On Time, Being, and Hunger: Challenging the Traditional Way of Thinking Life

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7 One A remarkable feature of living phenomena—think of metabolism, growth, reproduction, desire, thinking, aging, and so forth—is that they seem not only embedded in time, as are all other natural phenomena, but also to constitute , in themselves, singular formations of time. In developing organisms, for instance, cells seem to differentiate, migrate, and die according to quite a rigorous program (which, by the way, contains the ancestral memory of naturally selected characteristics out of which the program itself is composed). Genes prescribing the formation of tissues ought to be activated at precise moments and in coordinated fashion. Organs cannot be induced without regard to the general tempo of the whole and unique developing organism. Every single phenomenon of life seems to occur according to an original, self-produced, and self-regulated time; it seems to be regulated by an inner rhythm that is to some extent independent of the external influence of the material world. Put another way, living organisms organize themselves as if they had given to themselves their own present, their own past, and their own future. 8 On Time, Being, and Hunger The experience of biological objects is certainly constituted, as is the experience of every other natural object, by temporal succession (the pure form of all natural phenomena, as Kant would say). The second “Analogy of Experience” of the Critique of Pure Reason states that every natural causation is conditioned by temporal succession. Biological mechanisms as such, however , not only are conditioned by temporal succession, but are also meant to produce or form their own original order in time. This is in strict correlation with the fact that we are no longer dealing with the so-called efficient causation, but with the productive, the teleological causation, where time is not the frame structuring the mere succession of events but is itself created by the goal-oriented succession of stages of the process that produces a determinate entity. Aristotle holds that the temporal order of the stages of production in teleological processes is determined by the essence (eidos or telos) of the thing in construction. The earlier productive phases come first because they exist for the sake of those that come later, and the later phases are only possible insofar as they are sought by the earlier ones. “Further, where a series has a completion, all the preceding steps are for the sake of that. . . . Each step then in the series is for the sake of the next one” (Physics II, 8, 199 a 10–15). A house cannot be made from the ceiling. The construction of the house presupposes a determinate sequence in which foundations and walls must exist before the ceiling does. Nature acts in this manner as well. This is easily shown by the fact that if someone wants to imitate a product of nature, he or she ought to proceed exactly according to its model, following the same successive stages of production that nature follows. The production of a being , by physis or technē, follows an irreversible sequence constitutive of this being. The outcome of any teleological process embodies the history of its own coming into existence; it is or it shows itself while being or showing the singular and irreversible process of its own coming into existence. Nothing similar is supposed to happen in considering merely mechanical causation. Here events succeed one another without becoming each other’s past or each other’s purpose. Mechanical causation is indifferent to matter’s progression in time, to its history, to its possibilities. At any moment of the trajectory, one can deduce the causes and calculate the effects. It is as if the entire trajectory were always already (atemporally) given. As Ilya Prigogine states, in criticizing modern dynamics, “Dynamics defines every state Chapter One 9 as equivalent because each state can determine every other state, predict the totality of trajectories that constitute the evolution of the system.”1 In other words, there is no “evolution” of the system. Mechanical causation (in classical dynamics) implies temporally reversible (or temporally indifferent) laws: “dynamics defines as mathematically equivalent the transformations t → –t, that is, the inversion of the direction of time flow, and v → –v, the inversions of velocities.”2 (In Chapter 3, we will examine critically some philosophical presuppositions of Prigogine’s ideas concerning temporal irreversibility. It is likely impossible to introduce the “irreversibility” of time in nature without...