Anticipation: further considerations

How to orient oneself towards the future is a difficult question of daily importance, and it strikes most forcefully at the turn of the year.

A few weeks ago I wrote up some problems with attempts to obtain foreknowledge, and correspondingly to forewarn others, of future suffering. My criticisms were perhaps a little unfair as there is something perfectly natural and even inevitable to such attempts. Especially in the face of so significant an event as the arrival of a child (the example from the previous post), is it possible for a human being to live without wondering what the future will be like? Without watching and asking people who might know something about it?

I’ll take as my starting point that the answer is ‘no’. Here is my thesis as to why: more basic even than the desire to make our lives predictable (and thus potentially controllable) is the desire to make our lives explicable. We wish to know the narrative that we are in.

To defend explicability as the reason, I need to dismiss predictability as the most compelling alternative. Indeed, the concerns I raised in the last post were largely directed at the way foreknowledge failed to make good on some perceived benefit of control or mitigation of the suffering. There, the good of knowledge was bound tightly to the hope of control — whether of the circumstances themselves or of one’s internal response to them.

Here is a very trivial example of a desire to know in the absence of the potential for control: the wrapped gift addressed to you that was just recently under your Christmas tree. It enters your awareness as an impending surprise, and tugs on your desires, occupying your mind (even if just momentarily, as you unwrap it) with the question ‘what is it?’. For some the tug might be so strong as to produce a temptation to peep before its time!

And what is this tug? It can’t be (at least not rationally) a desire to control the gift, to make it what you want.¹ Your knowledge of the gift can execute no power over it. And I think it is fair to add that, whether you end up liking the gift or not, there was a pleasure in unwrapping it as your desire to know was satisfied.

Hidden things elicit a pull upon us. As it is for small paper-wrapped objects under trees, so it is for deep mysteries. So it is for the future. We are ever aware of it in front of us, like a wrapped thing we are waiting to uncover.

But it is of course at least a degree more complex than this: where there are often few indications as to what the unwrapping of a gift will unveil (perhaps the shape of it, or the suggestion you once dropped to your spouse), the present is full of hints, promises and forebodings of the future which make it less than a complete mystery, and possibly even more suspenseful for being so.

In my veggie garden, my favourite point of attraction at the moment is a vigorously flowering cucumber vine. As I watch the vine flower, I can’t help but day by day return to it to watch for emergent fruit. And not because I don’t know that cucumbers are what will (hopefully) come of it! In that respect the vine is no mystery to me, although just how well it will fruit, and which of those flowers will develop, is unknown. Indeed, more than any of the more established plants in our garden, I have a special interest in this one because I was there at its beginning and I sowed the seed myself.

While never fully dependent upon ourselves (just as I did not make that cucumber grow, as attested to by the many other seeds I sowed which have not taken or survived to maturity), the future is a kind of flowering and fruiting of our present and past. If my observations regarding the cucumber vine are typical, than this knowledge of what has been sown may in fact increase our desire to know how things turn out rather than lessening the suspense. Consider the way the unfolding of a novel takes hold of us: Before we take up the book the characters it is concerned with are largely unknown to us, and thus while we may have a general interest in knowing what the book contains, we do not yet experience that specific desire to know what happens next. However, once the characters are introduced, once certain actions occur which serve to sow the seed of a narrative beginning, the desire to know can become very great. Stories, then, have a similar phenomenology in this respect to our own lives — they propell us forward in our desire to see the fullness of the matter unveiled.

To return, then, to my initial claim that anticipation of the future is driven by a desire for explicability rather than control: what we wish to make explicable is how the seeds of the present are to manifest in the fullness of time. And in cases where we are sowing seeds which we have never sown before, inevitably we must look for indications in places where such seeds have been sown by others.

When we seek out foreknowledge, we are seeking out a frame for recognition and explanation of our own experience. It is not enough for me to recall that I buried a few specks in dirt, and be satisfied with such an account of my own actions and circumstances. We act for the sake of ends, and so does every other thing with life in it. If I didn’t think that those specks had life in them, I wouldn’t have buried them. If I didn’t think my own actions were for anything, I could hardly be said to have acted humanly.

Thus, we attempt to render our lives explicable by seeking out a kind of foreknowledge which is sense-making of the present — placing it in a meaningful relationship to the future. And very often, the only reason we are able to have an inkling of what the future will be like is that others have been there, as it were, before we have.

Elsewhere in my garden this year I sowed some parsnip. I have only ever bought parsnip from supermarkets with the tops snipped off, so I had no idea what the above-ground growth of parsnip was supposed to look like. Then, popping up all over the place after I planted the parsnips seeds were tiny seedlings which I carefully thinned out and replanted, believing them to be my parsnips. And because I am such an amateur gardener, it took just about until they’d started fruiting for me to recognise them for what they are.

The reality is that we don’t always (or even usually) know what kind of narrative we are in during those seasons of sowing. Sometimes we may sow parsnips and reap tomatoes. ² The future is always a little or a long way beyond our explication. That’s a little exciting, and a little bit more frightening. It’s not a reason to refrain altogether from the attempt to make sense of the present from the vantage of the future — as I’ve already argued, I think that would be unnatural and frankly impossible. But some epistemic humility never goes astray.

A Humble New Year to you and yours.

1. I do think there are cases of knowledge being mistaken for control, and desired for the sake of that control, but let it at least be admitted that it is not always so, and that such a desire makes perfect sense without any appeal to a sub-rational will to power. ↩

2. I’m quite sure that the tomatoes didn’t come because of the parsnip seeds I sowed, but rather because of the compost I happened to plant them in — but still, this was the sequence by which my past actions resolved into a given future. ↩