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?

The Temporal Asymmetry of the Present: I. The Present That Came From Somewhere

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?