Reimagining the Future: A Phenomenology of Cross-Temporal Presence Volume Three

"A book like this should not exist. Its topic does not exist, nor does its experience. Yet it is too quick, possessed too much of the now to simply iterate the banality of speculation. Futurology is not futurity, and though it is true by definition that the object of the first remains unknown in the present, the experience of the second is, in fact, what we are. For our being is, in its essence, a being ahead of itself. It is at once always and already ahead 'of' itself in that its futurity is a necessity for its presence. We experience the future as a coming to be, as a tension between what we have known and what we could know." (From the book.)

In this, the final volume of G.V. Loewen's phenomenological trilogy concerning how we experience the understanding of temporality in our lives, the very feeling of time passing, time lost, and time to come, it is the question of the future that animates its closing analyses. At once feared and desired, heralded and cautioned against, the future presents a challenge to human consciousness simply because it is, from the perspective of the present, both unknown and unknowable. It also cannot be located in the past, and not for any paradoxical reason; the past does after all contain hints of what is to come.

What is at issue is how to locate such moments and attempt to gain some insight from them. The meaning of the future can be said to be included in a human experience that does not close itself off to what it already imagines it knows, but at the same time must not presume to take the future into its own inevitably narrow embrace.

Author Bio: Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books on ethics, education, aesthetics, health, and social theory, and more recently, fiction. He was a professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.