Risk and uncertainty are constitutive features of human life, yet modern societies have sought to manage them through rationalization, calculability, and expert systems. The introduction reconstructs the historical shift in time perception and worldviews that turned the future into an object of human effort and desire, while stressing the persistent ambivalence of this shift. The chapter suggests that rationalization generates both empowerment and alienation, producing residues of uncertainty that numerical abstraction cannot eliminate. Drawing on examples from science, religion, and everyday decision-making, it demonstrates that modern engagements with risk rely not only on rational calculation but also on other modes of reasoning such as hope, faith, trust, and intuition. This conceptual framing underpins the book’s broader aim: to develop a phenomenological account of the systematic relationship between calculative, imaginative, and experiential embodied modes of navigating risk and uncertainty.