We have been treating possibility as something the present makes available.
But the present does not remain still.
Relations change.
And when relations change, possibilities change with them.
Consider a landscape after a bridge is built.
The river has not disappeared. The banks have not moved. The landscape may look much the same.
Yet the field of possible movement has changed.
A journey that once required a long detour can now take a direct route.
A new possibility has appeared because a relation has changed.
This is true at every level.
Biological evolution changes the relations among organisms and their environments, opening possibilities that did not previously exist.
Social change alters relations among people, institutions and practices, making new forms of action possible.
Conceptual change alters relations among distinctions and meanings, making new ways of understanding the world available.
In each case, possibility changes because relations change.
This gives evolution a deeper meaning.
Evolution need not be understood simply as the production of new things.
It can be understood as the transformation of the field of possibilities.
Something new becomes possible because the relations constituting the present have changed.
And once that possibility is actualised, the relations change again.
A new organism alters its environment.
A new social practice alters the relations among participants.
A new concept alters the distinctions through which a situation can be understood.
The new does not simply occupy the old world.
It changes the world of possibilities from which further novelty can arise.
This makes becoming inherently recursive.
The present generates possibilities.
Some possibility becomes actual.
That actuality changes the relations.
The changed relations generate new possibilities.
And so on.
Relations → possibilities → becoming → new relations → new possibilities.
There is no need to imagine novelty arriving from nowhere.
Nor do we need to imagine the future already containing everything that might ever happen.
The future can be genuinely open while still being relationally constrained.
What becomes possible tomorrow depends upon what has become actual today.
This also means that possibility itself can evolve.
The world of a bacterium is not the world of a human being. The world of a child is not the world of an adult. The conceptual world of a society can change as its distinctions change.
The world does not merely contain different participants.
Different relations constitute different fields of possibility.
Perhaps, then, evolution is not fundamentally the movement of things through a fixed space of possibilities.
Perhaps it is the continual transformation of the space itself.
And if the possibilities of a world can change, then becoming is more than the actualisation of what was already possible.
Sometimes, becoming changes what is possible next.
Which leaves us with the largest question of all:
Where does possibility come from in the first place?
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