Sprocket 4: Energy
Energy is one of those words. It meaning wonderfully plastic and evolving. And yet in this case that evolution is made all the more complex because the very foundation of the idea of energy lies in something rather weird. Before the notion of energy was created at the end of the seventeenth century there has only been one way to understand physical change, and that was ‘motion and rest’. Motion was therefore described as if it were a material or an entity, a being in its own right. Bodies did not ‘move’ as such, but rather were said to actually be composed of motion and rest itself. To be and to be either moving or resting were one and the same. The trouble with this view was that it made the mathematics behind motion almost impossible to work out. Motion and rest confused two interrelated and yet different elements in ‘motion’, namely momentum and energy. These two faces of moving operate slightly differently (One is the integration of the other) are conserved at different point of the overall process, and each is embedded within their own distinct systems. The key difference here being that momentum relates to motion itself, any moving body has momentum, while energy is more about changes in that motion (it is the future then of the future, the power which moment on moment drives the difference). Newton’s second law states therefore that unless force is operating upon a body it will continue to move or remain fixed. Energy is the power to change motion, the power to change what is already changing, while momentum is merely the embodiment of that which is changing: A vital distinction.
However the idea of such a force was by no means an easy one for thought to encompass. The problem was that this power to change what was changing felt, until people became used to the maths too ‘personal’ too individual. I felt like there must be a something or perhaps someone responsible for such a willed change. Even worse that this the very ideas of energy appeared founded on a paradox. Here was something that to all intense and purpose appeared to be something ‘willed’ that is something
that acted as if it had a will, and yet it was couched in the domain of physical extension (that is the outside world), where no will, no mind could clearly be postulated. What is it if not ‘will’ that makes the compass point, the apple fall, or the fire hot? What is energy if it is not a will of something or someone.
The initial theories of energies worried at this in two distinct ways. On the one hand one ad Newton who suggested that energy was the direct design of God. Each force might be merely the blind embodiment of power, an action devoid of a reason in itself, and yet the fact that it was there, silently altering the world driving it this way or thought was a testimony of the design of the hidden creator. That creator than then devised energy as the means by which change happened, he has wound it creation through this power, and now leaves that power to enact the world. Energy was therefore what God put into the world to do the creating for him, so that he could be a hands off creator – and so incidentally leave room for Newton and for man to discover the secrets of nature.
The alternative viewpoint was tat one espoused by Leibniz. This view pint suggested that, to understand energy it was necessary to revisit how we understood ourselves and or ability to act. Maybe Leibniz said we have all our actions wrong. We assumed that they are the creation of something we call our ill and our mind.. tat is that they are caught up at the very end, in the very highest reaches of our being. Action will consciousness and conscience were all seen as falling together. Maybe Leibniz says this is wrong. Perhaps we need to understand action not in the big decision, but rather in the little, Tat is those myriad fragment of acting, the moving of the hand, the drinking of the coffee without thinking, the sudden flight f fancy unlooked for, that beset a mind. It his was the case one might develop a theory of ‘willed’ or even purposeful action beyond the scope of a discrete individual kind as we usually understand them. Action and purpose world not then be the product of the conscious will, but rather tied I to the physical construction of the universe. Little blind particles of purpose act through creation, driving it this way, and not that, making and remaking a world in their own myriad different images (Leibniz calls these Monads).
The initial idea of energy therefore was absolutely revolutionary. It punched a hole the universe of motion and rest, and demanded that thought we worked the entire themes of will, and purpose. Either one needed a mathematical god who set purposes that were predictable within the world once and for all, and left it at that, or else one had to fragment the idea of the mind, and allow micro purposed in elements that were clearly never conscious or thinking as such. Either way the old world were everything was measured in a man’s mind and through straight forward perception was over. There was something else, in the world, some energy that conjoined of will and power with something as unseen as the human mind itself, and only known through its effects upon the world. It was this latter hidden and yet present element tat of course really challenged thought. The problem was how to understand such an element. How des one allow for something which is measured as he mind is measured only in results, in what it does, and which like a mind appears to act upon the world and drive it this way and or, and yet does so without a clear body. Or perhaps it would be more truthful to say does so according to those powers those forces by which one has a body ones own right. Electricity I therefore at once a force in nature but also the power by which one runs ones own body. And how does one then understand that this energy is itself bound up in a predictable universe’s fragment of the will or the sliver of the agony which allows this matter to also be my body, is then caught up in laws and rules which ender it predictable. Here then one has a fragment of the will, n agency apparently of something kin to how the mind might drive the body, and yet one bound up in its very inception within a strictly defined mathematical set of rues.\ Human has then found shadow element, apparently akin to their own powers (and yet greatly extended) and yet ones that we rebound up with laws and rules and maths. The challenge was of course how to understand this apparent paradox. Here traditionally there are to main ways. On the one hand one can take the mathematical element of the equation as the defining feature of energy. If ten what matters is the predictability of forces, then human insofar as they are bound up in force ought also to be predictable. The human mind as then the manifestation of force becomes caught up in the network of predetermination and preplanning that might well be thought to drive such forces onwards. Humans understand the universe at the cot of becoming merely another facet in that understanding –predicted and caught machines.
O the other hand one might reverse this process. If one does not worry too much about the maths, then there is something rather magical about energy fields. These are after all a hidden transforming something than s within the world and within us. They are then in a sense that missing fragment or movement in which what we are as a body or mind within the world, and what the world is meets and are in some kind f accord. They are then the point at with we as individuals let the universe into ourselves and ourselves into the universe. A point of mysticism,. This point was well known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The objection that both Newton and Leibniz made to each others theories was that they allowed mysticism in, which of curse (if one ignores the maths) they do Energy is the paint where I s an individual mind meet I as a part in the universe and feel a universe break into a me.
The only other possibility to these two was developed by such thinkers as Kan. He attempted to pull out the creative elements of the human mind as they occur within the mind (imagination and reason), from how those creations are used to understand the world, Energy was therefore in a sense a mystery because it was the product of human ideas and human imagination. It was as an idea understandable in itself and for itself (we can mathematically it) and yet the framework that makes that idea (what is energy) is unthought and unthinkable or does not really make top much sense. This fact thought Kant insists ought not to by confused with the fact that humans a different level (that of will) are able to create sliding galaxies of ideas and mental creation, of which energy is merely one example. The Human mind then creates the idea of energy as part of a wider fed of creation, and the two ought not, Kant hopes to become confused.
However this formation of Kan in a sense does not solve the problem of energy, it merely replaces it with a new mystery, which oppose the masterful human with the passive but necessary creation. Humanity is hen the master, they make the call the tune, and yet they can only do so if there exits elsewhere something beyond humanity a thing in itself which conforms Thought becomes then peculiarly unrewarding. I scheme, I think I work out what is happening in the world, and yet in a senses I do nothing. Everything I think is merely product in a me, and has nothing to do with that mysteries something in the world. I waffle on understanding everything and yet reaching nothing is Kant's formula, it has a beautiful deflationary symmetry to t, one that exalts humanity only at the last movement to deflate them utterly. But given the extremity of this deflation it is on wonder that this deflation never really took on. Once the gloss fell form reason (perhaps under the Guillotines blade) then mankind was unlikely ever to accept this position of wises of fools.
The problem then was hw t understand that energy which of course becomes how to understand how energy binds us to creation and yet does so without binding that creation itself, and making us all mere passive pawn within it. The answer of course is that energy into far as it is not mathematical is freeing. And yet what is it if I is not about maths? Here there are perhaps four dominate answers.
The first is that energy might be all about creation or imagination. As Imagine I tap into something, I make something, I have a read energy, a real power. This formula was perhaps first devised by Kant in his final Critique (or justice). To have an energy’s therefore to be a creative element in a universe of creation. Was a move it is of course very attractive, and yet it then hit the philosophical heavy water as exactly what such creation is. That is what is he movement this energy is breaking through? When am I being ‘creative’. Is regurgitating others ideas and yet doing so off my own bat, as if I was creating them then and there creative Or not? Am I going to restrict creativity to one or to moments in a life or day or make it the stuff of all moments. That is it something I do all the time something that allows the universe itself to be (this is the Whitehead formula, the universe is created moment on moment or something I do from time to time admits the hurly burly of the fixed universe? This debate takes one right back t that row between Leibniz and Newton. Does God create the universe the once *and then rewind it from time to time) or is he at work all the time, creating the universe moment on moment?
The second alternative ties energy paradoxically enough) to history. Fragment sin history, be hey stone circles, crop circles or cliff paths are then felt to have an energy of their own. The universe becomes then a place an individual dissolves themselves into mystical and historical forces, a point other times always break though. There is a real poetry behind such a viewpoint, and yet a paradox as well .Energy never looses its associating with hard science. To talk then of a country pock marked in lines of power of lay lines is to be rendering the magic of history or the power the past not something akin to geology. The very creative power that one ought to be lauding is then occluded within something rather like predetermines, an all the power one wanted falters. One is caught in a mystical procreation that is ever but as restrictive and problematic and a physical one.
Thirdly energy might be linked to the way we inhabit that fragment f the universe than is our bodies. Our minds are after all the dragging ’force’ behind this part, they are what makes it act, and makes it different. This move is once again utterly valid in itself, The mystery of being a finite mind within a fragment f the universe is a deep one. However the problem with understanding that move in terms of energies is that it can very easily appear as if that mystery, the mystery that makes us ourselves is already solved. We become then to easy once again (and strangely predictable), and once aging the quest to express our own individuality though energy leads back to something akin to re-creation. The mystical energies of the body are no less tyrannical than the mathematical energies, they are merely more nebulous…
Finally energy might be used to capture something very real about humanity and its relationship to individuality. It was Spinoza who first formulated (again in the seventeenth century) the idea that a human is rather porous to their fellow humans, and that this porosity is not fixed but rather varies by occasion and circumstance. Two men might then talk of a male every or two women of feel, and mean by that they catch echo other up in a certain way, they intuit or understand each other in away others might not. Energy then becomes name for affects, tat is for those power beyond a me, those feeling between souls. As a world I is here rather useful, and certainly described something real. And yet I of one wonder whether given all the baggage of the word energy (and its confusion with the other uses in this sprocket) Maybe we should go back to that old seventeenth century word Affect which means the same, and yet lacks the confusion.
All energies are founded upon a very metaphysical notion: Te idea of hidden transformation which mirror the will but are other to them. As such they have at the core a challenge to our understanding. This challenge is best understood s a double one: we are challenged to allow other element into our bodies and our thoughts, challenged to allow for the world outside, and yet at the same time we must not let this outside (this possibly predictable world) overwhelm us in pre-created predetermines. Both these challenges are caught in the single idea of energy, and the challenge one faces to think the idea adequately is the challenge to allow each their proper power.
