This is the fourth essay in my series, The Phenomenological Papers, a series of essays on topics in phenomenology and metaphysics. You can find the first essay here, the second here, and the third here. This one discusses the phenomenology of time, and how we should respond to the facts presented to us in temporal experience. I don't argue for it here, but there is an ontology implicit to this that I basically endorse.
I. The future is essentially experienced as something that is open. For example, tomorrow I will eat lunch, even though I have not yet decided what I will eat. What will come to be, how the world will come to exist—that is, what I will eat—will be subject, at least in part, to my choice. We go about every day imagining the outcome of such choices, before we make them. Of course, I will be hungry is not up to my choice, nor are a lot of other things. But a whole lot else is. And it is in these things which our experience of the future as being open consists. We experience imagined possibilities in a kind of nascent state, as a set of paths we can choose to bring about, or not, rather than as something already real. They are not possibilities we do actually have to encounter, but only could, or might.
However, note that it is not sufficient to characterise our experience of the future by merely saying that it ‘could’ happen, because otherwise contingent events from our past would feel the same way, as they only ‘could’ have happened themselves. It might have happened that I chose a different place to live or won the lottery. These past possibilities, nor the fact that they did not happen, which were equally contingent, are not experienced as something that is open in the same way. Indeed, we even experience future events that are ‘inevitable’ (that we are certain or near certain will occur) as open, like ‘the last day of the present year.’ These events are experienced as certainly coming to be, as necessary, but still as something open in the sense I am putting forward.