Critical Foresight: What is Time?

During the second half of the twentieth century, it was commonly accepted that ‘we can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present’. [2] But if, as Stambaugh asserts, ‘temporality is … the occurrence, the taking place of thinking’, where thoughts and actions in time are contextualised by a taxonomy of tense, then any meaning, significance and value ascribed to the epochal moment like say the ‘turning of the millennium’ is a mere linguistic and imagined projection of our current prejudices, interests and concerns, and is in no way attached in any real sense to the advent itself. [3] In the words of metaphysical philosopher J R Lucas, ‘whereas the present and past are real, the future, as long as it is still future, is not’. [4] On this view, it may be reasonable to ask why it was fashionable during the late 1990s in Australia to gather futures around the number 2000?