We began by asking when a beginning became an origin.
Perhaps we can now ask whether a history needs an origin at all.
An origin seems to promise an explanation. Find the first event, and the rest will follow.
But histories rarely work that way.
An event has preceding conditions. Those conditions have their own histories. What appears to be a beginning from one perspective becomes a continuation from another.
The origin keeps moving backwards.
Perhaps this is because history is not fundamentally a collection of things with beginnings and endings. It is a process of transformations in which what exists becomes capable of what comes next.
Life did not need an origin called life in order for chemistry to become organised into processes that eventually became living. Humanity did not need an origin called humanity in order for evolutionary histories to produce organisms with increasingly distinctive capacities.
There were only histories.
The categories came later.
This does not make our categories useless. Calling something the origin of life, or the origin of humanity, can be an extremely useful way of marking a particular transition in a history.
But the usefulness of the boundary should not be confused with a boundary existing independently of the history we construct.
An origin, then, may be neither a thing nor a place in the past.
It may be a relation between a past event and a later outcome.
We look backwards from what exists and ask where it began. The later thing selects an earlier event and gives it a special status.
The past has not changed.
But the history we tell about it has acquired a centre.
And once we recognise this, another possibility opens.
Perhaps we do not need to tell histories from their origins.
We can tell them from their transformations.
We can ask how one form became capable of another. How possibilities became actualities. How differences accumulated. How organisations changed. How new relations became possible.
Such histories have no single privileged beginning.
They have continuities, ruptures, contingencies and emergences.
They can still have moments that matter enormously.
But significance need not imply purpose.
A consequence need not have been a destination.
And an endpoint need not have been waiting at the beginning.
Perhaps this is what it means to think historically without teleology.
Not to deny that things have causes.
Not to deny that events have consequences.
But to resist the temptation to turn consequences into purposes simply because we know them in advance.
We began by asking:
Where did we come from?
Perhaps the better question is:
How did this history become the history we now recognise?
The first searches for an origin.
The second follows a becoming.
And perhaps, when we stop looking for the beginning that was always going to lead to us, history becomes stranger—and more open.
There was no destination waiting at the beginning.
There was only what happened.
And then, looking backwards, we called some of it an origin.
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