4.4.6  Reality of Motion

The basic issue in the philosophy of motion is whether the matter-in-motion can be itself the cause of its motion? The dialectical explanation considers that matter is the most primary source of the development of completion, and therefore it can be itself the cause and subject of motion. Metaphysical philosophy, on the other hand, insists on differentiating between that which moves and the mover. This is because motion is a gradual development and completion of a deficient thing, which can’t by itself develop and complete gradually, and therefore can’t be the cause of completion.

Ibn al-Arabi talks about motion in some details in the long chapter 198 [II.456-458], where he affirms that: “everything in the world that moves and rests doesn’t move and rest by itself, but by a mover (that is the cause that makes it move and a rest)”, but he adds that this mover either moves the object by itself or by its will to move it; so those who believe the mover moves the object by itself say that motion is created in the object, thus motion by itself, when it is in the object, causes it to move. And the same can be said regarding rest. But if the mover moves the object by its will, it will do that either by an (intermediate) means or without a means. Then if the mover is the object itself, it has to have a will, like the motion of the human being who moves under his will in the (six physical) directions.

Ibn al-Arabi then differentiates between the regular circular motion of the orb, as the celestial sphere of each planetary heaven, and the motion of objects, where motions of the orb are tidy and in a sequential manner like the motion of the millstone; each part doesn’t depart from its neighboring (part), while the motion of elements is different, because it is entwined, where some parts depart from the neighboring parts and occupy new places different from the ones they were in.

He also says that the motion of the orb is like the motion of the human being in the directions, since the orb moves by its will in order to give out what is (inspired) in its heaven by the divine Command which causes the things to occur in the earthly elements and the generators of earthly changes; so as a result of this motion, time emerges. Time, therefore, has no effect in the orbs’ appearance, but rather it affects only what is below it. Time doesn’t affect the appearance of the orb, because it is itself the appearance, or the result in the lower elemental realms, whereas the things that happen and appear in the orbs, the heavens, and the higher world have causes other than time. [II.456-458]

We have to admit that physicists habitually accept a very naive concept of motion, usually expressed by the formula “velocity equals distance per time” (). Such a simplified concept of motion has been working nicely for many centuries, and although modern theories slightly corrected these classical Newtonian mechanics, they didn’t address the more philosophical question about the nature of motion itself. To answer this question, one has to verify whether space and time are discrete or continuous, an issue that is still persisting and unsettled even in the latest theories. However, we find some philosophers, like Zeno, who argued that, whether we consider this way or the other, we shall inevitably end up with some irresolvable paradoxes, as we discussed in chapter III, section 5.

Ibn al-Arabi, based on his theory of the oneness of being and the principle of continual re-creation, as discussed in sections 1.2 and 2.1, gives a clear and far more extensive definition of motion which is utterly different from the simple notion of just a distance in time. In the same chapter that we just quoted above, he says: ‘You have to know that the truth about motion and rest is that they are two states of the natural embodied things ... that is because the embodied thing will necessarily need a volume to occupy by itself in the time of its existence. So it may either be in the same place in the next time, or times, which is called ‘rest’; or it is in the next place in the next time and in the following place in the third time. So its appearing in and occupying these places one after another can happen only by ‘changing’ from one place to another, and this may only be due to a cause. So it would be fine to call this change ‘motion’, although we know there is nothing but the embodied thing itself, the place, and the fact that it occupied a place next to that which it occupied before. But those who claim that there is some (real) thing called ‘motion’, which got into the embodied thing and caused it to change from one place to another, they have to prove it!’ [II.457.27]

With the above definition of motion, Ibn al-Arabi has in mind his basic principle of the ever-renewed creation, which suggests that the entire world is continuously being re-created every single moment of time, as we described in section 2.1. Therefore there is no real motion like that which we habitually perceive in the human common sense or estimative faculty; in reality motion is only a ‘change of place’: i.e., the thing that is the subject of motion is being re-created in different places, and not moved between them, so we imagine motion. At the end of his short book “al-Durrat al-Bayda” (“The White Pearl”), Ibn al-Arabi wonders how (the general) people (not to mention physicists and philosophers) don’t so easily realize the delusion of motion and space. He says that “everything that moves doesn’t move in (already) occupied space, but it moves in a void.” Then he explains that the thing may not move into a new place until this new place is emptied before hand. So by simple logic, this (false) assumption that there is real motion would lead to the conclusion that the result of an action would occur before the action itself. Thus this radically different conception meticulously challenges Newton’s law of action-reaction, which, practically speaking, always holds true, but which seems to be philosophically deceiving. So the mere concept of motion apparently violates causality, the most fundamental principle of physics, and even common sense. Actually, Ibn al-Arabi, following earlier radical theories in kalam theology, even questions causality itself, where he affirms that Allah says: “I create the things next to the causes and not by them” [II.204.13]. Though this doesn’t deny causality itself, nor the appearances of regular natural causality, but it does suggest a radically new type of strictly divine causality.

Ibn al-Arabi concludes, therefore, that motion is only a new creation in different neighboring places; there is no actual path of the object between its start and the destination points when taken on the smallest scale of time, when time itself is quantized. Based on this novel definition of motion, we shall be able to resolve Zeno’s famous paradoxes that are discussed in chapter III. But this is also what happens, according to modern physics, in the atom where the electrons jump between the energy levels, that have different distance from the nucleus, without any possible existence in between. In the Quran, it is also said that this is what happened to the throne of the queen of Sheba when it refers to the unnamed man “who has knowledge from the (divine) Book” moving her throne from Sheba to Solomon’s court “in a blink of the eye”.

To further explain how such instantaneous motion may occur, seeming faster than light, let us return to the analogy of the movie screen or computer monitor, that we discussed in section 2.7. When the electric current creates them, each pixel on the screen appears in a specific form of different color and intensity that may (slightly) change from one frame to the other. This momentary form, in which the pixel appears every time it is scanned, lasts only during the very short time while the current is in its place. Once the current leaves the pixel to make the next one, the form of the previous pixel vanishes intrinsically; we only see the traces of these forms for a short time until they are scanned again to appear in a new form, that may be different or similar to the previous one.

Similarly, if the perpetual creative process by the Single Monad is conceptually stopped, and taken in isolation, it will form a kind of still picture, of things around us, including ourselves both as bodies (matter) and as spirits or states of realization (meanings). Within this conception, the dynamic manifest world, then, is the instantaneous and continuously renewed succession of these slightly changing frames. Motion, therefore, is observed because things successively appear in different places, but indeed there is no actual motion, rather: the observed objects are always at rest in the different positions that they appear in. This is the same conclusion of the Arrow argument by Zeno, which Russell described as: “in some miraculous way the change of position has to occur between the instants (without moving)” as mentioned in chapter III.