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Arjen Mulder: In your essay “The Specious Present,” you propose a theory of the present as an embodied now: the now as a corporeal, neurological, cognitive experience. What is this now, this present?

Francisco Varela: The question of the now, taken in its most immediate sense - a sense that is not necessarily scientific - is a perennial topic for mankind. Every human culture has grappled with the question: what is this temporality? It is a tremendous paradox that we live now, and yet time, the future and the past, seem so present and so important. In the West we have been so gripped by the physics of the notion of time as something that is ticked away by the clock, and that time is an arrow, and divided in equal seconds, that it is very good to realize that even in our tradition there has been somebody like Saint Augustine ? and before him Aristotle ? who put his finger on the fact that the now has a certain depth. Saint Augustine made it clear that for humans the quality of life depends on understanding how much the now, the present, is a deep and living thing. He centered some of his meditations in the Confessions on the exploration of this now, which eventually led him to view his relation to the divinity within the richness of the present. He had a tremendous influence.
This notion resurfaces only centuries later in America with William James, when he says the flow of consciousness is what man is all about, and the now is what the flow of consciousness is about. This now he called the “specious present,” that is, the slippery, tricky present. At the same time, in Europe, Husserl and the phenomenologists invented the term the “living present.” That is exactly the same kind of understanding, that only when you break away from the spell of time as a sequence of instants one can measure by the clock, and you come back to your own depth of experience, you realize that what you live right now is almost like a cloud, like a whole, like a span, like a flash, which is far from a dot. The now is like an enormous matrix from which you can grow the quality of who you are. If the quality of that now is flat, your life is flat, and you have a life in which one appointment follows the other. It’s hurry here and hurry there; it has no depth. Everything that has quality requires the reassessment, the reinvention of the now, whether it is in aesthetics, in love, in sensuality, eating or playing or sport.

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The Deep Now (interview, excerpt)
by Francisco Varela

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