Entropy and Aging

Aging is something sentient beings do. We humans not only grow old, but obsessively reflect on the meaning of aging, its unwelcome impositions on our projects, and sometimes on the unexpected opportunities it affords for reconnecting with loved ones. We realize animals age, too. We care for them when their bodies ache, when they struggle to perform basic tasks, or as their bodily functions fail them. It gets more complicated with plants, though they are ‘life’ that is technically not ‘sentient. They do not age in the sense of experiencing bodily degradation. Trees, for instance, can successfully regenerate and replace tired cells and worn-out tissue in ways we simply cannot. Like types of jellyfishes, they come close to something like immortality. But aging appears to be a biological phenomenon. It concerns processes involving, among other factors, a decline of the body and mind rooted in genetics.

And yet that does not encompass all the different ways we speak of aging. We say that a vintage table has “aged well.” We understand that wine can “age,” and think of leather goods as developing a patina “with age.” The most obvious explanation for these is of course that they are just figurative uses of proper biological aging. Metaphors, that is, which we have derived from the intimate and even traumatic experience of biological aging. But then again, why? We could also say the reverse is true, that biological aging is a species of a broader phenomenon of physical aging involving things as well as life. If we were to entertain that possibility, what would a physical account of aging look like?

Bringing together lessons from the writings of Karl Marx and Catherine Malabou presents us with an intriguing answer: entropy. From the Greek entropḗ, where “en-” means “in,” and the root verb, “tropḗ,” represents to “turn” or “transform,” entropy means “to be amid continuous change.” It is a word devised in the late 1800s to explain how all forms of organization harbor a degree of instability that inevitably increases over time. Marx and Malabou both share an entropic appreciation in their philosophies. In different yet related ways, they portray what it means for types of order to eventually fall apart. Helped by their reflections, a fresh perspective emerges where “aging” is a word to explain how physical beings experience entropy as a kind of physical deformation.

I: Marx’s Last Journey

In two recent biographies of Karl Marx, the first by historian Jonathan Sperber and the second from cultural theorist Marcello Musto, we find snippets of a subject not at all associated with the figure of Marx: aging. More precisely, his own words on his own experience with chronic illness and age. Marx died on March 14, 1883, at 64, from what Sperber speculates was likely to have been tuberculosis, the same disease that killed Heinrich Marx, Karl’s father, in 1838 (Sperber, 542). 64 years old may not seem like much in terms of advanced age today, but then again, the life expectancy in England in 1850 at the moment of birth was an appalling 40 years. Marx’s last year seems to have been somewhat of a microcosm of the experience of aging: a slow but incremental loss of physical mobility and comfort was followed by chronic pain, bouts of respiratory complications, and extreme weakness, which kept him bedridden for the rest of his life. We also know the awful list of further ailments Marx’s experienced during his last year: coughing, vomiting, hoarseness, trouble swallowing, and eventually the loss of appetite.

Interestingly, though, it was also during this last year that Marx embarked on a journey like never before in his life: from London to the Isle of Wight, Marseille, Algiers, Monte Carlo, Lake Geneva, among others, eventually making his way back to London in January 1883. On the recommendation of his doctors, he was chasing the warmer weather and dry air of North Africa; the one and only time he set foot outside of Europe. When such weather failed to materialize, he was sent to the French Riviera to continue searching for it. Unfortunately, he returned to London weaker than when he left. Sperber notes that, by then unable to swallow, “he was subsisting largely on milk spiked with rum” (Sperber, 545). We also know from letters to Engels sent before reaching London on his return that he believed his death was imminent. For the sake of context, we should keep in mind that Marx had lost his wife, Jenny, to cancer in 1881, and his oldest daughter, Jenny Caroline, also to cancer, in 1883. Sperber notes that under the stress of his travels at his age, the advancement of his disease, and the recent loss of loved ones, “Marx returned to London to die” (Sperber, 545).

Marx lamented his age and the state of his health constantly in letters to friends and family, often using sarcasm to vent his frustration. For example, while in Algiers, he wrote to Engels of his “impaired intellect” and of how “time wasting” his illness was. His disease kept him away from finishing edits to the new edition of Capital and from finishing volumes 2 and 3. In a letter, dated 1882, he aired his dissatisfaction with his physical condition and expressed his wish to immediately “drop that invalid’s stupid job.” At other times, he was even more direct, leaving no doubt what he made of his situation: “a pointless, arid, not to say expensive, existence” (Musto, 107). Marx seemed specially frustrated with the feeling of stagnation and the overall lack of progress and success of his treatments that often comes with an aging, weaker body. He argued his doctors had put him on the “way to idiocy,” given that none of his treatments did anything more than cause further pain. We do know now that on this point he was right, as the courses of arsenic he was prescribed further debilitated his health. And it appears, too, that Marx understood, if for the most part subconsciously, that a full recovery was unlikely. In a letter to Engels, written after a number of failed treatments and continuously bad weather, which he also took to be a bad omen, he wrote that “at a certain age it becomes completely indifferent how one is ‘launched into eternity’” (Musto, 114).

What does Marx’s last year and comments on age and diseases of aging amount to? Are they the trivial remarks of a nineteenth-century figure, struggling to come to terms with his age, complete with the tacit ableist language typical of the age?

II: What is Aging?

Catherine Malabou’s recent book, The Ontology of the Accident, inspired by her experience of her mother’s Alzheimers, suggests that aging is both a gradual process and a set of events. “The metaphor of a flight,” she writes, “certainly characterizes ageing as a slow and gradual process that starts at mid-life and which…proceeds through an orderly traversing of subsequent stages” (Malabou, 40). That seems to fit well Marx’s recounting of his age during his last year of life. Comments such as letting oneself be “launched into eternity” express a sense of inevitability vis-à-vis a natural process of physical and mental decline. Or take Sperber’s own characterization from above, which suggest that Marx understood himself as having reached a moment of impending fate, as he “returned to London to die.” Malabou points out, though, that aging also appears as “[a] sudden rupture or flight crash, if you like” (Malabou, 41). That would address the other tangible sense we get from Marx’s letters, where he presents his age as responsible for the recurrent bouts of illness that take longer and longer to recover from. Seen in this way, when he expresses frustration with the pace of his recovery to Engels and his daughters, Marx seems to have this second sense of aging in mind. It was as if he only needed to beat this particular illness, to conquer it, so to speak, in order to get back to something resembling full strength and regular life.

Malabou wants to go further, however. She underscores that because aging is a process that involves the intrusion of events or episodes; it resembles and works like physical trauma does for the body. The intrusion of aging-events on the steady process of aging is a kind of “destructive plasticity,” she argues, for they act as violent shaping mechanisms that render us into new selves. To have aged is thus not to have “lost ourselves,” but more accurately, to have been (passively) shaped into a new person in the same way physical injuries often do. That is the difference for Malabou between aging and the kind of becoming that leads to adulthood. One involves self-development, where we ultimately claim ownership of those decisions and events we did not intend or make, while the other is a passive becoming that happens to us. It is similar to being scarred from an injury. It changes who we are because of unintentional physical trauma.

III: Entropy and Destructive Plasticity

In what way are Malabou’s views on aging as deformation and physical trauma entropic? The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, states that every organization harbors a certain degree of disorder. Such internal instability may either remain constant or increase over time depending on what is done to keep disorder at bay. At any rate, a fundamental commitment of any entropic perspective is that disorder cannot, however, ever decrease. Think here, for example, of how the temperature of coffee in a mug will over a short time equal to that of the environment. Now, if the same coffee is kept instead in an insulated container, then the temperature will remain constant, or at least will take longer to drop. But what is not conceivable in this example is the coffee’s temperature increasing, not without introducing an external energy source such as a microwave. The options are the continuation of the status quo or a downward turn to a lower state of order. Or consider now how repackaging the contents of a parcel in the original arrangement is virtually impossible. Once order is disturbed, then the best-case scenario is a new order that approximates the original. Such suggests that over time events generate disorder, which weakens the lawfulness of the starting position and results in a new, less orderly situation.

Malabou’s early work developed the idea of “plasticity” to explain the physical, social, and environmental mechanisms through which we ultimately become ourselves. In the same way that a sculptor shapes clay into form, our bodies and minds—even the very physiology of our brains—is shaped by the complexity of our daily experiences. But Malabou came to think that plasticity alone could not account for aging, for her notion seemed to depend on a developmental view of transformation. That is, it is thanks to everyday experience that bodies and minds get to be what they are. But there just so happens to be something violent about aging that such perspective fails to account for. Interpreting plasticity destructively thus addresses that concern for Malabou. She writes, “[n]o one thinks spontaneously about a plastic art of destruction. Yet destruction too is formative” (Malabou, 4). Physical and emotional trauma, not unlike the sculptor’s shaping of its clay into form, is formative as well. In those cases, however, the transformation of form and matter happens forcibly. Namely, through aging a person is transformed in a way that involves deformation and not development. For instance, a worn-out knee is not just what it is due to age and use, meaning it is different from a chef who is who they are thanks to their training. It has been forced, coerced, to become what it is through age and use.

Aging is hence violent in so far as it shapes through deformation. But then that also means that disorder must be part of this process, for damage is a type of weakening of organization. Malabou’s plasticity is destructive because it works entropically, altering bodies and minds by intensifying disintegration. It is, she says, “a plasticity that does not repair” (Malabou, 5–6). One of the main features of destructive plasticity, noted in the passage, is that transformation happens by accident. Like scarring and physical defect, the destructiveness of plasticity looks as if it came from nowhere. A broken hip or memory issues looks as if it simply happened to someone, for there is no overarching plan, no sculptor or blueprint, that is driving the process. A series of “traumatic-because-unexpected” events are experienced, steadily increasing our perception of disorder in life.

IV: Entropy and Materialism

The same entropic components are present in Marx’s general philosophical commitments. As early as 1841, Marx came to believe that philosophy places excessive emphasis on the layers and specifics of what it means to exist (e.g., as a thing or rational agent) at the expense of considering what it means to have to prolong such existence. He argued, too, that throughout the history of philosophy, figures like G. W. F. Hegel were bent on defining with precision how beings get to be what they are, their development or becoming from less to more complexity. But they paid little attention to the mechanisms through which beings either remain what they are or decline. They considered decay to be philosophically less interesting than becoming.

For Marx that meant that they were “idealists” and not “materialists.” Which is to say, they counted on a non-entropic understanding of existence, where organization remains what it is if left to its own devices. Marx turned to economics in the 1840s in part to better portray an entropic position he came to embrace: that enormous amounts of energy are needed to extend the duration of what exists, in particular human social life. Left to its own devices, existence tends to disintegrate just as the heat of the coffee mug dissipates and the package, once opened, tends toward lesser organization. Marx had a lot to say about the resources and labor needed to sustain different social systems, from slavery and feudalism to capitalism. He emphasized in his early works the continuous exchange with nature that prolongs human life, and in his later works he studied the fragile economic rhythms between production and consumption in capitalism that keep supply lines flowing and society moving. As feminist Marxist scholar Silvia Federici also argues, it is as if reproduction or maintenance of what already is, from tools, systems, and even laborers themselves, is just as important, if not more, as the production of the wholly new.

This tells us that behind Marx’s commitment to studying “exploitation” or “ideology” is more than an unorthodox economic mindset. Such concepts illustrate his worry that an entropic setting would lead to an unfair distribution of the requirements of maintaining social order. Does a conception of property, for instance, entitle some to the labor of others to prop up a social system they also get to enjoy the most? How rewarding is it to perform work geared solely towards cyclical maintenance rather than towards creation of the new? For physical beings to continue to be as they are, to revert their tendency to fall apart, a great deal of effort must be made to win an uphill battle against entropy. Marx cared to know who would have to put in the work to climb that hill.

V: A Marxist Theory of Aging?

It remains to be seen, though, how aging as entropic deformation applies to physical objects and not just sentient life. Malabou’s ideas can help us gain a new perspective on aspects of Marx’s works that could amount to a materialist theory of aging. I say “materialist” because his views would apply not only to people or sentient life but also to things and objects in virtue of being physical. Such claim, if true, would go some way towards giving us a different picture of “Karl Marx,” the revolutionary thinker who also wrote the most tedious of economic treatises. Let me thus introduce this idea here by drawing a few conclusions from a word Marx repeats often in his study of capital: Verschleiß or “wear and tear.” This is a term that still to this day, mostly in economics and contract law, speaks to the wearing out and deterioration of goods from standard use. The way, for example, a shirt would eventually come undone or a car fail to start.

Both volume 1 of Capital and what is known as the Grundrisse contain several references to the wear and tear involved in economic production. Consider this description from volume 1 of Capital on how machines degrade in their regular use:

The material wear and tear of a machine is of two kinds. The one arises from use, as coins wear away by circulating, the other from non-use, as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard. The latter kind is due to the elements. The former is more or less directly proportional, the latter to a certain extent inversely proportional, to the use of the machine .

(MARX, CAPITAL 1, 407)

Deterioration from use is a gradual process that sees objects slowly being consumed through the activities they are engaged in. A knife wears out from use just as newly minted coins become smooth and thinner over time. It is in that sense that things, like people, age, for they undergo a similar gradual decline in their functions and experience recurrent bouts of affliction that impair them but do not render them inoperative. That happens because they, like our bodies, are ultimately physical. Wear and tear, then, is similar to Malabou’s “destructive plasticity,” a mechanism that reshapes identity through physical trauma, not unlike scarring.

Now, if we think that protecting objects from deterioration by not using them would solve the degradation issue, we would be wrong. As Marx noted above, inactivity invites yet another type of wear he calls “decay.” Here is another good passage from volume 2 of Capital: “[w]ear and tear is furthermore caused by the action of natural forces. For instance sleepers suffer not only from actual wear but also from [decay]” (Marx, Capital 2, 173). Natural wear amounts to the sort of decay in which natural forces slowly damage and deform objects, compromising their original shape. The wooden “sleeper” slots Marx mentions and that support train tracks deteriorate with each passing train. But they are also subject to the decay that rain, sunlight, and humidity inflict. In fact, Marx suggests elsewhere that by using objects, though they surely wear out from activity, we also help shield them from some of the worst effects of natural decay. The reasoning for this being that one and the same operation consumes tools and machines while also keeping them at minimal functioning shape. A train that runs its daily route and degrades with each passing day is also kept away from the chemical reactions that would lead to rust and rot if it were standing still.

This brings me to another aspect of wear and tear that connects even more directly with Malabou. The German “Verschleiß,” a noun whose prefix “ver-” suggests a “process,” and its root verb, “schleißen,” translates to “peel off” or “cut out.” Given that Verschleiß implies a gradual process of transformation, deterioration involves primarily the passing of time as a slow process in which something becomes other to itself. That is, the spindle wears out not all at once but bit by bit. This may go unnoticed until it is too late, when the spindle has become something that no longer spins. Time is thus here gradual transformation. In addition, though a process of becoming defines how physical objects wear out, that such transformation could go unnoticed must mean that a rhythm other than a gradual becoming is also involved. For in production, machines and tools also seem to stand outside of any temporal processes of transformation, as when the spindle partially wears out and yet is still expected to perform its task successfully as any other spindle would. Presumably, then, such expectation would continue until the spindle fails, at which point it would seem radically transformed in an event suggesting the spindle is no longer able to be itself. Time as a gradual becoming of something through degradation interacts with time as an event of interruption.

To put it differently, deformation of what is material, a machine in this case, through the degradation of its parts ultimately results in the transformation of the object itself. Here is a particularly illuminating example from Capital, Vol.1:

But in the text we deal with that wear and tear, which no doctor can cure, and which little by little brings about death, with ‘that kind of wear which cannot be repaired from time to time, and which, in the case of a knife, would ultimately reduce it to a state in which the cutler would say of it, it is not worth a new blade.’

(MARX, CAPITAL 1, 215)

The regular wear and tear of the knife brings it ever closer to the total transformation of its form when, as dull or broken, it no longer behaves like a knife does. The lives of things, like the lives of our bodies, extended as they may through regular maintenance of parts, organs, and systems, facing the fatal sort of deterioration that is so thorough, it compromises the integrity of the whole. As Malabou points out, sudden events mark the process of aging, such as a fall or an intense illness, which give our bodies and minds new identities. Like the broken knife that can no longer be the same, a fall can mark a point of no return, the beginning of a new relation to our bodies and our selves more generally.

VI: Conclusion

In 1880, as his illness worsened, Marx discovered the work of one Sergei Podolinsky. Interested in the connection he drew between thermodynamics and Marx’s own thoughts on human labor, Marx read Podolinsky’s work with curiosity. On his reading notes of Podolinsky’s 1880 article, for instance, Marx highlighted the idea of entropy, writing that “the energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum” (Musto, 117). It was certainly a fitting time for Marx to reflect more directly on the tendency of things to fall apart. Sperber recounts that within two years, by 1882, Marx had experienced a steep mental and physical decline and could read nothing other than “publisher’s catalogs” (Sperber, 545). This tells us that his last year of life and his remarks on aging in letters, however ableist they may seem, should be considered in the entropic context in which “losing control” entails being unable to sustain the kind of order or lifestyle he was used to. They illustrate someone’s anxiety towards decline more than they do a preference for able bodies. That in two years he could go from studying current research in the natural sciences to reading only short fiction stories and, finally, to catalogues, illustrates an entropic progression from high to lower order, and certainly never the other way around. There’s certainly a lot more to say about this. But these examples should suffice as pointers for how Marx’s “Verschleiß” and Malabou’s “destructive plasticity” teach us something about aging. From natural decay, the degradation of objects that comes with use, to violent physical transformation, aging is present in all as a feature of being physical. What brings together the human experience of growing old with other uses of aging to describe the lives of things is the deformation that comes with existing in an entropic universe. That is the sort of interesting fate we seem to share in some way or another with everything else.

Omar Quiñonez

Omar Quiñonez is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University. He specializes in nineteenth-century philosophy and continental philosophy. Topics of interest are physical deformation, natural decay, and cultural decadence. He is currently working on a book project on deformation in Hegel’s philosophy of nature.