The Arrow of Time

We love arrows. They suggest direction, purpose, inevitability. In physics and popular discourse alike, time is imagined as an arrow — moving inexorably from past to future, carrying events along its shaft. Thermodynamics, cosmology, and even philosophy have all drunk from this metaphor. But here, as elsewhere, metaphor has hardened into dogma.

The arrow suggests a vector, a pre-existing path along which events are carried. But from a relational perspective, this is precisely backward. Nothing “moves forward” through time. There is no river, no projectile, no trajectory independent of the events themselves. What appears as temporal asymmetry — the “arrow” — is the result of successive cuts: the continual actualisation of potential into event. The directionality is not intrinsic to time, but emerges from the relational ordering of occurrences.

To talk of the arrow is to overlook the generative cut of time. The arrow implies pre-existence, a thread to follow. Relationally, events do not follow; they bring their own horizon of becoming. Each actualisation phases into the next not because it is propelled along an arrow, but because relational constraints unfold consistently.

So we can put it bluntly:

There is no arrow of time — only the direction of the cut from potential to event.