Amsterdam, March 10, 2026
It was the end of a beautiful day. The clouds were the same as the clouds Albert Cuyp painted, some three centuries ago, but then the surrounding landscape was a lake between Amsterdam and Leyden. As I approached Europe’s fifth-largest international airport, Schiphol, heading towards the twin agglomeration of The Hague and Rotterdam, about fifty kilometers away, the headlights and taillights of the six-lane highway disappeared and emerged in a tunnel beneath the runways, while above me, the world’s largest airworthy passenger aircraft, a Airbus A380, landed. A year and a half earlier, I flew on such a plane to South Africa, destination Pietermaritzburg, and made a stopover in consumer paradise Dubai. I marveled then at how normal this ‘futuristic’ world had become, whereas cities like Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town, but also New Amsterdam (New York) and Batavia (Jakarta), were founded by the Dutch in times when technology was still in use that we today dare to call primitive. Enormous distances were covered back then, and an impressive amount of organizational capacity was employed to make it all possible.
At the time, the world as it is now, with its car traffic and airplanes, would have appeared as a mind-boggling utopia. Christiaan Huygens, the physicist who first described light as a wave phenomenon, may well have fantasized about extraterrestrial worlds as early as 1698, but the cities he envisioned there were simply the most technologically advanced cities of his time—that is to say, Dutch.
Had Huygens been sitting next to me in the car, the current world would indeed have made an impression that was as unearthly as it was unreal. And he would be right. We are inclined to think that the current world, with its ubiquitous cars, highways, airports, and airplanes, for example, has been technologically inescapable. Yet there is more chance at play than it seems, and the situation corresponds more to the temporality of a transitional period than to a more permanent state.
Private mobility gives the impression, above all, of being more efficient. But in fact, that is hardly the case. For example: the average modern car travels at only 20 kilometers per hour if one takes into account all additional costs, assuming that the labor required for this is itself not part of the same journeys. Something similar applies to air traffic. Its cost-benefit ratio, too, defies assumed efficiency, considering that all air traffic has been subject to systematic subsidization of aviation by national states since its introduction in 1903. And there is more in ‘our’ world that refutes conventional assumptions. Yet the same world created a type of human being who considers this entire world—in fact a speculative reality—self-evident and inescapable. That type of human being, homo finalis, obstructs the view of something entirely different. This does not concern the familiar horizons of the utopian or dystopian (what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’), but rather a different vista that, in the eyes of homo finalis, can nevertheless be perceived as a beacon to navigate the future.
The world of finalis is, after all, as Nietzsche already believed, merely a transitional state in a larger evolutionary and historical process, even though finalis does not perceive it as such. The outline of that process can be interpreted as a utopian beacon or vista, but it concerns only the opening of the floodgates of the imagination, informed by the history of philosophical and poetic (artistic) thinking. Here, that consists of the step-by-step unveiling of that vision, beginning with the publication of a two-part cycle of poems in which the vision is present at its core.
The reader is cordially invited to accompany me on this journey.
Leon Dessau
Leon Dessau 