Playing time games, shifting limits, trying out ‘what prevails' and setting new limits is, as shown above, an essential part of the symbolic power of action between individuals. But the search for the moment goes on, not least in the sciences. Knowledge of the strategic moment seems imperative for practical application, and even Nietzsche suspected that fear of the unpredictable was the ulterior instinct of science. But the search for the moment can be interpreted in another sense: as an inquiry into the first moment, the origin, in which the universe could have arisen and time along with it. The time of physics, which with the advance of the natural sciences separated from the matrix of social time and which in the machine age became the ideologically linear guide rail for progress, to which all other time had to submit in the name of its external, objective reality, is beginning to approach the social conception of time again. Not just because the intensified study of the possible origins of the universe, and particularly of the question whether it was a unique event from the point of view of physics, can be interpreted as a kind of time game on the part of physicists. Prigogine and Stengers speak of a new coherence which is beginning to emerge between different scientific disciplines, and which is beginning to open up to the problem of development' in general. The concept of the event', for instance, has changed in that it is now the event which accounts for the difference between past and future, whereas wherever the arrow of time is denied in physics, past and future are regarded as equivalent.33 What physics has recently discovered is that most, if not all, cyclical phenomena can be chaotic'and vice versa. Transitions between the time of unreproducible’ and the time of 'reproducible' phenomena thus become possible in both directions. For the time of reproducible phenomena, we can therefore speak of a reversal of time, since the flow of events can be reversed, i.e. without the observed events changing the development already completed can be retraced. For chaotic phenomena, however, it is not possible to reconstruct their past or to reproduce them. Accordingly, there would also be two kinds of evolution.
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The Longing for the Moment