Motion
idea · 3 works · 4 mentions · 7 anchored passages
الحركة · al-ḥarakah · modeless motion · motion · motion having a modality · motion in the sense of traversal · qualitative and quantitative motion · the being-mean between the positions · universal motion · الحركة الكلية
in the texts
Risālat al-Wāridāt
Ḥarakah, motion: the single aspect of Being's descent that we can apprehend, though not its how; and the thing that, on reaching the sensory world, passes from being modeless to having a determinate modality.
When the degrees of self-disclosure had reached the world of the human realm — and you already knew that the descent is nothing but an expression for Being’s passage through the phases, and that you apprehend nothing of it but motion, though you do not know its modality, the inward being the reality of the outward and the outward its self-disclosure — then all the intelligible things came forth in …
Hence you find nothing but what is in motion, and nothing that comes to be save from motion — and that because the overflow does not halt for a single instant of the instants, the [divine] liberality being universal.
Perhaps in what preceded you took note that the immaterial is no native seat of change and alteration, of generation and corruption, since it is free of the sensory motion that requires these;
Kitāb al-Zawrāʼ wa-al-taʻlīqāt ʻalayhi
Motion as a single continuous individual, eternal in respect of essence and originated in respect of the relations attaching to it, with no actual parts, so that abiding forms are as unreal as abiding colours.
The verification of this is that the celestial bodies have a single motion in individual number, namely the being-mean between the posited positions, from which there is traced in the imagination the sempiternal extension that is expressed, in the usage of the people of theory, as motion in the sense of traversal;
So motion is eternal in respect of essence and originated in respect of the accidents that attach to it;
there is no actual existence for those colours and magnitudes in qualitative and quantitative motion, so likewise there is no actual existence for those forms either.
Risālat baqāʼ al-nafs baʻda fanāʼ al-jasad
Change of state, taken by the Greeks as eternal and overflowing from the divine power to the highest sphere, and by al-Tusi as the inseparable property of matter whose temporal structure proves matter itself to be originated.
for we understand from the passage (1) of a thing from one state to another — which is the meaning of motion — nothing but the priority of the state passed from over the state passed to, a temporal priority in which the prior and the preceded do not coexist.
And this demonstration goes against the well-known rule of Lavoisier, since the establishing of the motion from which matter is not separated, nor it from matter, requires the origination of matter out of sheer nothingness.
But there overflowed to those spheres, from the hidden governing power, a motion by which the first body was moved, that is, the highest sphere;