Customary Reflection and Innovative Habits

The most effective—indeed, the only—way to make the future different from the past is, in the judgment of pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, to remake the present. As Dewey notes, "present activity" is the only phase of human conduct really under our control (MW 14.184). ¹ For just this reason, we must be mindful of the past and solicitous about the future as well as attuned to the present: "Memory of the past, observation of the present, foresight of the future are indispensable. But they are indispensable to a present liberation, an enriching growth of action" unfolding in the here and now (MW 14.182). ² Dewey goes so far as to assert: "We do not use the present to control the future. We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity" (MW 14.215). But insofar as we do refine and enlarge such activity, we ineluctably reshape the future.

Thus, the most compelling reason to imagine the future is to reimagine and, thereby, to mobilize the resources requisite for remaking the present. More often than not, this requires us to wrest the maimed present from the deeply sunk talons of a vicious past. The future toward which we are driving is, in however an attenuated and inconspicuous form, always somewhat of a piece with the present through which we are moving. ³ When philosophers turn seers, they are even more than usual exposed to the risk of reenacting the misstep of Thales. Their captivation by what beckons from afar distracts them from dangers underfoot. But when they allow the frequently disheartening spectacle of human folly to graft onto their critical sensibilities an invincible pessimism, the graft all too often completely overtakes and destroys the plant. ⁴ Put otherwise, when they despair of life, they indict not life but themselves. Thus, William James endorses James Hinton's assertion: "That our pains are . . . unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne save in misery and dumb patience, which utter exhaustion alone makes patient,—that our pains are thus unbearable, means not that they are too great, but that we are sick. We have not got our proper life" (1979, 84). Prognosis and treatment wait upon diagnosis. One does not need to be a presumptuous seer in order to imagine that conflicting diagnoses of a fatal affliction—for example, nihilism as the tendency to take our mortal existence as a treatable disease versus nihilism as malady having its roots in a longing for transcendence—are likely to be offered as readily in the future as they have been in the past. As in the past, ethics in the future will almost certainly both treat life as itself a sickness and (from the perspective of thinkers akin to James, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Foucault) interpret this diagnosis as an illness without rival. That is, it will be a deeply divided affair, one in which (among other sharp divisions) the champions of a transcendent order will pit themselves against advocates of historical flux. ⁵

In any case, variable futures of ethics, in its various senses, are readily imaginable, ranging from the disheartening to the exhilarating. Some of these imaginable futures are disheartening because they are little or indeed nothing more than uncritical prolongations of doing the done thing, that is, of doing ethics in the unimaginative and ineffectual manner in which it is all too often undertaken. Some of these are, however, exhilarating because they hold out the prospect of reconfiguring our actual practices of ethical deliberation and ultimately deliberate conduct, even in its more entangled communal forms, in such a way that imagination becomes critical and critique, efficacious.

As hyperbolic as it is likely to sound, the future of humanity is bound up with the future of ethics, especially since the willingness and ability of humans to live wisely with others are increasingly a practical necessity and seemingly a human impossibility. The future of ethics is burdened with nothing less than securing for humanity the possibility of a future. This pressing need is, practically, a virtually unimaginable future...