Over a hundred years ago a Scandinavian philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard, made a profound observation about the future. … “He who fights the future,” remarked the philosopher, “has a dangerous enemy. The future is not, it borrows its strength from the man himself, and when it has tricked him out of this, then it appears outside of him as the enemy he must meet.”
We in the western world have rushed eagerly to embrace the future—and in so doing we have provided that future with a strength it has derived from us and our endeavors. Now, stunned, puzzled and dismayed, we try to withdraw from the embrace, not of a necessary tomorrow, but of that future which we have invited and of which, at last, we have grown perceptibly afraid. In a sudden horror we discover that the years now rushing upon us have drained our moral resources and have taken shape out of our own impotence. At this moment, if we possess even a modicum of reflective insight, we will give heed to Kierkegaard’s concluding wisdom: “Through the eternal,” he enjoins us, “we can conquer the future.”
The advice is cryptic; the hour late. Moreover, what have we to do with the eternal? Our age, we know, is littered with the wrecks of war, of outworn philosophies, of broken faiths. We profess little but the new and study only change.
—Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 1960.
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