Temporal Horizons of Worlding: 1 Temporal Plurality — Time as Relational Field

In conventional discourse, time is often treated as a linear, measurable continuum—an external stage upon which events unfold. Within a relational ontology, this view becomes insufficient. Time is not a neutral backdrop; it is a relational field through which worlds co-individuate, interact, and transform. Each world is temporally structured, its past, present, and future inseparably entangled with the potentials that constitute it.

Temporality, in this sense, is a construal field. It is an active medium through which patterns of possibility emerge, stabilise, and dissipate. Just as a musical phrase acquires its identity through the interplay of notes, silences, and expectations, a world acquires its contours through temporal resonance: past instantiations inform present alignments, while anticipatory structures shape the horizon of emergence. Worlds are thus never fully present—they are always co-temporally extended, their being stretched across what has been, what is, and what might be.

This temporal plurality challenges singular narratives of causality and sequence. Worlds do not merely succeed one another; they overlap, interlace, and sometimes interfere. A present moment is always a locus of multiple temporalities: the residue of past worlds, the pulse of contemporaneous worlds, and the prefiguration of emergent worlds yet to be actualised. In this way, temporal fields are not passive containers but active participants in worlding.

Relational temporality reframes our understanding of emergence. Where a conventional ontology might ask “when did this world begin?” a relational perspective asks, “how do temporal patterns align to actualise this world here and now?” This shift foregrounds the constitutive role of temporal entanglement: the continuity of a world is not a given, but a negotiated alignment among multiple co-existing temporalities.

Moreover, temporal plurality is not merely an abstract phenomenon; it manifests in the rhythms, resonances, and dissonances among co-individuated worlds. Consider the persistence of a cultural formation: its temporal field is marked by sedimented practices, recurrent motifs, and anticipatory imaginaries that collectively sustain and destabilise it. Similarly, ecological worlds emerge through complex temporal interdependencies, where species interactions, climatic rhythms, and evolutionary trajectories intersect. In every case, time is both medium and agent, structuring the very possibilities that worlds may realise.

To engage with temporal plurality is to cultivate sensitivity to the relational choreography of worlds. It demands an attentiveness to how past, present, and future do not merely follow one another but co-compose, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in tension. Time, in this view, is less a linear measure and more a resonant field—a horizon within which worlds come into, and out of, being.

Next in the series: Memory and the Persistence of Worlds, where we will explore how past temporalities persist within and across co-individuated worlds, shaping the ongoing interplay of potential and actualisation.