The Phenomenon of the Future as it was constituted by Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger

Abstract

“Time” is one of our most frequently used words. In a recent German study“Zeit” was found to be the most frequent word used in written German. These findings point to the fact that time belongs to the most important ontological faculty of the human being, dealing with almost whatever people do in ordinary life. However, when it comes to the use of the word“future” as one of the ontological aspects of time, this is not at all as frequent. At least not in the written language and maybe not even in the spoken one. But the interesting thing is that it is very important in the way we think of time, i.e., our time-consciousness, and in the way in which we deal with the moments that come next to now and with times to come in a longer perspective as well. This can be seen in exploratory studies of young peoples’ thoughts of the future, for example. Their constitution of the concept of time embraces the future as the more dominating constituent. To them thinking about time was almost impossible without directing their thoughts onto the future and the more existential conditions of living. So we can see here the phenomenological significance of the concept of the future, and the need for investigating and exploring it a bit further. I have touched upon this phenomenological context earlier (see Bjurvill 1995). At this time I would like to go into its more theoretical foundations, i.e., a phenomenology of the future, taking as a point of departure the dialectics of necessity and possibility which constitute the differentiating axis of the internal time-consciousness and the experience of the future. Three phenomenological philosophers, Sören Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger are the triangle I will use to thematize the existential core of the phenomenon of the future.