Vesuvius: Time as Contingency
‘Nature has created nothing to be immovable’
‘I am suspended on a point of fleeting time’
-Seneca, ‘On Earthquakes’
In this essay, I want to argue that time is nothing but contingency. We only truly understand how time works when we understand contingency. To think contingency is to move beyond universal laws without having to say that every new moment in time is completely disconnected from anything that came before. Taken to its conclusion, the latter is ‘randomness’ where no causality holds from the past into the present. Randomness is just the flip side of deterministic laws and is therefore flawed thinking.
Lucretius’ concept of the clinamen has been used by various philosophers to think about order as contingency. I’m thinking here of Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser. In this essay, I want to explore a couple of moments in history where people lived within an active and very present clinamen: the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and the earthquake that preceded it in 62. By descending into these clinamen, we can begin to understand how time is not reducible to mere ‘perception’ nor to a smoothly flowing arrow. Inside these clinamen — which from a later geological perspective are one continuous clinamen — existing orders are interrupted and recomposed. Time is remade in these situations while something like chaos happens, but within the chaos we can see new orders being worked out and therefore new compositions of time.
The deeper we stare, the more we find time and motion as percolations rather than smooth arrows. We find stabilities and ruptures, preservation and destruction. Every time we think we find a stable thing, we can trace that stability in multiple temporal and spatial directions.
Fresco from Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Vesuvius is a peaceful participant in the rhythms, tempos, and cycles of life.
79 CE
During the harvest in the year 79 of the Common Era, Vesuvius erupts for nearly 20 hours. Its ash and rocks fall and, later, pyroclastic flows bury the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in six to ten meters of volcanic material.
It is not hard to imagine life just before the eruption. It has rhythms, tempos, and cycles that historians and archeologists understand fairly well. It is a port town, so ships are coming and going. There is a forum — the civic hub of many activities in a Roman city. A carbonized loaf of bread baking in an oven and a terracotta bowl with carbonized eggs have been found in the excavations.
Julia Felix is renting out rooms in her Pompeii villa, running a restaurant, and making her baths available for a price. Graffiti has been excavated that seems remarkably modern. ‘Epaphra, you are bald.’ ‘Epaphra is not good at ball games.’ ‘I hope your hemorrhoids rub together so much that they hurt worse than they ever have before.’
Surprisingly, archeologists have found an unexpectedly large number of bodies with their house keys with them. Clearly they were expecting to return, perhaps to live there once again or to retrieve property if Campania proved uninhabitable but accessible. [1]
The archeological evidence points to what we would expect. Life was proceeding according to its rhythms and cycles when it was violently interrupted by the seemingly sudden eruption of Vesuvius. The eruption of the volcano changes time for everyone in the area. The cycles, rhythms, and tempos are suspended and recomposed. Some flee, some cannot, some decide to wait out the darkness. Pliny the Elder sees a scientific opportunity as marshals his ships so he can get closer. His nephew, the Younger, stays behind and reads Livy as he watches with his worried mother from their balcony across the bay in Miseneum.
The interruption changes these motions and the time that happens with them. I don’t mean that the experience of time changes. Time actually changes because time happens as a result of how motions interact. The experience of time changes because time actually changes. Our experience is not different than time; our experience is time because it is always in motions and interacting with other motions. To see it otherwise — to see a difference between the experience of time and time itself — is to reduce experience to perspective, and thus to a game of truth and illusion.
To better understand this, let’s remove perspective from our understanding of time and look specifically at the motions, including the experiential motions of the inhabitants.
For the inhabitants of the region, the volcano unleashed destruction. For most, the normal composition of time came to an end rather quickly. As the ash fell and the pyroclastic flow overwhelmed Pompeii and Herculaneum, one of history’s most famous moments of preservation occurred. It is not uncommon for us to say, ‘Time stood still in Pompeii and Herculaneum.’
Example: in Herculaneum, a large library was preserved by the ash and lava in a way that would have been impossible under normal atmospheric conditions. The heat of the volcanic debris sucked the oxygen out of scrolls and bodies as it encased them in its impervious substance.
Is this destruction or preservation? Some academics today are trying to read the scrolls with complex imaging systems that can discern the layers and the remnants of ink. If the imaging works, it will be preservation. If not, it will be destruction until a better technology comes along.
Thus, two times happen in the span of less than a day. Destruction and preservation occurred in an intense interruption of time that lasted, if measured by a clock, 18-24 hours. Time is not just a perspective; nor is what happened in 79 CE properly understood as a purely spatial phenomenon. The destruction was as equally real as the preservation. Two times unfolding in Campania in less than a single rotation of the Earth.
Let’s descend a bit more deeply into this Lucretian clinamen — a movement that interrupts an equilibrium. We find not only two times, but many more. [2]
To the inhabitants, this must come as a sudden event. When Vesuvius erupts, it interrupts a current composition of time. The interruption can appear as chaos. But fairly quickly people had to figure out what to do as ash was about to rain down on them. In some cases, a hyper-organization of human actions must have kicked in throughout the buildings, streets, and surroundings of both cities.
Every living thing that wants to survive must immediately begin to move faster than the volcanic ash and lava. Motions become highly orchestrated, though from the perspective of the prior equilibrium this is all pure interruption and chaos.
A new composition of time becomes immediately necessary in order to survive. People are living inside a literal Lucretian clinamen.
62 CE
Seneca, referring to the earlier earthquake in the region, captures this change in time that is a disruption of a stable equilibrium: ‘There is a general panic when buildings rumble and their collapse is signaled. Then everyone rushes straight outside, abandons his home, and entrusts himself to the open air’ (Natural Questions, ‘On Earthquakes’ 1.3, 5, page 87).
Some motions are violent and turbulent and force a new time on the situation. The earthquake happens or the volcano erupts, and the inhabitants need to figure out what to do immediately. No doubt the political, cultural, economic, familial, and sexual hierarchies — themselves governors of motions — were both disturbed and intensified as the new and temporary law of time played out. Who survives, who doesn’t? None of this institutes a sudden democratic equality.
As we’ve seen, some motions slowed down dramatically and became stable for centuries: the buried bodies and scrolls are decaying far more slowly than they otherwise would.
Widen our experience of time and this event was anything but sudden. From our modern vantage point, the earthquake of 62 CE was most likely a signal that gasses were building up within the mountain. Between 62 and 79, earthquakes were not uncommon in the area. For some, these would have been signs from the gods. Intellectual elites like Seneca looked for ‘natural causes’.
Seneca provides one of our written records of the earthquake: ‘We have heard Lucilius, excellent man, that Pompeii, the busy Campanian city, has been ruined by an earthquake, and all the neighboring areas have been badly affected…. For part of the town of Herculaneum collapsed too, and even what remains is standing precariously’ (Natural Questions, 1.1, page 87).
For Seneca, this event is both a recomposition of time and proof that everything is in motion:
When people promise themselves that everything will last for ever, it never occurs to them that the very thing we stand on is not durable. For it is a defect not of Campania or Achaea, but of every piece of ground, that it holds together only loosely; it is weakened by many causes, and while the whole endures, the parts collapse. (On Earthquakes, 1.15, page 89)
The earthquake of 62 demonstrated the ultimate Stoic ethical lesson — we can take nothing as permanently given: ‘nature has created nothing to be immovable’ (1.12, page 89). We live at the mercy of fortuna: ‘And yet we promise ourselves that all the blessings of fortune will last, and we believe that someone will find that happiness, which of all human possessions is the most fleeting and fickle, has substance and permanence’ (1.14, page 89).
Earthquakes, in other words, provide an experiential moral lesson. They shake humanity from its complacency about time and the desire for something, anything to be permanent. Thus we live in a constantly changing composition of motions. For Seneca, ‘nature’ is nothing other than these changing motions.
We are mistaken if we see Seneca as talking about the changeability of space. When he writes ‘nature has created nothing to be immovable’, he is talking about a ‘nature’ that composes time through its motions. More than this, he is changing our experience of space into radical temporality. Nature is not a thing; it is a play of forces and motions, which appear as fortune, fate, and providence in Seneca’s worldview.
Seneca lives in time. [3]
Natural Questions
What we think is stable space is, in fact, temporary motions and therefore pure temporality. We have to adjust our experience to live within this constantly changing temporality brought about by a nature that is constantly in motion.
Modern nihilism is born of this radical temporality, and it is Seneca’s fundamental topic in Natural Questions:
Wherever will our fears find rest? What shelters will our bodies find, where will they escape in their anxiety, if the fear arises from the foundations and is drawn from the depths? There is general panic when buildings rumble and their collapse is signaled. (Natural Questions, ‘On Earthquakes,’ 1.4, page 87)
Once we realize that we live only in time and that ‘natura’ is nothing but motion whose stabilities are merely temporary, nihilism is knocking at our doors. All of Natural Questions, especially ‘On Earthquakes’, is Seneca’s attempt to provide comfort in the face of this nihilism. [4]
It is, therefore, fundamentally about how the study of nature must change our experience of time: ‘So much for explanations, Lucilius, excellent man; now for what serves to reassure our minds, since it is more important to us that they become more courageous than that they become better educated. But you cannot have one without the other. The mind gains strength solely from liberal studies and from the contemplation of nature’ (32.1, page 112).
In other words, to contemplate nature is to contemplate the fickleness of time:
You will face all that without flinching if you consider that there is no difference between a short time and a long time… Time flows on and abandons those who are greediest for it…. I am suspended on a point of fleeting time; and yet it takes a great man to moderate his demand for time. (32.9-10, page 113-4)
There is another composition of time built into Natural Questions. Seneca saw this work within an ongoing ‘enterprise’ that stretched backward and forward in time. On each natural question, he reviews what has been said to assess its validity, but he also sees the ‘enterprise’ stretching forward without end. ‘I am not unaware, Lucilius, excellent man, of how great is the enterprise whose foundations I am laying in my old age, now that I have decided to traverse the world, to seek out its causes and secrets, and to present them for others to learn about’ (praef.1, page 25). [5]
Modern geologists today are part of that extension. They understand the earthquake as a precursor to the eruption of Vesuvius 17 years later.
As we look further into this clinamen — the disruption of an equilibrium — we move into another clinamen that finds the birth of geology out of cosmological chaotic motion.
Geology, Cosmology
How does the Earth form in such a way that it has a molten center that can break through its crust? How is it possible, in other words, for the eruption of Vesuvius to happen?
Descending into this question will take us back to the formation of the Earth and another instance of a clinamen.
We should attend to the temporality that is inherent in this story. We are fond of talking about these kinds of stories with terms like ‘gradual’ or ‘eventually’ or ‘process’ or phrases like ‘under the right conditions’ such and such is possible. We hide the contingency of the movements involved under these terms that smooth the flow of time and turn it into a line. Yes, we tell ourselves that the birth of the Earth was messy and took many millions of years, but when we label it as ‘gradual’, we impose a linearity of time that occludes our ability to see all the other percolating times hidden by the name ‘gradual’.
What if we descend into the contingencies glossed over and smoothed out by these phrases? To invoke terms like clinamen or chaos or contingency of motion is to try to grasp the percolation of time as it moves forward. ‘Gradual’ and ‘eventual’ are always retrospective terms that allow us to call the past ‘done’ and to place us at the end of a ‘process’ that carries with it the sense of smoothness. It returns us to the comfort of things and alleviates us from coming to terms with what Nāgārguna called pratityasamutpada — i.e,. the existence of any so-called thing as the result of its connectedness with all other things. When we radicalize this connectedness by seeing connectedness as prior to any thing, we find ourselves experiencing contingency.
As we stare into the gradualness of the formation of our Solar System, we find nothing but contingency, which is not to say randomness. Rather, we find an infinite mixture of orders and disorders.
About 4.5 billion years ago — which is already a strange statement about time since years are measured by the rotation of the Earth around the Sun — space debris from the formation of our Sun are colliding. Some collisions fuse the pieces even as more debris is created. As these conditions continue, gravity strengthens. Fusion increases in scale.
Jupiter has an essential role to play as does Saturn. Jupiter has formed and, like most gas giants in most solar systems we can see, it is moving toward its dominant star. Its path will lead to eventual absorption by the Sun. In the case of our solar system, however, Saturn has formed and is pulling Jupiter back.
We must see this as an instance of a Lucretian clinamen. As Jupiter is pulled through the debris field in its motion toward the Sun, it is stirring up more and more chaotic motion and thus causing more collisions of dust and gas and minerals in the region where Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars will form.
In the meantime, Saturn has formed and is pulling Jupiter away from the Sun. As Jupiter leaves the debris field of what we will eventually call our Inner Solar System, the chaotic motions begin to abate. It is likely at this time that the objects that make up the four inner planets have stabilized. [1]
Radioactive materials bombard this haphazard collection of debris, which heats up to between 2000 and 3000 degrees. The iron and nickel content of this object melt and a planet of lava forms.
As the motions continue, the increasing gravity pulls the heavier material to the center and pushes out the lighter material. Layers began to form. The outer materials begin to form a crust when they come in contact with the vacuum of space, which is 450 degrees below zero — another Earth-bound measurement universalized. This quasi-object, now about 30 million years old, is cooling from the outside in.
An equilibrium of motions has formed.
This equilibrium is not static. It has become a process that wasn’t originally present. It takes a long time before these collisions and fusions become anything that could be called a stable process. Eventually the continuation of this procedural equilibrium makes other processes possible — water builds up, atmosphere forms, continents form out of the accumulating waters. [2]
At some point in this internal heating and external cooling, life becomes possible. Did the self-replicating power of RNA that eventually found a home in collections of lipids living in these surface waters arrive on one of these meteorites? Was life on Earth always made of extraterrestrial ingredients?
The Earth itself has always been extraterrestrial.
New processes are grafted onto the larger process of planet formation. There may be laws of motion here, but that’s a pretty incomplete (and boring) way to understand how orders emerge from other orders.
To reduce these motions to laws is to see a smooth, linear flow of time. To do so is to miss a lot of details that can’t be reduced to simply talking about the reconfiguration of space in a short period of time. These motions are anything but smooth. They are chaotic motions finding predictable relationships with each other. To reduce them to fundamental laws is a profound act of faith.
The formation of the Earth, which will lead to the possibility of events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, was never foreordained. It was contingent through and through.
Let’s call this thorough-going contingency ‘nature’.
Time, Nature
In Natural Questions, Seneca sets out to describe how the forces of nature work. Nature is not one order inexorably unfolding. It is not a thing. It is motion:
… no cause of motion is more important than breath [pneuma].
… There is nothing more powerful in nature, nothing more dynamic; without it not even the most violent things have any strength; breath ignites fire; water, if you take away the wind, is static, and only starts moving when a gust of wind propels it. Wind can break up great stretches of the earth, can raise up new mountains from below, and can establish in the middle of the sea islands that have not been seen before. Thera, and Therasia, and the island that was formed in the Aegean sea in our own day as sailors watched — who doubts that berth brought them into the light of day? (‘On Earthquakes 6.21.1, page 104)
Breath (pneuma) for Seneca (as for all Stoics) is a plastic force. It is not a Newtonian law that can be reduced to math. It is the source of nature and the source of all motion, but is not reducible to a single motion. It is all motions that we must experience as fortune, providence, and fate. Without motion, as it was for Epicurus and Lucretius, nothing happens: ‘water, if you take away the wind, is static’; it doesn’t do anything. No experience is possible without motion.
To say it again, nature, for Seneca, is fundamentally motion without quantifiable physical laws prior to the motions. Order emerges from the motions. More than this, nature is order that is not reducible to a single order. It is all possible orders, and pneuma is the plastic force that makes everything move — including human passions. Earthquakes are not the same because the breath that causes them instantiates different motions (6.21.2). [7]
Time emerges as these orders form. It does not sit behind them or outside them measuring their progression, which would mean reducing their time merely to their age.
Nature is the contingency of motion.
Saul, Paul
Let’s consult the calendar that puts us at 62 CE.
At the time of the earthquake, it is entirely possible that Paul is imprisoned in Rome. Jesus has been dead for some thirty years. Seneca is about to die at Nero’s behest just a couple of years after the earthquake.
We can map the three events onto the same calendar time, but we keep them separate by putting them into different channels — the religious, the philosophical, the geological, and the archeological. These compositions of time differ greatly even as they occur at the same time.
Seneca sees chaotic but providential forces in Natural Questions. Unlike Paul, he does not see providentia as a linear history of promise and fulfillment. Seneca’s nature is not a God that reveals himself as something hidden from the foundations of the world. There is no grand human and divine narrative: Seneca’s nature is can only be experienced moment to moment. He offers it as a way of strengthening his readers’ (Lucilius explicitly) capacity to endure catastrophe by envisioning it as fate, fortune, and providence. The fundamental Stoic ethic is the recognition that you are responsible only for what you can control, and the only thing you control is how you react to external stimuli. Providentia should not be mistaken for a divine plan. It is simply the experiential capacity to change one’s perspective on events by deciding that what appears to be random (fortuna) is in fact ordered (providentia). Your only task is to adjust your expectations, and therefore your experience, accordingly.
Seneca’s cosmos is not out to get you or to save you. It is out test you.
This is not Paul’s (or Jesus’s) view of time. Paul’s composition of time, which is chronologically simultaneous with Seneca’s, is thoroughly bifurcated and marked by specific events that God has ordained.
Paul’s time is the unfolding of God’s Plan, which is about to be fulfilled.
Stanislaus Breton elaborates Paul’s composition of time with exceptional clarity. Time and eternity have a dual relationship. On the one hand, time is the expression of eternal forces that come from God and were revealed by resurrection of Jesus. The power to live with others in kindness and gentleness are moral qualities that are embedded in eternity and can be temporally activated by humans. On the other hand, time is the unfolding of a Plan where everything has been ordained from the beginning. In the former, we see time as the linear expression and maturation of eternal qualities of the human community. In the latter, time is a circle where the end is simply the fulfillment of what God set in motion from the beginning of time.
Paul is not making this up from nothing. He is not innovating in a vacuum. Paul has had a powerful moment of conversion on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1ff) that marks his own life as a before and after. This conversion is personal: Saul will become Paul. Jesus appears to Saul and asks him why he is persecuting him. [8]
When he does so, he has a new form of life and a new mission. He has a new composition of time caused by a clinamen.
This personal before and after is also profoundly and necessarily historical. As told in Acts, Saul is a Pharisee who is off to round up followers of the Way (tēs Hodou) in Damascus. He is determined to hold together the nómos [law, custom, tradition] of Moses as a committed and vehement enforcer. Jesus appearing to Saul forces a personal confrontation with history. Jesus was in fact the promised messiah, and like so many Jews, Saul missed it. (This was always the fundamental message of the Gospels.)
The appearance of Jesus to Saul has the force of the 62 earthquake and the 79 eruption of Vesuvius. A given composition of time — its cycles, rhythms, and tempos — is interrupted and recomposed. ‘Suddenly flashed around him a light from heaven’ that knocks him to the ground (Acts 9:3-4).
It is a genuine clinamen that arguably has far more lasting effects on our experience than Vesuvius. This clinamen creates a conundrum not just for Paul but for Christianity. We live in this conundrum today: what is the relationship between the before and after of Jesus?
Breton unfolds the starkness of the choice: ‘Two possibilities and two alone will be considered: either the decision of an unalleviated rupture or, beyond the ruse of diplomatic compromise, the noble realist project of constructing the ark of a covenant that would link up the Old and the New, without minimizing the gap between them.’ [8]
In other words, will history be bifurcated by a hard discontinuity or will Christianity be able to find a continuity from God’s promise to Abraham to the appearance of Jesus as a very different messiah than was expected?
Marcion and Mani will take the first and easiest path: the God of the Jews is fundamentally different than the God revealed by Jesus. The revelation of the messiah is a hard break with the past. Discontinuity through and through.
Paul will take the second and harder path: the promise made to Abraham is now universalized. The before is not radically different than the after as it is for gnostics like Marcion and Mani. But the after it not smoothly continuous either. The before is part of the Plan that is now in the process of being fulfilled. What is required is faith and belief that this is so.
Paul’s composition of time is both continuous and discontinuous. Breton argues that this requires him to create an ‘allegorical hermeneutics’ that is neither hard discontinuity nor the smooth continuity of rigorous determination. Breton likens Paul’s composition of time to Bergsonian durée:
Allegory is inscribed in a concept of time as duration [durée]. Novelty must therefore bring together the continuity of history and the discontinuity of change, if temporality is not to dissipate in a scattering of instants or in the fulguration of lightning flashes. (72)
Here the term ‘novelty’ signals something about durée that most understandings of time miss: new time is always being created. We live in an incomplete universe that is always unfolding on the edge of new nows. This incompleteness is neither the rigorous determinism of physical laws operating within a ‘block universe’, nor is this incompleteness a discontinuous ‘scattering of instants’ with no connection to each other.
This novelty does not require us to make a desperate plea for ‘randomness’ as our attempt to save freedom from a physical determinism. Novelty is a fundamental condition of a universe that is incomplete. As new time is created, so is the past replicated in the present, but this replication unfolds within the newness of time.
To put this in terms of my argument about time as contingency, novelty is contingency.
Time is contingency. Contingency is time.
A carbonized loaf of bread in an oven, a flash of light on the road to Damascus, and the eruption of a volcano all point to the contingency of time. This yeast, flour and water — if heated appropriately and for a sufficient length of time — will become bread. Saul will become Paul with a new mission and a new trajectory of time. The pyroclastic flow will destroy and preserve Pompeii and Herculaneum. Time will move forward.
In this forward movement, however, contingency is fundamental. The bread does not come out as hoped because it is superheated and becomes baked into carbon. Saul may misrecognize the message — Nietzsche certainly thought he did. The keys may not work upon returning home because the locks have melted, but it’s better to be safe than sorry — our mundane recognition that contingency is the foundation of time.
None of this can be said to be the unfolding of uniform meaning or necessity. Althusser puts it well in his discussion of Lucretius’ clinamen:
The world may be called the accomplished fact [fait accompli] in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End [Fin]. But the accomplishment of the fact is just a pure effect of contingency, since it depends on the aleatory encounter of the atoms due to the swerve of the clinamen. Before the accomplishment of the fact, before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment of the fact, the non-world that is merely the unreal existence of the atoms. [9]
Meaning, Reason, Necessity are not first. Yes, they happen — they are fait accompli — but that does not obligate us to see them as the smooth operators of time working behind the scenes, awaiting our discovery. We do live within orders, but that is only because we live in the uneven contingency of motions.
Time and existence happen out of the fundamental movements of contingent motions where clinamens are potentially everywhere, but sometimes they show up with greater force than other times.
Time is not smooth. Time is not a thing.
Time is contingency. Contingency is time.
S cannot be 0
Why compare Seneca and Paul? Why go back to the formation of the earth from the eruption of Vesuvius? Why do people carrying keys matter? What is all this talk of the Lucretian clinamen? Are these just different perspectives on time that is otherwise quite real and embedded in the physics of the cosmos? Is time real or is it just the illusory experience of a deluded human consciousness?
Whenever I hear physicists talk about the arrow of time, I immediately become impatient. They offer the arrow as an obvious fact — we remember the past but we can’t remember the future. Yes, at some level this is obvious, but they seem to want time to be a thing that they can define and ascribe to natural laws.
This motivation causes them to make a flawed maneuver. They always want to talk about reversible and irreversible processes. F=MA runs the same forward or backward as does E=MC(2). The only law in the toolbox that isn’t reversible is the second law of thermodynamics (aka, the law of entropy). They pick this law because they’ve already assumed that time only moves forward.
They’ve disconnected it from motion and made it a thing that they can set out to quantify.
Is this famous episode from 79 CE really only explainable as the irreversible and smooth flow of time? Is time really only moving forward for Saul? No doubt, time is moving irreversibly forward just as it was before the eruption and just as it is for Saul traveling to Damascus.
But if we assume that time is a feature of continent motions, as I am arguing, then we need a more sophisticated toolbox in which to understand time and our experience of it. In arguing for time as contingency, I am arguing for a different understanding of experience than we get from Classical Physics, which reduces experience to illusions that must be overcome by true knowledge.
The experience of Vesuvius, however, is not illusory. It is quite real as documented by Pliny the Younger. This experience is inseparable from the contingency of motions in which this experience is happening. The real measure of time here is not a ticking clock — there are no clocks at this moment. If time can be described as real in this situation, it is real because the various ways in which contingency is playing out. Pliny the Elder sleeps for a few hours while others panic. Some grab their keys hoping for a return. A loaf of bread is abandoned. A pyroclastic flow destroys existing cycles of life but immediately carbonizes and thus preserves them.
What is entropic and what is negentropic in all of this?
The rhythm and pace of time has radically changed that is not fully explained by entropy as the forward march of a physical law. We have to stare into the clinamen of this eruption to see that not one law of time is operational. Multiple motions are happening, and it is from these motions that time happens.
Time is not a thing.
Footnotes
[1] For a discussion of life in Pompeii before the eruption, see The Ancients podcast ‘Pompeii: Life before the Eruption’
[2] Michel Serres discusses the clinamen at length in The Birth of Physics, his reading of Lucretius’ De rerum natura published a century or so before the eruption. The Roman poet Virgil, who was deeply influenced by Lucretius, is 9 years old at the time of the eruption. Seneca, also influenced by Lucretius’ Epicureanism, died 15 years earlier at Nero’s behest.
[3] I’ve written about the fundamental temporality of Seneca’s ethics several times in Time as Practice. ‘Stoicism and Using Your Time Wisely’, ‘Moral Responsibility and the Flow of Time’, ‘Virtue without Truth’, and ‘Stoic Frontiers’.
[4] I’m using Harry M. Hine’s translation, published in 2014 by the University of ?Chicago Press. On Seneca’s Natural Questions as draining the world of gods and replacing them with natural forces, see Hine’s Introduction to Natural Questions, pages 12-13.
[5] Hine emphasizes this point in his Introduction: ‘In effect Seneca pictures a community of scholars stretching across time and across national and philosophical boundaries’ (page 9).
[6] I’m using ‘chaotic’ here as Michel Serres used it The Birth of Physics. There are two kinds of chaos. One is the laminar flow of atoms whose relations to each other never change. In this case, the difference between stasis and motion doesn’t exist because relations don’t change. Thus the difference between chaos and order doesn’t exist. The second chaos occurs after a deviation happens within the laminar flow. Something starts moving differently that all the other atoms. This chaos becomes the turbulent movement out of which new orders can emerge. My discussion of how the Earth formed is precisely this deviation and turbulence making new orders (not a single order, but multiple orders) possible.
[7] The historian of science Lorraine Daston calls ‘nature’ a ‘repository of all imaginable orders’. ‘Nature displays so many kinds of order that it is a beckoning resource with which to instantiate any particular one imagined by humans’ (Against Nature, 57). For Michel Serres, in Rameaux (translated as Branches), all things — le Gran Récit — ‘can be summed up in a single word, nature. How should we define it? By its original meaning: that which was born, that which will be born; that is, a narrative of newborn and contingent events that are unpredictable before they occur but formatted as a semi-necessary chain when drawn descending toward us’ (Branches, 110).
[8] The story is not consistent in Acts. It is told three times. In Acts 9, the light is visible only to Saul, but his traveling companions can hear the voice. Jesus does not deliver the imperative of his mission to the Gentiles; rather, he instructs him only to “get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do’ (9:6). Ananias receives from Jesus the message of Paul’s mission, but the narrative does not indicate how it is passed on to Saul from Ananias. In Acts 22, the opposite happens with respect to the traveling companions: ‘Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice’ (22:9). In this version, Ananias delivers the mission to Saul, and it is part of the narrative. In Acts 26, Ananias has no part to play because Jesus delivers the message immediately on the road to Damascus: ‘I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles — to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, to that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me’ (26:17-18).
[9] Stanislaus Breton, A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Joseph N. Ballan trans., Columbia University Press, 2011, page 47).
[10] Louis Althusser, ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 19778-1987, Verso 2006, page 169-70.