When the Mechanical World Misses Life End of the Nineteenth Century Beginning of the Twentieth Century

When the Mechanical World Misses Life End of the Nineteenth Century Beginning of the Twentieth Century

Mechanism and Objectivism are both tools of thought created by the human intellect to understand the world. The former explains things by cause and effect and structure, while the latter attempts to grasp the whole by means of predetermined purposes and functions. However, in the face of the creation and evolution of life, these frameworks reveal their critical limitations.

Mechanism assumes that the same causes produce the same results. To be analyzable, an object must be decomposable and maintain its identity. Life, however, consists in a continuity that is lost when it is disassembled. Removing a cell or organ does not reproduce the very momentum and direction of life that was there. This is because life is not the sum of its parts, but the process of continuous generation itself.

Objectivism, on the other hand, tends to view evolution as a movement toward some kind of perfection. However, there is no predetermined goal point in the evolutionary process. Organisms do not proceed toward an answer, but rather create a new form in the midst of the environment and internal tensions each time. Objectivism replaces this open movement of generation with a narrative that makes sense after the fact.

What these two schools of thought have in common is that they assume a human sense of time and space. We try to understand time by dividing it like space and comparing states side by side, but the time of life cannot be divided in this way. The past does not disappear, but remains folded inside the present. Even if it appears that we have returned to the same state, there is always an accumulation of changes inside.

From the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, this problematic consciousness was shared not only in philosophy but also around biology and physics. Against the background of an era in which the concepts of entropy and irreversibility were being developed, there was a growing sense of discomfort with treating life as a mere machine. Determining the limits of mechanism and objectivism also meant becoming aware of the limits of human intellect itself.

This realization does not give us a theory that fully explains life. Rather, it indicates a willingness to accept that there are things that cannot be explained. Rather than being an object to be grasped, life is an entity that shakes the very framework of understanding, and it is precisely in this that the renewal of thought is encouraged. At the point where the mechanistic view of the world comes to a standstill, life continues to be generated.