The 2002 text, “The Improbable Miracle of Existence”, put forward a paradoxical ontology that emphasized the unpredictability of being. What must be added, however, is that this unpredictability implies a retroactive temporal structure—time as a radical exteriority that can no more be abolished than entropy can be.
Of course, retroaction or Nachträglichkeit has never truly been ignored; it is built into history, dialectics, and natural selection. Yet we have seldom taken full stock of what it means for our relation to the real, to time, to the future. One might call it, figuratively, a cybernetic ontology—one that takes its bearings only after the fact, recognizing a fundamental strangeness in the real, which always eludes us in some respect and contradicts our linear stories and habitual visions of time. We are living through one of those dizzying moments of rupture.
At the origin of the Big Bang we hear talk of a singularity or an instability—which simply means that it should not exist. The world begins with an inexplicable anomaly that is already the anomaly of being itself. From there, determinism appears to reassert its rights, letting us reconstruct the universe’s first seconds. Except that the same laws predict an equal amount of antimatter and matter, so, again, nothing at all should exist. A slight imbalance in favor of matter must have echoed the original instability so that there could be something rather than nothing.
All existence seems to slip through the mesh of physical law—through the margins, through the transitions between levels of organization. One can say that the initial indeterminacy was transmitted into the phenomenal level, yet it must be stressed that at every stage it is precisely the improbable character of being that makes it a phenomenon—an object for physics, which then hunts for its laws. It is never determinism or calculation that can found any existence whatsoever, but rather the event in its singularity, as singular as the birth of the world.
Matter would thus be nothing but an odd number, a glitch, a singularity. One never explains its very existence—only its causes retroactively and its rigorous consequences. You cannot deduce the existence of planets (except by their influence on other planets); you observe that they are there. That is the experimental character of physics.
The existence of the universe is a miracle (a singularity); the existence of matter is a miracle (a flaw in being); the emergence of life is the miracle that answers a miraculous world. The indeterminacy of existence, which constitutes our freedom, precedes all determination, all matter, all life, all information, all meaning. Our world is a world of largely unpredictable events; life is a fragile miracle.
If existence is a miracle rescued from nothingness, then freedom and (relative) indeterminacy are indeed more primordial data of our temporality than the determinism of physical, biological, or social laws.
Indeed, when causality reigns, the end is given at the same time as the origin, and when the finality is all-powerful nothing stands in the way of its realization, time does not exist.
Not only are we in a universe of imperfect laws, of relative indeterminacy, but there cannot be any other because, as we will see, improbability is not only duration but also information, matter, life and freedom.
We could not have lived in a world that was not imperfectly and therefore disturbingly deterministic. Information is the other side of our fragility, our dependence on an external reality that escapes us and that we try to understand and tame. Information is everything we do not know about existence, everything that surprises us, threatens us or saves us, it is the enigma of the world.
These conclusions thus ran counter to the usual, purely deterministic ontology—not that determinism does not exist, but that deterministic laws produce indeterminacy through the collision of independent trajectories (Cournot), through symmetry‑breaking, through exponential divergences hypersensitive to initial conditions, as chaos theory shows. We are far from a fixist onto‑theology that grants beings an eternal substance beneath a divine gaze; instead, existence might be attributed to a defect in being, always exceptional in light of the universe’s laws and the infinity of space. Rather than seeing a divinely ordained creation, we must see an anomaly, an error with respect to universal entropy, which dictates that there be nothing. Modern deterministic physics (quantum theory, chaos, complexity) has had to incorporate an ever‑greater share of indeterminacy—or rather unreducible unpredictability—because everything cannot be collapsed into a single formula (“the wave function of the universe”). The unforeseen must be given its place. We must go one step further and admit that indeterminacy, the unforeseen, the flaw in being constitute matter, life, freedom, and meaning. In fact, all this is implicated by the function of information as soon as natural selection is triggered—a selection after the fact on the basis of outcomes.
The key point is that this share of unpredictability lies at the foundation of life, learning, and freedom—which arises not from a metaphysical free will or the anguish of death, but from the anxiety of the unforeseen, the unease of the living in the face of the universe’s constitutive improbability, a real that slips the leash of law and thwarts our goals, multiplying perverse or undesirable effects. Nothing is more capricious than the weather, and the margin of freedom left by uncertainty has nothing to do with an omnipotence that it refutes; it is rather a groping response—until some grand mad idea takes hold, scorning every precaution.
This is our world, not an ideal, disembodied one. It is not order arising from chaos but chaos emerging from the underlying order. That implies that the real is attested only after the fact, a posteriori—a prediction confirmed or refuted. From that standpoint, time is the true exteriority: it surprises and contradicts us. The improbable, ever‑changing real, despite its implacable determinism, coincides with the radical exteriority of time itself in its unpredictability; its after‑the‑fact sanction forces us to adjust our actions to their outcomes, to correct course, to keep steering toward a target instead of following a rigid program or blind plan. This is not merely a marginal adjustment, as in classical cybernetics (and so “cybernetic ontology” is too narrow and ultimately inappropriate); rather, it is what calls us into question in our very being, repudiates us, and changes our ends. Human time—active, cognitive—is not merely projection or durée but an after‑the‑fact dialectic that corrects and transforms us.
The exteriority of this unmasterable real must not be conceived spatially or as abstract otherness, but as a structure of time that historicizes it a posteriori—“for us,” yet against us—preventing it from ever closing and freezing in a “end‑of‑history” where nothing more could happen, where we would be connected to the Great Whole and freed from fear. It is the opposite of eternity. Despite poetic or religious intoxication, there is no direct access to the real that our narratives cover and our techniques attempt to master, caught in a dialectic that contradicts us, confronts us with failure and the real’s denials, assuring us that no end of time is thinkable. We must integrate this properly historical dimension, which one might call short‑sighted, contrary to millenarian ideologies; the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.
This temporality is reducible neither to presence (Husserl) nor to durée (Bergson) nor even to projected future, still less to eternity. And unlike Hegelian dialectic, which acknowledges the negativity of time, it is not merely internal contradictions and an implicit rationality unfolding inexorably; it is rather a permanent adaptation to radical exteriority, to the unforeseen as such—the true passage of time.
It is not just that we must admit our finitude and limited knowledge, nor merely the irreversibility of time, because the reneging that learning entails makes us ashamed of our former beliefs (a genuine hauntology), as of the false assurance of projecting ourselves into eternity (confused with the universal). Nothing testifies to the traumatic character of history better than the collapse of empires, ideologies, religions—as former communists knew, but even more so former Nazis such as Reinhart Koselleck (The Future Past), theorist of the “horizon of expectation” confronted with the “field of experience”. He alone among historians was truly attuned to this retrospective dimension of remorse and guilt in history, its most unbearable side. Who am I, indeed, if I can repudiate myself? Yet that is what we do constantly—fortunately—in any reflection or learning: a fundamental infidelity of retrospective time that changes and judges us. Though it is common to swear fidelity, that is promising more than we can keep; the future does not belong to us, no matter how dogged our resolve—even if familiarity can strengthen attachment, which is another matter.
That we do not know everything does not mean we know nothing or can do nothing; it only means we must follow a knowledge in progress and heed the lessons of experience. It is not that we cannot extract a philosophy of history and its great stages—only that it is always provisional and at the mercy of what comes next (cosmic, volcanic, pandemic, ecological, economic, political catastrophes). The relatively unpredictable character of the future is ontological, even though that does not at all prevent us from making forecasts—on the contrary, it forces a cycle of anticipation → surprise → correction → revised anticipation. This fundamental retroactive structure of lived and historical time is not reducible to a series of punctual ruptures but pervades all our experience, despite habits and long periods of apparent stability that seem to fill the whole stage—the reign of the past. Almost everything can be forecast, but always in an indispensable and fallible (probabilistic) way.
Real temporality remains that of an uncertain world in which information owes its value to improbability, temporarily reducing uncertainty before changing under external causation—a temporality made of projections into the future and of their after‑the‑fact check, which was unforeseeable beforehand, even though the unforeseen and improbable are never irrational for that reason.
That the unforeseen exists does not mean that anything is possible, any utopia popping up from nowhere; on the contrary, the material real thwarts our forecasts and brings us back to rationality (the real is rational—more rational than our reason). If the reversal of 1942 seemed a miracle to those crushed by triumphant Nazism (like Edgar Morin), it was nothing but the end of the “miracle” awaited by exultant Germans dreaming of a thousand‑year Reich, a return to dull normality (“I am forced to admit that everything continues,” Hegel conceded). As with stock‑market crashes, the earlier madness—the hubris—creates the abrupt reversals. If madness or some other improbable anomaly regularly upends the established order, order always re‑forms, a new negation of wild hopes restoring rationality at a higher level in an after‑the‑fact (re)construction. That existence is in itself a miracle must not make us expect further miracles, because even if time can be constructive (in the growth of complexity, for example), it is more often destructive (external collisions or mere internal entropy). The real does not vanish in the face of voluntarism. The miracle of existence has already occurred—nothing more is to be expected!
The probable always remains the most certain, but the very existence of the improbable (including a possible fatal accident) puts us in the paradoxical situation of being unable to project ourselves into any distant future, and yet forced to do so all the time—an incessant activity of the living and their necessary goals, which usually end in routine (otherwise there would be no life). Yet time is change; without it, there would be no evolution. Hence much can be predicted, but not future developments and discoveries, still less the timetable of events and catastrophes. Let us repeat: it is not that the “improbable” becomes the most probable; rather, there are statistical breaks in probability—a surprise (rarely positive) amid ordinary probabilities and countless impossible improbabilities, but each time the break changes the game and brings us back to the real. Dialectic teaches that every negation is partial and overcomes the initial one‑sidedness. Thus we are always caught in a dialectic of forecast–unforeseen, fidelity–infidelity, order–accident. Neither passive skepticism nor voluntarist dogmatism, but the progress of knowledge—history.
If history can be written only after the fact and if it is the after‑the‑fact that characterizes dialectic, historical nachträglichkeit is not merely subjective and contingent (as in Cournot), an updating relative to the present; it issues in a necessary evolution, selected by an effective real, in the emergence of the new or of failure. Such final rationalization challenges earlier projections, as in any learning or retrospective reflection (or in the surprises of music). To avoid simplism here too, we must, however, distinguish several sorts of after‑effect—practical, cognitive, historical, narrative—yet all of them fall under the fundamental retroactive structure of temporality, from cybernetic feedback to natural selection or market sanctions. Time is not linear. It is not just past, present, or future, but rather failure, revision, correction, constant feedback in the face of the unforeseen that constitutes temporality as the radical exteriority of the real. That after‑effect can be as objective (results, balance sheets, interactions, adjustments) as it is subjective (time to understand, “quilting points”, reinterpretation, re‑inscription, repetition that makes sense). It is not always immediate when it concerns economic or ecological collapse. Economic determination, as Engels said, operates not mechanically but only “in the last instance”, imposing itself over longer spans on political and ideological wanderings that can no longer sustain “the production and reproduction of real life” (which is precisely what communism fell victim to). This can be seen as a delayed constraint, yet it is better understood as nonlinear causality. The real puts up no opposition to the wildest ideas until they are put into action; only afterward does it push back.
On top of the ontological constraint, we must add the mismatch between our dogmatic thinking and an incalculable future, along with its tendency to overstep every boundary—as dialectic itself encounters its limit in the after‑effect of confronting the real. Dialectic is indispensable to think the ruptures and discontinuities we live through, even if talking too much about dialectic turns it into an abstract, ready‑made schema that smooths over the shock we feel (“properly historical understanding is sacrificed to a metaphysical schema” Dilthey). Beyond the cognitive limits of a real that escapes us, there is the omnipresent rambling of inherited narratives and their false hopes, which can once again collide—post festum—with the real (as Marx said).
By its very construction, narrative language defies time; it speaks of what is not present. It deceives us even as it confers consistency and duration on things—but also on our lives and institutions, on a common world at the root of humanity’s cultural development, which is certainly not nothing! This narration, extending our episodic memory, is indispensable to learning and to our responsibility or identity, as well as to giving historical meaning out of selected, memorable elements that are not insignificant—even though they are detached from a multitude of real events and molded into an overly linear, simplifying, mythologizing form. We mainly learn to believe in things that do not exist and to lie sincerely, which is indeed imperative in society and for troop morale but cannot be without drawbacks. Impossible to dispense with stories; rumor manufactures them whenever they are lacking, but here again, time does the sorting.
We must persuade ourselves that humanity has never had immediate access to the real. “What it perceives, it narrates. What it understands, it constructs. What it anticipates, it projects”, while the real regularly obstructs our projections, objects to our stories, and forces us into painful revisions. These observations must not be reduced to pure speculation, for they have eminently practical consequences—chief among them, the necessity of feedback, of adjusting to results. They also lead to the sad fact that we react only in the face of catastrophe, when there is no longer any choice—calling into question the delirious ambition to change the world (which was my entire activist life!), to dominate it by our subjective will.
Even though our goals and convictions constantly guide our actions and are most of the time crowned with success, it is not ideas that rule the world; they only jostle it. Causation is, in the end, material, massive, autonomous, systemic. Even moral ends do not depend on our good intentions and are not realized directly without mediations. That does not prevent morality and law from progressing toward universality under the pressure of fact (the ruse of reason). It was materialism and science against religion that ensured the universality of Marxism (before dictatorship!), whereas identitarian, fascist ideologies divide into contradictory narratives, opposing values and wills. It is worth recalling all this at a moment when it is no longer the far left but the reactionary ideology that wants to persuade us that everything is ideology: social progress, ecology, even science—supposedly nothing but moral ideology (atheist) rather than an existential, very material issue, the progress of the universal demanded not by our excellence but by a fully globalized world—digital, economic, ecological, pandemic. We never know how it will end, except that, in the long run, reason will surely return.
Jean Zin, “Ontologie”, 2 May 2025
English translation by ChatGPT (OpenAI), licensed CC‑BY‑SA 4.0 (or pdf DeepL)
