time

Recently I’ve been taking part in a ten-week online masterclass called Science of the Noosphere. During the third week, evolutionary cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme of the California Institute of Integral Studies explained why he thinks the universe has been, in his words, “aiming at” life and human consciousness from the very beginning.

I was struck by this teleological approach to the universe. I myself have learned in my philosophical and legal work not to ask why, but rather how: not ‘why is this the way it is’, but ‘how did this come about’ – how do things happen, how do they work? For me, intentionality is not the most important thing; how it works is really relevant.

But then Swimme replied that he’s interested in the question of why, and he immediately linked this to his assumption that « the universe is a self-assembling creativity aiming at community ». This, of course, is far from my traditional way of questioning events or situations. But Swimme’s argument certainly made me think. He starts with the idea that the universe was designed from the beginning to produce life. How can he say that?

But I liked his idea of a teleology based on the approach of large numbers. Somewhere, sometime in the infinite number of universes now known, there had to be a good chance that one of them would be inherently suited to producing life (as we know it). And life, for Swimme, obviously leads to or includes living communities – of which humanity today is the most evolved form. Chance is still involved, but it had to happen somewhere.

Purely by chance, I suppose, the most prestigious talk show on Dutch television, Zomergasten, had as a guest in the same week the cosmologist and professor of theoretical physics Thomas Hertog, who used to work with Stephen Hawking. In a three-hour conversation, he discussed the Big Bang, black holes and the critical role of time in cosmology. Since distances in the cosmos are measured in light-years, the farther telescopes can ‘see’, the closer in time you get to the Big Bang. And from this approach to time, based on telescopic records and theoretical models, he was able to show a simulation of how big the cosmos is and how dense it must be. When I saw this simulation and the enormous amount of rocks and gases and stars and chemical reactions and whatever else is going on out there, Swimme’s teleological approach, based on chance and infinite numbers, suddenly became plausible to me.

And then I remembered a somewhat more concrete and pragmatic approach to time, expressed by Asger Jorn in internationale situationniste (Numéro 4 – Juin 1960):

« Le temps n’est pas autre chose pour l’homme que une succession de phénomènes en un point d’observation de l’espace, cependant que l’espace est l’ordre de coexistence des phénomènes dans le temps, ou le processus. »

(« For man, time is nothing other than a succession of phenomena at a point of observation in space, while space is the order of the coexistence of phenomena in time, or the process ». – By the way, I think this might actually also apply to women and all variants of the 2SLGBTQQIA spectrum).