ANIM
Reality can be questioned from any discipline, as long as one keeps aware how the discipline relates objectively to all else. In the case of Newtonian motion -- still the powerful everyman description of the universe -- a questioner must understand Newton's mental climate. To do so requires research into much earlier times, to the beginning of ideas of motion for humans.
Animals, of course, can move. They are named for this ability.
When one examines the history of ideas for clues to the word "animal," curious threads are found raveled.
A primary theme of writers for at least the last three thousand years, from the times of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, is the beginning for motion in metaphysic terms, in things.
These titles show this:
De Motu Animalium—Aristotle (3000 BC)
De Motu Animalium--Borelli (1680-81)
De Motu Locali Animalium--Fabricius (1618)
De Motu Locali Animalium--Harvey (1627)
(from Jaynes 1970).
The translation from Latin is easy because of the words changing little, being that important, over almost five thousand years.
What we think of as classical motion has similar affiliations in title, throughout longish times. It is wise to point out here that three thousand years is a mere blink in the evolution of our species sapiens, which easily started hundreds of thousands of years ago. Does your mind feel the edge of a cliff of eons of time?
Basic thoughts for theories of motion have included celestialism, organismic, then materialistic, and most recently energetic (quantum) views. They formed metaphors for other, social ideas of the times. I began extensive referencing here: Carolyn Merchant, Daniel Boorstin and others have summarized these ideas with important historic research, quoting lengthy and exact passages from many ancient scientists. I look at the marks that are to reference from The Discoverers by Professor Boorstin-- ten of them.
The Random House College Dictionary has 28 listings of the prefix anim-, with such known words as animated, animal, and animism.
Merchant in her work shows long sections on vitalism, animism, motion, and curiously, something called vegetavism: 18 pages to look at again in her book.
I offer for the reader a number of direct quotes next; they document the quest for a definition of animism and motion. The original language surpasses by far a temptation to abstract. One will see powerful thought centering on a single concept-- how can things begin to move?
Primary Causes
Joseph Campbell, Mythology, page 87-
It is already clear from the studies that have been made of children in the West… life becomes restricted to animals and plants, and consciousness to animals, hardly before the ages of eleven or twelve… when the adult is asked about the mysteries of creation it is seldom that he will answer in other terms than those of the infantile artificialist or animist: the world has been made by some omniscient god for some purpose... or else... there is within things themselves some force that makes them.
149 -- in the words of Plato: 'The motions akin to the divine part in us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe; these, therefore, every man should follow.'
Next up on my desktop stack of references is a book called Sacred Dance from Oesterley, from 1923, with a red library cover. In it, page fourteen, is "Now, in the animistic stage what first suggested the presence of life in anything was movement." Page fifteen has "The innate tendency to rhythmic motion."
From The Mythology of All Races -¬Volume 2, 1930 -
How far the (Eddic) deities are derived from animistic spirits of different departments of nature is a moot point... man viewed rivers, hills, trees, thunder, wind, and the like, as alive in the same sense as he himself was... Some were in motion... trees swayed by the wind.
Volume 10, 269 –
Taking 'anima' in its primitive sense of 'breath,' 'wind,' no other word seems really preferable as a description of the ancient notion of indwelling lives or powers in all things.
From Dictionary of the History of Ideas –
The standard and most important variant of anthropomorphism is animism which sees a soul in everything in nature (87).
When attraction and repulsion appear together in Newton's Principia (1687), they are put together as a theory of force, and the idea of force was considered at that time to be highly animistic (89).
This is not widely known, that Newton's Laws of Motion were shaped by a climate that involved animistic forces. A fundamental question regarding motion, therefore, does not really involve Newton, but a perhaps even more illustrious predecessor.
Aristotle
I found Aristotle in the library -- Great Books of the Western World, 9, Aristotle II. This is a labyrinth for referencers; to wit -- page 115, Book VIII, 588b -- the History of Animals –
Next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes the plant, and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount of apparent vitality.
Page 23, 698a, On the Motion of Animals (still by Aristotle who has his own numbering system made known to me by Julian Jaynes) has
The origin of all other motions is that which moves itself.
Page 233, 698b tells us
...neither would there be any walking unless the ground were to remain still.
Page 236 has 701a and 703a –
...The prime mover then moves, itself being unmoved, whereas desire and its faculty are moved and so move... desire is the last or immediate cause of movement", the soul originates movement in the body.
Nothing prior to Aristotle defines motion this sharply. He saw the need.
Great Books of the Western World Volume 10 quotes the Greek physician Galen's On the Natural Faculties, page 167 -
I. Since feeling and voluntary motion are peculiar to animals, whilst growth and nutrition are common to plants as well, we may look on the former as effects of the soul and the latter as effects of the nature. And if there be anyone who allows a share in soul to plants as well, and separates the two kinds of soul, naming the kind in question vegetative, and the other sensory, this person is not saying anything else, although his language is somewhat unusual. We, however, for our part, are convinced that the chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms; accordingly we employ those terms which the bulk of people (my emphasis) are accustomed to use, and we say that animals are governed at once by their soul and by their nature, and plants by their nature alone, and that growth and nutrition are the effects of nature, not of soul.
And three thousand years after, still informed by Aristotle, the beginning of Maria Montessori's Chapter 15 in The Secret of Childhood-- :
It has been a serious error to list movement among the various functions of the body without adequately distinguishing it from those of the vegetative life such as the assimilation of food, breathing, and so forth... Movement, although it is characteristic of animals, does have an influence also upon the vegetative life.
The quotes in the above section, jumping thousands of years, show the competition and desire to define what was once called "anima."
These references show that the beginnings of animism are difficult to trace. Could it be tied to the beginning of the use of wood, when people didn't want to feel like tree-slaughterers and thus rationalized a lesser vitality for them? Galen the Physician hinted strongly that there were a number of his contemporaries ascribing animism, motion, to things other than animals.
There are much older writings than Greek of course, and many translations have been done on cuneiform, Linear B, heiroglyphics, the New World languages... one is drawn ever backward to ideograms and pictograms beginning the written word. Everywhere, translations of languages (with some few exceptions to be noted later) are standard for animism in the sense that verb forms refer to the same objects in motion that we expect to see today ("I run to the tree" instead of "The tree moves to me"). Verbs are obvious indicators of motion beliefs.
And, for a long time while our nouns have changed, verbs have existed under the radar of science.
Verbs and Animacy
In this chapter, the unifying theme is rather an extra-linguistic conceptual property, namely animacy... we define it as a heirarchy whose main components, from highest to lowest... are: human, animal, inanimate... animacy can be a relevant parameter in language change… thus suggesting that animacy is a universal conceptual category that exists independently of its realization in any particular language (178-79).
In Yidiny... preference for the dative with noun phrases of higher animals, and strong preference for the locative with noun phrases of very low animacy (e.g. stones) (183).
...within the overall class of animals we again find that some languages make finer distinctions... in Ritharngu... the special... affix is used for humans and higher animals, such as dogs and kangaroos, while this affix is not used for lower animals, such as insects and fish, and inanimates. In Yidiny, as discussed above... there is... a continuum, with higher animals being treated as animate more often than lower animals... with many pairs of animals the distinction is clear, as between most mammals and insects... finally, we come to inanimates. Most languages seem to leave this as an undifferentiated class... however... in Navaho, inanimate entities that are capable of spontaneous motion are classified higher than other inanimates, the former including, for instance, wind, rain, running water, lightning (189-90).
These quotes suggest that the casual, animistic use we have for action verbs was not always so; in more naturalistic languages, verbs are used differently and in some cases, more widely. But -- probably because these are all human languages -- animals and especially humans enjoy the most freedom of motion, reflected in verb use.
Planetary Motions
Maxwell published this in 1877:
..the phrase 'at rest' means in ordinary language 'having no velocity with respect to that on which the body stands,' as, for instance, the surface of the earth or the deck of a ship. It cannot be made to mean more than this. It is therefore unscientific to distinguish between rest and motion, as between two different states of a body in itself, since it is impossible to speak of a body being at rest or in motion except with reference, expressed or implied, to some other body (from Matter and Motion , page 22).
He wrote, too, after a section about the fundamentalism of physics, in a footnote,
...it is possible to assert that a physical system is of dynamical type although we may not have been able to form an idea of the configurations and motions that are represented by the variables(136).
The philosopher Tommaso Campanella exclaimed,
when he understood what Copernicus was saying, that the earth really moved... 'Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens!' In a world so sentient and alive, motion is everywhere (Jaynes from "The Problem of Animate Motion in the Seventeenth Century").
Tricker and Tricker, in 1967's The Science of Movement, right from page one say
To change the theory of movement meant, in effect, abandoning Aristotle's complete scheme of things. It was as though, today, we were asked to abandon our picture of the universe of the fixed stars, the solar system, the atomic theory of matter, and the whole scientific picture of the world which we now inherit from infancy, in order to improve one aspect in what could not have appeared to be anything more than a minor area of the whole. It is thus, perhaps, not altogether surprising that it was 2,000 years before this reformulation was achieved... (the) second factor which contributed a good deal to the difficulty experienced by those living in ancient and medieval times in arriving at a better theory of movement was that their own experience of movement was so very limited. Today we are accustomed to being started and stopped in buses and...
I would like to go on with this form for a bit more.
Kuhn writes
Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by 'earth' was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus' innovation was not simply to move the earth (1970:149).
McCain and Segal from The Game of Science: Second Edition—
Copernicus... by assuming that the earth spun on its axis once a day, he could hypothesize that the fixed stars that seem to rotate were actually stationary.
Newer Ideas
Of course, it is true, but the earth does not seem to be moving to us who live on it (145).
His (Einstein's) idea was to create a physics valid for all coordinate systems, since the universe abounds with the non-inertial as well as the inertial kind... to create such a universally valid physics, a general physics, then we must treat both the observers in the stationary (inertial) system and the observer on the revolving circles (a non-inertial system) with equal seriousness (195).
Bringing the good reader through this kind of timetraveling is to give one the sense of a constancy through the last 2000 years of science.
Definitions in celestialism, vitalism, or animism are thus either easy to know or, at one level deeper, metaphysical. These -isms of motion are simple if one presumes a soul, a spark in us that gives us a power beyond other forms of life, even if the earth is considered alive. And one readily sees that all of the -isms have a more or less standard motional sense. Even Einstein's has, if only in the idea that it has yet to affect society in conscious ways. We still feel that we walk on a planet.
Origins of Thermodynamics
A fixed earth, in its various ancestral forms, would favor a beginning for thermodynamics in the natural belief that the ground stayed much more still than we, abstractly, consider it today. Winds were felt to move from the vastness beyond with no trees. The sun and moon were holy; there were hot and cold "exhalations" (winds) that had effects. These had patterns that some like Aristotle watched, and his observations are more alike than dissimilar to those of today.
Thermodynamics, the great describer of atmospheric motion on earth today, where hot and cold air or water rise and fall, fueled by the sun, was born not by sophisticated weather instrumentation, but by a form of anthrocentrism, related to a simple physics: the fixed earth idea. Think what could have instead developed if it was thought that the solid earth sped in space. If a bowl of water or air is moved, the water or air will tend to stay in one place. (For a thorough story of early ideas of winds see Kals, 1977, The Riddle of the Winds).
And of course thermodynamics is virtually beyond question in 1994, when this is written. But it began by inference from simple experiments and observations related to the beliefs of the time.
A Tool for Interspecific "Mindreading"
Contemporary meanings for animism are still examined (Carl Jung for instance). But it is largely rote-- ¬one need only stand on a streetcorner and listen to everyday conversing to realize our belief: action verbs are always tied to animals or machines.
The relation of animacy to ideas of the beginning of motion is somewhat hidden. Animism runs deeper than anthrocentrism (for example, both creationists and evolutionists use the same verbs). I see evidence that it became implicit, much like an instinct, before ever becoming conscious and defined. It obviously has attracted a great emphasis in history. If anthrocentrism was a survival mechanism, animism was more a semi-traceable legacy... from who or what? The possibility of it being from nonhuman ancestors, other animals, comes to mind, since as we go back in historic time it seems to change. If true, this might be a valuable bridge bringing us back before human language, for those who wish to find a direction to true communication with other species.
We in 1994 take for granted, with the presumption of schoolchildren, the fundamental, innate supremacy of the freedom of motion. Speed is a god. And in the sciences, we base our belief systems on motion. The progressions we make in natural history will be varied and many in the future¬-- wider-ranging field observations, biochemical, evolutionary clarifications, ecologic relations, resource uses. The base for these is completely... grounded. This is the "humans have existed for an eternity" idea: we know all. But in the frame of a biologic time scale, the previous becomes less consequential. This is the "only for a moment" idea: we know nothing. From the first things we consider to have motion-- ameboid, flagellar, ciliate -- to our own walk around the block is an immense time.
The origin of prokaryote, mobile cells is taken as roughly 3.5 billion years ago. It is instructive to remind the reader that the debate concerning animacy and mobility, has taken place, roughly, in only the last three thousand years.
Interspecific communication is not a reality; we know little about the belief systems of animals. Yet, realizing the vast times involved here, the closeness to us in time of Aristotle’s reasoning, and the trend to restrict motion to animals, one is tempted to entertain the possibility that, before Aristotle and Galen felt the need to address animacy, a different sense of it was present—not just in earlier humans but in previous species that evolved in lineages related to ours.
Are our language beginnings related to the evolution in languages of those animals that led to us? How far back may we trace, and with what method?
I suggest the defensible view that ideas and questions common to all human languages, at conscious and especially subconscious levels, reveal even older communication forms. These common ideas seem to include animacy for what we now call inanimate objects. Think of where Aristotle and Galen got their questions, or what they argued against; one is drawn ever back in time to something that could not be called human that had a different sense of animacy.
Further, these ideas and questions are now vanishing, sinking deeper into our subconscious: regressive, becoming extinct, possibly thought of as “crazy,” which of course would somewhat encompass extinction in our genes. But at the same time this would be a tool for “reading the minds,” interpreting the realities, of other animals. It is not an easy manner reasoning out what some call “deep memory,” the vestigial patterns we still have, however faint. But with careful inference, generalities can be suggested. Ancient people had smaller doorways—therefore they were shorter. And they felt the need to reason out animacy—therefore previous humans, and those before them, believed differently.
A group of thoughts are considered in this method with the next chapter. The research question: might there be a definable point in Animalia where the sensing of motion changes? Could this be examined with clues to how animals live today?
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