Motionless Motion

MOTIONLESS MOTION SOME years ago a modern mathematician who had at that time become interested in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy asked me if it would be possible to employ symbolic logic to set forth the proofs for the existence of God. In the attempt to show him that the difficulties in these proofs derived from something other than their logical form, I discovered that most of the terms I was using meant something quite different for him. This was particularly true of the term " motion." I, of course, was referring to actus entis in potentia inquantum huiusmodi. When I tried to show him how this notion required an analysis of matter, form, and privation he expressed typical Cartesian astonishment. In the discussion which followed he referred to an idea of motion by a neoKantian which he said fairly well expressed his own concept of motion: All determination of place ... is a work of the mind: omnis locatio mentis est opus. From this point the way is open to Galileo's foundation of dynamics: for since place has ceased to be something real, the question as to the ground of the place of a body and the ground of its persistence in one and the same place disappears. Objective physical reality passes from place to change of place, to motion and the factors by which it is determined as magnitude. If such a determination is to be possible in a definite way, the identity and permanence, which were hitherto ascribed to mere place, must go over to motion; motion must possess 'being,' that is, from the standpoint of the physicist, numerical constancy. This demand for the numerical constancy of motion itself finds its expression and its realization in the law of inertia.1 He also was. of the opinion that quite a number of the modern scientists and philosophers would agree, at least in general, with this idea of motion. I was inclined to agree with him on 1 Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 19!t3), p. 36!t. 419 420 ROMAN A. KOCOUREK the latter point but on the first one I had to say that such motion was " motionless " and that only by using the concept developed by Aristotle could we arrive at the prima ,;ia. Furthermore, while admitting that motion as conceived by modern science has a certain validity in the explanations of the mathematical physicist, I said that to attempt to make this the basis of any kind of a complete explanation of the ultimate principles of the universe could lead to a very unE .cceptable philosophy. I do not recall whether my mathematician friend was convinced or not. In the present paper I would like to elaborate some of these notions. Cassirer himself, in his Substance and Function, attempts to make this idea of " motionless motion " the basis of a new explanation which will replace that of Aristotle. In the first chapter he shows how the new developments in logic must necessarily replace the logic of the Philosopher, founded as the latter was an a now out-moded metaphysics. His conception of the Greek synthesis in his analysis of the problem of knowledge shows his appreciation of the work of both Plato and Aristotle: There is no denying that Plato shaped his conception of knowledge on the pattern of mathematics, and his theory of ideas not only owes separate fundamental insights to mathematics but is determined throughout its whole structure by this science. On the other hand, his theory far transcends whatever Greek mathematics could present in the way of stable results, and Plato seems to have given to the mathematics of his time much more than he took from it.... What Plato had done for mathematics, Aristotle did for biology. Not only did he conceive of it as a self-contained whole; he was the first to provide a conceptual language for its separate parts....2 What he has in mind·here is shown in the rest of his Introduction to this work. He shows how the work of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant has discovered a new basis for the interpretation of Nature. As he says: • E. Cassirer, The...