Only the Future can be Understood

Common sense says only the past can be understood, for the present too far exceeds our immediate apprehension, while the future does not even exist. The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk (Hegel).

Another sense says that only the present can be understood, for that which would understand it--contemporary consciousness--is produced by it, while the past remains so textually mediated and in need of reconstruction that it lies forever behind fog, and the future, again, does not even exist (Adorno).

But if to understand means to bring some concept completely within the understanding, to achieve a complete adequacy of concept to consciousness and vice a versa, then both common sense and its negation in another sense remain afflicted with some untruth, for both past and present are accessible only through textual mediation and reflection, both past and present retain some excess that consciousness can never fully grasp, their concepts remain incomplete and can never said to have become adequate to the non-concept they would conceptualize, thus they cannot become mutually adequate with consciousness. The future, however, is not afflicted by the excesses of the past and present, precisely because of the condition identified by both common sense and its negation: the future does not exist. The future--whether as extrapolation, desire (Jameson), or anxiety, that is, in any case, as some symbolic act--has no life in the Real (Lacan). Of course, the latent possibilities that can be unfolded into the future exist, but that is not the same as the future existing; futurabilities exist but not the future as such (Bifo).

The future does not exist, has no life in the Real, but is already always only a concept, a concept that can be willed into self-identity precisely because it has no Real existence to constitutively afflict it with the incompleteness of concepts of the past and present. Thus, only a concept of the future can become mutually adequate to consciousness.

Only the future can be understood, and, perhaps paradoxically, because this future, no matter how seemingly individual or idiosyncratic, is necessarily produced from within the symbolic order that produces individuals, it is thus the future which best indexes consciousness's mediation of a sense of the common and its present and past.

Only the future can be understood, and only through understanding the future can the past and present become known.