overcoming the world 71which things are distinct from one another and identical to themselves
would be very diff erent from what it is in the world that we actually
inhabit. Th eir natures would be hidden, at least to us.
We understand a state of aff airs by grasping what it can become in a
range of circumstances: the understanding of the actual is inseparable
from the imagination of the possible— of the adjacent possible, of what
can next happen or of what we can make happen next. So if there were
no time, we would be unable to understand the grid by appreciating
how its diff erent parts work. In a sense, all we could do is stare at it, not
even to see it, if seeing connotes a mea sure of understanding.
Th e intimate relation between time and distinction is further shown
by our ability to put both of them aside in our mathematical and logical
reasoning. Such reasoning takes place in time (if indeed time is real).
We can use our mathematical and logical discoveries or inventions to
represent time- bound events. Newton and Leibniz developed the cal-
culus, for example, for just that purpose.
Nevertheless, the relation among logical and mathematical proposi-
tions is not itself time bound. A conclusion is simultaneous with its
premise, but an eff ect must come aft er its cause. In mathematics and
logic we explore a simulacrum of the world, from which time and phe-
nomenal diff erence (the distinctions among kinds of being) have been
sucked out. We consider the world under the aspect of bundles of rela-
tions, unrelated to the time- bound particulars that we experience.
We can readily recognize the evolutionary advantages that such a
power aff ords us: thanks to its exercise, we vastly expand our repertory
of ways of understanding and of representing how parts of the world
can interact with another. We do so, however, at the cost of letting into
the inner citadel of the mind a Trojan Horse built against the recogni-
tion of distinction and time.
No wonder the qualifi ed versions of the metaphysic of the overcom-
ing of the world— the versions that represent the phenomena as less real
than their hidden archetypes— have so oft en been expressed in the lan-
guage of mathematics. Th ere is a sense in which our mathematical and
logical reasoning gives us a foretaste of the overcoming of the world.
Th e adherents to the overcoming of the world treat this foretaste as a
revelation of the nature of ultimate reality. We who resist both this meta-
physics and the moral project it helps inspire may prefer to understand