Being and Motion by Thomas Nail

Author:Thomas Nail [Nail, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Epistemology
ISBN: 9780190908928
Google: -dB2DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-11-12T21:35:10.840565+00:00

Chapter 25

Medieval Theology II

Impetus

The Externalization of Motion

The second kinetic operation or feature in the ontological description of force is the externalization of motion. Kinetically, the externalization of motion occurs when a flow becomes disjoined or released from a field of circulation. Once such a flow breaks free or bifurcates from the conjunction of a circulatory system, it is then capable of folding itself into a new series of junctions in a new field or connecting to another field elsewhere. When the internal motion of circulation, like that of a rotating sphere, for instance, appears to transfer its motion to another body as a cause, agent, or force, what occurs kinetically is not the transfer of a metaphysical substance, as it is historically described during the medieval and early period, but the continuation of the same movement, circulated differently. The two circulations are not ontologically separate, although they are kinetically distinct, but are simply two coordinated systems within the same continuous flow of motion. The externalization or transfer of motion from one body to the other is not like tossing a ball from one person to another, but more like the transfer of sea foam across the surface of a wave.

In other words, there is no third thing that moves between them, only a change in the modulation of the same coextensive field or relative neighborhood of the two folds. The term “externalization,” therefore, does not refer to a radical outside, but only to the relative outside of a single folded flow. This is the kinetic condition for the historical description of being as having an external force or “impetus.”

As such, the externalization of motion or force has three main characteristics: (1) it breaks free from the direct control of God and his spherical circulation, (2) it is not reducible or simply identical to God, and (3) it can be transferred externally from God to beings or between beings. External force therefore presupposes not only the prior centripetal accumulation of motion into some kind of collected being or circulation (in this case God) but also the centrifugal capacity of that being to redirect motion outward beyond the periphery, ultimately directed toward a new circulation.

Although it took several centuries for the external theory of force to reach its full dominance as a primary description of being and to fully break away from the centrifugal motion of divine spherology, it first began to do so in the work of the sixth-century Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus. It then developed over the course of the centuries, eventually acquiring the name “impetus theory,” or what we now call inertia.

Impetus Theory

Philoponus’s innovative contribution to the description and primacy of force was to liberate it from the direct and centrifugal control of God. Against Aristotle, Philoponus argued that force, or dunamis, is actually transferred or externalized from the mover to the moved, so that what is moved continues in motion independently of the mover once it is set into motion. He called the transfer of this external force rhope in Greek, often translated as “inclination” and later Latinized as “impetus.

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