It can be helpful to think of flux, as of the wind, but shorn of its physical properties like pressure. Screen animation of abstract patterns is also kinematic, when shorn of the psychical properties of the eye. Note that in animation, the movement across the screen has no corresponding physical movement.
Zeno's paradox was used by Dooyeweerd to argue that the kinematic aspect cannot be reduced to the spatial (e.g. as of a sequence of distinct spatial occurrences). If we see it as true kinematic movement, the paradox dissolves. (Screen and film animation makes use of sequence of spatial images, but is seen by us as movement rather than as staccato sequences because smoothed out by the psychical functioning of the eye.)
The good possibility that the kinematic aspect introduces is dynamic variation, or a basic kind of change. The quantitative and spatial aspects know nothing of change. (Strauss argues change is not kinematic.)
rather than:
In NC (vol IV, p.163) Dooyeweerd says "movement is not a change of place; but a flowing space in the temporal succession of its movements".
There are two ways to understand the kinematic aspect and its kernel meaning, to treat it as solely movement in space, or to treat it as movement of things meaningful in other aspects too, such as movement of an argument or the plot of a novel. If we commit to the first, then the second is an analogy of the kinematic in those later aspects. If we commit to the second, then movement in a novel plot is original kinematic and not analogical.
Strauss commits to the first, and indeed, to a limited version of the first. But Dooyeweerd seems broader because he does indeed cite movement of argument as kinematic. In Dooyeweerd, but not Strauss, kinematic seems to be about change rather than merely spatial movement. Yet sometimes Dooyeweerd fixes on the spatial movement, and we end up a little confused.
I commit to the second, kinematic as change, and the way I see it is that when thinking about spatial movement, we are thinking about the kinematic shorn of all later aspects, so we have only the pre-kinrmatic aspects that are meaningful to us, so we can think only about quantitative and spatial change. Quantitative change makes mathematical variables meaningful (as indeed Dooyeweerd includes in his discussion of the kinematic aspect) and spatial makes flowing movement in space meaningful. Dooyeweerd stresses that kinematic refers to "flowing movement" and, I take it, this qualifier is added to preclude change-in-location as kinematic; change in location is meaningful in the spatial aspect - as in Zeno's Paradox.
Then, when we bring in later aspects, we can call things "movement" that occur in later aspects, not least movement in argument or plot, and also today animation on screen (movement that is psychical).
1. Although physical acceleration does indeed need a cause, there is kinematic acceleration, which does not speak of cause. Physical acceleration is defined as force / mass, and force and mass are meaningful originally in the physical aspect, with force being the cause of the acceleration. But that is not the only definition of acceleration.
2. Acceleration is also defined as dV / dt (differential calculus) about change in velocity. That definition is meaningful in the kinematic aspect without any reference needed to the physical aspect.
3. Dooyeweerd's text does not say that acceleration is not of kinematic, but only that acceleration-less uniform movement or flow is meaningful in the kinematic but not physical. He does not say that changing movement is meaningless in the kinematic aspect but only in the physical; it is only when we think about causes of change that we need the physical aspect. I hold that changing flow and movement, as well as uniform movement, are meaningful in the kinematic aspect without the physical.
4. That we may differentiate physical acceleration from kinematic is evidenced by Dooyeweerd's differentiation of physical space from original space [NC, ===]. Notice he talks about "the physical concept of acceleration" rather than acceleration as such. In fact, in the rest of the paragraph it is even clearer that when referring to the physical concept of acceleration he is talking about causes, not change in movement: "That is to say that physical movement cannot reveal the original nuclear meaning of movement, but must have an analogical sense, qualified by the very meaning-moment of energy. In its original modal sense movement cannot have the meaning of an effect of energy."
1. Physical rotation involves physical acceleration, and also often a dissipation of energy, so that such rotation always slows down. But pre-physical rotation does not. And may go on forever, in principle.
2. Kinematic rotation is defined as dA / dt, which is change in angle, by time.
3. (Note that the rotation of electrons around atomic nuclei goes on forever. So does that in superconductors. Is that evidence even in the physical realm for kinematic rotation?)
In my view, change as such may be understood without any reference to its cause.
It is unfortunate, in my view, that Strauss holds his view because it gives the kinematic aspect very 'thin' meaningfulness compared with others. Even more unfortunate, because it goes against our intuitive grasp of kinematics (which Dooyeweerd says is a more valid understanding of aspectual kernels than is a theoretical grasp, such as Strauss offers) but it would bar the science of phoronomy from investigating changing movement. My argument above allows it to. Even more unfortunate, he seems to build a large edifice of philosophical thought on his belief.
For me the soundest argument for the kinematical aspect in between the spatial and the physical is the notion of inertia that developed from Galileo and Newton. The View from Aristotle was that motion was somehow abnormal or unnatural. Thus things on earth moved because they were trying to find their 'natural state of rest' - in a world that presumably was trying to become static. The idea of inertia is that movement is an normal aspect of the functioning of the cosmos.
"Newton, in his first law of motion, came to formulate the idea of inertia in terms that open up the physical aspect - if a body deviates from uniform motion in a straight line, then it is because it is subject to a force.
"However, the significance for idea of inertia, in relation to the spatial aspect, is that movement - in all its anticipations - is a quite normal aspect of the being of the cosmos."
My comment: This is a useful insight, that, contrary to some Greek thought which held that rest and stasis are the 'good' or 'natural' states, movement and dynamism is indeed a 'good' and 'natural' state. Indeed, Dooyeweerd several times stressed that the cosmos and especially humanity are always 'restless'.
But to the extent that inertia presupposes mass (as it is defined in physics), then it must be of the physical aspect rather than kinematic. To be of the kinematic, inertia would have to be defined without reference to mass, i.e. as undeviating, unchanging movement. But even then I believe that from the kinematic aspect, movement can be changing, such as in rotation or acceleration.
Note that physical movement depends on kinematic but is not the same as it. For one thing, the kinematic aspect recognises uniform movement whereas this is meaningless in the physical aspect, and movement is only known in the physical aspect if it changes or is relative to another frame of reference. Moreover, physical movement speed can never exceed the speed of light, but kinematic movement can do so because no mass nor energy is involved. (Consider for example, the lines taken by two beams of light, which cross. Now turn one so that it becomes more parallel to the other, and the point at which they cross moves away. Keep turning, and eventually they are parallel; just before that, the point at which they cross, which is a kinematic and not physical fact, is moving at almost infinite speed.)
Physical movement and change may be seen as an analogy of the kinematic, because it involves laws other than the kinematic to explain it. They involve cause. For example, acceleration, in physics, is defined in terms of force and mass, whereas in kinematics it is defined purely as change of velocity.
Certainly, we have around us today a type of movement that Dooyeweerd would most likely not have experienced: that seen on a computer or television screen. There is no movement of physical things, but there is movement. Wertheimer (1912), the founder of the Gestalt movement, investigated this using alternately flashing lights and reported a kind of 'disembodied' movement, which he called 'phi' movement. Though he and many tried to reduce this to phenomena of the sensitive aspect, it would be dangerous to conclude that this is only sensory functioning and not true movement - just as it would be foolish to conclude that the black marks on paper are merely shapes and not words.
So perhaps computer and video animation is a kind of 'pure' movement that is concrete but without being of a physical body.
Concurring with this view is that I find that when putting a multimedia title together that contains animation rather than a simple sequence of static frames then the number of factors I have to get right increases enormously. (The number of factors one must take into account seems to multiply each time we gain another (later) aspect.) Moreover, animation seems to convey a completely different meaning from mere positioning of text and graphics.
This is part of The Dooyeweerd Pages, which explain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Questions or comments would be welcome.
Copyright (c) 2004 Andrew Basden. But you may use this material subject to conditions.
Written on the Amiga with Protext.
Created: by 16 March 1997. Last updated: 30 August 1998 rearranged and tidied. 24 December 1998 added Multilevel Flow Models and a theme. 13 September 1999 added re phi movement and did a bit of tidying; added notes from Dooyeweerd. 7 February 2001 copyright, email. 27 September 2001 wee change to themes. 24 August 2005 brought up to date with .nav,.end, a few changes. 22 September 2010 Dooyeweerd's and Basden's kernel. 5 October 2010 Roper on movement and Aristotle. 21 September 2016 briefly. 28 September 2017 diffce from physical movement. 30 January 2023 acceleration, rotation. 15 May 2024 rw intro a bit; section on Strauss; Physical movement; canon. 23 January 2025 without reference to cause. 30 Jan 2025 canon, bgc. 8 March 2025 2 perspectives on kinematic.