Table 4. Method: Motion and Space.
Motion: Method (Part 2) and Principle
I started out the last lecture by examining how philosophic problems were connected to different conceptions of motion which were set forth by the modes of thought, and to make that clearer I showed how space could be related to motion.1 I went on to say that each mode of thought could be broken into four moments, and I chose to begin with the moment which seemed most likely to succeed first with you, namely, with those more extensive forms of discourse where you have enough to analyze, where someone is setting forth what motion is. So we ended the lecture by examining aspects of motion that result from a consideration of method. And you’ll recall—I’ll use the same diagram for each of the moments—the problem of method is a problem conceived, on the one hand, in terms of the knower acquiring knowledge—knowledge is taken to be fundamental and characteristic of this point of view—or in terms of the knower being the basis, in which case he makes the knowledge rather than assimilates himself to the knowledge (see fig. 10). Or, on the other hand, you might conceive the process in which a method is used to be a process by which things not yet known but knowable are brought into the region of what is known; or a process in reverse where, beginning with what you know, you solve problems which are encountered and then go beyond that, the progressive increase of what is known from what is knowable being the result of your method.
Let me put together what I said last time in these terms because you may not have noticed the answer that I was giving to the question, What do these differences of method amount to with respect to differences of motion? If they’re all being used on motion, why isn’t motion the same? We said that there were two universal methods—the method of dialectic, using the mode of thought we called assimilation, and the operational method, using the mode of thought we called discrimination—and two particular methods—the logistic method, proceeding by construction, and the problematic method, by resolution. And what I’ve just said tends to reduce for the purposes of your notebooks, and maybe your memories, to four different processes (see fig. 11). There is a tendency among philosophy students—it’s very curious: I’m always tempted to say, “People think”; they don’t “think,” they “say”—to say that the method which is proper is a method of proof; and, therefore, the analogy that is normally thought of is a postulate set or some other form of Euclidean procedure. This is far from being the only method in science, and even in philosophy there are other methods involved. One method, which is even called logic by a recent philosopher, John Dewey, is inquiry; and inquiry is a process totally different from proof: it is the use of a problematic method. There’s another method that is spoken of fairly frequently which is different from proof: the method of discovery. Finally, there is the method which the friends with whom we conduct cold philosophic war use; this is the method of systematization. An interesting thing about these methods is that if you are the adherent of one, you can shrug your shoulders and say, Well, I can do the other, too, and I can do it better than you. If you talk about proof, then you spend a lot of time developing a method of induction and a method of probability—that’ll take care of discovery and inquiry—and the organization part you do by your semantic schemes. And so on through all the rest.
But let’s take this a step further. What do we mean by motion, from commitment simply to the method? As I say, this does not depend on anything out there which is motion; this is what you think about motion if you think in a particular way. Let’s go upwards. Motion by the logistic approach is local motion, and the space in which it occurs is three-dimensional space, which is called “extension”—the better word is “the void,” but you usually use the first one if you’re being logistic. All the other changes can be reduced to changes of body in space. Still remaining on the particular methods—bear in mind, the particular methods will both have a place for local motion—inquiry has several kinds of motion, among which is local motion; but the only kind of motion that needs a space is local motion. Therefore, again, let me describe it as “local motion plus.” And space is the proper place of bodies and the common place in which this occurs. I’ve put space in because in both methods, we are talking about space for physical objects. Suppose we go up to the universal methods. According to the dialectical method, local motion is relatively unimportant. The type of motion here would be what the method of inquiry would call generation; that is, as I said in lecture 2, a continuous process would be a series of instantaneous generations. The place in which this occurs is “room”—Plato’s name for it—but place is now not three-dimensional space but potentiality. It’s one of the reasons why proponents of other conceptions say that Plato and Descartes both mistook place for matter. Or, if you get to the operational, the method which is operational is the method by which you know something when you can do it, when you construct it. Consequently, all change is the change by which you make something, or to use the word which is more respectable these days, you “measure” something; and your measuring process interferes with or gives a character to the results of your measurement in such a way that you can’t separate the measurer and the measurement. Consequently, by space you mean a measured distance. Since the measured distance depends merely on the establishment of your variables, the measured distance may be other than physical distance; that is, you can measure rapidity of discernment without worrying about the body that’s doing the discerning if you’re engaged in psychological or physiological tests (see table 4).2
The point that I am trying to make is that we have already in our methods, therefore, differentiated four views of motion which can be separated by four totally different views of space, of which bodily space would be proper to only the first two. The other two use space in a larger sense, of which bodily space is only one specification. For instance, among the measured distances, there are measured distances that have to do with bodily motion, and, therefore, the operationalist can deal with it; but he’s not limited to it, nor is it the source of his basic ideas. Let me, in addition, make a second point. Bear in mind that these are methods; and you can think of the method when you’re talking about motion either in terms of the method by which you know motion or in terms of the method by which motion is produced. The definitions we are dealing with are definitions of process by process. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether you take the formal or the material mode, that is, whether you are considering the method in terms of the method of knowing or the method of making motion.
With this as a background, let’s go on to our second question, which raises the problem of our starting point. You can practice your methods of knowing in general and in abstract; but one of the requirements, if this is to be knowledge, is that you separate the vacuous or imaginative or fantastic or meaningless operations which are formally all right from the ones that do, in fact, for reasons which you can specify, represent what is the case. This is a way of getting the method related by the principle to the objective fact. How do you do that? Well, there are two ways, just as there were two ways of thinking of method (see fig. 12). One way is to devise means by which you can insure that your knowledge coincides with the object of knowledge. If the known and knowledge are identical, then what you are dealing with is not merely a methodological and imaginative construct; it represents what is the case in respect to what you’re talking about. But there’s a second way, which is precisely the opposite. Here you’re dealing with something you want to know, the knowable, which is not yet known, but it is, let us say, a thing; and you’re dealing also with the experimenter who’s trying to find out about the thing. One way of making a good beginning is precisely to cut these two, knower and knowable, apart; just as one way of getting your principle is to put the other two, knowledge and known, together. If you make your beginning with something that you can guarantee belongs to the subject matter without any intrusion of the illusions or peculiarities or the subjectivities of the observer, then you’ve made an objective beginning; and if your method will keep you on the track so that every step of the method will merely relate the thing and not get the measurer mixed in, your method is being objective. But the opposite is just as good, and there are people who like the product better. That is to say, since everything you know depends on what it is you’re able to do, the best beginning would be a beginning which you can repeat, or anyone else can repeat, and nothing that is alleged to be in the nature of things will distort it. This would be an actional beginning.
Well, let’s take a look at principles in the same fashion that we did our methods. The first two kinds depend on the coincidence of knowledge and the known. They depend on finding a whole of some sort.—I used those words for a long time; finally I invented this pair of terms. But I’ve been using them so long that I’ve used them in print, and now, even though I invented them, my definitions don’t always hold. Let me tell you what they mean: they belong to me!—Holos comes from the Greek and it means “whole”; skopein means “to view” or “to see.” If you view what you are doing from the point of view of the whole, you’re being holoscopic, you’re beginning with a principle which depends on some organic unity which organizes the whole that you are talking about. The possibility opposite to this is the meroscopic. Meros is the Greek word for “part”; and if you organize your view, if you skopein or view it from the point of view of the part, you’re being meroscopic. Now, there are two possibilities in making a holoscopic approach. You can either begin from the whole of everything, the whole universe, and assimilate everything together; or you can begin with the whole of what is known about any particular subject and, using now the method of resolution, resolve everything together. Let’s take them in this order.
The first I’ve called comprehensive principles. They are principles in the sense that the whole which you choose is comprehensive of everything. In the example that you’ve read, namely, the man who used this principle with more art than any other philosopher, Plato, the comprehensive principle is an assimilation of the conditions of being and knowing and meaning; that is to say, what is most truly are the ideas. But the ideas are not your ideas or any other psychological ideas: they are beings. They are beings which are more truly what they are than the idea that you form of any thing, which is an imitation of them, or than the thing itself, which aspires to be as purely as they are. And, of course, both of these are logos, that is, speech; therefore, speech likewise depends on this kind of an idea. The contemporary philosopher who uses comprehensive principles in a set of terms that are most easy to identify is Karl Jaspers. If you take a look at his The Way to Wisdom,3 a radio program broadcast in Switzerland which appeared there as The Notion of Philosophy, he has a chapter on “the englobing”—a good English translation of the German word. In it he says that the beginning point of any philosophic solution is an englobing principle, which is what here I’ve been calling a comprehensive principle.
How did this operate in the Timaeus? Well, you remember in the Timaeus, we began at once by separating things into that which isn’t always and that which is always changing; and in that process of separation we set up the proportion that being is to becoming as knowing is to opinion, and knowing and being turn out to be exactly the same. The universe is built on a model which imitates an intelligent animal, the intelligent animal being intelligible because it is intelligent. Therefore, the physical universe is the embodiment of these intelligent principles in the physical sequence of relations that make the total movement of the universe. Once you have this basic principle, you can go on to other forms of principle. That is to say, within the universe itself, under the second region, the region of necessity, there are three principles of motion—this is not in the part you’ve read, but it’s part of the Timaeus and you’ll recognize what I’m saying. There is, first of all, the father, or the maker; secondly, the receptacle, or the mother, which is space; and third, there is the offspring, which is the middle region. If you go on to the third region, the region where you deal with an organism within an organic universe, the problem of principles is the problem of what can you say about the motions that originate in the organism and the motions that come from the outside.
All right, let’s take a look at the comprehensive principle in terms of what we’ve been saying about motion. The principles of motion will be treated in two ways: first, the beginnings, in the sense of how you can talk about anything; but second, and most important, the cause. The cause of motion in the Timaeus is the eternal model; or, if you like to be more modern, it would be the inclusive formula that you can write, the general field equation on which your relativity physics is based. This is, likewise, the divine; therefore, the theological will come in at a different point (see table 5).4
What’s the second possibility? Well, the second possibility would appear in what I like to call reflexive principles. We’ll now take our beginning not from a universe which is intelligible in its very essence, that is, a built-in intelligibility where the universe itself does its thinking; we’ll take it, rather, in terms of what we know. In our own bodies of knowledge it is frequently the case that what we are saying is an instance of itself, and when that occurs we have a reflexive principle. The most famous instance of this comes from the seventeenth century, and it’s so badly treated today, let me tell you about it. It’s Descartes’s cogito, ergo sum. It grew out of his universal doubt. If you examine thinking, he says, there’s no kind of thinking which is not questionable; and he goes over a long list of kinds in the various places in which he expounds the universal doubt—his Discourse on Method is a short version. Not only is what your nurse told you, what your parents told you, what you learned in school or read in books, obviously all of the information that you have stored up about Damascus, not only is all that dubious—they’ve told it to you—but although I’ve been there, even sense impression is dubious, too. Moreover, you can get around to the point where, obviously, anything you prove syllogistically or mathematically is likewise dubious. And you don’t need very great ingenuity; all you need do is a little reading. The skeptical literature is a fascinating one. Under these circumstances, where does the universal doubt end? Well, doubt ends with the recognition of this process itself, namely, as I go along thinking and thinking that everything I think is dubious, there’s no doubt that I’m thinking. I think, and in the respect of being a thinking being, I am. It is this reflexivity which gives you your beginning. Descartes, then, ingeniously proceeded to devise from this initial principle a whole series of principles—he needed some more—and they’re all reflexive ones. But I won’t go into them here.
Spinoza, who was influenced by him, was convinced that you could do a geometric demonstration of ethics, and it all comes from one principle: God conceived as causa sui, “cause of itself.” What I’ve said about the doubt of thinking would apply here, too. Everything that is can be traced back to a cause; but any allocation of causes, particularly in the temporal sequence, is only probability at best and, therefore, is dubious, except for one, namely, the cause of itself. If anything is to be caused, it is traced back to the self-caused. This need not be theological in its character. Sartre, for example, holds that causa sui is not a concept that applies to God, but it applies to man. All the way through, since it is man thinking himself and the universe, causa sui would explain everything that is.
Since I didn’t give you any Greeks, let me go further back. Aristotle uses reflexive principles. There are causes which are external causes, and there are internal causes. Nature, you will discover in our sequence of readings in Aristotle, is an internal cause of motion; it is a principle of motion within the thing. Physics will examine these internal principles of motion and will leave aside the external principles; it will not deal with violent motion. If this seems odd to you, when you get around to reading Galileo, watch what he does with natural motion and violent motion. There’s a similar differentiation that comes into the picture and influences the later procedure. What’s God’s activity according to Aristotle? Thinking. Thinking about what? Thinking about thinking. And as you come down, each one of the sciences is involved in a reflexive principle—I won’t give you them all since it may make you unhappy to have so many principles—which, as its virtue, precisely locates for examination what it is you are talking about. Take the Poetics, for one more example. The definition of tragedy has as the crucial differentia in the definition that the tragedy is a form of literature which effects the purgation of fear and pity by what? By fear and pity. What’s the advantage of the definition? What Aristotle is trying to do is to focus attention on the work of art itself, an extremely difficult job. He doesn’t want to talk about the artist, he doesn’t want to talk about morality, he doesn’t want to talk about figures of speech or language. He wants to talk about the tragedy, and the reflexive definition draws a circle around the subject matter that we are going to deal with. The basic idea in Aristotle’s philosophy, as he repeats again and again, is that we think that we know when we know the cause. Unlike Plato, however, it is not the cause of everything, not a comprehensive cause, but the cause of the particular field that you’re dealing with, the cause that would operate, therefore, in the resolution of the questions in that field.
What’s motion, then? Remember, what we were interested in was that motion became the cause by which the universe comes into being and anything else comes into being within it. Notice that there is a cause outside the motion which gets the motion going. Motion, Aristotle says—and you’ll be reading this—is an actuality, an entelekheia, an entelechy. Motion is an actuality, and as an actuality it needs a cause. Thus, physics—remember, phusis is the word that is translated “nature,” so physics means “natural science”—is the study of natures, and natures are internal causes of motion. In the world about us there are a great many motions. They are sometimes due to something which is an external cause; but basically the ones that can be known are ones that can be traced to an internal cause because they are natural motions and not the confused motions that come from the mixture of many sources of motion. So, again, as for the other holoscopic principle, we can locate a cause of motion which makes the investigation of motion possible.
How do we go about our meroscopic principles? Well, let me repeat what you need a principle for.—I think I’ve mentioned the fact that in my youth principles used to be important, but the youth of the present day obviously have no notion about what principles are; therefore, they talk a lot about principles without ever knowing what they’re talking about.—You need a principle to get started. A principle is a beginning point. For the purposes of knowledge, it is a beginning point which would guarantee that the processes you engage in, which might have many virtues yet still be unattached, have objectivity. One way of guaranteeing it is to get a point of coincidence between the processes and the reality; the other is to cut the two apart (see fig. 12). If you could make a beginning in which nothing that you did made any difference, and if your method would always deal with such simples, that is, if the method went step by step and always related an object to an object without any subjective interference or some suppressive form of distortion ever entering in, then the result of your method would be objective.
There are many kinds of simples that you can deal with. One kind that the Greeks thought of were simple things, and they called them “atoms,” which merely means that you can’t cut them up any further, they’re indivisible entities. The Greeks also thought of another kind that became much more popular in the seventeenth century: you could begin with simple ideas, which would be ideas that you can’t cut up any further. The Greeks also thought of a third kind, which have been more popular in the twentieth century: you might begin with undefined terms, a term or a word that you can’t cut up any more. Then, in each case, you stick atom to atom and you get a composite body; you stick idea to idea and get a compound or complex idea; and you stick term to term and get complex terms. But in any case, whichever the beginning, with a simple you can’t make a mistake. This is guaranteeing without any dependence on subjectivity because a mistake always consists in relating two things that are unrelated. When you have only one thing, you can’t make a mistake. As soon as you talk about the one thing, you can make a mistake because then you say something about it; and, therefore, philosophers have been fascinated by this step.
Let me give you one example from a philosopher I haven’t quoted thus far, and this will be in terms of a simple idea as a basis.5 If I looked at the wall and I said the simple word “yellow,” I wouldn’t have made a mistake. If I said, “I see yellow,” even though all the rest of you looking do not see yellow, there’d be no way in which you could convict me of making a mistake: if I see it, I’m the only one who would know that. If I say, “The wall is yellow,” then we’d have an argument. And it’s at this stage that you leave off the simple and go into the complex, the principle being always in terms of what it is which is simple.
What happens with respect to the points that we’ve just made? Motion with simple principles would be a property of the parts out of which the body is set up. Let’s stay with atoms—the same thing is true even if you take ideas or words, but it’s a little more complicated. The atoms are already in motion. The composite body would take its motion partly from the motion of its constituent parts, partly from external motions, and you would go along. What are the principles of motion? Atoms and the void.—Remember, I said there are two questions that run all the way through these, and I’m sure that you have gotten them as we’ve gone along: the questions of principle and of cause. A cause is always a principle, a principle isn’t always a cause.—The principles of motion are the atoms and the void. What’s the cause of motion? For every atomist from Democritus on, except when they’ve been led astray by beguiling nonatomistic philosophers, there’s only one answer: a preexistent motion. If the thing wasn’t in motion, or if something that it came into contact with wasn’t in motion, no motion would be caused. The cause of motion is motion. Notice, we’re in a different realm down here. We had different causes of motion for both the reflexive and the comprehensive principles; but motion is the cause of motion for the simple principles.
Let’s take the other approach. Let’s assume, as an operationalist should, that there isn’t anything hidden out there, whether facts or things, that all knowledge is a process of operation or of construction. If you want a principle that will give you some guarantee, you must be sure that it’s a beginning which you yourself alone are responsible for and can repeat and which other people can repeat under your guidance, under your description. These are actional principles. Therefore, an actional principle would be—to put it in terms that will probably least violate your imaginations—at least a process of measurement, one, however, in which the process of measurement itself enters into the situation in such a way that you cannot ask what the measured thing would be if you hadn’t measured it because your measuring it is among the considerations that come into the picture. This process of measuring would be the model of whatever is held to be, either in science or in art. It is experienced motion, caused motion, measured motion; and the problem, consequently, would be the problem of what goes on in the same frame of reference or in the translation from one frame of reference to another.
What is the cause of the motion? Well, let me ask first, What are the principles of motion? Principles are the variable that the thinker thinks. This may seem trivial; but the greatest advance in the history of science, I would say—if anyone asked me, but no one does[L!]—, was made by Galileo when he got the bright idea of dealing with time, space, and mass as the only variables that were relevant. Get them in interrelation; then begin looking at things, begin looking at falling bodies, begin looking at projectiles, and say, All I’m going to do is give values to time, space, and mass. The mass he was a bit vague about, but nonetheless he did know about matter; and whether he knew about force or not we’d have to argue about. Nonetheless, these are his principles. What’s the cause? The cause is what you do. The experimental method will produce the thing you are looking at, and there isn’t any nature that does it differently: this is the cause. As I say, there are very few operationalists in the last fifty years who’ve been bold enough to use these principles—no, that isn’t quite true: Popper and Weissman are beginning to talk this way.6 Nonetheless, most of them tend to want to talk about simple principles although the present state of the examination of particles would make the establishment of an indivisible an extremely difficult process. It’s much more a matter of confusion.
What have we done thus far? We have asked two questions about motion. I’ve related the one question to methods and the other question to principles. I think that you’ll eventually see that there are four questions that we can ask. Let me review them since we will be going on to the third one in the next lecture. You may remember I said that method was a discursive process which requires a multiplicity of terms, at least three—the three terms of the syllogism and probably not many more: I still think that most of the methodological devices can be reduced to three. The principle was what organized the sum of your terms, and I said n terms here. Interpretation, the minimum of a proposition which could be true or false, requires two terms. And selection: out of all of the terms that you might use or all of the things you might talk about, which are infinite in number, you select those that you will talk about (see table 2).
What are the questions—and now I’m trying to focus on motion—that you are answering when you choose your method, your principle, your interpretation, and your selection? The sum of the four will be an answer to the question, What is motion? Each of the four makes a contribution to this question. The question of method would be that part which asks, What is the process that we mean when we talk about motion? When you go to principle, since this process might take on fantastic forms, you are asking a somewhat different question. Pick all the processes that are involved, then ask, How do you nail them down, how do you get scientific about them? Interpretation, since you’re dealing with individual sentences, would be the sense that you give to motion which would permit you to identify the motions; therefore, you’d go to the plural: What are motions? Is this a motion or not? You’ve not yet given a unique definition. It’s entirely possible that your enumeration of motions might give you some trouble when you get to method to relate all the things you want to call motions into something which is a process that you would call motion.
Finally, there is selection. This is a long form of the question, not the same question as interpretation: What are we talking about when we talk about motion? For instance, among the things that we could talk about is events and statements, which seems to be the favorite selection in modern philosophy; or we might choose to talk about ideas and forms of thought, although the nineteenth century was a good deal more epistemological; or we might choose to talk about substances and beings, if there were such a thing as metaphysics. If we were talking about motion, consequently, it would be appropriate to say, Well, now, look. Before we go any further, are you under the odd notion that there is any such thing as a thing? Because if there is, there’s no sense talking about motion. If you were open-minded, you would say, O.K., let’s talk about words. And then you get going from there. Or you could turn around and say, Since the only way in which you can talk about motion is by taking the characteristics of words seriously, what are the motions you want to talk about? Well, you would immediately get into a series of problems which are the subject of the next lecture and, therefore, I won’t go into it; but the kind of problem that you would get into can be seen in terms of what it is that we found when we talked about methods and principles (see table 3).
Now, you’ll remember that the universal methods gave us one method for all problems, and they gave us a kind of motion which went beyond local motion; whereas the particular methods gave us many methods for different kinds of problems, and the only time that you talked about space was with respect to local motion. What happened when we got over to the question of the objectivity of motion? Well, we found that for the holoscopic principles we could ask an intelligent question about a cause of motion because a cause isn’t itself motion, but the only cause of motion you can find in meroscopic principles is some form of motion. This would look as if we were discovering something about motion, but it turns out it has simply grown out of the commitments we have set up by the principles that we are applauding. And, among other things, it would indicate that some of the problems which look as though they would need empirical evidence for their solution do not, in fact, need it. Is there any such thing as a cause? Well, from the holoscopic point of view, meroscopic causes are only causes of external actions and they don’t account, therefore, for the causes of natural motion. But, conversely, from the meroscopic point of view, what the holoscopic principles do is to confuse space in some sense with matter—confuse, notice, in two different senses. For Plato, space means potentiality, so that everything that eventually happens is potentially in what he calls space. Aristotle distinguishes between proper place and common place, and it is proper place which is the cause of the motion of objects under what we later called the influence of gravity. When things move up and down or things move around, it is in terms of the characteristics of place. Both Plato and Aristotle said that space is empty, but space enters as a kind of cause of some of the motions. But for the meroscopic principles, space is empty in a different sense: three-dimensional extension is space only in the sense that you draw the motion on it; it does not enter as a cause.
In the next lecture, as I said, we will go into the problems that are involved in the third aspect of our answer. You’ll notice, if you put these four parts together, they add up to the single question, What is motion? And you need to take into account, if you’re going to be systematic, all four of these moments of the term. For the time being, however, you may focus on one of them, such as what the changes are that you’re going to call motions, which is the question we’ll look at next, namely, interpretation.
