Social Networking
16-05 -- Summary Of Essay Five: Motion Is Not Contradictory
These are Introductory Essays, which have been written for those who find the main Essays either too long, or too difficult. They do not pretend to be comprehensive since they are simply summaries of the core ideas presented at this site. Most of the supporting evidence and argument found in each of the main Essays has been omitted. Anyone wanting more details, or who would like to examine my arguments and evidence in full, should consult the Essay for which each is a précis. [In this particular case, that can be found here.]
Dialectics, The 'Doctrine' Of Change That Cannot Account For Movement!
In Essay Five I demolish Engels's alarmingly brief and superficial 'analysis' of motion:
"[A]s soon as we consider things in their motion, their change, their life, their reciprocal influence…[t]hen we immediately become involved in contradictions. Motion itself is a contradiction; even simple mechanical change of place can only come about through a body being both in one place and in another place at one and the same moment of time, being in one and the same place and also not in it. And the continual assertion and simultaneous solution of this contradiction is precisely what motion is." [Engels (1976), p.152.]
This is, of course, an idea he copied from Hegel, who in turn lifted it from a paradox invented by Zeno (490?-430?BC), an ancient Idealist and mystic who concluded that motion was impossible.
Initial Problems
There are several serious problems with this passage that need airing -- before I can proceed to discuss its fatal weaknesses.
1) The first is connected with Engels's claim that the alleged 'contradiction' here has something to do with its "assertion" and "solution". This is not easy to square with his other belief that matter is independent of mind. Who, for example, "asserted" this alleged contradiction before humanity evolved? And who did the "solving"?
Or, are we to assume that things only began to move when sentient beings capable of making assertions appeared on the scene?
2) The next revolves around the rather odd fact that this alleged 'contradiction' can in no way explain motion. No one imagines (it is to be hoped!) that this 'contradiction' works like a sort of internal metaphysical motor, powering objects along. But, as we will see in Essay Eight Part One, this is precisely what dialecticians like Lenin seemed to think:
"The identity of opposites…is the recognition…of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature…. The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their 'self-movement', in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the 'struggle' of opposites. The two basic (or two possible? or two historically observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).
"In the first conception of motion, self-movement, its driving force, its source, its motive, remains in the shade (or this source is made external -- God, subject, etc.). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of 'self-movement'.
"The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is living. The second alone furnishes the key to the 'self-movement' of everything existing; it alone furnishes the key to the 'leaps,' to the 'break in continuity,' to the 'transformation into the opposite,' to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.
"The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute." [Lenin (1961), pp.357-58. Italic emphases in the original. Bold emphases added.]
It could be argued that this is a little too quick. However, that get-out clause will be tested to destruction in Essay Eight Part One.
Independently of that, it is not easy to see how an object being in one place and not in it, and being in two places at once, can explain how or why it moves. At best, this alleged 'contradiction' is derivative -- that is, it is quite apparent that it is motion that explains the 'contradiction', not the other way round. But, in that case, what explains motion?
Plainly, if dialecticians want to cling on to this 'theory', they will find they cannot explain why objects move, which is rather odd since they spare no opportunity regaling us with the glad tidings that they are the only ones who can!
[DM = Dialectical Materialism.]
It could be objected that DM-theorists in fact appeal to contradictory forces to account for motion, but we will see in Essay Eight Part Two that there is no interpretation that can be placed on the word "force", or on the word "contradiction", that will sustain such ancient view of change and movement.
["Ancient" in the sense that it was an early Greek idea that moving objects needed something to sustain their motion. In contrast, modern Physics merely accounts for change in motion/momentum, and, in order to do that, most theorists have dropped all reference to forces. Details can be found in Essay Eight Part Two, here.]
But, even if forces were 'contradictory', and recourse to a continual cause of motion was both available and rational, that would hardly explain how an object being in one place and not in it, and being in two places at once, could explain why it moves. Plainly, this alleged 'contradiction' does no work.
Moreover, even in DM-terms, this makes little sense. Are we really supposed to believe that an object that is 'here' is made to move by its being 'not here' --, its 'dialectical' opposite? Or that these two 'places' are locked in some sort of 'struggle', as DM-classicists claim is the case with such 'dialectical' opposites? Or that the one turns into the other -- i.e., that 'here' turns into 'not here', and 'not here' turns into 'here' --, as the aforementioned DM-worthies also claimed?
3) In fact, Engels's 'analysis' was itself based solely on a very brief thought experiment, one that was in turn motivated by a superficial consideration of a limited number of words associated with locomotion.
Indeed, Engels was quite happy to derive a set of universal truths about motion -- applicable everywhere in the entire universe, for all of time -- from the alleged meaning of a few simple phrases. Clearly, the concepts Engels used cannot have been derived by 'abstraction' from his (or from anyone else's) experience of moving bodies, since no conceivable experience could confirm that a body is in two places at once, only that it moves between at least two locations in a finite interval of time.
To be sure, that is why Engels not only had to indulge in flights of fancy to make his case, it is also why he had to impose his views on reality. [And this was despite his promise that this was something he would never do.]
4) Leaving this aside, even if Engels's claims were correct, they couldn't account for movement (and hence they can't explain change). Clearly, Engels failed to notice (just as subsequent dialectical-copiers of the above passage have failed to notice) that the way he depicts motion does not distinguish moving from stationary bodies. Stationary bodies can be in two places at once, and they can be in one place and not in it at the same time. For example, a car can be in a garage and not in it at the same moment (having been left parked half-in, half-out); and it can be in two places at once (in the garage and in the yard), and stationary with respect to some inertial frame, all the while.
In other words, Engels claim, at the very most, supplies only the necessary conditions for movement, not the sufficient conditions.
The only way this and similarly awkward counter-examples can be neutralised by DM-fans is to re-define the relevant terms in a way that would in fact make Engels's 'analysis' inapplicable to material bodies, in that it would then apply solely to immaterial, mathematical points. Unfortunately, in that case, Engels's thought experiment would no longer highlight what is unique to moving material objects.
Either way, Engels's words cannot be used to distinguish moving from stationary bodies.
Of course, mathematical points themselves cannot move by occupying still other points --, in which case, they cannot move. Since points are not containers, no point can occupy another point. Points have no physical dimensions or rigidity, so they cannot even 'push' each other out of the way as they 'try' to 'move'.
[Certainly, there are mathematicians who talk as if they believe points can move, but, beyond a certain way of speaking (i.e., figuratively), there is nothing to support the idea that they can (and everything to suggest they can't -- not the least of which is that such points do not exist in space and time to move anywhere). On this, see Essay Seven Part One, here.
Indeed, if certain ways of speaking could make things move, more of us would believe in magic.]
Alternatively, anyone who claimed mathematical points could move would have a hard time explaining where they moved to, where they were before they moved, and how they could be contradictory (if these points were only the same size as any point they allegedly 'occupied', it would mean they could not be in two such places at once, or they would expand). Indeed, such individuals would have to do all that explaining without appealing to yet another set of mathematical points that allows them to argue this way.
5) Engels's claim that motion is contradictory only follows if a body cannot logically be in two places at once, or if it cannot be in one place and not in it at the same time (otherwise he would not have called it a logical contradiction, and he could not have used it to illustrate the alleged limitations of FL). Engels just assumed the truth of this premiss; he nowhere tried to justify it (and no one since seems to have bothered to fill in the gaps).
[FL = Formal Logic.]
However, because an ordinary stationary material body can be in two places at once, and in one place and not in it at the same time (as we have just seen), Engels's key premiss is not even empirically true. In that case, it certainly can't be a logical/conceptual truth restricted only to moving bodies. If it is true that stationary objects can also do what Engels says, then it cannot be a contradiction when moving bodies do it -- or, at least, it can't be a contradiction true only of moving bodies. In that case, it cannot be something that accounts for motion, or even distinguishes it from rest.
Of course, it could be argued that the 'contradictions' Engels was interested in were 'dialectical contradictions', not logical contradictions. However, his wording does not support such an interpretation:
"Motion itself is a contradiction; even simple mechanical change of place can only come about through a body being both in one place and in another place at one and the same moment of time, being in one and the same place and also not in it. And the continual assertion and simultaneous solution of this contradiction is precisely what motion is." [Engels (1976), p.152.]
It certainly seems from this that Engels was talking about logical contradictions.
And, believe it or not, that would be good news for DM-fans, for we at least have some sort of handle on this sort of contradiction. The other sort (i.e., 'dialectical contradiction') has resisted all attempts at explanation for nigh on 200 years (not that anyone has tried very hard). [In fact, the best effort to date has been demolished here.]
And Now For The Fatal Defects
1) It is not easy to reconstruct the rationale behind Engels's (and thus Hegel's) conclusion that motion is contradictory, but it seems to depend on this line of argument (beginning with a rejection of an apparent contradiction, in E1a):
E1: An object cannot be in motion and at rest at one and the same time.
E2: If an object is located at a point it must be at rest at that point.
E3: Hence, a moving body cannot be located at a point, otherwise it would not be moving, it would be at rest.
E4: Consequently, given E1, a moving body must both occupy and not occupy a point at one and the same instant.
[E1a: An object can be in motion and at rest at one and the same time.]
But, if this is Engels's (or even Hegel's) rationale, then he/they give no reason why we should prefer one contradiction (E4) over another (E1a). And yet, E1a is a familiar truth, for it is surely possible for an object to be at rest with respect to one frame of reference and yet be in motion with respect to another.
On this, Robert Mills had this comment to make:
"Another way of stating the principle of equivalence, a way that better reflects its name, is to say that all reference frames, including accelerated reference frames, are equivalent, that the laws of Physics take the same form in any reference frame…. And it is also correct to say that the Copernican view (with the sun at the centre) and the Ptolemaic view (with the earth at the centre) are equally valid and equally consistent!" [Mills (1994), pp.182-83. Spelling altered to conform to UK English. More on this here.]
[It is worth recalling that the late Professor Mills was co-inventor of Yang-Mills Theory in Gauge Quantum Mechanics, and thus no scientific novice.]
Hence, in one frame, the Earth is stationary, in another is it moving. But, in that case, if E1a is true, E4 cannot follow, and the imputed rationale behind Engels's 'contradiction' evaporates.
2) Engels's conclusion clearly depends on an object moving between locations with time having advanced not one instant, that is, his conclusion implies that the supposed change of place must occur outside of time -- or, worse, that it happens independently of the passage of time --, which is incomprehensible (as even Trotsky would have admitted):
"How should we really conceive the word 'moment'? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that 'moment' to inevitable changes. Or is the 'moment' a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom 'A' is equal to 'A' signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is if it does not exist." [Trotsky (1971), pp.63-64.]
And yet, how else are we to understand Engels's claim that a moving body is actually in two places at once? In that case, a moving object would be in one place at one instant, and it would move to another place with no lapse of time; such motion would thus take place outside of time. But, according to Trotsky, that sort of motion would not exist, for it would not have taken place in time.
This would further mean that while we may divide position as finely as we wished -- so that no matter to what extent the spatial aspects of a body's location were partitioned, we would always be able to distinguish two contiguous points, allowing us to say that a moving body was in those two places at once --, while we can do that with location, we cannot do the same with respect to time.
Engels's 'argument' thus depends on the claim that while the location of a particular body is subject to infinite divisibility (an assumption which, one presumes, is necessary to support the claim that moving bodies must be in two places at the same time, no matter how microscopically close together the latter are -- which implies that spatial locations can be given in endlessly finer-grained detail), the time interval during which the said body occupies this or that or any other location is not subject to similar division. Now, this is an a priori and non-symmetric restriction -- that is, this restriction is applied to time, but not to space --, which is impossible to justify on either empirical or logical grounds.
[Not one single DM-fan, as far as I am aware, has ever even tried to justify this one-sided stipulation. In fact, it is equally clear that not one DM-fan is even aware of it!]
If this constraint is waved (as surely it should be!), it would mean that no matter how close together the two locations are that a body is supposedly in, we can always specify a time interval during which locomotion occurs -- or, perhaps map two moments isomorphic to them. That done, the alleged 'contradiction' vanishes.
Again, the only way to neutralise this response is to counter-claim that a body must be motionless if it is in a certain place at a certain time (as we saw in E2). In that case, if it is moving, a body must be in two places at the same time.
But, that just repeats the non-symmetrical restriction noted above (and the suspect derivation upon which doubt was cast earlier). If we can divide up places more finely so that it is possible to say an object is in two of the latter while the 'instant' during which this occurs stays the same, then we can surely do likewise with respect to time, specifying two times for each of these two places (or, at least, a time interval in which such a change of place occurs).
Once more, none of this is the least bit surprising since Engels's claims about motion and change date back to the a priori speculations of that ancient mystic Heraclitus -- a thinker who did not even bother to base his wild ideas on anything remotely like evidence (having derived his 'profound' conclusions about all of reality for all of time from what he thought was true about the possibility of stepping into a certain river!) --, and to an Idealist conundrum invented by Zeno.
[Of course, these observations dispose of the DM-claim that contradictions between space and time are only to be expected since reality is fundamentally contradictory. This is because this 'contradiction' plainly results from a lop-sided convention that interprets one of these as continuous (place) and the other as discrete (time). But, if they are both treated in the same way, there is no contradiction.]
3) Engels also failed to note that several other paradoxical consequences follow from his ideas. One of these is that if a moving body is anywhere, it must be everywhere, all at once. This is because his argument depends on the idea that a moving body must be in two places at the same time -- i.e., in, say, P1 and P2 --, otherwise it would be stationary. This allows him to derive a 'contradiction': a moving body must be in two places at once, and it must both be in and not in at least one of these at the same moment.
But, clearly, if the said body is in P2 it must also be in P3 in the same instant. If this is denied, then the conclusion that a moving body must be in one place and not in it at the same instant, and in another place at the same time, will have to be dropped.
However, if it is still held true that at one and the same instant a moving body is in one place and not in it, and that it is in another place at that time (otherwise it would be stationary), then it must be in P3 at the same instant that it is in P2, or it would not be moving while at P2, but would be stationary at P2.
In that case, such a body must be in at least three places at once. Unfortunately, the same argument now applies to P3, and to P4, and so on...
Hence, assuming that the said body is still moving while at P2, by the application of a sufficiently powerful induction, it can be shown that any moving body must be everywhere if it is anywhere, all at the same instant!
Now that is even more absurd than Zeno's ridiculous conclusion!
But that's Diabolical Logic for you!
Ambiguity -- The Mother Of Distortion
We saw earlier that Engels's use of "contradiction" cannot distinguish moving from stationary objects. In that case, the alleged 'contradiction' he 'derives' is more a function of certain ambiguities found in language than it is a reflection of objects and processes in reality.
In Essay Five, here and here, I list numerous examples of similar ambiguities that seem to imply 'contradictions' (all of which Engels failed to consider) if we insist on treating language in this crude and Philistine way (that is, if we copy Zeno, Heraclitus, Engels and Hegel).
Now, these ambiguities are relatively easy to resolve, and if the same tactic is applied to the language the above Idealists use, the same result emerges, and their 'contradictions' simply vanish.
Yet More A Priori Superscience
As noted above, Engels performed no controlled (or any other) experiments before or after he 'derived' his conclusion about motion. In fact, it is impossible even to describe a single observation or experiment -- other than a thought experiment, which would itself depend on the sorts of ambiguities highlighted earlier -- that could conceivably confirm Engels's claims. This is partly because these 'contradictions' cannot be observed, and partly because of the modal, universal and omni-temporal character of the conclusions themselves.
This means that the only substantiation Engels could have offered to support his claims would have been language-based; he would have to have referred anyone sceptical of his conclusions to what certain words really meant. It would be no good advising non-believers to look harder at the phenomena, refine their search or redo their experiments --, which is, of course, why one finds no evidence at all in books on dialectics that either confirms or even vaguely supports a belief in the contradictory nature of motion. All we find in its place are dogmatic assertions based on a brief consideration of a few words. [Readers are invited to check!]
Thus, Engels's only 'evidence' would have been based on an appeal to linguistic usage -- and to Hegel's, at that! This predicament (which he shares with all other metaphysicians) invariably passes unnoticed because (1) it is so widespread in traditional thought, (2) it has been going on for so long, and (3) it is imagined that by looking at words the Armchair Philosopher is examining the world itself, and not merely a few specially-selected phrases.
Nevertheless, Engels restricted his comments neither to examples of motion he had personally investigated nor to the entire set of instances experienced by humanity to date. Still, he felt quite confident that he could extrapolate from his own understanding of a few ordinary-looking words to conclusions that were applicable to every conceivable example of motion anywhere in the universe for all of time:
"Never anywhere has there been matter without motion, nor can there be…. Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter. Motion is therefore as uncreatable and indestructible as matter itself…." [Engels (1976), p.74. Bold emphases added.]
If fact, what Engels actually did -- and this is the extent of the 'careful' scientific research he carried out in this area -- was to copy the analysis of motion he found in Hegel's Logic.
As we shall also see (in Essays Nine Part One and Two, and Twelve (summary here)), that alone has revealing ideological implications.
Word Count: 4,030
© Rosa Lichtenstein 2009
Hits Since December 5th 2007: