Inertia, the life of the inanimate

June 10, 2014 at 6:16 pm (Uncategorized)

One paper that impressed me very deeply was an argument that inertia is incoherent since it explains a change in motion, but there is no such thing as a change in motion. The first premise is taken straight from Newton, and the second one is both from experience and supported by very solid arguments. If some object is moving and is shoved from its course, then there is a first motion and a second motion, but no tertium quid in between them, only a limit point in which there is, by definition, nothing moving.

But the inertial moment is still a moment of conflict between what the mobile has of itself and a vis impressa that is necessarily from another. The inertial resistance can thus be understood as the mobile’s attempt to preserve what is its own against what is from another. It can be viewed as analogous to the desire of the living being to preserve its own self-activity, i.e. its life. The change is not some third thing between motions, but a conflict between the only sort of self-operation the non-living has an an action going against it.

Now this self-motion is not inherent in the mobile thing – it too was acquired from without. The non-living thus seems to borrow its self from another, but it counts as enough of a self that it resists future change. Whatever can dominate over it can, in effect, be the self of the inanimate as such. This is exactly what every artifact is. From this perspective, technology is the making of the inanimate into the self.