President Trump’s Memorial Day address opened by reflecting on the power that drives sacrifice—not politics, but something far deeper.“Great poets have written that it's love which moves the sun and the stars,” he said.“But here on the sacred soil, right where we are, we're reminded that it's love which moves the course of history and moves it always toward freedom. Always.”
Emphasis added. Great poets may have written that, but a great philosopher certainly did: the concept is from Aristotle's Metaphysics.
We know that God cannot cause movement by moving (Metaphysics 1072a26). If God did cause movement in this way, God would be susceptible to change, possess potentiality, and would not be the pure the energeia that Aristotle believes God must be. [Also, following Aristotle, Aquinas etc. -Grim] This is why God must cause movement through desire (Metaphysics 1072a27). An object of desire has the power to move other beings without itself moving....
The notion of movement through desire is straightforward. Which one of us has not been excited to move here or there by our desire for this or that? We might even suppose that desire is the primary source of all movement. Such an idea is entertained by Aristotle in De Anima: “It is manifest, therefore, that what is called desire is the sort of faculty in the soul which initiates movement” (De Anima, 433a31-b1).
Aristotle's basic account is that the soul that motivates the heavens has some capacity to perceive the eternal divine, and therefore loves it and longs to imitate it. The heavens cannot persist eternally in the same way, but they can move in a way that imitates eternity. This sort of motion is circular, because it begins and ends and begins again in the same place and continues in the same way. Thus, the way the stars and sun reel about forever in the heavens is motivated, he thought, by their longing to be like the divine they could perceive.
The insight the President is citing here wasn't meant as a kind of beautiful metaphor. Aristotle meant it quite literally: it is love that moves the sun, that moves the stars.
5 comments:
I'm curious; what did Aristotle mean by "love" here?
The word is orexis; the linked paper is pretty helpful in explaining in basic terms how all of this works. Essentially most forms of movement are not ends-in-themselves, because they are done for something else: you move from here to there because there is something over there that you want. This includes state changes that are undertaken for some reason (the paper gives the example of losing weight: you don't undergo the state change of weight loss for itself, but for some other purpose: for health, which is an end in itself, or to become attractive to others, which entails a further end of attracting another).
Orexis is the faculty in the soul that drives such movements (kinesis). It is a recognition that something is wanted/missing/desired, sufficient to impel a living creature to seek it.
Thanks! I'll check out the link, too.
On a lighter note, the idea that "you move from here to there because there is something over there that you want" seems strange for Peripatetics.
Well, health is a suitable telos for taking a walk, as is philosophy.
Yes, I know. It was just an amusing juxtaposition for a moment.
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