Current Issue: Spring 2007 (Vol I)
Things Fall Together
Time is often conceived of as a river, a current flowing ever onwards in a direction we cannot change, with an ebb and flow we cannot escape. But imagine, if you will, the river of time running “backwards,” flowing not down from its source but rather upstream back to it. The reality of life in such a world is, to say the least, not easy to conceive. Events do not simply occur in reverse order. Rather, the very direction of entropy—the natural and inexorable tendency of the universe toward disorder—is reversed; the world spontaneously becomes more rather than less ordered. Dust on the floor neatly picks itself up. Piles of rubble assemble themselves into buildings.
Backward-flowing time is one of many such fictional “dreams of time” proposed by physicist Alan Lightman in his novel Einstein’s Dreams. The very idea of such a world raises important questions about our own concerning the relationship between an object’s parts and its whole; it assumes that an object “exists” in fragments prior to its construction as a complete entity. The nature of essence then comes into question, as it is that which would determine the whole object’s identity, and therefore to a certain degree its existence at all. It is our present hope to treat this general problem of existence through an examination of essence, considered on the basis of time in reverse.
On the surface, the notion of backward-flowing time appears to be the direct inverse of the time which flows in our world. In our universe, the tendency is toward greater and greater entropy, or disorder, while in the imagined world it is toward order. What would it mean, in all actuality, for the inherent tendency of the world to be a motion toward order? Any conception immediately presents us with several problems. The first and most important is this: if the nature of all things is to become more rather than less ordered, and all things are thus in a process of becoming ever more structured, what is to become of the very notion of “structure” or “order” itself?
It is our common assumption that the temporally posterior exists contingently upon the temporally prior, that the “after” depends on the “before”: a broken window, for example, exists conditionally upon a whole one. This determination is scientifically framed as an order which collapses into disorder, that is, as entropy increasing. The second law of thermodynamics indicates that all things tend towards disorder and randomness, otherwise known as entropy. The unidirectional flow of this process ensures that change, especially decay or destruction, is never, strictly speaking, reversible. A whole window represents a greater order than a broken one, and the pieces of a broken window can never be simply reassembled. We may attempt to glue the pieces back together into a whole, but a glued-together object is not the same as an initially whole one. At the very least, any change in state requires a loss of energy in the form of heat.
Now, the condition for any amount of matter (e.g. an otherwise innocuous pile of dust) to be considered a discrete entity (e.g. a rock) is that its molecules exist in a certain spatial and energetical relation with one another.1 If we wish to claim that the molecules that comprise the rock are in any meaningful sense the selfsame rock, as opposed to some absolutely different entity, the implication is that the scattered dust of a pulverized rock exists in a disorganized relation in relation to the former organized, whole state.
Similarly, the “disordered” (broken) window can only come about as a low energy- state, disordered isotope of the “ordered” high energy-state, structured window.2 To deny this sameness through time (i.e. sameness through entropic decay) is to deny the very possibility of order in the first place; why speak of “order” as opposed to “disorder” if changes in energy-states have no effect upon the objects they supposedly structure? The notion of an ordered system as opposed to a disordered one requires that one and the same distinct system be considered. Given no unity between the whole window and its broken counterpart, or between the rock and the pile of dust, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of either in terms of higher or lower energy, structure, order, etc. Let us assign this idea of unity-through-time the traditional philosophical designation of eidos, or “image,” as that which subsists or persists through external physical or temporal change.3
If we posit—as we all generally do—that there truly are such things as rocks or windows, then as a direct consequence we must posit that these objects exist in some measure apart from their generation or destruction. The reason is that, whether eidos is postulated as “eternal” or not, there remains the fact that the eidos of an object of cognition must exist apart from any particular present moment in which we find that object—else, why speak of it as enduring through time? With this substance of the object intact, its motion through time remains simply accidental or separate from its essence. Thus neither coming-to-be nor ceasing-to-be, both of which are processes in time, can be understood as impacting the “thing itself,” which must exist through— hence in some manner both before and after, in either case properly apart from—the entire process of production or dissolution.
This idea is perhaps easiest to see in an examination of the concept of soul. If one posits that something of a person exists after his death (and there is no reason why it cannot then also precede his conception), the fact of a person’s conception or death becomes irrelevant, as does the direction of his lifetime—from conception to death or death to conception. It is not too fanciful to imagine a human being progressing (regressing?) from decayed corpse to old person to young person to newborn and thereupon back into the womb—a perfect motion from absolute decay and dissolution to absolute order and structure (in the form of a pure ideality pre-existing even the zygote’s formation in the womb). As long as we accept the notion that systems and actions have an eidetic reality about them that escapes temporal considerations, there is nothing in essence that prevents the conception of time-in-reverse. This death-to-birth scenario is exactly identical in type with the spontaneous ordering of dust or broken windows. It is the notion of eidos which authorizes and enables such a conception. The result of exposure to the processes of the natural world—whether dust becomes a rock, or a rock becomes dust—is irrelevant once eidos is a determining factor. Either way, the order or disorder of an object is seen to be extrinsic to its essence.
Even those who shy away from belief in an immortal soul still generally accept the notion of a unity-through-time with regard to themselves: that is, that there exists something to designate self from other. Whether or not it is metaphysical, the foundation of any such belief is inherently and inescapably eidetic: it takes for granted that there is or are some fundamental element(s) of a person that persist through time. Otherwise there could be no possible distinction between self and other. Furthermore, there would be no need to protect oneself or seek one’s own benefit if the present self were inherently different from the future self.
Yet for all the reasonableness of a seemingly immortal eidos, every material object has to contend with the finitude of time. For anything to exist in our world at all, it must be decaying. If nothing else—and there are innumerable factors for rusting, rotting, eroding, etc.—the very matter which makes objects available to our cognition is always in a process of subatomic decay. Neutrons spontaneously disintegrate into proton-electron pairs; subatomic particles split and rend without any provocation. Whatever exists in time is always already decaying, always already not-itself, always moving inexorably toward the only constant in the cosmos: destruction. The eidos or essence of an object may be posited as ideal and therefore atemporal, but the object itself must always exist in time. As a result, we must question the validity of conferring on an ever-shifting materiality a stable, ideal essence with which it will never harmonize.
It is in fact a structural requirement of any object’s constitution that it will at some point no longer exist. To live is to be mortal. To be in this universe is to be subject to the law of entropy. A prerequisite, then, for any coming-to-be is a ceasing-to-be. Thus, while conventional accounts of reality usually privilege the existent, such a privileging always ignores the fact of impermanence: irrevocably and indelibly written into the causes and conditions of any phenomenon’s arising (as the universal condition of arising) is that same phenomenon’s eventual disappearance in death or dissolution. We see in this manner that existence is absolutely dependent upon non-existence. If we may be permitted, existence is “caused” by non-existence.
But in this case what may we call non-existence?
Non-existence is, by definition, a void; it is not nearly a stable enough ground upon which to establish anything like a cause. On the one hand, then, we understand the necessary destruction of phenomena as, in the most important of senses, prior to their arising. On the other hand, however, the destruction, annihilation, or cessation of existence is in itself no-thing. Moreover, it would require the inconsistent assumption of that which it negates; for the idea of a “non-existent chair” is unintelligible without a chair that does exist, at the very least in thought.
We are thus forced into the following paradoxes: at every moment we base our concept of the real or the existent fundamentally upon the unreal; the notion of “existence” as such is, consequently, completely absurd, since all is inextricably bound to its own negation. Yet this negation itself is equally absurd. What could it possibly mean to say that something ceased to be at all, i.e. that it “is” non-existent? We only speak of things having ceased-to-be because we have the idea that they came-to-be. If something has not come to be, then, it cannot ever cease to be. However, if something must cease to be in order for it to come to be, there is no way to really assert that it ever truly comes to be at all, given that it never came to be independently from its necessary ceasing to be.
What gives objects their perceived unity in our world is that they appear to persist as themselves; this perception is only an illusion. The only “fact” of nature is impermanence, which amounts to saying that there are not and cannot be concrete facts of nature.
This solution may sound depressing. But consider the alternative: a world where eidos—and therefore reverse-time—was possible would be a world in which objects possessed an eternal Form prior to their creation or dissolution. It would be a world of absolute determinacy, a world in which structures and processes proceed along lines dictated by the essences of objects, in order to constitute those objects in their most perfect teleological form. Human will would have no meaning in such a place. But it does in ours. Our universe is entropic, our world declining. It is the realm of indeterminacy, of chance, of death; and thus, of freedom.
1. Of course, we may ask, “What is a molecule?”: a spatial and energetical relation of atoms, hence of subatomic particles, and so on, in all likelihood to infinity.
2. In many ways, iso topos—“same type,” “isotope”—is a much better term than eidos—unity, substance. It highlights the topological nature of the consideration, the fact that the concerns of traditional Western metaphysics are fundamentally questions of type or kind or category, how a given type or topos can be recognized or reconstituted, etc.
3. Naturally, here “external” is taken in a dual sense: both spatially and conceptually exterior to the “essence” of the object under consideration. A brush of paint on the outside of a car would not ordinarily be considered as that which changes the car into something not-a-car; neither would the removal of its engine, though the latter change is decidedly “internal.”
Alex Yiannopoulos is a senior in the school of Arts and Sciences studying Philosophy and Linguistics with a minor in Physics. His main interests are metaphysics, 20th-century philosophy of language, and the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. He plans to spend the next few years in Kathmandu, Nepal, studying Tibetan Buddhism at a monastic university.