#theoryoftime

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Sad Mondays, addition to #6.5 & #8

Author: Magda Wisniowska - November, 2020.

According to Spinoza, substance or “being” can be perceived in only one of two possible ways: either as extension, in other words, as a physical body with a certain size, shape, and weight, or as thought, and thus as a mind. Extension and thinking are Spinoza’s two attributes of substance. This means that a Spinozian perceives everything - every single existing individual - as having a mind and being capable of the activity of thinking. Everything thinks because everything participates in the infinite intellect of God, of which everything is a finite expression. Or as Beth Lord writes in reference to Spinoza’s rejection of Cartesian dualism,

… all extended beings have minds. Every mode in the attribute of extension (and indeed every other attribute) has a corresponding idea, and that is what is meant by ‘mind’… Minds, then, are not the exclusive preserve of human beings. Cats, caterpillars and bacteria have minds; stones, trees and rivers have minds; pencils, factories and sewing machines have minds. Since all these things are modes of God, God necessarily has the idea of each of them in the infinite intellect. (Spinoza’s Ethics, 59)

I am more than happy to acknowledge a cat or caterpillar as having a mind, and even at a push, a single cell organism like a bacteria, but it does seem silly to suggest that a pencil might have a mind, and the graphite on my piece of paper, not to mention the individual carbon atoms, their six protons, six neutrons and six electrons. But if we struggle with perceiving the world in this way, it is because our ideas of thought have more to do with ideas of consciousness and time, than with the process of thinking itself. I want to suggest it is not so much a problem with “thought” as it is with the “I” that consciously thinks.

Describing carbon atoms that think, is my way of introducing Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. As Corry Shores helpfully summarises in his essay, “Self Shock: The Phenomenon Of Personal Non-Identity In Inorganic Subjectivity,”

The first synthesis is the living present that fuses now with now with now, etc. the second one, memory, places nows into relations of now and prior, while the third synthesis relates now to next, and it is the “empty form of time” bearing the structure of the split self as well as being the basic temporal relation of before and after. (Shores, 173)

Together with Shores, I want to suggest that a carbon atom possesses a minimal amount of awareness. At the very least it is capable of making a covalent bond with another carbon atom, to form a sheet of graphite. As Shores would say, when two physical bodies collide, they leave an impression on one another, even if this impression is momentary, lasting no more than an instant. For such bodies there is no sense of time as such, as this would require temporal differentiation (and recent science also agrees, see [link]). Instead, there is only a sense of “Now!” with no temporal relation to other nows. This is the “exclusive now of the momentary mind,” a mind without subjectivity (Shores, 174).

The sense of time is very different in a single-celled organism. A single cell might be composed of individual elements — carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen — each with their own momentary mind, yet taken together, the combination of elements as a whole act very differently. A bacteria forms both momentary relations and more permanent ones, but crucially also anticipates them. It feeds, either by consuming carbon or by making its own food through photo- or chemo-synthesis. If it can, it moves away from danger. It reproduces by binary fission, growing and dividing rapidly. A bacteria wants to survive, meaning it is aware of itself as a unity that will continue to live, even after this current moment passes. A bacteria therefore has both a rudimentary sense of a past and present, but also a self-consciousness — and not because, as Shores agrees, “it thinks about itself”(ibid.). It is self-conscious because it is aware of itself beyond the present, despite there being nothing to indicate that there is anything other than the “now.”

Which brings us to Deleuze’s third synthesis of time and the kind of mind that we identify with, both aware of its surrounding and self-aware, capable of temporal differentiation. I began this text with a reference to Spinoza, but the other figure here is Kant, especially his definition of cognition as requiring both sensible intuitions and concepts of the understanding (see description of Kant’s Copernican Revolution in the Critique of Pure Reason (B xvii)). For Kant, intuition is how objects appear to us by means of sensibility; concepts are the means by which these objects are thought. All intuitions occur in the “now” of the present, which is why the world as we perceive it, always appears different to us. And yet, we are able to make sense of these endless, momentary, and individual “nows,” to distinguish past from present from future. Like the bacteria before, we know ourselves to exist beyond each momentary present, even though there is no actual relation between any single existing “nows” and the non-existing “nows” of the past. As Shores phrases it, our self-consciousness somehow allows these existing and non-existing nows to “co-exist incompatibly”(176). Thus he argues that the unity of self-consciousness already implies a temporality in which time is a “form,” “a synthesis of incompatible states of affairs” (ibid.).

[itscolossal]

Sunlight Casts Shadows of Phrases Exploring Theories of Time in a Street Art Installation by DAKU