Time: Mechanical and Organic

A reflection upon two ways of thinking about time, plus an introduction to Frederick Wilhelmsen.

Recently, my wife and I tried growing basil, mint, and some other herbs in an aero garden in our kitchen. Some seeds grew. Others did nothing. Nevertheless, it was pretty remarkable to watch some plants slowly take off.

If you sat and watched these plants for a short period of time (anywhere from a few seconds to a couple hours), they appeared to be doing nothing. Obviously. But in due time, what I shall in short order refer to as organic time, the growth became apparent. The basil, in fact, exploded.

Indoor gardens and plants provide a front row seat to the organic processes at play around us all the time. It is easy to lose sight of the slow but steady march of seeds and weeds and trees in the surrounding environment. And it is ultimately satisfying to watch something transform from a miniscule, invisible seed into an incredibly robust set of stalks and leaves.

Plants provide us with a powerful metaphor for thinking about growth and time. There is no magic number that dictates when a plant will grow (albeit, the aero garden pods do list an “estimated time” for when the seeds will sprout). Nature, the surrounding environment, and the plant itself dictate precisely how fast and whether a plant will grow.

Indeed, the growth itself marks the time and not time the growth.

How do you measure a year?

Perhaps nobody has ever pressed you to define time. We all know what time is. Right? You might say that time is a number (just look at your watch). Or you might say that time is a thing that can be bought and sold. Or you might say that time is something that we’re all in. Time, you might insist, moves in one direction. We have free time and spare time. We can lose time. We can gain it. We can waste it (oh, sin of sins in this our age ever defined by the mystique of work). It passes slowly or quickly. Time is a sequence. Time is a thing. Time had a beginning. Time will have an end. Correct?

We should probably know how to define it, no? Our concept of time shapes our entire collective life and culture. Yet, what we think about time is a convention, and it is shaped by the dominant media of our day, including our language. Allow me to explain.

As Mortimer Adler writes in Aristotle for Everybody, time is the measure of change. Prior to wristwatches and grandfather clocks, how did people mark the time? They’d observe the changing shadow of the sun cast on the ground with a sun dial. They’d watch the coming and going of the seasons, the seemingly infinite cycle of death and decay. They’d gaze at the waxing and waning of the moon. These are simply changes that occur organically; this time was organic time; it was marked off by events in nature, including the human body.

For the ancient and/or primitive mind, it was not so irrational to think that time ran in a circle. Just look all around you. Things bloom and die and bloom again. Aristotle himself believed in a universe without beginning or end. Why does time have to run in a straight line? You cannot draw time itself, even if you can represent it with a line. You can only get at time by way of metaphors and media. And the media and metaphors you use matter.

If you want, you can even measure time by cups of coffee. Thank me later for getting the song from Rent stuck in your head.

When you think of events as happening in time, you make time into a container. And when you think of time as a container, it is very difficult not to fill it with things (namely, events). Indeed, strange as it may sound, people used to think of time as happening in events.

And then came the monks. They wanted to make sure they could pray at regular intervals. I don’t blame them. It is good to pray and to pray regularly. But with these monks, time began its steady, regular march towards quantification and spatialization. As Daniel Boorstin writes in The Discoverers:

“The first steps toward the mechanical measurement of time, the beginnings of the modern clock in Europe, came not from farmers or shepherds, nor from merchants or craftsmen, but from religious persons anxious to perform promptly and regularly their duties to God. Monks needed to know the times for their appointed prayers. In Europe the first mechanical clocks were designed not to show the time but to sound it. The first true clocks were alarms.”

These monks weren’t trying to create the 9 to 5 workday. That wasn’t their intention. But that is precisely what the development of the mechanical clock eventually did. It is in the nature of technology to introduce unintended consequences. The mechanical clock, with its twelve neatly arranged numbers and hands, set the world ticking in a new direction.

Time and expectations

Frederick Wilhelmsen was perhaps one of the greatest minds of the 20th century that nobody has ever heard of. If you can get a copy of his book The War in Man (co-written with Jane Bret, published in 1970, and now out of print), I highly recommend it. What follows below is peppered with many insights from The War in Man.

Essentially, Wilhelmsen helps us to answer this question: Why should we distinguish between organic time and mechanical time? Why does this distinction matter? Well, our presuppositions about what time is shape the expectations we have. Consider our deeply held and oftentimes unreflective expectations about education, work, and relationships.

Do all students need four years to obtain a bachelor’s degree, two years for a master’s, and three for a doctorate? Why must students take 128 credit hours to graduate? What is so magical about the number “128”? Your success on the GRE depends on how many questions you can satisfactorily answer in a given period of time; by so doing, it confuses intelligence with, in the words of Wilhelmsen, “the swiftness with which the eyes get across a piece of paper.”

These temporal conventions shape institutional life all over higher education. I don’t expect them to change anytime soon, but simply acknowledging how our conceptions of time shape our expectations of success or failure helps to put these successes and failures into a new light.

As an aside, Wilhelmsen points out how Aquinas never fixed the time when a person came into the age of reason; the age of reason is simply that time when a child can differentiate right from wrong. Doesn’t that understanding of the age of reason make a lot more sense than simply saying that the age of reason is 7 years old? Doesn’t it make sense to say “This person deserves a degree” when experience proves he/she deserves it?

Even outside of the university, consider how our concept of time shapes our expectations of expertise. Malcom Gladwell in Outliers argues that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. If you want to master coding in Python, you better gear up and put in those 10,000 hours! Want to become an expert cellist? 10,000 hours! Why 10,000 hours? Because a study by a few psychologists said so. To his credit, at least one of these psychologists took issue with Gladwell’s claim.

You know as well as I do that not every hour passes the same. Mechanical time is homogenous time. In other words, mechanical time presupposes that every hour is the same. With organic time, each moment may differ in quality.

An hour in a DMV is not the same as an hour spent playing a videogame or watching a movie. Tempus fugit, time flies. But not always. It depends on what you’re doing with that time. If you’re practicing to become a musician, you might learn more in a half hour than you’ve learned in the past several months simply because you discovered a new concept that allowed you to reconceive how you played the instrument. A higher quantity of time doesn’t necessarily translate to a higher quality use of that time. If your expectation is that it will take you a certain amount of time to achieve mastery, you may mindlessly play for an hour and think to yourself: “I’ve done it. I’m on my way.” On the other hand, you may hit the 10,000-hour mark and wonder, “Why am I not the best?”

Obviously, with work, rationalist mechanical time shapes a number of our expectations. We’re called to work from 9AM to 5PM (a holdover from the industrial era). We get vacation time by the hour; we bank it, then we use it. We fill out timecards, marking off productive time from non-productive time. In the medical sphere, doctors get X amount of time with patients (15 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever, depending on what insurance will pay for and what the hospital bureaucracy will allow). We pay consultants by the hour. Many, in fact, get paid by the hour. We mark our salaries by the year. Interestingly enough, stipends, Wilhelmsen observes, are a practice that acknowledge the organic nature of time insofar as they are awarded based upon an event (e.g., a lecture given) and not an abstract amount of time (e.g., the amount of time it took to put the lecture together).

What would the world look like if we ceased to pay people by the hour? Would it fall apart? How else would we pay them? I’m sure we could figure something out.

Let me say one more thing about mechanical time in relation to work. When companies attempt to insert meaning into an organization in a mechanical way, it often does not work. Perhaps you can build a culture with meaning injected from the top down (with the help of a new corporate internal marketing scheme meant to energize employees, for example, as awful as that sounds). But what would happen if organizations thought of a meaningful corporate culture in organic terms? Perhaps they’d carefully plant and nurture any fragile buds of meaning for as long as it took them to bear fruit. Sometimes, it takes time for things to become meaningful. How much time? We don’t know. Stop checking to see if the thing is growing and just keep watering it.

As I. A. Richards puts it in The Philosophy of Rhetoric:

“We shall do better to think of a meaning as though it were a plant that has grown—not a can that has been filled or a lump of clay that has been moulded.”

Perhaps most importantly, human relationships develop and decay in organic time. We cannot truly measure with a clock the time spent with a friend. As Francis Bacon noted long ago, “Friends are thieves of time.” We live in a world of total work, and people, especially our friends, can eat up our productive hours. If we’re really puritans about our work, we may avoid having any friends at all, regardless of whatever Cicero or Aristotle say about the necessity of friends for the good life.

If you want to repair a dysfunctional relationship, it will take time. How long? Nobody can tell you. Nobody can quantify it. Remember: the events themselves mark the time. A recognition of the reality of organic time can help you set realistic expectations about relationships that have gone sour or those on the rocks.

Grief, too, is not something that you can really make sense of with mechanical time. A man in a white coat can tell you, perhaps, how long a person grieves on average in the aggregate after the death of a child. But, statistics be damned, if you fall outside the bell curve in one way or another, you have no good reason to feel guilty about continuing to grieve. Some wounds close up easier than others. As with a plant that has lost one of its branches, “healing” (an overworn metaphor in our day) depends on multiple factors, especially the environment.

Resurrection

In case you’d like to know, everything in our aero garden died, not because I neglected it, per se, but because I failed to take into account how the needs of a plant grow with the plant itself. We planned to travel away from home for a few weeks, and in preparation for this, I filled up the aero garden’s water tank to its maximum level and then put in a splash of plant food. That’ll do it! But when we returned our plants were as dead as could be. As it turns out, a bigger plant goes through the same amount of water more quickly than a smaller plant.

What’s the lesson here? The plants themselves dictated how much water they needed and when they needed it. They were running on organic time. They always had been. My assumptions about how to tend to the garden didn’t grow with the garden itself. I needed to pay better attention to organic time.

I should like to resurrect this aero garden, by the way, and start afresh with new plants. How long will it take to bring it back to life? Only time will tell.

If you liked this post or would enjoy seeing others like it, please subscribe to this Substack. I’d also be very grateful if you’d also consider sharing it with others whom you know that have an interest in philosophy, culture, media, and technology. If you’d like to read more Wilhelmsen, check out his provocative essay “The Great Books: Enemies of Wisdom?” For more on primitive conceptions of time, Mircea Eliade is your man. A special thanks to Richard Thames for originally introducing me to the idea of time as a container.