The present, as philosophy knows well, doesn't exist, and yet it is the only thing which exists. The past has been, and so is not, and the future is to be, and so is not yet. That only leaves the present. But as long as the present has duration, any duration at all, it can be divided into the bits of it that have been, and so are not, and the bits of it that are to be, and so are not yet, so that the very duration of its existence consigns it to nonexistence. The problem here is obvious: the relationship between presence and existence is logically circular, or tautological in the manner of a claim that a = a. Worse than that, the tautology is embedded in the tense structure of language, which insists that ‘has been’ and ‘will be’ are equivalent to ‘is not’, since what ‘is’ must be rendered in the present. The claim that what ‘has been’ ‘is not’ barely constitutes a claim at all, since all it does is to relive the conspiracy of being and presence which inhabits tense.

The complicity of presence and being, and its incumbent logical problems, hangs over all notions of the present, so that the analytical framework of tense acquires a metaphysical importance. In this discussion, three notions of the present are in question: the historical present, the philosophical present and the literary historical present.