We ordinarily think of the present as a point between past and future. Behind us is what has happened; ahead lies what has not yet happened. The present seems to be where the two meet.
But this picture leaves something important out.
The present did not simply arrive.
Every present has a history. The road we stand on was built. The language we speak has been shaped by earlier uses. The institutions we inhabit have been formed through previous decisions. The concepts with which we think have themselves been made and remade.
The present, in other words, is not merely now. It is what has become.
This matters for how we understand possibility.
We have previously treated possibility primarily as a relation between the present and the future: a situation makes some continuations possible and others impossible. But if the present is itself the outcome of previous actualisations, then possibility has another temporal direction.
The bridge across the river is a simple example. Before it was built, crossing at that point was not possible in the same way. Once it exists, the present contains a possibility that the earlier situation did not contain.
The past has therefore done more than produce an event that is now over. It has changed the possibilities of the present.
This is not quite the same as saying that the past determines the present. A bridge does not determine where we go merely because it makes crossing possible. It changes the field within which we can act.
The distinction is important. Causation asks why something happened. Possibility asks what a situation has become capable of.
The present is therefore temporally asymmetric.
Looking backwards, we find actualisations that have transformed the relations constituting the present.
Looking forwards, we find possibilities that those transformed relations now leave open.
The present stands between them, but it does not stand neutrally between them. It is both inheritance and opening.
What has happened has changed what is possible now.
And what is possible now may change what the present becomes.
Perhaps, then, the present is not best understood as a point between past and future at all.
Perhaps it is the moment in which what has become becomes capable of becoming something else.
And that raises the question with which we must begin:
What exactly does the present inherit from the past?
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