ABSTRACT
Men were judged on the degree of human excellence that they incarnated. The very word “person” simply designated the masks that actors wore in plays and that symbolized certain universal human types. A metaphysics of the future must transcend humanism and evolutionary reaction. If metaphysics is constituted as a body of doctrine bearing on the meaning of existence achieved through reasoning about the consequences implicit within the structure of being, it nonetheless remains true that philosophical questions themselves grow out of experiences which are pre-philosophical. Aristotle approached in The Rhetoric the philosophical paradox which states that all political and moral acts have consequences only in the future. The political, unlike the playful, while exercised in the present, aims at the future. The appeal to the past reduces liberty ultimately to choices made within a determined framework and shrivels human freedom to decisions having to do with the perfection of the future, be it human or physical.
