Understanding and Practice of the Future in History and Modernity

The article discusses historical and modern synonymously understood images, discourses and concepts of the future. The author introduces the concepts of the actual and uncertain future, physicalist and social future. It offers a reconstruction of Plato's distinction between the past, present and future in the dialogue "The State", which allows the author to introduce a schematic diagram of the future. It is shown that the discourse of the future contains three planes: the position and the concept of the future, allowing to think rationally about the future and the past, and the present, the attitude of the subject (individual) to these time modalities, objective reality, as a rule, including time and non-temporal (objective) reality. In addition to the image of the future introduced by Plato, the features of the image and understanding of the future of St. Augustine, the natural science understanding and the image of the future, the understanding of the future conditioned by the construction of social sciences are discussed. The author claims that at present a new image of the future is being formed, which is characterized by: opposition to the physicalist understanding of the future, epistemological opacity of the reality of the future, natural-artificial modality of thinking, new ontological foundations. All these statements are illustrated by the material of several cases, including the novels of A. Bogdanov, two modern foresight studies, the concepts of Plato and Aristotle, the project of F. Bacon, V. Zenkovsky's statements, F. Julien's book and the case of the Donor project, which the author analyzed in detail.

future, present, the past, discourse, concept, image, mind, time, ontology, reality