Temporality and Possibility

“Some are brave out of ignorance; when they stop to think they start to fear. Those who are truly brave are those who best know what is sweet in life and what is terrible, then go out undeterred to meet what is to come.” The ancient Greeks are not renowned for their sense of history, but these words – put into the mouth of Pericles for a funeral speech honoring fallen warriors in the first winter of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides some thirty years later, when their city Athens lay in total defeat – reveal the fundamental temporality of the human being: commitments made in view of past experience and future uncertainty. The awareness that we have a past and a future opens a finite temporal horizon for each moment, frees us from the grip of the immediate present, enables us to push back the frontier at either end, to study history and to develop techniques of prediction. Temporality makes possible genuine action; we know that what we choose to do makes our history and changes our destiny. Despite its obscurity, the future is not a blinding fog bank; here and there we see possibilities illuminated by experience including the knowledge of the sweet and the terrible. The past constrains, but it is not a mere dead weight that conditions the behavior of an organism. It contributes to the future by opening our consciousness to a wider range of possibilities and by shaping the character of the person who chooses the aim of his life and adheres to it through vicissitudes.