Maturana starts from the observation that the meaning of the concept of time depends on the circumstances of its use. According to him, these „circumstances“ do not represent a world existing independently of human consciousness, but rather relationships within the self-contained context of language use, through which people recursively and consensually coordinate their behavior.

Maturana understands life as a flow of transformative processes. It is essentially a moment of passing away and coming into being, a constant process that consumes itself in order to bring itself forth. It is a recursive enactment in the now. From this perspective, past and future are terms that people invent as self-observers to explain their presence, their emergence in the now. Time itself is a linguistic expression invented by humans for the background against which the present, as well as the past as its source and the future as its extrapolation, occur.

Thus, time is not located in any kind of reality, but in language, or, as an exclusively linguistic phenomenon respectively. Language, or language use respectively, is not a means of symbolically representing the properties of a reality independent of humans, but rather a means that constitutes the consensual, recursive dynamic of interconnected human behavior. Language is the specific way in which humans act collectively. Everything that „exists“ for them must necessarily be expressed in language. Talking of a reality independent of humans and their language use is as meaningless as talking of a time outside of language use.

Time can therefore only be understood through its use in language as an abstraction of successive processes, which we currently, i.e., in the present, coherently distinguish in linguistically generated experience. In experience, time appears as an observer-independent functional unit because it is configured as such in language. In the execution of temporal distinctions, it appears directed and irreversible. This also applies when we observe cyclical, reversible processes as sequential sequences.

For each domain of experience, there are specific distinctions of time, or proper time, which have emerged from the application of the same type of abstraction to specific process dynamics. Time, as an abstraction generated by observers in language use, is biologically grounded; physical time is derived from a specific domain of experience of the observer. In summary, from Maturana’s perspective, time is an explanatory principle spontaneously generated by observers in language, without a „real“ reference, and justified only by mutually agreed-upon, coherent experience.

Literature:

Humberto R. Maturana, The Nature of Time (1995), https://sites.evergreen.edu (Download 10.02.2026)

Humberto R. Maturana (1928 – 2021):

neurobiologist and philosopher

Keywords:

constructivism

Kommentare