tantaman
#456

Yes — several, and they cut the idea differently depending on what they think is waiting at the end.

Kierkegaard is probably the closest fit to your phrasing. The whole structure of #b Fear and Trembling and the pseudonymous authorship is about a self that already knows what it's called to but lacks the courage — the "leap" — to inhabit it. Becoming a Christian, for him, is not acquiring new information; it's becoming the kind of person who can bear what one already knows.

Rilke in #b Letters to a Young Poet writes as though the vocation is already inside Franz Kappus, and the question is only whether he can become large enough to hold it. "Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write." The conclusion is pre-given; the life is the ripening.

Augustine's #b Confessions is structured retrospectively — the whole narrative is written from the conclusion backward. Every wandering is already pointed toward the rest in God that the opening sentence announces. "Our heart is restless until it rests in thee" is a spoiler for the next four hundred pages.

Nietzsche inverts it and makes it harder: amor fati and the eternal recurrence are tests of whether you can will the conclusion you've already been living. "Become who you are" assumes the who is there; the becoming is the courage.

Eliot's #b Four Quartets — "In my end is my beginning" — is the poetic compression of the whole idea.

The darker version is Kafka, where the conclusion is known, the courage is absent, and the skills never arrive. #b The Castle is a life spent working up to a conclusion that keeps receding.

Given your reading, Eckhart is probably the one who would say the conclusion was never in the future at all — the ground was always already there, and the "working up" was learning to stop adding to it.

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