The Future

Extract

Years ago, there was a popular song whose refrain went thus:

Che sàrà, sàrà,

Whatever will be, will be,

The future’s not ours to see,

Che sàrà, sàrà.

The first line of this refrain is the motto of the noble house to which Bertrand Russell belonged; it serves to express a view of time that has been set forth by Russell in many of his writings, but the view is one widely held long before Russell lived and now held by many people independently of him. We should not be misled by the tautological appearance of the sentence ‘Whatever will be, will be’; in the song it is a way of putting forward a positive thesis, which may fairly be called a philosophical thesis, even though people who hold it are often little practised in systematic philosophical reflection. We may call it the thesis that there is a definite or determinate future. A book may lie open at one page, but it has a definite text from first page to last, irrespective of this; many people think in this way of the book of human history.

We should distinguish between the definiteness or determinacy of the future and its being causally determined by the present and past. If there are causes that now exist or have already existed from which the future can issue only in one way, then the future is clearly determinate ; but the converse does not hold. The metaphor of the book may help us again; even if the text of later pages is not determined by the text of earlier pages, there may nevertheless be a completely fixed text on those pages which we have not yet turned over.