This post will only make sense to me for a week or two, because Ari's defiinition of motion is so difficult: motion, says Aristotle, is the the entelechy of a potency as such.
To understand this definition, I propose to offer my own version thereof, while borrowing (more accurately, stealing) a little from Joe Sachs, and while also doing something that neither he nor Aristotle does, which is to place motion within the genus "change." This genus includes not only qualitative, quantitative and locational change (all of which belong to the species "motion"), but substantial change as well, which is not a motion b/c the substantial change is not the traversal of a continuum. "Not ... a continuum" is appropriate here because the change from non-human to human doesn't involve a transition from, say, 1% human to 2%... to 99% to fully human).
So let's see if my paraphrase of Aristotle succeeds: motion is a change (1) that is incomplete (2)
1. [the genus] a change [already circular? see below]; that is, a capacity for doing something that previously was not being exercised now is being exercised. Like any change, it involves matter, form and privation, but Ari's definition has a helpful way of conveying this: instead of saying "change," he says the "entelecheia of a dynamis" or (to use somewhat JosephSachs-like translation) the BeingAtWorkStayinItself of a CapacitytoBeAtWork. Note how the two terms are correlative, with entelecheia being a kind of fulfillment of dynamic.
I would argue that what Ari is doing here is referring to the genus, change, by using the terms entelecheia and dynamis as a very illuminating synecdoche. Think of how, in using the terms entelecheia and dynamis, he is having us avoid thinking of change in terms of morphe (shape) and hyle (stuff). He avoids giving terms that we might use to describe how something being formed by a craftsman might be a kind of inert stuff that is to be given a shape.
As post-Cartesians, we might note that, in using entelecheia rather than morphe he prevents us from thinking of form as we do of geometrical shapes: as some inert stuff that has taken one shape or another, moving across Cartesian gridlines, whose interactions are guided as it were by mathematical laws.
He instead wants us to think of change as something that is best illustrated by what happens in organisms. And for good reason. He wants us to see motion as the doing of something by an individual having the capacity to do it. In fact, even shape (as it exists in NATURE, not as it exists in geometry) is an activity: keeping the same shape is something an individual DOES (e.g., bubble keeps its shape via its interaction with its surrounding atmosphere). So entelecheia is a better term than form. Digression: once you see HavingAShape as an acheivement, the complaint that Aristotle privileges rest over motion seems to be more a manifestation of ignorance than a legitimate criticism. For even staying in one place is an achievement (think of things wandering around in the Spacelab)
2. [the specifying difference] that is incomplete. That is, the the doing that is being exercised is not yet [already circular? see below] completely done. In fact, if it were complete, then the doer would no longer be moving.
Some thoughts about this definition: if my definition seems circular, then so is Aristotle's, simply in virtue of the fact that it uses the term entelecheia. For that term involves the notion of continuance, and continuance involves a before, during and after.
In any case, placing a species in an appropriate genus is never circular, but I do admit that in offering this defense of my definition I am forestalling the problem of circularity, for that problem now besets the definition of the genus change.
Why its illuminating to call change an entelecheia: change is keeps its identity through time, while both in the (in this case, partial) possession of and aiming for the continuous (and in this case, complete) possession of its goal. In substantial change, an entelechy is complete in a way that it is not for motion. For organisms, as entelechized bodies or entelechies, are complete as soon as they exist at all. Nevertheless they do aim at a kind of further completion of their activity through their life acts, and that completion is a kind of unravelling of what is already within them. Turn back to the entelechy called motion and you will see that the same is true for it as well--except for the fact that as soon as it exists it is somewhat incomplete, and once a motion is complete, it no longer exists. Motion is nevertheless like substantial entelechy inasmuch as it is ONE continuous change straddling many phases. For all of these reasons, motion is, in a manner analogous to substance, an entelechy.
Self criticism: in placing motion within the genus change, I am describing motion at a level of generality that includes substantial change. But substantial change, while not reducible to motion, presupposes it in the following way. Substantial change occurs only when certain accidental changes have occurred (think decapitation; conception). So while my move to the genus does not explicitly presuppose motion, it does, if you will, require the recognition of motion in some way. In any case, the definition has the hope of avoiding circularity only if there is such a thing as a change that is all-at-once, i.e., substantial change.
Another criticism: because the genus is knowable in virtue of the recognition of substantial change, and substantial change is less evident than motion in the proper sense (e.g., locomotion), it would seem that I am defining the less obscure by recourse to the more obscure. I think I can defend my definition against this criticism by saying that which is distinctive about substantial change actually has a lot in common with energeia, which is at least as obvious to us as is kinesis.
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