DE Weekly: Past, Present, & Future
Below is an archived email originally sent on April 21, 2025.
Past, Present, & Future
“Life can only be understood backwards;” wrote Søren Kierkegaard in his journals, “but it must be lived forwards.”
This is one of Kierkegaard's most famous entries, and rightly so; I’d wager all of us have at one point or another reflected on our past and thought, “If only I had known…” or, “If only I had done that instead of this…”.
We live within a framework of time conceptually represented by a past, present, and future. For the way we live our lives, this framework is oppressive in the sense we are confined to the present.
Choices we made in the past are unchangeable, out of our grasp once made. And no matter how we envision our future, it often eludes us. Thus, we can only live and act in the present.
That Kierkegaard quote is often quoted outside of its full context. It’s helpful in this instance to include the fuller journal passage:
“It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards.”
This fuller quote lends much-needed context to Kierkegaard’s message; specifically, we must be aware of the consequences of our past upon our present and future.
Time is always moving forward, and us with it; we do not get to pause the march of time to reflect on our choices or change this or that. It is continually unfolding before us.
This is one of life’s realities which would contribute to Albert Camus’s declaration of the absurdity of life.
We are destined to play a game in which the rules are ever changing, and we don’t know whether a move we made two turns ago will have been the right one or not.
The conundrum we are charged with is this: what do we do in the present? What do we do in the face of this absurdity––that the past and future are always out of reach and only the present is ours?
Do we break down, give up, and die? Not in the least.
I recently listened to an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast featuring Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India.
As Lex often does, he steered the conversation at one point to the philosophy of life and death. I found what Modi had to say insightful.
On the future and on death he said, “You can never master the road if fear of accident or death holds you back . . . Most people stress so much about the future that their present quietly slips away. Before they know it, the moment has already faded into the past.”
This idea––if you’ve read the existentialists––is nothing new. In fact, it resonates with what Kierkegaard and other existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about years ago.
The existentialists believed, by and large, that our past significantly influences our present and future. Not only on the individual level, but societally, as a whole.
They believed that the past is a foundational element of our existence, and can have a profound impact on how our lives might go.
Despite this, they still believed that we could transcend this––transcend any predetermined “role” we might have in life––and create a new and better meaning for ourselves.
In other words, even though we might have been born into a certain situation or have made certain choices in the past, the fact we have total freedom and responsibility presents us the opportunity to shape our future.
The past might be cemented, yes. But the future is not predetermined; it is uncertain and full of possibility. This level of freedom is dizzying and the potential for despair lurks around every corner, but so too does a bright future and the potential for meaning.
Life can only be understood backwards, but I can reflect on my past to better inform my present and future.
Life can only be lived forwards, but I can affect a future of meaning with the choices I make in my present.
Time is continually unfolding before me, but its unfolding is of no matter to me, for I cannot control it. What I can control is my present––the present belongs to me. I would do well to embrace it.
“I truly believe that those who live in the present are the ones that live their lives to the fullest. That’s because they know that every moment lived has already slipped into the past. So, you must embrace the moment before it fades into the past––otherwise chasing the future only turns the present into the past. It’s not a trade worth making.” –– Narendra Modi
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Il est ressuscité, il est vraiment ressuscité ! Joyeuses Pâques à tous !
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