists that can register its passage. But one can not deny: we all have a strong sense that time does pass, ineluctably and in one particular direction, and that it is a fact of nature.
The further we go in time the worse it gets. According to Adorno, we inhabit an age of the disintegration of experience. Paul Ricoeur suggests that "we are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual".
There is nothing similar to time. It is as unnatural and yet as universal. Chacalos points out that "present" is a notion just as puzzling as time itself. What is the present? We know that it is "now". We speak confidently of other parts of time, such as "past'' and "future". But the matter that was just now "present" is already "past" and the matter that is right now "future" is immediately becoming "present".
