The past cannot be changed.
What happened happened. The bridge was built. The word was used. The decision was made.
And yet the past can acquire a different significance.
A road built to connect two villages may become the main street of a city. A scientific observation made for one purpose may later become evidence for a theory its discoverers could not have imagined. A word inherited from an earlier language may acquire a use that transforms how its earlier history is understood.
Nothing in the past event has been altered.
What has changed is the relation between that past and the present.
This gives us a more subtle sense in which the future can change the past.
A later actualisation can transform the conditions under which an earlier actuality persists. What was once merely a road may become part of a city. What was once an isolated observation may become part of a theory. What was once a possibility may become the foundation for possibilities that could not previously have been imagined.
The future does not reach backwards.
But the consequences of what becomes actual can reorganise the present, and through that reorganisation the past can acquire new functions, meanings and possibilities.
This matters for our understanding of inheritance.
The present does not inherit the past once and for all. It continually reconstitutes what the past is capable of doing in the present.
A relation inherited from the past can enter into new relations. Those new relations can make possible something that could not have been done with the inherited relation before.
History is therefore not simply a line of transmission.
It is a process of continual recontextualisation.
The past constrains what the present can become, but the present can also transform the way inherited structures participate in what comes next.
This is another reason why inheritance is not determination.
If the past were a complete specification of the future, later actualisations could add nothing genuinely new to the relational field. But if actualisation transforms relations, then what happens next can change the possibilities through which what came before continues to matter.
The temporal asymmetry therefore has an unexpected consequence.
The past determines what happened.
It does not determine everything that can happen with what happened.
The future cannot change the past as actuality.
But it can change the possibilities that arise from the past.
And so the present is not merely where past and future meet.
It is where the inherited past is continually reorganised into possibilities for the future.
The question that remains is whether the present, understood in this way, is simply a point between two times at all.
Or is it the field in which past actuality and future possibility are continually transformed into one another?
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