Futures are created by imagination and hope – only theorizing possible futures with [less/more aff impacts] can allow us to transform society.

Kant sets the course for a pragmatic vision of the future – any future – as an indispensable foundation for social action in service of its realization, against thinkers who posit it merely speculatively or dispense with it altogether. The future looms not as a constitutive threat but as a regulative postulate for orienting practical reason, a vital albeit revisable guide for the creation of a better world. For Kant, one may hope for that to which one actively aspires. Appropriately pluralized and brought down to earth, as it were, we may in like fashion hope for unattained utopias, for possibilities blocked in the past that may still in time become real as well as for the prospect of a brighter tomorrow wrought by action in concert.

Kant laid the groundwork for this perspective, but he was not alone in taking it. Writ small, the sort of generative prophetic hope he suggests appears mundanely in William James’s observation that there are instances ‘where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming’; ‘faith in a fact’, he emphasizes, ‘can help create that fact’ (James, 1979, p. 29, italics in original). Politics, and any collective endeavour for that matter, is an archetypal domain of such hope, for ‘[w]herever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the pre-cursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned’ (James, 1979, p. 29). James’s example is of passengers acting in concert to foil a train robbery; scaled up, democratic participation likewise requires a provisional trust in the capacities of one’s fellow citizens for responsible participation.

Writ large, Kant’s prophetic history offers inklings of the philosophy of history of August Cieszkowski, who projected Hegel’s largely backward-looking Geist into the future. With Hegel, that is, history culminated in his own moment, and the state sketched in his Philosophy of Right reflects a mildly reformed vision of his contemporary Prussia. Cieszkowski criticized Hegel for his myopia, writing that instead of humans enacting a supplied script in the theatre of the world, the true realization of Geist as freedom in the world would involve humans authoring and improvising it themselves in performance. Just as Marx (2000a, p. 82) wrote in his own commentary on Hegel’s political thought that to transcend philosophy means first to realize it, Cieszkowski argued that realizing Geist means transcending its conceptually distinct ontological priority over us, transforming speculation about the future into its active facilitation. In short, the realization of the philosophy of history for Cieszkowski (1979, p. 54), like Kant, means that humans collectively become the ‘executors of history’.19

The ultimate upshot is that pace presentism, the resolution to the problem of the forgotten future is to recognize that desired states of affairs cannot be expected to simply happen. Amidst the myriad contingencies and potentiality, interrupted trajectories and synchronicities of nonsynchronous temporal vectors, many futures lay dormant in the present, but not just any future can be realized. If our endeavours are to be anything more than blind groping or shots in the dark, they must connect to prospective tendencies present within reality but not yet drawn out of it; if we are to have concrete utopia it is only through our participation in its effectuation. As Bloch (1977, p. 519) writes in his own commentary on Hegel, whether the actual becomes rational ‘depends on the phenomenology or history of appearances of true action’.20

Benjamin offers a version of this view in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, a work that is not a testament to historical despair despite its celebrated equation of civilization and barbarism. Rather, it seeks hope in the prospect of reviving the unfulfilled futures of the past, not to reprise them point for point but to take solace and inspiration from their utopias, to read them forward out of the past and into the future.21 For Benjamin (2019, p. 205), hope for the future involves the recognition that history does not occur in ‘homogenous, empty time’ time; instead, it is primed for rupture, ‘filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]’. This ‘now’ is the domain of the instantaneous, of the possible irruption of action, the promise of ‘blast[ing] a specific era out of the homogenous course of history’ (Benjamin, 2019, p. 207). Crucially, while Benjamin (2019, p. 208) describes this other temporality as ‘Messianic time’, the historical continuum is broken not by a supernatural power, but by humans working in concert22; in his case, by the revolutionary working class, who may divine the future because they create and arrange it themselves.

The fact that the time of the erstwhile future, understood solely as the fulfilment of the Enlightenment progressive project, has likely passed (though, to be fair, one could never exactly know this to be the case) does not mean that other possibilities do not remain for the time to come. After all, the world contains multitudes, events flow unexpectedly and the future lasts a long time, even forever.23 The question of hope accordingly becomes not merely what stymied-cum-novel interpretations of the world allow us to fully make sense of it, but also, and more importantly, what sorts of experiments can push our world towards rendering these interpretations compelling, to give them more purchase in concrete practice.24