Abstract
The present volume brings together two contributions that pursue a common foundational question: under what conditions can world become binding at all, and what follows when this condition is structurally destroyed.
The point of departure is the diagnosis that many contemporary crises of modern societies—political incapacity to act, the reproducibility crisis in science, the simulation of responsibility in administration and technology, and the expansion of structural poverty—share a common but rarely articulated cause: an inadequate ontology of time.
The first contribution develops the concept of Eigenzeit as a categorical alternative to dominant models of time, particularly to the widespread assumption of a block-like continuum of world-time. Eigenzeit does not denote subjective duration or a physical measure, but an ontological operation: the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in human action. Time appears here not as a neutral container of events but as the effect of irreversible closures in structurally open worlds. Decisions do not merely produce changes within an already given temporal framework; they bind world irreversibly. From this perspective, far-reaching consequences emerge for science, politics, and human rights. Reproducibility proves to be a property of closed world-conditions; politics reveals itself as structurally incapable of deciding Eigenzeit collectively; and rights appear insufficient insofar as they implicitly address the human being without protected Eigenzeit as an administrable object.
The second contribution examines the social consequences of this ontological structure. Building on the concept of Eigenzeit, poverty is interpreted not as a socio-economic condition of scarcity but as the ontological consequence of systematically withdrawn world-binding. Modern systems of work, markets, and social security increasingly organize action in procedural time while structurally preventing irreversible world-binding. Poverty thus appears as a permanent impossibility of living Eigenzeit. This condition is conceptualized as existential prohibition (Existenzverbot): a structural constellation in which life remains formally permitted, yet the possibility of performing actions that bind and carry world is effectively withdrawn.
Taken together, the contributions show that central societal conflicts arise not primarily from moral or organizational deficits but from a temporal-ontological blindness toward irreversible world-formation. The volume therefore does not propose Eigenzeit as another model of time, but as a necessary categorical complement wherever reality is not presupposed but brought into being through responsible decision. From this perspective, poverty, political paralysis, and the simulation of responsibility appear as symptoms of an order that administers time while failing to protect the conditions under which time—and thus world—can come into existence.
Keywords
Eigenzeit, ontology of time, philosophy of time, block universe critique, ontology of decision, irreversible world-formation, world-binding, non-delegable responsibility, irreversibility and freedom, openness and closure ontology, time and responsibility, decision theory ontology, simulation and responsibility, limits of simulation, critique of probabilistic freedom models, critique of many-worlds ontology, trace of lost possibility, ontology of action, ontology of reality formation, temporal ontology of responsibility, reproducibility crisis in science, ontology of scientific knowledge, traceability vs reproducibility, epistemic conditions of knowledge production, open time vs closed time, philosophy of science and time, ontology of knowledge production, Eigenzeit and science, politics and time ontology, limits of political decision, structural limits of collective decision-making, responsibility and political ontology, symbolic politics and simulation, human rights and temporal conditions, affordances and world-binding, pre-legal conditions of agency, ontology of human rights, temporal conditions of subjectivity, poverty ontology, ontology of poverty, poverty as loss of world-binding, poverty as loss of Eigenzeit, existential prohibition, Existenzverbot, structural violence and time, administrative stabilization of poverty, wage labour ontology, critique of wage labour, market time vs Eigenzeit, procedural time and administration, market and state time loop, substitute binding, addiction and world-loss, neurodivergence and world-binding, autistic epistemology and work, self-determined work, work as world-binding practice, work before value, operatoric research, operatoric ontology, world-formation theory, temporal crisis of modern societies, responsibility and irreversibility, limits of institutional simulation, structural impossibility of agency, ontology of societal crises, time and social theory, Eigenzeit and structural poverty, temporal foundations of social order
Citation
Speed, Timothy. Eigenzeit and the Ontology of Poverty (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 12). Zenodo, 2026. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18999898.
Direct access to the full text: Speed_2026_World-Binding-Vol_12_en.pdf