The Temporal Asymmetry of the Present: II. The Possibilities We Inherit

If the present has come from somewhere, then it inherits something from what has happened before.

But what?

Not simply a collection of past events. Most past events disappear without leaving any significant trace in the present. What matters is what they have changed.

A bridge is again a useful example. Its construction is a past event, but what persists is not the event itself. What persists is a transformed relation between the two banks of the river. The present inherits a possibility: the possibility of crossing here.

The same is true of less tangible things.

A word acquires a new use. A tool is invented. A distinction is introduced into a language. A practice becomes established. A law changes the organisation of a community. Each may alter the field of what can subsequently be done, said, thought or understood.

In this sense, history is not merely a record of what happened.

It is also a history of what became possible because something happened.

This gives us a different way of thinking about inheritance. What the present inherits from the past is not necessarily a determinate outcome, but a changed field of possibility.

A road does not tell travellers where they must go. It changes where they can go easily. A language does not determine what its speakers must say. Its accumulated resources make some distinctions, meanings and forms of expression available in ways that others are not.

The past therefore constrains the present, but constraint is not determination. Indeed, constraint is part of what makes possibility possible at all. A completely undifferentiated field would contain no structured possibilities.

What we inherit is consequently neither a blank slate nor a script.

It is a landscape of possibilities already shaped by history.

And because that landscape was itself produced by earlier actualisations, every present possibility carries something of its history within it.

The future, then, does not begin from nothing.

It begins from a present that has already been made capable of some things rather than others.

The question is not simply what the past caused.

It is:

What possibilities has the past left the present capable of inheriting?