Aristotle's Physics IV: Time Is Not Motion, but Something of Motion

Orientation #

He says that in the fifteenth reading, “before I went south,” they saw the difficulties about how time exists and how the now can cease to be; now, in reading sixteen, “we got to start to approach the definition.” He also looks ahead: the continuity of distance, motion and time will be examined “more fully in the sixth book,” and the importance of number for time “we’ll see later on.” Verified sources: the class reads Aquinas’s commentary on Physics IV, lectio 16, and runs on into the opening of lectio 17 (probably); ten minutes are read from the handout “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 104, probably the stretch on whether thoughts are continuous (inferred). The previous class dealt with the puzzles about whether time exists and the now; the next class treats before-and-after in place, magnitude and motion and the definition of time as number of motion.

The class, in order #

1. Recap and the two crude opinions (“two, not too deeply thought out opinions”) #

Point: Aristotle opens by saying what time is remains unclear from what was handed down, and dismisses two received opinions.

• Opinion 1: time is the movement of the whole, the circular motion of the sky. Two arguments against:
  1. A part of a going-round-in-a-circle is some time, but is not a going-round. But part of time is time, “just as part of a line is a line.” So time is not the circular motion.
  2. If there are many heavens, and time is the motion of each, “many times will be together,” which does not agree with what we think about time.
• Opinion 2, “more gross”: all things are in time, all things are in the sphere of the whole, so time is the sphere. Aristotle calls it “too stupid to look into”; Berquist: it is an equivocation on two meanings of in.
• Aside: John Paul II’s address in Kazakhstan to representatives of culture, art and science quotes a Kazakh author; he will bring the text in another day.
• Aside: Floridians call winter visitors “snowbirds.”

2. Two senses of “in,” and the slipperiness of likeness (“beware of likeness”) #

Point: the second opinion confuses in place and in time, which are not two central senses but a central sense (in place) and one “led back” to it by similarity.

• Melissus made a parallel confusion, not of in but of limit: being never came to be, so has no beginning or end in time; therefore (he concludes) unlimited in size.
• “We’re in this room, in this day, in this year”: in does not mean the same thing.
• Plato: “beware of likeness”; Aristotle in the Sophistical Refutations: deception in general takes place because of likeness. This links deception with imagination, which is “taken with the likeness of things.”
• Joachim of Flora overextended the likeness between “that they may all be one, as you and I are one” and the unity of Father and Son; corrected at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which teaches that no likeness between creature and God can be noted without noting a greater unlikeness.
• Aside: a Saudi student objected to Shakespeare’s “reason is godlike”; he gave him the Lateran text to show “we’re not as crazy and heretical and impious as we might appear.”

3. Time seems connected with motion (“time seems especially to be motion and change”) #

Point: Aristotle’s own starting thread is the connection between time and motion, which the first opinion at least respected.

• Signs in ordinary speech that we connect time with motion: Newton’s “flow of time”; tempus fugit, time flees; “time waits for no man”; Shakespeare’s simile of minutes hastening to their end like waves toward the pebbled shore.
• The question then: is time itself a motion, or something of motion? Compare the earlier question whether motion is the thing in motion: “Is it the falling that falls?” Was it the flying that flew through the air, or an airplane?
• Aside: a Melbourne take-off delayed an hour over a broken seat belt.

4. Two arguments that time is not motion (“time is not faster and slower”) #

1. The motion of each thing is only in the thing changing, or where it is; but time is everywhere and among all things. Your walking is in the hall, mine in the woods, but both at the same time. Even the sun’s motion is up where the sun is, while time “seems to be down here and everywhere.”
2. Motion is faster and slower; time is not. Objection from speech: “the time went fast,” seniors saying “I just got here yesterday”—a sign we half-think of time as a motion that could go faster or slower like walking. Reply from the text: fast and slow are determined by time (fast moves much in little time, slow little in much), but time is not determined by time, “neither as regards how much it is nor as regards how it is.”

• Aristotle’s remark that for the present there is no difference between saying motion or change: like the proemium of the Metaphysics (wisdom), where he does not distinguish art from science, only noting that the difference is treated in the Ethics, because there he wants only what they share against experience.

5. But not without motion: Rip Van Winkle (“neither motion nor without motion”) #

Point: having rejected “time is motion,” Aristotle also rejects “time has nothing to do with motion.”

• Pattern: “my shape is not my body, but it’s not without my body; therefore it’s something of my body” (a limit or termination of it). Likewise motion is not the thing in motion but not without it. So time is something of motion.
• Rip Van Winkle (Irving’s Sketchbook, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow): asleep in the Catskills from before the Revolution, wakes, finds George Washington painted over King George on the sign, declares “I’m for the king.” He joined the earlier now and the later now into one, so no time seemed to have passed.
• The WWII gunner over Normandy who took two scotches, slept two days, and thought it was the next day: no motion perceived, so no time perceived.
• Text: if the now were not other but one and the same, time would not be; since its otherness is hidden, we take it as one. He stresses: you must see the earlier and later now as two nows before you are aware of time; this connects time with number, “because two is the first number.” One now, no time.
• Top of page five: when we do not distinguish any change but the soul remains in something one and indivisible, we think there is no time; when we sense and determine [two nows], we say there has been time. Conclusion: time is neither motion nor without motion.
• Aside: a dozing college student woke swearing when a loose crank window banged, and apologised to the priest.

6. Things that must be defined as something of another (“defined as something of another”) #

Point: many things are defined by this “not X, but not without X” route.

• Poetic meter: not syllables, but not without syllables; so something of syllables, namely an order of accented and unaccented syllables (long and short in Greek or Latin).
• The soul: not the body, but cannot be defined without the body. The human soul is the strange case: not a body, not definable without a body, yet can be without a body; hence hard to understand.
• Thomas in the commentary on the soul compares the definition of soul to that of an accident: not because soul is an accident, but because both are defined as something of another.
• Metaphysics VII: either only substance can be defined and accident cannot, or accident is defined in another sense of “definition.” Reason: definition means limit—finis in Latin; Greek horos (limit) and horismos, like “horizon,” the line separating sky from earth. A limit contains all of the thing and nothing else: all Worcester within the city limits, no part of Shrewsbury. But to define an accident you must put something other than itself inside its limit, contrary to what a definition is.
• Hence (Monsignor Dionne) logic cannot be purely formal as modern logicians want: even definition must attend to whether the thing is defined by itself or as something of another. Blindness is yet a third kind, defined as the negation of something else.
• Aside: Shrewsbury, “a kind of wealthy suburb,” resists being swallowed by Worcester and has better snow shoveling.

7. Reading 17: we sense motion and time together (“we sense motion in time together”) #

Point: since time is something of motion, the seventeenth reading begins to grasp what of motion; the first sign is that we perceive them together.

• Berquist’s own imitation of this method (from Book I): told X is soft at ten and cold at eleven, you cannot know a change occurred (ice cream); hot at ten, hard at eleven, likewise (a hot stone); soft at ten and hard at eleven, you know. Change is perceived only through opposites, a sign that change involves opposites—parallel to Heraclitus’s fragments and Plato’s fuller induction in the Phaedo.
• This is proof only “in the sense of a sign”: we never perceive them apart. Likewise we never perceive motion without something in motion: if you could not see the ball leave the ballpark (his imagined Coliseum “Greek temple,” really a roller rink by the Lexington park), you would not perceive the motion.
• Text: if it were dark and we underwent nothing through the body, but some motion was in the soul, some time would seem to have been. Richard II in prison, weeping, aware of time: “now hath time made me his numbering clock”—number will matter later. Conversely, when time seems to have passed, some motion seems to have been: the sun down the sky, the clock gone around, the sand fallen. So time is either motion or something of motion; not motion, so something of motion.

8. Before and after: magnitude, motion, time (“the continuous is that which is divisible forever”) #

Point: continuity and before-and-after pass from distance to motion over it to the time it takes.

• This part of the road is before that; the motion over this part is before the motion over that; the time to get here is before the time to get there. To be treated fully in Book VI, the book on the continuous.
• Text: the moved is moved from something to something; every magnitude is continuous; motion follows magnitude, time follows motion; “as much as the motion, so much does the time seem to have been.” Sometimes we measure motion by time and vice versa.
• Two definitions of the continuous: logic’s, a quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary; Book VI’s, that which is divisible forever. If the road is divisible forever, so is the motion, and so the time.
• Argument from faster and slower (Aristotle sometimes reasons from magnitude alone, sometimes takes two together): the faster covers the same distance in less time. In the time the faster covers a distance, the slower covers less (else equally fast); the faster covers that lesser distance in less time (else equally fast); in that lesser time the slower covers less again; and so on. Alternating shows time and distance divisible forever.

9. Are thoughts continuous? (“thoughts are not divisible forever”) #

Point: by analogy, if thoughts were continuous thinking would be; but thoughts are not divisible forever.

1. From defining: “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral” breaks square into three thoughts; if every part of every definition were definable, forever, you would never understand anything. Same for the syllogism: every C is A resolves into every C is B and every B is A; if that went on forever you would never know anything by reasoning.
2. From “next”: because of infinite divisibility there is no next longer or shorter line, unlike numbers (seven has a next, eight). But there is a next thought: “every mother is a woman, no man is a woman”—next, “no man is a mother,” with no statement between; likewise quadrilateral, equilateral, right-angled, then square, nothing between. The likeness of defining and syllogizing.

• We do speak of continuous definitions, continuous syllogisms, and continuous proportion (four to six as six to nine: the end of one ratio is the beginning of the next; two to three as four to six is not). This borrows the other aspect of the continuous, parts meeting at a common boundary—a point ending one line and beginning another, the US–Canada border. So in Euclid the conclusion of one demonstration is a premise of the next: “continuous reasoning,” but not in the defined sense.

10. The senses of “before” and the road of knowledge (“a road in our knowledge”) #

Point: “road,” “line of thinking,” and “before” are carried to reasoning by likeness, and it matters which likeness.

• From the Categories: first sense of before, in time; to it are reduced before in motion and before in magnitude or place (again Shakespeare’s waves, “each changing place with that which goes before”: time, change and place bound together). Second sense, in being: this can be without that but not vice versa—Aristotle’s example one and two, a before-and-after without motion and without the continuous. Third, before in reasoning, more like the second than the first, yet compared to the first because we start there.
• Kasurik: you can tell how well a man understands by his examples; Aristotle’s are always worth asking about, a modern Thomist’s not. Thomas on Aristotle’s examples of the mover: father (mover by nature) and advisor (by reason), the two main movers around us; and mother vs. father, mater/materia, the father the maker—why God is called father, “a cause in the third sense.”
• Mathematics keeps the concrete words: Euclid calls factors the sides of a number (two and three of six), square and cube numbers—“square” equivocal between arithmetic and geometry but with a likeness; geometry named from measuring the earth, starting concrete before the science of numbers in Books VII–IX.
• So “road” is carried to knowledge not for continuity but for before and after: an order in our knowledge, not a strictly continuous one, “otherwise you have to go through an infinity of things to know anything.” The recording ends mid-sentence: “So notice in—”.

His words #

• “wisdom” — his name for the Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics].
• “Natural Philosophy” (first book of) — Physics I [ed.: Physics].
• “led back” — how the sense in time relates to the central sense in place [ed.: reduced].
• “something of motion” — time’s status once it is neither motion nor without motion.
• “two nows” — the condition for being aware of time; “two is the first number.”
• “definition” = limit; finis; horos, horismos, cf. horizon.
• “the continuous” — (logic) a quantity whose parts meet at a common boundary; (Book VI) that which is divisible forever.
• “next” — what numbers and thoughts have and lines lack.
• “continuous proportion / continuous reasoning” — end of one ratio (or demonstration) is the beginning of the next; continuous only by likeness.
• “sides” of a number — Euclid’s term for factors.
• “road in our knowledge” — carried over for before-and-after, not continuity.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics IV, Aquinas’s commentary lectio 16 (the two opinions; time not motion; not without motion; “neither motion nor without motion”).
• Aristotle, Physics IV, lectio 17, opening (inferred): “we must begin to grasp what it is of motion”; motion follows magnitude, time follows motion.
• Handout, “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 104 (verified source, probably the material on thoughts not being continuous).
• Shakespeare, sonnet: “like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore…” (quoted).
• Shakespeare, Richard II: “time made me his numbering clock” (quoted).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics VI (the continuous); Physics I (Melissus; change between contraries).
• Aristotle, Categories (three senses of “before”).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VII (definition of accident); proemium (art/science vs. experience); Nicomachean Ethics.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (deception through likeness).
• Thomas, commentary on the De Anima (soul defined like an accident) (inferred locus).
• Plato, Phaedo (induction of contraries); Heraclitus fragments.
• Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, against Joachim of Flora.
• Irving, The Sketchbook (Rip Van Winkle, Legend of Sleepy Hollow).
• Euclid, Elements I; Books VII–IX; Galileo on naturally accelerated motion; Newton on the flow of time; John Paul II’s Kazakhstan address.

His questions #

• If time is the circular motion, what follows about a part of time? A part of time would not be time, though part of time is time as part of a line is a line.
• Do “in time” and “in place” mean the same thing? No; in place is the central sense, in time is led back to it by likeness.
• Is it the falling that falls, the flying that flies? No, an airplane flies; so ask whether time is motion or something of motion.
• Where is your walking, and where is mine, and where is the time? Yours in the hall, mine in the woods; the time is in both places at once.
• Does the time go fast? We say so, but fast and slow are determined by time, and time is not determined by time.
• What is poetic meter—is it syllables? Is it without syllables? Not syllables, not without them: an order of accented and unaccented syllables.
• Would Sherlock Holmes know a change occurred if X were soft at ten and cold at eleven? No; only with opposites (soft then hard) is change known.
• If the slower covers less in the same time, how long does the faster take for that lesser distance? Less time; alternating shows distance and time divisible forever.
• Is there a statement between the premises and “no man is a mother”? No; there is a next thought, so thoughts are not continuous.
• What are two and three to six? Today “factors”; Euclid says “sides.”