Ontological irreversibility is irreversibility as a mode of the actual in the sense of Nicolai Hartmann (Ethik, Berlin: de Gruyter 1926; Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, 1938). It is not gradable, not epistemic, but constitutive: what has become actual has exhausted its space of possibility.
Hartmann’s modal analysis
Hartmann’s modal analysis sharply separates the modes of the possible, the actual, and the necessary. Actuality is asymmetrical with respect to possibility: a possibility can be actualized, but an actuality cannot be de-actualized. The arrow of modality points in one direction only.
For the ontology of the definition of death, this modal analysis yields a decisive distinction: “permanence” is a modal concept of the possible — “could be restored, but will not be.” “Ontological irreversibility” is a statement about actuality itself — “can no longer be undone, because the substance has changed.”
Aristotelian root
Ontological irreversibility has its historical root in the Aristotelian pair of concepts genesis and phthora (De Generatione et Corruptione I): coming-to-be and passing-away are the most fundamental, irreducible transitions between being and non-being, categorially distinct from mere changes of state (alloiosis). To undo a coming-to-be would not be a contrary motion, but a different substance — structurally asymmetrical.
Confirmation from the philosophy of nature
Ilya Prigogine’s thermodynamics of dissipative structures (La Nouvelle Alliance 1979; The End of Certainty 1996) confirms ontological irreversibility at the level of the philosophy of nature: the arrow of time is not merely a macroscopic-statistical illusion, but is anchored locally in the microstructure of unstable systems. The reversible (Newtonian mechanics) is the special case; the irreversible is the rule of the actual.
Significance for the definition of death
In the context of the definition of death, ontological irreversibility is the strict condition: only when the separation of body and spiritual substance is accomplished such that no natural force can undo it has certain death occurred. This condition is reached neither through permanence (a treatment decision) nor reliably through medically diagnosed irreversibility (an inductive inference) — but solely through the ontological fact itself.
Ontological classification
Superordinate class: Irreversibility
Sister concept: Medically Diagnosed Irreversibility
Connected with: Death, Substance, Precautionary Principle
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Hartmann, Nicolai (1926): Ethik. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Hartmann, Nicolai (1938): Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit. Berlin: de Gruyter.
- Aristotle: De Generatione et Corruptione (Book I). https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/gener_corr.html
- Aristotle: Physics IV (10—14, on time).
- Prigogine, Ilya & Stengers, Isabelle (1979): La Nouvelle Alliance. Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard.
- Prigogine, Ilya (1996): The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature (orig. La fin des certitudes). New York: Free Press.
- Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1974): L’Irréversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion.
Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.