Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions

2. The Logic of Becoming

23 Chapter Two
The Logic of Becoming F or Aristotle, movement is understood in terms of actualization. The concept of phusis signifies a potentiality, a potency, a power for movement, and kinesis is defined as the process through which this power is expressed. Crucially, kinesis is an inner power that grounds the individuality of existing things. This concept of power echoes repeatedly throughout the subsequent history of philosophy, although it assumes various guises—for example, Spinoza’s conatus; Kant’s ‘thing in itself’; Nietzsche’s ‘will to power.’ Aristotle’s God, the ‘unmoved mover’ or ‘final cause’ of all things, is the ultimate source of power, and the laws of logic are identical with the operations of the divine mind. Thus, for Aristotle, the source of power and the logic of its expression are eternal; all motion within the cosmos is grounded by God’s unceasing , completely actual affirmation of being. This idea of God’s ‘fullness of being’ was popular among medieval theologians: Anselm and Aquinas add Aristotelian concepts to their Christian doctrine of a divine Creator and rationally defend God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived ,” and as the causal ground of the universe. Aristotle’s cosmological plane of motion, his metaphysics of substance, and the scientific, objective position of his enquiry into becoming remain intact through the Christian philosophies of the middle ages. In the seventeenth century, new developments in the physical sciences were accompanied by intensified philosophical interest in the question of movement. Thomas Hobbes, for example, attempted to give an account of both the natural and social worlds on the basis of atoms and motion: he suggests that all reality emerges from the movements of bodies of the smallest size; that reasoning is a kind of motion; and that the motions of government generate and sustain the civil state. Hobbes’s atomism provokes the same question that Aristotle raises against his materialist predecessors : how are we to account for qualitative change if everything consists of units of matter? Hobbes, like the Greek atomists, recognizes only locomotion , explaining qualitative change simply as a rearrangement of particles and concluding that nothing moves itself. Nevertheless, in Leviathan (1651) the notion of power dominates Hobbes’s analysis of human existence : “Life itself is but motion,” a striving for becoming, “a perpetual and restless desire for power after power that ceases only in death.” The inner self is, as it were, submerged in this stream of material desire: the exterior motions of sense experience give rise to, or ‘imagine,’ interior mental motions . For Hobbes, human beings are very much formed by the world, acted upon by external material forces; their desire is reactive, and, lacking the power to change themselves, they live and die in the sort of state that a Buddhist would describe as ignorance. Leibniz, like Hobbes, was drawn to questions of power and motion. More strongly influenced by the theories of Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, he attempted to provide a philosophical grounding for “the new science of power and action, which one might call dynamics.” In his essay “A Specimen of Dynamics” (1695), Leibniz defines motion as “a force striving towards change,” arguing that a body’s “force of nature”’ is more fundamental than its extension, and that “there is never any true rest in bodies.” The metaphysical vision of the world elucidated in the Theodicy (1710) emphasizes a divine power of actualization at work in every moment of finite becoming—and for this reason Leibniz is the only modern philosopher, besides Hegel, to be mentioned in Kierkegaard’s Repetition. More controversial among his contemporaries than either Leibniz or Hobbes was Spinoza, whose unique perspective has profound implications for both philosophy and theology. Like the medieval theologians, Spinoza draws heavily on Aristotle’s ontology, but he reaches conclusions quite opposite to Catholic doctrine. In the Ethics (1677) Spinoza argues that the classical concept of substance necessarily implies absolute immanence . This means that substance becomes an infinite and unique power of being that contains everything: regarding the power of thinking as an eternal, infinite “mind,” and extended nature as an eternal, infinite “body,” Spinoza insists that this mind and body are parallel expressions of a single substance. Although we may conceive of, and even love, this substance as divine, reason refutes all claims about a transcendent, anthropomorphic , creative God. Indeed, the arguments at the beginning of 24 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming [3.129.247.196] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 09:55 GMT...