Intentionality, the Future and What-Is-Not

Václav Němec

The paper presents an analysis of the intentional relationship of a subject to the future as the region of what-is-not-yet. As is shown by the author, the subject primarily intends its own self as the active center of the future situation and projects its own future action into this situation, yet it also anticipates a number of its external circumstances. Apart from the foreseeable segments, the subject also intends the non-foreseeable segments of the future situation, these including the non-foreseeable aspects of its own action that it recognizes over and above its own project. The subject’s active attention is focused primarily at the novel that it will have to perform by itself in order to manage the future situation, it simultaneously being undeducible from the already given. In a critical reading of J.-P. Sartre the author then demonstrates that the appropriate attitude towards future is constituted not by anxiety but rather by faith, as enabling the subject to bridge the gap between the present given and the not-yet-being future.