Thursday, January 23, 2020

Holism, Nature, Motion

In his consideration of Body Motion as Holist, previously discussed, Spinoza introduces the possibility of the increasing complexity of such wholes.  At the maximum there is the "whole of nature", which anticipates an Ecological concept of Nature. Now, he characterizes any such Body in Motion as "affected" by "another body", according to one of the Lemmas. The thesis of that Lemma, that a Body maintains Motion or Rest unless affected by an external Body, seems Newtonian, except that the Ethics precedes Newton's work by two decades.  Regardless, in the context, Spinoza does not consider the problem of the Motion of the whole of Nature, which entails the existence of no external Body, and, hence, of nothing to affect it.  One potential solution is to apply his Nature Naturing vs. Nature Natured distinction, with the concept of Body, the maximum of which is Nature, in these passages, of the latter variety.  That leaves open the possibility of immanent, esoteric Motion, but with no explanation of how it systematically relates to the exoteric Motion of one Body affecting another, and their Holist coordination.  Otherwise, it is unclear how he might resolve the apparent problem.

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