How Philosophy Becomes Possible: XVI. When the Future Becomes Philosophical

If the present has been made, then it need not remain as it is.

This possibility was already implicit in the historical consciousness emerging in thinkers such as Vico and Herder. Human institutions, languages and forms of life had histories. They were not simply given by nature. They had emerged through human activity under particular conditions.

But once history makes the present intelligible as something that could have been otherwise, another question becomes difficult to avoid:

What else could it become?

The Enlightenment gave this question increasing force. Kant, for example, could ask not only what human beings are, but whether humanity might develop its capacities differently. The present could be judged against possibilities that it had not yet realised.

This was a new philosophical relation to time.

Earlier philosophy had certainly thought about the future. Aristotle had distinguished potentiality from actuality, and political thinkers had imagined better forms of government. But historical consciousness changed the problem. Possibility was no longer located only in the capacities of things or in abstract alternatives.

It could be located in historical development.

Human beings could become different because the conditions under which they lived could change.

This gave philosophy a new kind of object: not simply the good society, the virtuous person or the rational order, but the process by which one form of human life might become another.

The future could therefore become philosophically significant without being predictable.

Kant's question of enlightenment, for instance, treats human beings as capable of emerging from an immaturity that is not simply a biological condition. What matters is whether people and institutions can develop the capacities already available within them.

The future is thus neither wholly determined nor wholly open.

It is constrained by what has been inherited, yet enlarged by what has become possible within that inheritance.

This distinction would become increasingly important. If history has direction, is that direction something discovered in history—or something imposed upon it? If human beings can transform their conditions, how much of that transformation can they actually control?

The nineteenth century would push these questions much further. Hegel would attempt to understand history as a development of freedom through changing forms of social life. Marx would turn historical development toward material production, social relations and conflict. In both cases, history becomes more than a record of what happened.

It becomes a field in which possibility is generated through transformation.

That changes the philosophical meaning of action.

If the present contains unrealised possibilities, then acting is not merely choosing between options already available. Action can alter the conditions under which future options become available at all.

History can therefore become reflexive.

Human beings inherit a world, act within it, and in acting change the world that subsequent generations inherit.

The future is not simply waiting to arrive.

It is partly produced by what the present makes possible.

Philosophy has therefore acquired another question.

Not simply:

What is?

Not simply:

How did this become what it is?

But:

What can become possible from what has become?

Once that question becomes philosophical, the future is no longer merely what has not happened yet.

It becomes a dimension of possibility.