The Horizon of Construal: 10. When Description Stops Working

We often treat a failed description as a temporary inconvenience.

We do not know enough yet.

The measurements are incomplete.

The theory needs refinement.

More information will eventually allow us to say what is happening.

Sometimes that is true.

But sometimes something more interesting occurs.

It is not that we lack a description of what is happening. Our way of describing what is happening has ceased to work.

The distinction matters.

A map can fail because a road has been omitted. That is a problem of information. But a map can also fail because the landscape no longer fits the distinctions by which the map was made.

The difficulty is then not that we have failed to describe one more thing.

It is that the things we know how to describe no longer organise the situation adequately.

This can happen when a relation we had taken for granted stops holding. A category that seemed stable begins to blur. A boundary no longer separates what it once separated. A distinction that once made consequences visible no longer does so.

The world has not disappeared.

Something has happened to the relation between the world and our construal of it.

This is why a failed description can be revealing.

It can show us what the description had depended upon.

When a coordinate system breaks down, we discover that location had depended upon a particular structure of space. When a physical theory reaches a domain in which its equations cease to provide meaningful predictions, we discover that the theory had conditions of applicability. When an everyday distinction becomes impossible to maintain, we may discover that what seemed like an obvious feature of the world was also a feature of the way we had made the world intelligible.

The failure therefore points backwards.

It reveals the conditions that had previously remained invisible because the construal worked so well.

And it points forwards.

For once the old description can no longer carry us, we face a peculiar kind of openness. We are not simply waiting for more facts. We may need a different way of distinguishing what matters.

The horizon of a construal appears precisely here.

Not where reality ends.

But where a way of making reality intelligible reaches the edge of its competence.

The interesting question is therefore no longer simply:

What is beyond our description?

It is:

What has our description required in order to work at all?

The Horizon of Construal: 9. The World That Pushes Back

If the world becomes intelligible through construal, it might be tempting to conclude that we are free to construe it however we please.

We are not.

The world pushes back.

A distinction may seem useful and then fail.

A category may organise our experience and then cease to predict anything.

A map may guide us until the road it depicts is no longer there.

A physical theory may work beautifully within one domain and fail beyond it.

Something constrains the construal.

This is why construal is not construction.

We do not simply make a world and then inhabit it.

We participate in a world whose patterns enable some ways of making distinctions and frustrate others.

A stone resists.

An organism changes.

A measurement disagrees with a prediction.

A relation persists where we expected it to disappear.

The world answers back.

And this matters because it gives us a way to avoid two opposite mistakes.

The first is to imagine that the world arrives already divided into exactly the categories we use to describe it.

The second is to imagine that our categories are entirely our own creation.

Neither is adequate.

A construal is possible because something in the world can sustain it.

It remains useful because the relations it identifies continue to matter.

It reaches its limits when those relations no longer support it.

Perhaps, then, the relation between world and construal is neither passive representation nor arbitrary construction.

It is participation under constraint.

We construe the world.

The world pushes back.

And somewhere between the two, a way of making something intelligible can become possible.

Which raises the question we have been approaching all along:

What happens when the world pushes back hard enough to change the construal itself?

The Horizon of Construal: 8. The Material World

We tend to think of materiality as the most obvious way the world can be.

Things occupy space.

They persist through time.

They have boundaries.

They resist us.

They interact.

And so we speak of a material world as though “material” simply names what is there before anything else happens.

But perhaps materiality deserves a closer look.

To construe something materially is to make certain features consequential.

Persistence matters.

Location matters.

Boundaries matter.

Resistance matters.

The distinction between a thing and its surroundings matters.

A material object is not merely something that exists. It is something that can remain, occupy, resist, interact and be distinguished in particular ways.

This does not mean that we invent material objects.

The world constrains the ways in which it can successfully be construed.

But the material world we encounter is not simply a collection of pieces of matter waiting to be labelled.

It is a world in which particular distinctions have become stable enough to matter.

This gives us a different way of approaching an old question.

Instead of asking:

What is matter?

we might ask:

What makes a material world a possible construal?

The question shifts our attention from substance to possibility.

What must be the case for persistence to matter?

For location to matter?

For a boundary to hold?

For something to count as relatively independent of its surroundings?

These are not merely properties added to matter.

They are part of what makes materiality intelligible.

And perhaps this is why the material world can feel so obvious.

It is a remarkably successful construal.

It gives us a world of things that persist, occupy places, resist change and enter into relations.

But its success should not make us forget that it is a way in which a world becomes intelligible.

The material world is not thereby unreal.

It is something more interesting:

a world in which material distinctions have become possible, stable and consequential.

The Horizon of Construal: 7. The Conditions We Mistake for the World

We have seen that things depend upon relations.

We have seen that distinctions require a background.

We have seen that a construal works because certain conditions hold.

But there is a curious consequence.

Once a construal becomes familiar, we tend to forget its conditions.

The space in which things can be located becomes simply space.

The continuity against which events can be distinguished becomes time.

The relations through which events can be connected become causes.

The stability through which objects can persist becomes a property of the objects themselves.

What made the world intelligible begins to look like the world itself.

This is an easy mistake to make.

A successful construal disappears into what it allows us to see.

We no longer notice the distinctions that make an object an object, or the relations that allow it to persist. We simply encounter the object.

The conditions have become invisible because they work so well.

This does not mean that space, time, causation or objects are unreal.

It means that we should be careful about assuming that the forms in which we successfully construe the world must also be the forms in which the world exists independently of that construal.

The distinction is subtle but important.

A condition of intelligibility is not necessarily an object of which the world is made.

And once we forget that, we can begin asking questions that quietly presuppose the answer.

What is an object in itself?

Where is something located before there is a space in which to locate it?

What happened before time?

What caused the existence of causation itself?

We have encountered versions of these questions before.

Perhaps the problem is not that they are difficult questions.

Perhaps they are questions that have carried the conditions of one construal beyond the point at which those conditions can be assumed.

The map has become so familiar that we have mistaken its coordinates for the territory.

And this gives us a new reason to be interested in the horizon.

For perhaps the quickest way to discover the conditions of a construal is to follow it to the point where those conditions stop working.

The Horizon of Construal: 6. The Relations Behind the Thing

We are used to thinking of a thing as something that exists first and enters into relations afterwards.

A tree stands in a forest.

A planet moves through space.

A person encounters another person.

But look more closely.

What makes the tree the tree it is?

Its roots relate to the soil.

Its leaves relate to light and air.

Its growth relates to seasons.

Its boundary is maintained through exchanges with what surrounds it.

Remove these relations, and the thing does not simply remain the same thing with fewer properties. Its very persistence is affected.

The relations are not additions to the thing.

They are part of what allows it to remain a thing.

The same is true of the planet. Its identity as a planet depends upon relations of motion, mass, orbit and gravitational interaction. Change those relations sufficiently and what counts as the same kind of object may change with them.

This suggests that we have been putting the relation in the wrong place.

We imagine:

thing → relation

But perhaps it is often closer to:

relation → stability → thing

A thing can be a relatively stable pattern within changing relations.

This does not dissolve things into relations. The tree is still a tree. The planet is still a planet.

But their being what they are is not independent of the relations through which they persist.

And this brings us back to construal.

To construe something as a thing is to recognise a pattern of stability within a field of relations.

The thing appears because something holds together.

Perhaps, then, the world is not made intelligible by first finding its things and then discovering their relations.

Perhaps relations are already working behind the things we see.

And once we begin to notice them, the apparent solidity of the world becomes something more interesting:

a stability achieved within becoming.

The Horizon of Construal: 5. What Makes a World Possible?

We have been looking at what construal makes visible.

Now we can ask a more difficult question:

What makes construal possible?

The question is easily misunderstood.

We are not asking what existed before a construal, as though there were first a world and then, afterwards, someone began to describe it.

We are asking what must be available within a relation for something to become intelligible at all.

There must be differences that can matter.

There must be some continuity across which differences can appear.

There must be relations within which something can persist, change, interact, or be distinguished.

There must be constraints: not every distinction can work equally well.

And there must be some way in which what is encountered can participate in these distinctions.

None of these conditions is itself simply another thing in the world.

They are conditions under which things, events and relations can become intelligible as such.

This gives us a subtle reversal.

We normally imagine:

world → things → relations → intelligibility

But perhaps the order is closer to:

relations and distinctions → intelligibility → things and events as we can construe them

This does not mean that relations and distinctions exist independently of a world.

It means that a world is not merely a collection of things.

A world is also the structured field in which things can become distinguishable, persistent, related and consequential.

And perhaps this is what makes a world possible.

Not that everything is already there.

But that there are ways for something to become something.

The question, then, is no longer simply what the world contains.

It is:

What must be possible for there to be a world of things at all?

The Horizon of Construal: 4. The Background We Don't See

Something becomes visible because something else remains in the background.

A figure stands out against a field.

A tree becomes an object against a landscape.

An event becomes an event against something that continues around it.

We rarely notice the background precisely because it is doing its job.

It allows the thing to appear.

This is true of concepts as well.

To recognise something as an object, we normally assume a space in which it can be located.

To recognise something as an event, we assume a temporal continuity against which it can occur.

To recognise something as a cause, we assume a world of processes in which events can be related.

The background is therefore not simply what we have chosen not to describe.

It is part of what makes description possible.

And yet, once a construal is working, its conditions tend to disappear from view. We see the object, not the distinction that made it an object. We notice the event, not the continuity that allowed it to count as an event.

The map shows the roads.

It does not show the assumptions that made the roads mappable.

Perhaps this is why the limits of a construal can be so revealing.

When the background can no longer be taken for granted, what was previously obvious may cease to be intelligible.

The object loses its setting.

The event loses its temporal field.

The relation loses the structure that made the relation possible.

And then we discover something we normally overlook:

A construal does not merely make some things visible. It also makes a background possible against which those things can appear.

The background we don't see may therefore be one of the most important parts of the world we do.

The Horizon of Construal: 3. The Difference That Appears

We have become accustomed to thinking of differences as things we notice.

This is red and that is blue.

This is a tree and that is a stone.

This happened before that.

The difference seems to be sitting there, waiting to be observed.

But not every difference matters.

There are countless variations in the world that make no difference to anything we do, predict, or understand. A difference becomes significant only when it enters into some relation in which it can have consequences.

A difference, then, is not merely a gap between two things.

It is a distinction that does something.

The distinction between a living organism and its surroundings matters because the organism maintains itself in relation to them.

The distinction between one event and another matters because their relations allow us to order, connect, or explain what happens.

The distinction between one object and another matters because something can persist, interact, or move differently.

Difference becomes visible through consequence.

And this changes our question.

We need not ask only:

What differences are there?

We can ask:

Which differences become differences that matter?

This does not mean that we create the difference.

Something must constrain what distinctions can successfully be made.

But neither does the distinction arrive fully formed, waiting for a name.

It emerges within a pattern of relations in which one possibility begins to count differently from another.

Perhaps, then, construal begins not with naming things but with making differences consequential.

And if that is so, the world does not first present us with things which we subsequently distinguish.

Things and differences may emerge together.

A thing becomes a thing because some difference holds.

And a difference becomes significant because something can become a thing.

The map is beginning to draw itself.

The Horizon of Construal: 2. Before the Thing

We speak easily of things.

A stone is a thing. A tree is a thing. A planet is a thing.

It seems that things simply exist, and that relations come afterwards. The stone exists; then it has a position, encounters another stone, casts a shadow.

But consider what makes the stone the same stone from one moment to the next.

Its material changes. Its position changes. Its surroundings change.

Something nevertheless persists.

What persists is not simply a piece of matter. It is a pattern of distinctions that allows us to treat what changes as belonging to the same thing.

This does not make the stone imaginary.

It means that thinghood is not exhausted by material presence.

A thing has a boundary, but the boundary is meaningful only in relation to what lies beyond it.

It has an identity, but identity depends upon what counts as change and what does not.

It persists, but persistence is intelligible only across difference.

The thing, in other words, is already relational.

We might therefore have begun at the wrong end.

Instead of asking how things enter into relations, we might ask:

What relations make something available as a thing?

The question is larger than it first appears.

For if thinghood depends upon relations, then the world is not first populated by finished things which subsequently acquire properties.

Things may instead be achievements of stability within becoming.

And that gives us a curious thought.

Before there is a thing, there need not be nothing.

There may be something happening that has not yet become available to us as a thing.

Perhaps the world does not begin with things.

Perhaps things are ways in which a world becomes distinguishable.

The Horizon of Construal: 1. The World We Already Have

We tend to begin with a world that is already complete.

There are things.

There are events.

There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change.

Then there is us, encountering this ready-made world and trying to describe it.

It seems so obvious that it is difficult to see it as an assumption.

But consider what we actually encounter.

Before we can say this is a thing, something must have become distinguishable as this rather than that.

Before something can be an event, there must be some way in which its occurrence can be distinguished from what continues around it.

Before something can persist, there must be some basis on which what is encountered at one moment can count as the same as what is encountered later.

The distinctions seem to belong to the world.

But perhaps that is because, once they are working, we no longer notice the work they are doing.

This does not mean that we invent the world.

It means that the world does not necessarily arrive already divided according to the distinctions through which we can understand it.

A thing is not simply a piece of reality with the label thing attached.

It becomes available as a thing within a particular pattern of distinctions and relations.

And the same may be true of events, objects, boundaries, causes and possibilities.

Perhaps, then, the question is not merely:

What is the world like?

Perhaps we should also ask:

What has to happen for something to become intelligible as the kind of thing we say it is?

That is the first step toward understanding construal.

The world we already have may not be the world before construal.

It may be a world already made intelligible through it.

The Horizon of Construal: Prologue — The Edge of the Map

We are accustomed to thinking of the world as something already there.

There are things in it, events that happen to them, relations between them. There are places and times, causes and effects, objects that persist and processes that change. We encounter this world, and then we describe it. Some descriptions are accurate, others mistaken. Some concepts are useful, others misleading.

It is an appealing picture.

It is also a remarkably difficult one to maintain.

Consider a map.

A map is useful because it distinguishes things that matter for the journey: roads, rivers, towns, boundaries, landmarks. It leaves other things out. No one expects a map to contain the whole territory.

But suppose we reach the edge of the map.

The obvious thought is that the territory continues. We simply need a larger map.

Sometimes that is exactly right.

But not always.

There are occasions when reaching the edge of a map tells us something about the map itself. Perhaps the scale has ceased to be appropriate. Perhaps the distinctions it provides are no longer useful. Perhaps the very coordinates by which we have been locating things no longer make sense.

The difficulty is that we tend naturally to interpret such an edge as though it belonged to the territory.

We ask:

What is out there?

But perhaps the more revealing question is:

What has happened to the way we were representing the territory?

This distinction matters.

A description can fail without the thing described failing. A coordinate system can cease to function without space disappearing. A biological category can become unstable without organisms ceasing to exist. A physical theory can encounter a singularity without nature containing a peculiar object called a singularity.

The edge of a description is not necessarily the edge of the world.

This is the problem we want to explore.

We will call the activity by which something becomes intelligible in a particular way construal.

The word is deliberately modest. It does not mean that we invent the world. Nor does it mean that we passively copy a world that has already been divided into the forms our descriptions require.

To construe something is to make it available as something.

An event becomes distinguishable from what surrounds it. A thing becomes recognisable as something that persists. A boundary becomes significant. A relation becomes consequential. A background becomes available against which something can stand out.

We ordinarily notice the result and forget the conditions that made it possible.

The map hides its cartography.

And this is where the edge becomes interesting.

For while a successful construal allows us to move through a world of familiar distinctions, its failure may reveal something that success conceals: the conditions under which the world had become intelligible in the first place.

This gives us a different way of thinking about horizons.

A horizon is not necessarily a wall at the end of reality. It may be the point at which a particular way of making reality intelligible can no longer carry us further.

At such a point, the temptation is to ask what lies beyond.

But perhaps there is another question we should ask first:

What does the horizon reveal about the way we have been construing the world?

That question will take us into some strange territory.

We will encounter objects that are not quite objects, boundaries that do not belong neatly to either side, mathematical infinities that need not correspond to infinite things, material worlds whose materiality is itself something to be understood, and possibilities that seem to emerge rather than wait in advance for us to choose among them.

We will also return to an old question:

Where did the universe begin?

But perhaps by then we will see that the most interesting part of the question was never simply where the beginning was.

It was the map we brought with us when we went looking for it.

And perhaps, when we reach its edge, we should resist the urge to draw a larger map.

Perhaps we should first look carefully at the one we have.

For the edge may be telling us something.

Not about what lies beyond the world.

But about how a world became intelligible to us at all.

The Problem of Beginnings: X. The Beginning of the Question

We began with a question:

How did the universe begin?

It seemed to be a question about the universe.

Perhaps it was also a question about us.

We know beginnings because we encounter them everywhere.

A child is born.

A building is constructed.

A fire is lit.

A journey starts.

A sentence begins with a word.

Our experience teaches us a particular grammar of beginnings.

There is something that was not yet.

Then something happens.

Then it is.

The beginning is an event.

And the event has a before.

We rarely notice that we are carrying this grammar with us.

Until we ask about the beginning of everything.

Then the familiar machinery begins to misfire.

What was there before?

Where did it happen?

What caused it?

What was the universe inside?

What was there instead?

Each question seems reasonable.

Yet each quietly imports a world that the question is asking us to explain.

Perhaps this is why the problem of beginnings has proved so resistant.

We have been trying to imagine the universe as one more thing that began.

But the universe is not one more thing within a larger world.

There is no obvious cosmic room in which it was waiting.

No earlier time in which it had not yet arrived.

No external location from which we can watch it appear.

And perhaps no prior cause that we can simply assume without first asking whether causation has the same meaning beyond the world in which causal relations occur.

The lesson is not that the universe therefore has no beginning.

Nor that science cannot investigate its earliest state.

It is something more modest.

We must not confuse the beginning of a thing with the conditions under which a world of things can begin to exist.

A beginning within the world is one kind of beginning.

The emergence of the world in which beginnings are possible may be another.

And this returns us to the question of possibility.

We assumed that possibilities were already there, waiting to be realised.

But perhaps possibilities emerge with relations.

A door makes entering possible.

A distinction makes alternatives possible.

A new relation can make a new way of becoming possible.

Perhaps the deepest beginning is therefore not the appearance of the first thing.

Perhaps it is the emergence of a world in which things can become different.

If so, the beginning is not necessarily a point at which everything suddenly becomes present.

It may be the beginning of possibility itself.

And now we can see why the original question was so difficult.

We were asking about the beginning of the world using concepts that had themselves been formed within the world.

We were asking what happened before time, where the universe was before space, what caused causation, and what existed when nothing existed.

The questions were not foolish.

They were the natural questions of creatures accustomed to local beginnings.

But natural questions can carry hidden assumptions.

And sometimes the most useful thing philosophy can do is make those assumptions visible.

So perhaps we should leave the universe alone for a moment.

There is another beginning worth noticing.

The beginning of the question.

Why did we ask:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Perhaps because we can imagine absence.

Why did we ask:

What happened before the universe?

Because everything we have known has had a before.

Why did we ask:

What caused the universe?

Because causes are how we ordinarily make sense of events.

Our questions have histories.

They emerge from the distinctions, relations and experiences through which we have learned to make a world intelligible.

That does not make them arbitrary.

It makes them situated.

And perhaps this is the final boon of the journey:

Before asking how something began, ask what makes “beginning” possible.

Sometimes the answer will be an event.

Sometimes a process.

Sometimes a new relation.

And sometimes the question itself will have begun too late.

The universe may have a beginning.

We may never know exactly what that means.

But we have discovered something we can know.

Every question begins somewhere.

And sometimes, to understand the world, we must first turn around and look at the place from which the question began.

The Problem of Beginnings: IX. Returning to the Big Bang

We can now return to the question with which we began.

What happened before the Big Bang?

The temptation is to answer.

Perhaps there was another universe.

Perhaps there was a quantum state.

Perhaps there was a multiverse.

Perhaps something else entirely.

These may be serious scientific possibilities.

But they do not answer the conceptual question we have been following.

For if time itself begins with the universe we are describing, then before cannot simply mean an earlier moment within that universe.

If a theory proposes some prior state, then we can ask whether that state belongs to a larger temporal framework.

If it does, we have moved the beginning elsewhere.

If it does not, then before may no longer be the right relation.

The same applies to space.

We might imagine something existing outside the universe.

But if the universe means the totality of space-time under consideration, then “outside” cannot simply mean another place.

We have learned to be suspicious of cosmic containers.

And then there is causation.

What caused the Big Bang?

Perhaps something did.

But we cannot infer this merely from the fact that events within the universe have causes.

A cause is a relation between things or events within some structure.

The emergence of that structure is not automatically another instance of the same relation.

None of this tells us what happened at the beginning of the universe.

It tells us something more modest.

It tells us to be careful about what our questions presuppose.

And this matters because the popular versions of these questions often take concepts that work beautifully at the local level and simply enlarge them.

A local beginning becomes the beginning of everything.

A local cause becomes the cause of everything.

An empty place becomes nothingness.

An earlier event becomes something before time.

But enlarging a concept does not guarantee that its conditions of application survive the enlargement.

A map of a city cannot simply be enlarged until it becomes a map of the whole world.

At some point, the map itself becomes part of what needs explaining.

Perhaps our questions about the beginning of the universe have something of this character.

We have been trying to stand outside the universe in order to explain it.

But there may be no outside from which to stand.

And this gives us the boon we can finally bring home:

A concept that works within a world cannot automatically be used to explain the conditions of that world.

This is not a prohibition on asking cosmic questions.

Quite the opposite.

It may be what allows us to ask better ones.

Instead of asking only:

What happened before the Big Bang?

we might ask:

What does “before” mean in the context of a theory in which time itself has a boundary?

Instead of:

What caused the universe?

we might ask:

What conditions make causal explanation possible, and do those conditions extend beyond the universe?

Instead of:

Why was there something rather than nothing?

we might ask:

What makes “nothing” intelligible as an alternative to something?

The questions have not disappeared.

They have become more difficult.

But they have also become more precise.

And perhaps that is what the journey was for.

We went looking for an answer to the question of the beginning.

We came back carrying a way of noticing when the question itself has crossed a boundary.

There is only one thing left to ask.

Why did we imagine the beginning in the first place?

The Problem of Beginnings: VIII. The Beginning That Has No Before

We have been trying to imagine the beginning of the universe as an event.

Something happens.

And then the universe exists.

But an event normally has a place in a sequence.

There is a before.

There is an after.

Something changes.

That is what makes it an event.

So if the universe began, we are tempted to imagine the beginning as the first event in a sequence.

But then we immediately ask:

What came before it?

Perhaps the difficulty is now clear.

We are treating the beginning as though it were an ordinary event.

But perhaps it is not.

A beginning within the universe can have a before.

A beginning of the temporal order cannot have a temporal before in the same sense.

This does not mean that nothing happened.

It means that the word happened may itself depend upon the order whose emergence we are trying to describe.

The same applies to space.

We can ask where an event happened because events occur somewhere.

But if space itself is part of what begins, asking where the universe began may be asking for a location outside the very field of locations.

And causation presents the same difficulty.

We can ask what caused an event because causes and effects stand in relations within an already structured world.

But the emergence of that structure cannot automatically be treated as another event within it.

Perhaps we have been making the same mistake in three different forms.

We have imagined:

a time before time,

a place outside space,

a cause before causation.

Each seems to require a larger framework in which the thing being explained can occur.

But if the beginning concerns the emergence of the framework itself, the framework cannot simply be placed around it.

This suggests a different meaning of beginning.

Perhaps a beginning is not always the first event.

Sometimes it is the point at which a new order becomes possible.

A musical composition begins when its first note sounds.

But the possibility of melody depends upon relations among sounds.

A language begins for a child not with the first word in the abstract, but with the emergence of a system of distinctions through which words can become meaningful.

A path begins when movement acquires a direction.

In each case, the beginning is not merely an item.

It is the emergence of a new field of possibilities.

Perhaps something similar is required when we think about the universe.

We need not imagine a thing appearing at a location outside space.

Nor an event occurring before time.

Nor a cause operating before causation.

We might instead ask:

When did there first exist a world in which events, places, causes and possibilities could become distinguishable?

That question is still difficult.

But it no longer demands an impossible vantage point outside the world.

And perhaps this is the clue we have been looking for.

The beginning of something need not itself belong to the order that it makes possible.

The beginning of time need not have a time before it.

The beginning of space need not have a place beyond it.

The beginning of a causal order need not have a prior cause in that order.

A beginning can be real without being preceded.

Perhaps that is what we have been trying to imagine all along.

Not the first thing.

But the first becoming.

And if so, there is one final question.

If the beginning is the emergence of new possibilities, what does that tell us about the world that comes afterwards?

Perhaps we have been looking for the beginning as though it were the answer.

Perhaps the beginning is only where the question changes.

The Problem of Beginnings: VII. When Possibility Begins

We have been looking for the beginning.

First in time.

Then before time.

Then in nothing.

Then in a cause.

Then in a background.

Finally, in a first difference.

Each time, the beginning moved.

Perhaps we have been looking in the wrong direction.

We have assumed that, before something happens, its possibility is already there.

A seed can become a tree because becoming a tree is already possible.

A building can be constructed because its construction is possible.

A person can learn a language because the possibility of learning it already exists.

Possibility seems to come first.

But does it?

Consider the first door.

Before there was a door, was there a possibility of entering that room?

Perhaps.

But entering became possible in a particular way only when there was a doorway.

The possibility was not simply waiting somewhere.

It emerged with the relation between the spaces.

We encounter this everywhere.

A path becomes possible when there is somewhere to go.

A conversation becomes possible when there are speakers who can respond.

A tool becomes possible when there is something it can be used to do.

A new form of life becomes possible when new relations among conditions arise.

Possibilities seem to multiply as the world acquires new distinctions and relations.

Perhaps possibility is not a warehouse.

Perhaps it is a becoming.

This changes the problem of beginnings.

If possibility itself can emerge, then asking:

What was possible before the universe?

may be no easier than asking what was happening before time.

Possible for whom?

Possible where?

Possible within what relations?

A possibility is not simply a thing waiting to become actual.

It is a way in which things could become otherwise.

And ways of becoming otherwise depend upon what already exists.

The possibility of a door depends upon walls, openings, movement, rooms.

The possibility of speech depends upon bodies, sounds, listeners, and histories.

The possibility of life depends upon conditions that make life possible.

Possibility seems therefore to have a history.

Not necessarily a history of things that were once possible and then became impossible.

A history of new possibilities becoming available.

This gives us a different way of thinking about beginnings.

Perhaps the universe did not begin when the first thing appeared.

Perhaps what began was a field in which new possibilities could continually emerge.

A beginning would then not be the transition:

nothing → something.

Nor even:

one state → another.

It would be something more subtle:

a world acquiring the capacity to become otherwise.

If so, the first difference mattered because it made further differences possible.

The first relation mattered because it made further relations possible.

And what we call a universe may be less like a thing that appeared than like a process in which possibilities continually become available.

We began by asking:

What came before the universe?

Now another question has taken its place:

What would it mean for possibility itself to have a beginning?

Perhaps the answer is not that possibility suddenly appeared.

Perhaps possibility began when there was finally something that could be otherwise.

The Problem of Beginnings: VI. The First Difference

We have removed the background.

There was no earlier time.

No empty space.

No prior state.

No obvious cause.

So perhaps we have finally reached the beginning.

But there is still a problem.

A beginning must begin something.

And for something to become something, it must become distinguishable.

A thing becomes this rather than that.

An event becomes one event rather than another.

A boundary separates one region from another.

Difference makes distinction possible.

So perhaps the universe began with a difference.

But immediately the old question returns.

A difference from what?

We seem to need two sides.

Something here.

Something there.

A before and an after.

A this and a not-this.

But if this is the first difference, there cannot already be a fully formed second side waiting for it.

Otherwise it was not first.

We have arrived at a strange possibility.

Perhaps the first difference cannot be a difference between two already existing things.

Perhaps it is the difference that makes two things possible.

That sounds almost impossible to imagine.

Yet we encounter smaller versions of it everywhere.

A boundary does not merely separate two already independent territories.

It helps make them distinct as territories.

A doorway does not simply sit between two rooms.

It makes an inside and an outside available as places one can enter and leave.

A distinction can therefore be productive.

It does not merely describe a difference.

It can establish one.

Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe is so difficult to picture.

We keep imagining the first thing.

But perhaps the more primitive event is not a thing at all.

It is a distinction.

Not:

Something appeared.

But:

Something became distinguishable.

And yet even that formulation is dangerous.

Distinguishable from what?

We are tempted to answer immediately.

From nothing.

But we have already learned that nothing has no address.

So perhaps the first difference does not stand between something and nothing.

Perhaps it is the beginning of the very possibility of distinguishing something from something else.

There would be no completed world waiting on either side.

There would be only the emergence of a distinction from which a world of differences could develop.

This changes the meaning of “first.”

The first need not be the earliest item in a sequence.

It might be the first condition under which a sequence becomes possible.

And perhaps a beginning is not necessarily an event that happens first.

Perhaps it is the emergence of a difference from which before and after can subsequently become meaningful.

If so, the question—

What came before the first difference?

—has become almost impossible to ask.

For “before” is now one of the things the difference makes possible.

We began by looking for the first thing.

Perhaps we should have been looking for the first distinction.

But there is one problem left.

If possibility itself depends upon relations and distinctions, then perhaps even possibility has a history.

And if that is true, we have not yet reached the beginning.

We have reached something stranger:

the point at which possibility itself begins to become possible.

The Problem of Beginnings: V. The Background That Wasn't There

A beginning usually has a background.

A match is struck in a room.

A tree grows from the ground.

A building rises on a site.

A conversation begins among people who are already there.

We rarely notice the background because it is already present.

Then we ask about the beginning of the universe.

And almost immediately, we imagine one.

Perhaps there was an empty space.

Perhaps there was a state of nothingness.

Perhaps there was some prior condition from which the universe emerged.

But what if there was no background?

This is harder to imagine than it sounds.

We are accustomed to seeing things against something else.

A figure against a surface.

An event against a history.

A change against a previous state.

An object against a surrounding space.

Even when the background is empty, it is still there.

But if we are asking about the beginning of everything, what would be the background?

There cannot simply be another region of space.

That would be part of the universe.

There cannot simply be an earlier time.

That would be part of the temporal order.

There cannot simply be a prior state.

That would already be something.

And so we face a peculiar difficulty.

We keep trying to imagine the beginning against a background that the beginning is supposed to bring into existence.

Perhaps this is why the imagination keeps producing darkness.

Darkness feels like the absence of everything.

But darkness needs a space in which there can be no light.

Silence needs a world in which sound is possible.

Emptiness needs something that could be absent.

A background is not nothing.

It is one of the conditions under which something can become distinguishable.

And this may be the deeper problem.

We tend to imagine the universe as one enormous thing that appeared within some larger setting.

But if it is the whole of the relevant setting, there is nowhere else for it to appear.

There is no cosmic stage waiting for the universe to enter.

The stage is part of the performance.

Perhaps, then, we should stop asking:

What was the universe in?

and ask:

What made a universe possible as something distinguishable at all?

That is a different question.

It does not ask for a prior object.

It asks about the emergence of the conditions under which objects, events, relations and histories can become distinguishable.

Perhaps a beginning is not always the arrival of something against a background.

Perhaps, at the deepest level, a beginning is the emergence of a difference that creates a background and a foreground together.

If so, there was no empty stage before the universe.

There was no stage.

And that makes the question of the beginning stranger still.

For if there was no background, what could the first difference be a difference from?

We may have reached the point where even the word first begins to wobble.

The Problem of Beginnings: IV. The First Cause That Arrived Too Early

If there was nothing before the universe, perhaps something caused it.

This seems to solve the problem.

Until we ask a simple question:

What caused the cause?

Perhaps the cause did not need a cause.

Perhaps it was eternal.

Perhaps it existed outside time.

Perhaps it was necessary.

There are many possible answers.

But notice what they have in common.

We have begun by assuming that the universe must have a cause.

Why?

Because things that happen usually have causes.

A glass breaks because it is dropped.

A tree falls because of wind.

A building exists because someone built it.

Within the world, causation is everywhere.

But these are all local relations.

A cause is related to an effect.

There is something that causes, and something that is caused.

There is a process connecting them.

There is a difference between what happens before and what happens afterwards.

There is a world in which the relation can occur.

And then we ask:

What caused the world?

We have taken a relation that operates within the world and extended it to the world as a whole.

But if causation is one of the relations that belongs to the universe, can we simply assume that it also stands outside the universe, waiting to bring it into existence?

Perhaps.

But that requires argument.

It cannot follow merely from the fact that things within the universe have causes.

After all, we do not normally ask what caused the existence of the whole causal order every time we explain an event.

The match causes the fire.

We do not need another match to cause causation.

The question changes when we move from:

What caused this?

to:

What caused everything?

The second question may look like a larger version of the first.

It may not be.

A city contains doors.

It does not follow that there must be a door outside the city through which the city entered.

A sequence contains earlier and later events.

It does not follow that the beginning of the sequence must itself be an earlier event.

And a universe contains causes.

It does not follow that the universe itself must stand within a larger causal order.

Perhaps the first cause arrived too early.

Not because it is impossible.

But because we placed it inside a framework that may not yet have existed.

We imagined a cause before the universe.

But before may not have been available.

We imagined a cause outside the universe.

But outside may require a space beyond the universe.

We imagined a cause producing the universe.

But producing may itself be a relation within the world whose emergence we are trying to understand.

The difficulty, then, is not simply finding the first cause.

It is deciding whether “first cause” is a coherent extension of the concept of cause.

Perhaps causation explains how things happen within a world.

Perhaps it does not explain why there is a world in which things can happen.

And perhaps that is not a failure of causation.

Perhaps it is simply the point at which a local relation reaches the edge of its domain.

Which leaves us with a different question:

What kind of background must exist for a cause to be a cause?

The Problem of Beginnings: III. Nothing Has No Address

We have removed before from the place where we had put it.

There is no obvious earlier time in which the universe was waiting to begin.

So perhaps we can try another answer.

Before the universe, there was nothing.

This sounds different.

But does it?

Try to imagine it.

What do you see?

Perhaps darkness.

An empty expanse.

No stars.

No matter.

No movement.

Nothing at all.

But notice what has happened.

We have imagined a place.

And there is already a problem.

If space began with the universe, there can be no empty space before the universe.

An empty room is still a room.

A dark sky is still a sky.

A vacant landscape is still a landscape.

We have not imagined nothing.

We have imagined something in which nothing is happening.

Perhaps we can remove the space.

Then what remains?

Nothing.

But for how long?

We have now smuggled time back in.

We have imagined nothing lasting until the universe appeared.

But something that lasts has a history.

And something with a history already exists within a temporal order.

So we remove time as well.

Now there is no place for nothing to be.

And no time for it to last.

And no distinction between nothing and anything else.

The imagination begins to fail.

This may not be an accident.

Perhaps nothing is not a primitive condition from which something can emerge.

Perhaps it is a concept that only becomes possible within a world of distinctions.

We can say that a room is empty because we know what could be in it.

We can say that a glass contains nothing because we know what it would mean for it to contain something.

Absence is intelligible because there is something whose absence can be recognised.

Even emptiness has an address.

But absolute nothingness has nowhere to live.

There is no place in which it occurs.

No time during which it persists.

No boundary separating it from something else.

No observer standing outside it to notice that it is empty.

This creates a peculiar reversal.

We usually imagine:

First there was nothing.

Then something appeared.

But perhaps nothing is not the simpler state.

Perhaps it is the more sophisticated concept.

To call something absent already requires a world in which presence and absence can be distinguished.

So perhaps the universe did not emerge from nothing.

Perhaps the very idea of nothingness depends upon a world in which something can be absent.

If so, we have been asking the question backwards.

We began by asking how something could emerge from nothing.

Perhaps we should ask instead:

How did the possibility of nothing become possible?

The Problem of Beginnings: II. Before Before

The question returns almost immediately.

What was there before the universe?

We have already noticed the difficulty.

If time began with the universe, then before appears to have nowhere to stand.

But the word is so familiar that it is easy to underestimate what it asks of the world.

For one thing to be before another, there must be some kind of order.

Breakfast comes before lunch.

Monday comes before Tuesday.

Childhood comes before old age.

In each case, before relates two distinguishable moments within a sequence.

But what if there is no sequence yet?

What would it mean to ask what came before the first moment?

We might imagine an earlier moment.

But then the first was not first.

Or we might imagine an endless succession of earlier moments.

But then the question of a first beginning has simply disappeared.

The problem is not that we have failed to look far enough back.

The problem is that looking back is itself what is in question.

Suppose we say that there was nothing before the universe.

The sentence sounds reassuring.

It gives us an answer.

But notice what it imagines.

There was a before.

And during that before, there was nothing.

Nothing lasted until something happened.

But how long did nothing last?

The question sounds absurd.

That is precisely the point.

An empty period is still a period.

A time in which nothing happens is still time.

So we cannot solve the problem by placing nothing at the beginning of the temporal sequence.

We have merely extended the sequence and emptied it.

The same difficulty appears when we imagine a cause.

Perhaps something caused the universe.

But a cause is ordinarily prior to its effect.

If the causal relation requires temporal order, then a cause before time again assumes what it is meant to explain.

This does not prove that the universe had no cause.

It shows something more modest and more troublesome:

our ordinary idea of a cause may not travel beyond the conditions in which causes become distinguishable.

Perhaps this is the mistake we keep making.

We encounter a limit.

Then we treat the limit as if it were another place.

We arrive at the beginning of time and imagine more time stretching behind it.

We reach the edge of space and imagine empty space beyond it.

We encounter the absence of everything and imagine a condition in which that absence patiently exists.

But perhaps a limit is not always another region.

Perhaps the beginning of a relation is not itself another instance of that relation.

The beginning of temporal order need not be an earlier moment.

The emergence of space need not occur somewhere.

The conditions under which causation becomes meaningful need not themselves be caused in the ordinary sense.

This leaves us with an uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps the question:

What came before the beginning?

is not difficult because the answer is hidden.

Perhaps it is difficult because before is one of the things that has yet to become possible.

And if that is so, we have reached an even stranger question.

Not:

What came before before?

But:

What must happen for there to be a before at all?

The Problem of Beginnings: I. The Question That Starts Too Late

How did the universe begin?

It seems an innocent question.

Perhaps the most innocent question imaginable.

Everything we know begins somewhere. A tree begins as a seed. A building begins with construction. A conversation begins when someone speaks. Even the things that seem permanent have histories.

So it is natural to ask:

When did the universe begin?

And then, almost immediately:

What happened before it began?

There is only one problem.

If time began with the universe, what could before mean?

This is not merely a scientific difficulty. It is a conceptual one.

The word before describes a relation between events within a temporal order. One thing happens before another because both can be located in a sequence.

But if the question concerns the beginning of temporal order itself, then the relation may no longer apply.

To ask what happened before time began is rather like asking what lies north of the North Pole.

The words form a question.

That does not guarantee that the question has somewhere to go.

Yet this is precisely what makes the problem interesting.

For our ordinary understanding of beginnings has a familiar shape:

First there is one condition.

Then something happens.

Afterwards, there is another condition.

A beginning is a transition.

But a transition requires some way of distinguishing before from after.

What, then, are we imagining when we imagine the beginning of everything?

Perhaps we picture an empty universe waiting to be filled.

But where is this emptiness?

Perhaps we imagine an infinite darkness before the first light.

But when does this darkness occur?

Perhaps we imagine some prior cause producing the universe.

But where does this cause operate?

Each attempt to imagine the beginning seems to smuggle in something that has already begun.

Space.

Time.

Causation.

Absence.

We imagine a stage before asking how the stage appeared.

Perhaps this is why the beginning of the universe remains so difficult to think.

Not because it lies unimaginably far in the past.

But because our ordinary concept of a beginning may already assume the world whose beginning we are trying to imagine.

And so the question with which we began—

What happened before the universe began?

—may have started too late.

Before asking what happened at the beginning, perhaps we should ask a more dangerous question:

What must already be possible for anything to begin?

The City of Doors as Conceptual Journey

I. The City Without a Map — the failure of a static ontology
II. The First Door — distinction and emergence
III. The Room That Was Not There — relational individuation
IV. The Locked Door — possibility beyond waiting
V. The Corridor Between — relation becoming real
VI. The Door That Opens Behind You — history as continuing becoming
VII. The Empty Room — absence and the possibility of nothing
VIII. The Door That Appears When You Knock — participation without control
IX. The City Builds Itself — recursive self-organisation
X. The Door She Carries — the participant as a condition of possibility

The City of Doors: X. The Door She Carries

The traveller decided to leave the city.

She did not know when she made the decision.

There had been no particular moment.

No final disappointment.

No revelation.

No voice telling her that her work was finished.

One morning she woke and knew that she would go.

The knowledge was not unpleasant.

She had come to like the city.

She liked its streets.

Its doors.

Its unanswered questions.

She liked the people who answered questions with other questions.

She even liked the innkeeper.

But she knew that she could not remain forever.

The city had taught her too much about staying.

So she packed her bag.

There was not much in it.

The same clothes.

The same notebook.

The map with which she had arrived.

She unfolded the map on the bed.

For a long time she looked at it.

It had not changed.

That was almost touching.

The streets were still there in black lines.

The squares.

The bridges.

The river.

The names.

It was an excellent map of a city she had never visited.

She folded it carefully and put it away.

Then she left the inn.

The innkeeper was waiting downstairs.

“I hear you're leaving.”

The traveller stopped.

“Who told you?”

“No one.”

“Then how do you know?”

“You packed your bag.”

She looked down.

“That seems unfair.”

He smiled.

The traveller crossed the room and sat at his table.

For a while neither of them spoke.

Finally she said:

“I think I've understood the city.”

The innkeeper looked alarmed.

“Oh dear.”

She laughed.

“Not completely.”

“Better.”

“I don't mean I know everything.”

“Good.”

“I mean I understand something I didn't understand before.”

He poured her a drink.

“What is it?”

She looked towards the window.

The street was beginning to wake.

“The city isn't made of things.”

The innkeeper waited.

“It isn't?”

“No.”

“What is it made of?”

She thought.

“Things becoming.”

He nodded.

“That will do.”

The traveller smiled.

“I thought you'd argue.”

“I have been waiting a long time for you to stop asking whether the answer was correct.”

She raised her glass.

“And is it?”

“Correct enough.”

They drank.

After a while, the traveller said:

“When I arrived, I thought I was outside it.”

“The city?”

“Yes.”

“You were.”

She looked at him.

“I was?”

“Yes.”

“Then I entered it.”

“Yes.”

“And now?”

He shrugged.

“You tell me.”

She looked at the room.

The inn.

The street.

The people passing outside.

She thought of the first door.

The room that had not been there.

The locked door.

The corridor.

The past that changed as history.

The empty room.

The door that appeared when she knocked.

The city building itself.

She thought of the clockmaker.

You are a condition.

“I don't think I'm outside it anymore.”

The innkeeper smiled.

“No.”

“Because I changed it.”

“Perhaps.”

“And it changed me.”

“Certainly.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I didn't build the city.”

“No.”

“But some doors would not have appeared if I hadn't been here.”

“Yes.”

“Some rooms became rooms because I entered them.”

“Perhaps.”

“Some things happened because I asked questions.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him.

“So I became part of its history.”

The innkeeper lifted his glass.

“Now you're leaving.”

She laughed.

“That seems an odd response.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I have only just realised I belong here.”

The innkeeper looked almost sympathetic.

“Perhaps belonging is not staying.”

She was silent.

Outside, someone knocked.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Neither of them looked.

The traveller finished her drink.

Then she stood.

“Goodbye.”

The innkeeper nodded.

“Perhaps.”

She laughed.

“No. This time I mean it.”

“So do I.”

She left.

The city gate stood at the northern edge, where she remembered it.

Or almost where she remembered it.

The road leading towards it was narrower.

A tree had grown beside the wall.

There were two doors in buildings she did not remember.

One was open.

One was closed.

She passed them without stopping.

At the gate, she turned.

The city stretched behind her.

From here it almost looked like the city on her map.

Almost.

She could see the towers.

The river.

The roofs.

The streets.

But she knew better now.

She knew that the city visible from a distance was not the city.

Not entirely.

The city was also the opening of shutters.

The carrying of bread.

The repetition of footsteps.

The movement of leaves through water.

The questions asked in workshops.

The arguments beside doors.

The things that disappeared because nobody needed them.

The things that appeared because someone did.

The city was what happened between things.

And because of them.

And through them.

She looked at the gate.

Beyond it was the road by which she had arrived.

She stepped forward.

Then stopped.

There was a door in the gate.

She was certain there had not been one before.

It was small.

Wooden.

Unpainted.

There was no handle.

No keyhole.

No inscription.

She smiled.

“Of course.”

She stood before it.

For a moment she considered knocking.

Then she remembered the woman in the square.

Wait until you have a reason.

The traveller looked down the road.

She had a reason.

She wanted to leave.

She raised her hand.

Then stopped.

A strange thought had occurred to her.

She turned back towards the city.

“Is this how I leave?”

No one answered.

She looked at the door again.

“Or is this how I stay?”

Still nothing.

She laughed.

The city had one final question for her.

Or perhaps she had brought it herself.

She touched the door.

Nothing happened.

She pressed her palm against the wood.

It was warm.

Then she understood.

The door was not locked.

It was not waiting.

It was not hidden.

It did not require a key.

She had been carrying it.

Not in her bag.

Not in her notebook.

Not even, she thought, inside herself.

She had been carrying the conditions through which a door could become possible.

She stood very still.

The realisation was not grand.

No light appeared.

No bell rang.

The city did not pause.

A cart continued down the street.

Someone called from a window.

A dog barked.

A shutter closed.

The traveller smiled.

She removed her hand.

The door remained.

She looked at it.

Then she looked at the road.

For the first time, she understood that leaving was not the opposite of participating.

Wherever she went, she would enter relations.

She would alter possibilities.

She would become part of histories she could not control.

She would encounter things that seemed complete until a new relation changed what they could be.

She would carry questions into places that had not previously required them.

Sometimes she would knock.

Sometimes she would listen.

Sometimes she would walk away from a blank wall.

And sometimes, perhaps, a door would appear.

She looked back at the city.

It no longer seemed strange.

That was the strangest thing of all.

The city had not become ordinary.

She had become unable to imagine an ordinary world.

She stepped through the gate.

The road opened before her.

For a while she walked without looking back.

The landscape changed.

The city disappeared behind the hills.

By afternoon she reached a village.

It was smaller than the city.

There was one street.

A church.

A well.

A row of houses.

Nothing unusual.

She smiled.

At the end of the street stood a woman beside a wall.

The woman was looking at it carefully.

The traveller slowed.

There was no door.

The woman turned.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Do you know what is behind this wall?”

The traveller looked at the stone.

She could have answered in many ways.

She could have said that there was probably another house.

Or a garden.

Or a road.

She could have said she did not know.

Instead she listened.

For a moment there was only the wind.

Then, perhaps, something else.

Or perhaps not.

The traveller smiled.

“I don't know.”

The woman looked disappointed.

The traveller raised her hand towards the wall.

Then stopped.

The woman watched her.

“Are you going to knock?”

The traveller looked at her.

“Why?”

The woman considered this.

Then she smiled.

“I don't know.”

The traveller lowered her hand.

“Perhaps that's a beginning.”

She continued down the street.

Behind her, the woman remained beside the wall.

The traveller did not turn around.

She had learned that looking back was not always necessary.

She carried the city with her.

Not its streets.

Not its buildings.

Not its map.

She carried something more difficult to name.

The understanding that things did not simply wait to be what they were.

That relations were not merely threads stretched between completed objects.

That possibility was not a warehouse behind the present.

That absence required a world in which something could be missing.

That history was not the opposite of becoming.

That participation was not control.

And that no one stood entirely outside the world they were trying to understand.

The traveller walked on.

The sun was beginning to set.

Ahead, the road divided.

One path led through a forest.

The other followed the river.

She stopped.

For a moment she wished for a map.

Then she laughed.

She reached into her bag.

She took out the old one.

She unfolded it.

The roads on the paper did not include either path.

She folded it again.

This time she did not put it away.

She held it in her hand.

Then she began to draw.

Not the road.

Not the forest.

Not the river.

She drew a door.

A simple rectangle.

Then another.

And another.

Soon the page was full of them.

Some open.

Some closed.

Some leading nowhere.

Some leading to places she had not yet imagined.

At the bottom of the page she wrote:

A door is not what separates one world from another.

She paused.

Then added:

It is one of the ways a world becomes otherwise.

She looked at the words for a long time.

Then she folded the map.

She placed it back in her bag.

The forest was growing dark.

The river was carrying the last light of the day.

The traveller chose neither path immediately.

She stood between them.

For once, she did not think of herself as standing before a choice that had been waiting for her.

The paths had become paths because she had arrived.

And she would become someone different because she took one.

She smiled.

Then she began to walk.

Behind her, somewhere beyond the hills, the city continued.

Doors opened.

Doors closed.

Walls remained walls.

Until they didn't.

People knocked.

People listened.

People walked away.

And the city built itself.

The traveller did not know whether she would ever return.

Perhaps she already had.

She walked until the road disappeared into evening.

And somewhere ahead of her, where there had been only darkness, a door began to appear.