Thus it is not just that the future is no longer what it used to be', as a piece of graffiti announces from the wall of a house in Berlin. It is increasingly overshadowed by the problems which are opening up in the present. The future no longer offers that projection space into which all desires, hopes and fears could be projected without many inhibitions because it seemed sufficiently remote to be able to absorb everything which had no place or was unwelcome in the present. The future has become more realistic, not least because the horizon of planning has been extended. But this also means that it is drawing closer to the present. With the abundance of human activities and their repercussions over a period of time, which become apparent because they require periods of planning and development that cannot be reduced at will and can be cancelled only with difficulty, a momentum of the present has been established which has to concentrate on itself. The scope of action is restricted because a part of the future is already being disposed of in the present; the ecological loops of human action become loops of time which react upon the present. The invocation of the future, in the name of which political action was justified for a long time, had to be reduced and at least partly transferred to the present.
Time conflicts and temporal asymmetries resulting from the need for coordination and integration of different time-structures and structuring patterns can be resolved by institutional mechanisms which establish priorities or invent workable compromises,9 or they find direct expression in the change of cultural symbols which serve as means of orientation. Time', as the Finnish philosopher von Wright concluded in an astute analysis, ‘is man's flight from contradiction.'1o In order to be able to accept change, time has to be created. In order to be able to accept changes with time, it could be continued, the categories of time have to be changed repeatedly. This is happening at present, under the pressure produced by the collapse of the concept of progress and the potentially negative consequent effects, which are becoming manifest with delays in time through the effect on the natural environment. The temporal category of the future is being abolished and replaced by that of the extended present.11
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From the Future to the Extended Present