The Temporal Asymmetry of the Present: III. The Past That Remains

The past is gone.

The bridge was built years ago. The decision was made yesterday. The word was used in a particular way long before we encountered it. None of these events is still happening.

And yet something of them remains.

What remains is not the event itself, but what the event changed.

The bridge persists as a relation between places. The decision persists in the organisation it produced. A new use of a word may persist as a resource within a language. What was once an event can become part of the conditions of subsequent events.

The past therefore remains in the present through transformed relations.

This is different from saying that the past is somehow stored inside the present. Nor does it mean that everything that happened continues to matter. Most events leave little or no enduring alteration.

What persists is whatever has become incorporated into the organisation of the present.

This gives us a more precise sense of historical inheritance. The present does not inherit the past as a collection of completed events. It inherits the relational consequences of previous actualisations.

A road is not the journey that created it. A language is not the history of its speakers. A scientific concept is not the discovery through which it arose. Yet each can carry its history forward by changing what can subsequently be done.

The past remains, then, not by continuing to exist as past, but by becoming part of what the present is.

And this changes our understanding of time.

The past is not simply what lies behind the present. Some of what happened has become constitutive of the present's possibilities.

That is why historical explanation need not stop at asking what produced the present. We can also ask what earlier actualisations have made the present capable of being.

The distinction matters because what persists does not necessarily determine what follows.

The bridge remains, but travellers choose their destinations. The inherited language constrains and enables expression, but speakers can use it in unexpected ways. A concept can open a line of thought without prescribing where that thought must lead.

The past can therefore remain powerful without becoming destiny.

It remains as condition, not command.

And if that is so, then the temporal asymmetry becomes clearer.

The present is made from what has happened.

But what it can become is not simply contained in what has happened.

The past remains in the present as transformed actuality.

The future remains in the present only as possibility.

Between the two stands the present: inherited from one direction, open to the other.