Extend (étendue) - Spreading (étendisme)

Probabilism, Determinism, Evolutionism and Developmentalism represent four angles of study of space-time becoming.

Probabilism accounts for the subatomic state of existence of elementary particles, the quanta. The subatomic state represents a situation where subatomic particles have the capacity to exist in terms of superposed states. A superposed state translates a set of probabilities resulting from the characteristics taken by a subatomic particle according to the context in which it is observed. Particle and context form a determining duo, for both, where according to the context of observation the situation rendered by the particle is modified, or, if one prefers, what the observer who looks at this situation will be able to qualify : he himself being a stakeholder of the qualification of the context in which the observation takes place. The de-coherence translates the passage from the quantum situation to the situation and constitutes a bridge between the quantum world and the atomic world.

Determinism recognizes the existence of an immutable link between causes and effects : between consequent phenomena and antecedent phenomena. This form of representation of becoming is linear in the sense that everything acts and is acted according to historical laws.

Evolutionism looks at an anomaly of the determined becoming in the sense that the process of causes and effects generates the appearance of a novelty : the consequents determine the antecedents. With the process leading to life, a relational anomaly appears, which makes the consequents demonstrate that something new arises from a particular arrangement of antecedents. This anomaly would trigger a differentiated becoming no longer characterized by a simple determination, but by a finalist determinism (Claude Bernard) expressed through a new notion : that of evolution.

Finally, developmentalism accounts for the conscious work carried out by life forms on their own evolution. The development translates a rise in capacity of the power to act of living beings on their own historicity.

The following quotation from Leleu¹ allows us to establish a form of complementarity between the deterministic angle of the natural laws of classical physics and the point of view of the consequent transformations of evolutionism :

The Earth of the origins would have been formed shortly after our Sun 4.5 billion years ago, an initially hostile environment with a surface of molten lava and probably a collision with another star (Theïa) which formed our satellite the Moon, an environment not very favorable to life… We had to wait for the Earth to cool down, for a crust to form on its surface and for enough steam to condense to form the first oceans. The first traces of life would go back to 4 billion years, simple cells that would have then evolved through genetic mutations to more and more complex species until the diversity of species that we know today. In this chronology, the first species of the genus “homo” (homo-habilis, homo ergaster…) appeared about 2 million years ago, the modern man (homo sapiens) having appeared only about 300 000 years ago.

If four points of view allow us to identify four fields of manifestation of transformations, of change in general and of expression of futurity, a fifth point of analysis provides us with an integrative key between them : the étendisme. By étendisme, we understand the whole of the processes and dynamics, the totality of the passages of the qualitative to the quantitative, allowing to follow and to understand what happened, happens and will happen aesthetically and ethically between the infinitely small and the infinitely big.

Notes

1
Leleu, F., The Big Bang — A History of the Universe (2020) https://webfred.lautre.net/jphy/index.php/cours-cycle‑4/9‑organisation-et-transformation-de-la-matiere/56-le-big-bang-l-histoire-chimique-de-l-univers (2020)