The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality by David Couzens Hoy

Author:David Couzens Hoy [Hoy, David Couzens]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Movements, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Criticism
ISBN: 9780262013048
Google: GYxjswEACAAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2009-07-15T00:32:30.011028+00:00

4

“The Times They Are a-Changin’ ”: On the Future

If nostalgia is one side of the coin, hope is the other side. Nostalgia is putting all one’s hope in the past. The previous chapter maintained that nostalgia is to be avoided. Does avoiding nostalgia therefore mean giving up hope for a better future? This is a central question in the politics of temporality. In this chapter, I will consider the advantages and disadvantages of hope. Hope can imply too much continuity with the past, such that total change becomes unlikely. In contrast, hope for total change can blind the politically active to possibilities in the present.

For this debate to make sense, much depends on what is meant by the future, a word that perhaps should always be followed by a question mark. An initial distinction concerns the “future” in both the phenomenological and in the historical senses of the term. This is not a distinction simply between an individual’s future and a collective future, although that is certainly a central part of the difference. In the historical domain, there is also the difference between the teleological and the eschatological sense of the future. Although these are normally run together, they are not identical in meaning. Teleology implies an account of the developmental emergence of social and political events and structures. Eschatology, in contrast, suggests a sudden, disruptive occurrence such that when it happens is irrelevant. The eschatological event could happen tomorrow or centuries from now. I will explain below how Kant and Hegel project teleological accounts of the historical future, with Kant’s being more eschatological and Hegel’s being more teleological. Insofar as the scope of these accounts involves the history of all humankind, it is called “philosophical history” or “universal history,” and is more in the domain of the philosopher than the historian.

Not every philosopher shares this interest and even belief in universal history. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for instance, receive these ideas with skepticism. Schopenhauer dismisses universal history as seeing shapes in clouds, and Nietzsche sees it as an elitist abuse of history. In a famous parable Walter Benjamin gives a Nietzschean twist to the Marxian dialectics of history. Benjamin’s parable of the Angelus Novus salvages a minimal hope from the collapse of the ideal of universal history that then has echoes in the recent political writings of both Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek.

If Derrida and Žižek differ over the status of subjectivity and consciousness, they both face the difficult problem of how to justify their skepticism about universal history with their hope for the possibility of progressive politics. Derrida in particular starts by returning to a more phenomenological sense of the future. English cannot capture in its single word, “future,” the two senses that Derrida distinguishes in French: l’avenir and le futur. For Derrida, the latter is the predictable future that is expected, whether for better or worse, whereas the former is the unpredictable, unexpected event, again, for better or worse. For example (not one of Derrida’s), we might expect

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