struggling with the world 127
would correspond a diff erent universe, in which its repre sen ta tion of
the workings of nature holds. Th e one real universe would be only one
of these imagined universes.
Of all the elements of the vision of reality here described, this ele-
ment is the one that may seem to be least closely and necessarily pre-
supposed by the struggle with the world. Yet the singular existence of
the universe stands intimately connected with the reality of time, and
acknowledgement of the reality of time in turn supports views of his-
tory and of novelty that prove indispensable to this approach to life.
Conversely, the denial of the unique existence of the universe robs the
events that take place in our world of some of their fateful force, for
they now begin to seem to be no more than the enactment of a script
that might take, or has taken, many very diff erent forms.
If the thesis of a plurality of universes, not causally connected to one
another and bereft of any shared or global time, fi ts poorly with the
struggle with the world, the idea of a succession of universes, of states of
the universe, succeeding one another, as the result of infl ection points of
contraction and expansion, fi ts easily. Th e one real world has a history.
For all we know (that is for natural science to establish), this history may
have started before the fi ery beginnings of the present universe.
- Time is inclusively real. Time is not an illusion, as the more radical
versions of the metaphysic of the overcoming of the world represent it
to be, nor, as many of our established ideas about causation and the
laws of nature imply, does it touch only certain aspects of reality. It
holds sway over everything; nothing is exempt from its infl uence.
Th e idea of the inclusive reality of time may at fi rst seem to be a gen-
erally accepted notion, contested only by metaphysical doctrines that
have remained marginal to the main currents of philosophy and sci-
ence in the West. In fact, it is a revolutionary proposition, contradicting
many of our conventional beliefs, especially about causality, as well as
much of our established understanding of what science has taught us
about nature.
Th e physics of the twentieth century reaffi rmed belief in an unchang-
ing framework of laws of nature even as it overthrew the distinction be-
tween natural phenomena and their background in space and time. Yet
the idea of immutable laws of nature supposes that the laws, symmetries,
