We usually explain the present by looking backwards.
We ask what caused it, what preceded it, what conditions made it possible. Causes come before effects.
But there is another kind of explanation: the explanation that looks forwards.
A seed is described in terms of the tree it will become. A young organism is understood in terms of its mature form. A technology is interpreted according to what it will eventually enable.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. Future consequences can be relevant to understanding present possibilities.
The difficulty begins when possibility becomes purpose.
The tree begins to appear as the reason for the seed. The mature organism becomes the point towards which development was directed. The eventual technology becomes the explanation of why earlier forms appeared.
The future has become an explanation of the present.
This is the forward-facing version of the mistake we encountered with origins. There, the present selected parts of the past and called them beginnings. Here, an imagined future selects aspects of the present and calls them signs of what is to come.
In both cases, the standpoint reorganises the history.
But the asymmetry matters. When we look backwards, we have an actual history to constrain our interpretation. When we look forwards, we have possibilities.
We can know what preceded us.
We cannot know, in the same way, what will follow us.
The future can therefore guide action without determining meaning. We may act towards a possibility without discovering that the possibility was already the purpose of what preceded it.
A present event can make a future possible.
That does not mean the future explains why the event happened.
The future may be a consequence of the present without being its reason.
Perhaps the deepest temptation of destiny is therefore not to predict what will happen.
It is to make what we hope will happen explain why we are here now.
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