The Relations of Possibility: V. A Future Is a Relation to What Has Not Happened

We often speak of the future as though it were somewhere ahead of us.

The present is here.

The past is behind us.

The future lies in front.

It is an appealing picture.

But what exactly is this future?

It cannot be a thing waiting somewhere beyond the present. Nothing has happened there yet.

And yet the future is not nothing.

We can already distinguish between futures that are possible and futures that are not.

A seed may become a plant. A stone may fall. A door may open.

The possibilities are present before the events themselves are.

So perhaps the future is neither a place nor a collection of events waiting to occur.

Perhaps it is a relation between the present and what has not yet happened.

The present stands in different relations to different possible continuations.

Some are open.

Some are constrained.

Some are excluded.

A ball at the top of a hill has not yet rolled in any particular direction. But the possibilities available to it are structured by its position, the shape of the ground, and the relations in which it participates.

The future is therefore not simply what comes next.

It is what can come next.

This also means that possibility is always relational.

There is no future in isolation from something for which that future is possible. A future is a possible continuation of a particular present.

Change the present relations, and the futures change.

This is why becoming cannot be understood simply as movement through a pre-existing timeline.

To become is for a present configuration of relations to give rise to another configuration of relations.

And when that happens, the field of possibility changes again.

The future that becomes actual is not merely selected from a pre-existing catalogue. Its actualisation transforms the relations from which subsequent possibilities arise.

The process is therefore recursive:

present relations → possible futures → actual becoming → new relations → new possible futures

Nothing has to be added from outside.

The possibilities emerge from the relations already in play.

This gives the future a curious status.

It is not yet actual, but it is not merely imagined either.

It belongs to the structure of the present as what the present leaves open.

Perhaps, then, the future is not something we move towards.

Perhaps it is something the present continually makes possible.

And if that is so, then becoming is not a journey through a future that already exists.

It is the continual transformation of the relations from which new futures can arise.

Which brings us to a more difficult question:

What does it mean for a world to afford a future?