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.
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