Future Oriented Temporality as a Worldview Narrative of Western Culture

The purpose of the article is to explore socio-cultural conditions in European history that formed Modernity as the system of ideas and attitudes to reality through new forms of temporality, which, in turn, still determines our worldview. The historical justification strategy uses two temporal dimensions: the idyllic past and the sequenced present. Therefore, the dominance of future-orientation, as a feature of the worldview that was formed in Europe in the era of modernity, is a cultural nonsense. The article analyses the features of its formation. The theoretical basis of the research is the classic works of enlighteners, who were the first to consider history as a planetary phenomenon, and humanity as an “unfinished project” not only of nature but also of history. The historical and philosophical works of George Collingwood, Jacques Le Goff, and Jonas Ahlskog have helped to argue the assertion that modern European culture has a specific scale of understanding time — the future is the horizon of goal setting, and not the past “golden times”, which in the pre-modern era were perceived as a model for endless reproduction. However, in his work, Matt Ossias notes that the dimension of the future has lost its optimistic and technological connotations in contemporary Western culture and is associated with risks and uncertainty. Scientific novelty. The study demonstrates that in the era of modernity, unique worldview characteristics were formed, which emphasize and determine the specificity of European culture, namely the way of perceiving time. For the first time, the uncertainty of the future was perceived optimistically, and expectations were located on the horizon of linear secular time. Conclusions. The philosophical context of modernity associated with the main worldview features of the Enlightenment was formed under the influence of the methodology of natural sciences. For example, the history of civilizations was interpreted as a continuation of the geological history of the planet; the object of socio-philosophical reflections acquired a global scale — it was no longer about the history of separated communities, but the history of human race progress; the stages of social evolution were clearly outlined and considered inevitable for each society. The perception of modern times, its “here” and “now” coordinates had lost connection with the past and became oriented into the future, which was seen as dependent on human intentions and efforts.