How should we greet the future? With gladness or with grief? It comes to us like a pale dawn, like New England, but it isn’t New England. We know it for our benefit, but, at least today, parting is grief. You, future, must wipe our eyes.
The German word Zukunft covers two different language and thought traditions, futurum and adventus. Futurum, the future participle of the Latin sum ("I am," but deriving immediately from the perfect tense fui--"I was"), corresponds to the Greek phyw and its substantive physis, which has to do with the materialistic becoming of things in process. Adventus, on the other hand, is the Latin correlate of the Greek parousia, having to do with the arrival and entrance of persons or events. Futurum is extrapolated from processes of the past and present, whereas Zukunft is the advent of an Other, the new, which cannot be extrapolated from past or present, but breaks in with new possibilities from beyond.
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The German word Zukunft covers two different language and thought traditions, futurum and adventus. Futurum, the future participle of the Latin sum ("I am," but deriving immediately from the perfect tense fui--"I was"), corresponds to the Greek phyw and its substantive physis, which has to do with the materialistic becoming of things in process. Adventus, on the other hand, is the Latin correlate of the Greek parousia, having to do with the arrival and entrance of persons or events. Futurum is extrapolated from processes of the past and present, whereas Zukunft is the advent of an Other, the new, which cannot be extrapolated from past or present, but breaks in with new possibilities from beyond.
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