Against the Block Universe

The “block universe” has become the philosopher’s favourite monument to time: a frozen four-dimensional edifice, where past, present, and future all coexist as equally real, laid out like rooms in a house. We are told that what we call “the present” is nothing but the wall our consciousness is scraping against, a trick of perspective on an unchanging whole.

It sounds elegant. But it is a fiction born of metaphor, not necessity. The block picture arises from treating spacetime as if it were an object that is rather than a system that orders. It reifies geometry into ontology: drawing a diagram of worldlines, then mistaking the map for the territory.

Relationally, the mistake is clear. There is no eternal block of pre-existing events. There is potential, and there is actualisation. To imagine the future already “there” is to dissolve the very distinction that makes becoming possible. What the block universe erases is not time, but emergence itself.

Its appeal rests on the illusion of certainty: the comfort that everything is already fixed, already written. But the cost is high: it denies actuality its openness, and reduces events to coordinates on a frozen grid.

The relational alternative is sharper: time is not a static dimension, but the ever-renewed cut between potential and event. The block is an artefact of metaphor; reality is not a monument but a living articulation.

So let us put it bluntly:

There is no block — only the continual becoming of events.