struggling with the world 129
Th ey are adrift on changing laws of nature. Causation would then mean
something diff erent from what our conventional beliefs take it to mean,
or it would be prior to the laws of nature rather than derivative from
them. Causality is better regarded as a primitive feature of nature, which
may or may not assume recurrent, law- like form.
Everything changes thanks to time. Time itself, however, does not
emerge or disappear.
Inclusive time is continuous. It is not, as the arithmetical interpreta-
tion of the concept of the continuum suggests, to be grasped as a series
of still shots, of slices, as a conception of time bewitched by the suprem-
acy of time over space supposes.
In such a view, time is not emergent. It is, in fact, the only aspect of
reality that cannot emerge from a more fundamental background. We
register its reality, always and everywhere, by recognizing the diff eren-
tial character of change: some things change relative to other things.
However, the kinds of things that there are also change, and so do the
ways in which they change. Th at is what time is: the unevenness of
change in a world in which everything, including change itself, changes
sooner or later.
- Th e new can happen. In the vision that is required by the struggle
with the world, new, really new events can take place in the world. Th e
really new is not countenanced by the preexisting structures of reality
and by the laws of nature prevailing at the time. It violates them, not
just our understanding of what they are. It evolves together with them.
Th e new is not just a ghost stalking the world waiting for its cue to
come onto the stage of actuality: a possible state of aff airs, within the
perimeter of all the possible states of aff airs, that can be identifi ed, once
and for all, by speculative thought or empirical science. Th e outer hori-
zon of the possible cannot be fi xed beforehand by either the former or t he
latter. What counts is the close possible: what we can do next, what
the present state of aff airs can become under certain interventions, the
there that we, or nature, can get to from here.
Th e really new implies surprise: surprise not just by the light of our
present understanding of the world but of any understanding, even a
godlike mastery of the concatenation of causes and eff ects from the
beginning to the end of time.
