past and future – GV Loewen

Our Memory of the Future

Our Memory of the Future (Prescience, Predilection, Prediction)

At first glance, the future and the past appear to be nothing other than opposites. The past has occurred, the future has not. The past is a matter of record, even if such documentation remains private. The future is, by definition, as yet unwritten. So how, if this is indubitably the case, can we suggest that in spite of this, we are in possession of a kind of ‘memory’ of the future, a foreknowledge of what is still to come? For phenomenology, memory takes up the converse position to anticipation. But just here, we note that the latter can be very much based upon the former. Erfahrung anticipates Erlebnis, and indeed, the adventure of life experience at the personal level takes on the mantle of a discursive venture, the more sedimented it becomes within our consciousness. This mutual imbrication of memory and anticipation also suggests that the past and the future may not be quite as oppositional as they seem. There are at least three angles by which we may investigate further.

1. Prescience: Though I have heard others tell of ‘predictive dreams’, wherein the dream sequence turns out to be repeated in waking life a short time afterward, I have never myself experienced ‘prescience’. Often, the narrative is one of trauma, even life and death, such as when the dreamer has inadvertently run over a child who has rushed unexpectedly into the path of their vehicle. In waking life, the same sequence of events occurs but this time, due to this foreknowledge and the recognition that one is ‘living the dream’, as it were, the child’s life is spared. I have heard numerous examples of this phenomena, which could well be put down to a backreading effect that trauma can have upon us; we seek to provide a rationale for challenging action in the world, positive or negative. Prescience of this flavor might be a ‘psychosomatic’ cousin of the better known (pseudo)experience of déja vu. At the same time, the unexpected and dramatic are not at all always the themes of dream-into-reality. I have also heard many accounts of a simple, even repetitive mundanity which is first dreamed and thence lived out. One example that is oft mentioned is that of one’s morning routine, where one thinks that one has already awakened, gotten out of bed, and run through one’s daily ablutions even to the point of getting into one’s vehicle and starting it up, only to actually then awake and, likely with a sigh, run through the entire series once again, this time perhaps harboring some small skepticism about the question of reality itself. Prescience is also claimed by quasi-religious specialists – much more so in antiquity or in traditional societies than today and in our own – as part of their specific skill set; the ability to access an intertemporal plenum where the normative flow of linear time is not relevant. Even here, however, I will suggest that precisely because human life is mostly routine and thus predictable, the dreamer and the shaman alike are merely playing upon, and perhaps also playing out, our general sense that tomorrow will be much the same as today. This is the ‘odds on’ approach that functions as a leitmotif in all three of our apertures, and only becomes outré or even eldritch when misplaced; either by calculation, as by the shaman, or by sheer repetitive happenstance, as with the dreamer.

2. Predilection: Here, one is assumed to have a better grasp of what might yet happen not because of the ability to access alternate forms or aspects of consciousness or time, but rather more mundanely, has instead honed a worldly skill that opens the door to making subjective predictions. Predilection could be very much defined by the personalization of probability theory, our third character below. Yet there remains a link with prescience even so, making predilection our second term in a loosely logical formula. This is the case because religion has itself been personalized, beginning in the pre-modern and accelerating during the modern periods. We have seen that prescience is highly personal; intimate, in the case of the shaman, who can only transfer his powers to an apprentice – the motif of existential transport, unforced in the instance of soul transmigration, and violently criminal, even evil, in the instance of ‘consecrated hosting’ and such-like sorcery – and beyond even this, intimate to the point of being unshareable, in the case of the prescient dreamer. Predilection is not as exclusive, nor does it need resort to occult means and methods to be communicated. Yet it also, on the far side, never ascends to a discourse, as does the statistic. This is so due to its still somewhat personal character. One might say, simply as a nod to the face-to-face, that predilection is the personable version of prescience, just as prediction is that entirely impersonal. These learned skill sets which occur only in our shared world are also much more recognizable than those deliberately occluded – the shaman’s trickery – or yet occlusive by nature – the world of dreams. The fact that predilection is an extension of action in the present is also of note: this second term allows us to recall the past and our work now ‘in’ that past to ourselves, with a view to repeating it in a present which through that very action moves itself into the future. Here, we gain the perspective that simple doing propels the present into the immediate future, without the need to command that future to appear as either preparatory apparition or maleficent vision.

3. Prediction: Probability and statistics are part of a fully modern discourse, taking their formal place within applied mathematics. Discourse is, as we know, something that one studies, equally formally, and within the pedagogic framework of various institutional settings. The ability to ‘crunch the numbers’ might seem to an outsider to have retained a bit of the occult atmosphere around it, for not everyone has a gift in this arena, but the results of this skill set are both public and as well, function cross-culturally, neither of which can be claimed by either of our first two terms. The shaman’s magic is notoriously local in effect; one has to be a believer in it oneself if it is to have any result at all, thus extending our notion of the placebo, in this instance back into time. The person with a knack for this or that may find that his skill is irrelevant given shifting historical context. But a statistic is simply what it is; the only common confusion that perdures – much to the delight of those who operate casinos – is that between point and series probability. In a closed system, the relation between one event and the next is fully dependent upon the range of possible events so enclosed; this generates the series. But no matter what the make-up of the set or even ‘universe’ occurring is at hand, one cannot transfer such odds point to point; a blue marble pulled out of a sack this time does not by itself connote a red one the next. So, when a gambler believes that it is high time ‘his’ number comes up, he is deluding himself. The set of possible numbers at stake, completely public and thus above-board, assuming the wheel is not itself rigged, nor the dice weighted, contains no series probability, only that point. A red 34 this time does not imply a black 31 the next. And even though craps operates upon a real-world curve, super-positioned upon a finite and discrete statistical model derived from the binomial theorem, this does not help us predict point to point rolls, for here, series probability only comes into play over the course of many assays. Prediction is thus itself subject to occultation by the unwary and the wishful-thinking, but in itself it has none of these features. This overlay of ‘mystical’ desire only underscores how enduring is the human sense that we should be able to control, even a little, events which have yet to occur. It is no coincidence that one of the themes of time-travel in entertainment fiction centers around taking advantage of foreknowledge in order to get rich, or to maintain the transtemporal lifestyle with some perhaps higher purpose in mind, from episodes of The Twilight Zone to Stephen King novels. In fact, prediction is as routine as it is mundane. And if our ‘need to know’ basis cannot be entirely assuaged even by the most accurate of risk analysts – weekly weather patterns and daily stock performances, morning commute times and the divorce and suicide rates alike – we can take some comfort in knowing that the near future is highly unlikely to be radically different from either the recent past or thus the present as well.

Each of our three apertures, however contrived, are attestations to humanity’s basic will to life; what our species and likely its forebears have as part of its existential character, and what has replaced, for us, the survival instinct of animals. We are aware, somewhat indirectly, that the world continues as a futural space of beings, even if we ourselves will at some point be absented from that worlding. The confusion between point and series probability likely has its truer, and far more profound, home in a similar confusion regarding our own lives and those of our children. Vicarious parenting is certainly seen as negative, but what parent could say that they would not want at least a little of themselves ‘in’ their kids? And yet society at large is not a closed system – all efforts to make it so, through ethnic enclave or even parochial schooling are, to my mind, their own kind of regressive evil – and history, as the known narrative of human consciousness as a whole, is as open as our imagination and experience combined can be. Given this, our children lead their own lives, point by point, without the parent being able to predict with any accuracy this next life. That the apple may not fall far from the tree ignores the fact that such a fruit bears within it another tree, unlike that of its predecessor. It also, as with most chestnuts of this sort, conflates two utterly different forms of life; a human being is not a tree, a child not a fruit.

That we should neither retreat into a false seriality nor a simpleton’s utterance should be obvious, but the problem of knowing exactly what to do in the present, so that the future will be at least tolerable for those children’s different lives, remains of the utmost. And seen this way, none of the three categorical terms that we have briefly discussed above can help us in any ultimate manner. In their stead, what we do have at our disposal is a phenomenological memory of the future, constructed at once by the experiential dynamic of Erfahrung – this tells us that ‘we can do it again’, in Schutz’s sense, and includes both the expectations of practice and discourse – and Erlebnis – this in turn exhorts us to live in order to add to our experience through the truly novel and thus unexpected. Erfahrung is the hearthstone of human knowledge, while Erlebnis is its birthstone. In their syncretism do we find the living present, and in this shall we gain the touchstone of the future itself.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency? (The shared character of past and future)

To be given respite in the face of a crisis is our greatest hope. Once given, once taken, how does this effect our character? Just now, and just then, I was compelled to be resolute, facing down the end and facing up to my personal challenge; the end of complacency, of whatever sort. Resolute being, one of the elemental ‘existentials’ of Dasein, places my being before itself, and thus as well wills my personhood to walk away from itself, itself as it is today. Cultures of all credo and stripe face this same task, and by it, all of them are challenged both bodily and mightily. It is perhaps not implausible to imagine that the courage which is demanded of a single human being in the face of the as yet unknown future might somehow be scaled to suit the needs of that same person’s society. The question of individual character might become a way in which to interrogate cultural merit, a kind of ‘superorganic’ structure which germinates in the basic subsistence of any social organization. The primordial society had no sense of history, and yet, painstakingly and imperceptibly, walked into a future, even though the concept of which could not itself take hold in this original imagination. Any time we today shun this movement, we are regressing into this first being; the proto-human who, in spite of himself, evolved a penetrating and visionary consciousness.

Resoluteness is Greek, while gratitude is Hebrew. This is one mythopoetic manner of understanding the mystagogical function of the two contrasting ethical stances. That the former is superior to the latter in theory alone does not immediately help us, for it was born in the desultory of dismal dismay; the future is nothing but the end, its all downhill from here. For the Hebrews, the stance is itself weaker, but the motive superior: the future is ours to walk toward and though its all uphill from here, nevertheless, the vantage will be worth it. With the demise of Christian metaphysics in German idealism, the willing being had but resoluteness to call upon in order to become that futural figure. Can one be grateful for the loss of gratitude? As it is so often used as a mere platitude, being grateful lacks the essential kick which propels Dasein to complete the arc of its thrown project. At the same time, resoluteness alone often dismisses what has in fact already been accomplished, and to our credit. Today, we must then ask, what is resolute gratitude? What is the means by which Dasein discloses to itself not only its futurity as a being-ahead-of-itself, but as well, its own beingness-as-it-has-been, which would include its accomplishments?

Due to a serious health condition, I lived under the impression of the loss of futural being for about 18 months. I was recently given a clean bill of health, a second chance at life, if you will, and found it just as difficult to accept the latter as I did the former. I had become resolute, and had found gratitude, but only concerning the past. I was resolute before the sense that the past was now all I had or could have had, and grateful for this past. But taken in this way, the conceptions become salves and vanish from the vocabulary of vocation, the erudition of ethics. Here lies one of the clues to resolute gratitude: that both must orient themselves toward only the future of Dasein. One may refer to what one has completed only in the sense of Schutz’s ‘I can do it again’, as a writer might say to herself, ‘I have written so many books, why should I not write another?’, and so on. In support of this self-reference which is not back-referencing, I must as well only refer to my prior experience in the manner Schutz has also detailed, when he quotes ‘I cannot swim in the same river twice’. Experience would indeed lose its value, both as the basis for human knowledge but as well, for any ethics, if it itself could only be repeated. This is why, in the primordial human trope, experience is limited to the daily round and to a small suite of crises in which all who live must be challenged by the call to that same life. Childbirth as the future, dying which is the past, hunting and gathering and storytelling and child-raising, as the present presents itself. Is it only the scale and detail of these essential rites of passage which has been altered over the eons?

I want to suggest that for our own time, what has in fact been altered in a qualitative manner are the implications of mine ownmost death. During the interminable tenure of the social contract, there were no persons, and only parts of the mechanical whole dropped away. The ethnographic witness of mourning rituals in subsistence societies, however marked by astonishment and shot through with romance, nevertheless tells us that there is no one, only the many. One loved one’s group, unto death, and in that death the love of the group holds utter sway over the shared emotions. Here, experience of the human condition is the same thing for all. For us, so far removed from both the complete intimacy of the cohort – Freud’s ‘horde’ has been, in English, trailed away from itself with the over-emphasis on sheer size rather than cohesiveness, which is the other aspect the term suggests; his sense that it was paternalistic is almost assuredly an ironic projection, imported from his own analysis of the modern State – and the daily necessity for its nurturing and nourishment, cannot but see in experience only difference, not sameness. Just so, philosophers too have made it an ambition to convince us that experience must be ever new; Erlebnis and not mere Erfahrung. The lack of the novel in our lives is assuaged by the invention of theatrical experience, such as that to be found in sports and entertainment fiction. But there is nothing truly new in a game which has itself been played thousands of times, or in a script designed to appeal to a known market. In spite of this, we can be so captivated by the ongoing action that we forget the other chief aspect of authentic experience: its presence enacts not action but rather an act.

In this, individuated experience, becoming an ‘in hand’ through its generalized call to conscience, reenacts the moments of ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase, to be found in contexts of crisis which the primordial human community endured or celebrated. That we cannot feel the presence of ‘others’ is precisely due to their being others to ourselves. This was not the case originally, and no ethic of the future would ever imply that it should so be again. We experience life only as our life, and this, in turn, invokes in us both resoluteness and gratitude. On the one hand, I am alienated by my solo adventures; ultimately, no one can fully share them, and this comes home to me most intensely when I am tasked with completing my own Dasein, when I am faced with finitude. But on the other hand, I am liberated by the very same sensibility; no one else has experienced life quite the same way as have I! This is a marvel, a wonder, and perhaps still for some, a miracle. Narrative thus becomes a means of communicating an unshared vision, rather than one of iterating a vision already known to all. Not only did this shift in human consciousness open up language to both religion and to science, it transformed cosmology itself, freeing it from being the vehicle only for cosmogony. Until the ethic of the individual emerges, gently beginning in the West with the Pre-Socratics and much more radically given a futural model in the life of Jesus, our story of the universe was the story of its creation alone.

Today, origin myths are mostly of interest to folklorists and writers of fantasy quest narratives. This ‘lorecraft’ constructs in turn a ‘worldcraft’, in a manner not so different from what must have occurred during the social contract itself. Cosmogony thus remains as a part of the theater by which the lack of novelty in modern life is partly compensated, thus as well retaining an integral aspect of its cultural value; the latter day spectacle of the pulp fiction epic is our version of each evening’s fireside tale, told and retold in increments, night after starry night. But cosmology proper, liberated from the umbilical uroboros, is now able to investigate for itself the reality of the universe as it can be known without recompense and as only and ever presenting to our astonished senses the radically new. Cosmology is, in a word, the centerpiece of authentic human experience, for no other realm of our yet shared understanding is as alien and wondrous. It can be so simply due to is non-human character, and in this, it tells us its own story, bereft and unrelated to our human concerns. No cosmogony has this function, and indeed, just the opposite; origin myths relate human experience to the universe, not the other way round. This is also why almost all contemporary adventure epics chart a course backward rather than into the unknown. They are attempts to recover the recipe for respite alone, and mistake their ancient form – the extended, originally oral, narrative – for their present function – to impel the present to overcome itself.

In this, we can be, both as a culture and as persons, too grateful for the past. The resale market for cosmogonical stories remains a leading ledger of this error. We are ourselves led away from the world-as-it-is, for that is after all the function of entertainment cast only as itself. The melodramas of fiction and sports, whether live-action or ‘virtual’, present to us a world askew, a world righted, a world askew then righted, or more disturbingly, a ‘right world’; a world which is seen as being itself in the right. Seldom are we met with the future of our own world, with all of its rightness and wrongness fully in our face. ‘Is this not after all the real world?’, we may ask ourselves. ‘If so, I cannot be entertained by it; I must be resolute only, and take my gratitude from that which allows me to dispense with my obligation to the future of that world.’ In short, the future is seen only as a task, rather than as well a gift. History is also both of these, but with the past, we overemphasize the giftedness therein and turn away from its challenge. Our stance towards the future is the very opposite; we overdo the task in front of us and forget what a great gift, indeed, the greatest of gifts, it is to have a future at all.

And just as a person can fall ill and be forced to contemplate the lack of that future and the end of one’s life, the completion of one’s Dasein, so a culture entire can sicken itself to the point of disbelief in the future, of itself and in principle. Our half-planned technical apocalypse is a dangerous gesture to this regard. The future causes in us a basic resentment toward life if we take it only as a task. Our very will to life, so essential and indeed, seen as an essence in its supplanting of the animal’s survival instinct, is muted by this overstatement of the unknown as only a threat. Along with this, the dredging of the salvaged selvedge of historical druthers distracts us from becoming conscious that what we have been, as a species, presents just as much of a challenge to us – for it tells us who we are and why, and speaks these wisdoms to us without either rancor but also outside of all salvation – as it does a gift. The authentic disposition of Dasein’s response to the call to conscience as concernful being is that the past and future must be understood as equal parts curse and blessing. We cannot, as the cosmogonical viewpoint had it, simply choose the one and not the other, just as we cannot, as Nietzsche reminds us, choose joy without sorrow. We cannot choose the past without the future since it is we who walk forward resolutely from the one toward the other. Just so, this movement cannot be accomplished without gratitude, for futurity is something elemental to our being, and not merely an unknown factor to be discerned with time, an alien language to be deciphered with study. The future is, in its authenticity, of the same ethical presence as is the past, and thus requires of us the self-same sensibility; that of resolute gratitude and grateful resoluteness. Only by way of this will experience confer upon us its overcoming of complacency, and the universe will continue to be open to our wonder.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.