past, present and future...

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

In thinking about the "human condition’’ I got to thinking
about time, the passage of time in our lives… you often
hear the advice that we ought to “live in the present”
and that is, mostly good advice but it comes with a price,
we act far too much in the present and we fail to
give the future its due…

we spend too much time engaged in the present or
in the case of the radical right, the past… and as much
fun as that sounds, we don’t pay enough attention to
the future…

let us say I have enough wealth to buy a house, (I don’t)
but I buy a house and I can justify it by thinking it would
be a good rental property or a good investment, or
perhaps even a place to retire to…

but the reality is that our current situation allows us to
buy a house and that is enough justification to buy a house…
it really has nothing to do with any possible future
justifications/rationalizations… rationalizations are really
attempts to justify some action taken in the present…

or said another way, we have no sense of historical presence
in our lives… we pay little or no attention to the future…
when we need to pay far more attention to what will be and not
as much as what was or what is…

the question of, “who do you want to be” is just as if not more
important as the question of “who are you currently”
because in our focus on the past or present, miss the
very important question of “what ought we be”…
in other words, we don’t think about the future in
our thinking about our lives…

for example, to take a journey, one must not only have
in mind, the beginning place, but we must have the final destination
in mind… if you don’t have a destination in mind, how do you
know what direction you should take in your journey?
and therein lies the modern problem… we don’t have
a final destination in mind, America should look like this, in
X amount of years and then we can have some sort of goal to aim
for and have a destination in mind…we are floundering as
a nation, as a culture and we are floundering as a civilization
because we don’t have a goal to aim for… a possibility for us to
reach…

the goal chosen must a realistic goal, a goal that is achievable, but
not so far away as to allow people to give up hope on reaching that
goal…so, the goal of the 60ties, under JFK, was to reach the moon,
and they did that because that was an achievable and reachable goal…
today, do we have any type of similar goal, no… not at all
and that is why we are floundering as a nation… as a people…
we have nothing to reach for…

which leads us to the second point, in that part of the failure
of America lies in its present ideology of greed and capitalism…
that is not a goal that we can use to reach during our journey…
for the goal of wealth and power and fame, doesn’t have anything
beyond achieving wealth, power or fame…in trying to reach wealth,
that is the only thing you will be rewarded with, is wealth…
it leads to nothing else… it has no function beyond gaining
wealth… seeking wealth or power or fame leads you nowhere…
those goals cannot lead you to another other than wealth, or power
or fame… but a goal to become a more just society, that goal can
lead us individually and collectively to something more…
to achieve a just society means we are trying to reach a more
equal society… for that is what justice means, equality…and
reaching that goal allow us to reach other further goals
of freedom and peace and hope… when we seek the right goal,
we are rewarded by achieving more than just the goal in question,
we are rewarded with value beyond the stated values that lead
us nowhere, like greed, capitalism, lust, can only lead us to
greed, capitalism and lust… no other goals are possible with
wrongly chosen goals…

So what goals should we be attempting?
Who knows because we are not attempting to
achieve intentional goals that are worth our effort…

trying to achieve individual wealth within a societal premise
leads us to collective failure… we must think in terms of
both the individual and the collective…

what goals or destination can we attempt both individually
and, AND collectively that will improve us, both individually
and collectively…

we are taking a collective journey without any idea of where
the hell we are going… and that has led to the failure that
is modern day America…

and so we must no longer focus on the past or the present, we must
now mind the future and think, what are we trying to do that will
help us in the future…

it is about our collective goals as well as our individual goals
we must seek…

so what collective goals should we be seeking?

how about the creation of a fair and just society?

or how about the creation of a society that treats all its
citizens equally… which is to say, treat all the citizens
justly…

We are floundering as a nation because we don’t have a
collective goal we seek as a nation… and we shall continue
to flounder as a nation until we begin the process of seeking
a fair, equal destination for all its people…

Kropotkin

2

or perhaps to think of it this way,
we are addicted to the gathering of moments…
we go to Disneyland to have a series of moments,
riding the Matterhorn, for example…
and then doing the Pirates of the Caribbean …
a series of moments designed to create “memories”
which are a series of moments… we are addicted to
this creation of moments/memories…
but do we have any concerns about what is “next”…
I get a new job, but how is that gonna to “fit”
into my plan or understanding of my life…

our lives is like a sit-com series… each episode is separate
and isolated, with little connection to any other episode…
there is very little past or future in these little episodes,
but a whole lot of present, of moments in our lives…
and we are presented with the idea that our lives is full
of minor, petty little learning problems which can be solved
in 22 minutes…but the truth is far more complicated…

our very existence creates a lifelong problem,
highlighted by the Kantian questions,

“What am I to do?”
“What ought I believe in?”
“What can I know?”

or said another way, we have an epistemology question of
knowledge, a theological problem of what am I to have faith in,
and a moral/ethical question, what am I to do?

every single day is another day of possibly answering these,
and other Kantian questions… it isn’t about creating ''moments"
as the ads on TV claim but to answer the basic questions of
existence…of which is one such question, “Why am I here?”…

do our lives have a unity that exists from beginning to end,
from birth to death? or are our lives a series of separate episodes
that have little to no unity, like a sit-com?
the only way to create some unity within our live is to
think of our lives as something more than a series of
isolated episodes, part of a sit-com…if I begin to think of
myself as a philosopher, who uses his life experiences as
part of the basis for a philosophy, I have made my life something
more than a sit-com, a series of isolated episodes, my life becomes,
all of my life, becomes a subject of interest for me, my life becomes
a basis from which I can make use of in the creation of a philosophy…
my life goes from a sit-com to a teaching exercise in which every
aspect of my life is grounds for better understanding what it means
to be human…
even the difficult parts of losing my hearing now become
a tool of understanding of what it means to become human…
or perhaps I begin to think of myself as an Artist, now my life
becomes the canvas or the medium from which I now use to
create ART…I can use my hearing loss as a means in which in some
fashion, I use ART to create meaning for and about my hearing loss…
my own life becomes platform upon which I built my ART from…
or if I decide to think of myself as an Historian, then my life
becomes the stuff that I use to explain or understand history…

I have no need to explain or justify my life in terms of
the choices I have made, or the discipline I use to
explain and/or understand my life as a means to myself or
to others…here is a means to move past or beyond the
simple gathering of moments, by thinking of ourselves as
something more than just a sit-com or to think my life as a
collection of moments…by the use of philosophy, I can
create meaning in my life that doesn’t exists if I think of
myself as spectator in my life, as a series of moments or as
a sit-com…

Kropotkin