The future is an entirely unphilosophical category. In as far as it is something that is sought, calculated, expected, or even feared, it imbues the process of thinking with motivations belonging to common sense. The virtue of a philosophical text is its complete indifference to the coming of its ‘true’ reader, capable of comprehending it; a philosophical text is at its weakest where it is trying to convince. This is not to say that the philosophical text doesn’t have its intended effect, this effect being to force the reader to think differently. But as the probability of its success is a question of calculation whose variables are, in any case, unknowns, the best it can do is to itself think differently, renouncing any promises from the future; the promise of change. Incapable of promising change, the philosophical text, at best, can attempt to be change, in a curious rupture with the present.
The future becomes philosophical once it stops promising. It stops promising once it stops insisting, insisting as imminent change. It is man who needs to learn to promise, says Nietzsche, but, one might add, he can only do so once he rids himself of any promised future. In chanting the chant of the future philosophers, he did not conjure the forces of an ever-contigent to-come, but the power of his own present writing to give birth to them, as an all-too human promise against all present writers. The promise of the man Nietzsche is not that the future philosophers will home, breaking with the present in the name of a contingent future, but that the future philosophers are promised, no matter if they do actually arrive. It was the complete decadence of his time, its incapacity to promise future philosophers, which allowed Nietzsche to become a man who promises.
If there is such a thing as unphilosophical times, it is in as far as there are times where the future doesn’t stop promising, where it doesn’t stop insisting. In such delicate moments, a desolidarisation with the present is no longer a subversive act, as the category of change is immediately absorbed by what is to come; time itself revealed in its immensity, beyond all calculation. No matter what promises philosophers will come up with, such promises will pale in comparison to what time will respond with: ‘Too late, too late, things will be different, alright.’ It was the atomic bomb that robbed the Cold War era of the capacity to think, confronted with the all-too obvious stupidity of a species on the brink of willingly erasing itself from the face of the only known planet in the universe capable of sustaining life. The currently imminent climatic catastrophe, escaping the narrow confines of the will-they-won’t-they drama of unleashing nuclear holocaust – in that sense more akin to the ‘uh-oh’ right before the rollercoaster drop – might be one of the roots of our own unphilosophical time. Sure, the slap in the face of stupidity is no longer the ‘I swear I’ll push that button if you don’t do as I want’, and rather the nonchalance of people in view of record temperatures, fires, floods, and failing crops. But the difference gets blurry where nuclear threats reappear as responses to climatic changes, as the worst joke ever written: ‘I’ll burn you to ashes in order to asphyxiate last.’ Once it is no longer a human finger that decides the fate of the planet, the ‘saved by the bell’ narrative is antiquated; how can we promise anything if we already know what is promised?