“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through,” wrote the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, “and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence.” But, of course, we don’t say this of organic entities like buds and blossoms and fruit. And we need not say it about ourselves, either. In the optimistic model of wrongness, error is not a sign that our past selves were failures and falsehoods. Instead, it is one of those forces, like sap and sunlight, that imperceptibly helps
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