Process philosophy in healthcare - Part 5
A kinetic theory of everything
Thus far in this series on process philosophy I’ve argued that nothing in the world is ever static, that there is no transcendental realm ‘beyond’ this world, and that there is no singular, standard, universal time regulating life.
From all of this you might imagine that these interlinked arguments were all features of a thoroughly worked-through philosophy of process, movement, flux and flow. But that’s not the case.
Until very recently, there has been no definitive way to think about process in Western philosophy.
Certainly there have been enormous theoretical advances, but until Thomas Nail’s 2024 book The Philosophy of Movement there has been no distillation of all of this scholarship into a coherent philosophical system.1
The Philosophy of Movement is the distillation of a decade of scholarship (12 books in 12 years) that began with Nail’s study of migration and borders, but now encompasses a vast field ranging from the works of Lucretius and Aristotle, Bergson, Kant, Marx, Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari; space-time and quantum mechanics; cultural studies, history, art and architecture; OOO and the new materialisms; theories of objects, earth, and image; the writings of Virginia Woolf; psychology and noise studies.
At the outsetThe Philosophy of Movement tries to answer a simple question;
‘Why have some of the greatest minds of Western history dedicated their lives to the discovery of something genuinely immobile that could explain why things move? The Greek philosopher Aristotle imagined an “unmoved mover” who first propelled and gave order to the cosmos. The ancient scientist Archimedes imagined that if he had a fixed fulcrum and a lever long enough, he could move the earth. Later, the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes reinterpreted Archimedes’s fulcrum as a point of “certain knowledge” from which the rest of moving reality could be objectively known. Most modern thinkers, such as Descartes and Isaac Newton, also shared a belief that God was like an unmoving clockmaker who set our mechanical universe in motion while he remained still. Even Albert Einstein’s incorrect theory that we live in an finite “block universe” was part of the centuries-long effort to explain motion of something immobile’ (Nail 2024 p.2).
Nail argues that our entire system of thought makes sense of movement only by reference to a static world that itself doesn’t move.
We seem determined to explain movement away.
Which is odd, really, given that we don’t try to explain such grand concepts as time and space away. Instead we try to give compelling accounts of them and and validate their existence.
So why have we worked so hard to invalidate movement’s existence and its fundamental role in explaining how the world works?
Nail argues that this prejudice against movement goes back to our earliest systems of thought.
The early Greek philosophers believed that the universe was a giant spinning sphere with an absolute immobile core. Aristotle conceived of an ‘unmoved mover’ to explain purpose in the universe. World religions argued for the role of eternal god(s). Descartes looked for unquestionable, unchangeable first principles to explain events. Modern science looked for deterministic, immovable, constant, and universal laws of nature. Linguists created vast taxonomies of fixed things. Political theorists tried to establish first principles and moral absolutes. Evan the Kantian phenomenologists attempted to explain everything in the phenomenal world in terms of stable essence and concepts like being and identity.
For much of human history, then, movement has been seen as a ‘derivative and passive’ accidental side-effect of stasis (Nail 2024, p.3).
And this has had enormous consequences that extend far beyond esoteric questions of ontology and epistemology.
It allowed Western Man, for instance, to invent a Great Chain of Being that saw ‘stable’ and immobile things like the mind, reason, detachment, objectivity, form, the laws of nature, and God as superior to anything that was inherently mobile.
Things that were mobile: nature, bodies — women’s bodies especially — the weather, animals, viruses, were seen as inferior, lacking limits and reason, aimless, having no constituency or political voice, de-formed, unsettled, they are matter out of place, unbounded and indeterminate. They can be neither grasped nor defined.
People who lived in settled homes and communities, in orderly cities with strong established political systems and long-establishes social hierarchies were considered the Enlightened ones. While immigrants, nomads, vagrants, free thinkers, anarchists, the neurodivergent and non-conformist, crip and queer were labelled as mad, bad, dangerous, unruly, primitive and corrupt.2
The Philosophy of Movement rejects the whole premise that movement is a by-product of stasis, arguing instead for movement as first philosophy.3
What this means is that there is nothing before or outside movement.
The key principles underpinning Nail’s philosophy are that movement is:
Indeterminate, meaning that movement follows no pre-defined line, path, or fixed background, but is in a constant process of metamorphosis (Nail 2024, p42)4
Relational. This is not the kind of relation that links one determinate thing to another: there is no ‘A meets B’ here (see #1 above). Rather, relation is a metastable process that affects all change, everywhere, all the time and all at once. Or as Nail puts it, it is a ‘degree of simultaneous reciprocal change in an open process’ (p.44)
Processual. Again, this is not a process happening to a ‘thing’, as we often conceptualise it. Rather it is change in the nature of change itself
So, as Nail sees it, metastable states — what others call matter, objects and things — result from movement, not the other way around;
‘Energy flows in, cycles through, and then flows out — of everything. Structure and form are the metastable by-products of energetic flows. We should think of forms not as fixed, unchanging entities but as fabrics woven from crosscrossing threads’ (p. 50).
Nail argues that a philosophy of movement should not only be theoretically robust, but that it should be real. A philosophy of movement should be palpable and verifiable.
To that end, Nail offers literally hundreds of examples drawn from the natural world, geology, art, politics, aesthetics, science, religion, epistemology, and many other fields, of the way energy is in a constant process of dissipation and entropy, spreading out in fractal, dendritic patters from ‘hot’ to ‘cold’ states.
Nail sees four broad patterns of movement repeating throughout the universe:
Centripetal motion - where flows are gathered and organised into denser areas (think here of cities and towns, organised religions, the formation of planets, metastable states like mountain ranges, animals and plants)
Centrifugal motion - flows moving from organised, low entropy states to dissipated high entropy energy states (i.e. dendrites, river deltas, birth, the big bang, viral spread)
Tensional motion - the dendritic spreading out of energy with each of the distinct branches being held together and pushed apart at the same time (families, trees, stars and galaxy clusters, orbital motion, books, knowledge)
Elastic motion - adaptive and responsive expansion and contraction to prevent adapt to environmental conditions (colonialism, capitalism, leaves, music, dark matter)
Perhaps more than any coherent philosophical system developed so far, Nail’s philosophy of movement conforms to all of the principles of process philosophy:
It describes immanence without any recourse to a transcendental realm ‘beyond’ this world
It is about a constant generative process of creation and does not repeat a spatialised notion of linear time
It assumes no fixed identities, beings, or matter
And, perhaps most importantly, it is universal
Although Nail’s philosophy of movement has been a decade in its maturation, it is early days for its critical reception. Time will tell whether others see it as the distillation of pure process philosophy, and how it might be applicable for future research, thought and practice.5
So, with that, it seems like this is the right place to wrap up the theoretical parts of this series.
In a couple of week’s time I’ll try to pull all of this together, draw out some more explicit links to healthcare, and recommend some readings and resources if you’re interested in thinking more about process philosophy.
Until then.
Reference
Nail, T. (2024). The philosophy of movement. University of Minnesota Press.
Some might argue that Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze all provided coherent processual systems, but each one has been criticised in various ways for being vitalist, materialist, and transcendental in different ways.
Enlightenment in many languages refers to whiteness, whereas blackness and darkness are often relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy.
Although Nail’s work recognises a strong debt to the work of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the vitalists, new materialists, actor network theorists and speculative realists of the last century, he is at pains to show the important ways his approach differs from all of theirs.
Nail draws heavily here on the Lucretian concept of the ‘swerve’ to explain how and why movement moves this way.
Nail’s latest book project is provisionally titled Pink Noise and looks at 1/f patterns of motion are quite important to nearly everything including physical and mental health. Here is a short excerpt from the end of Chapter 1, still in draft form (so please don’t cite yet); ‘For the first time in history, a whole new wave of experimental and clinical researchers is building on spontaneous brain noise to understand consciousness, treat mental illness, and uncover the creative power of our non-conscious mind. The science of flux is far from solving all the mysteries of the brain, but we now know enough to see that a Copernican revolution has arrived that is already starting to change everything scientists and philosophers thought they knew. Its consequences go far beyond the realm of neuroscience. Flux is pushing us to reimagine evolution, society, how our thoughts evolved from non-conscious matter, how we design artificial intelligence systems, and how we care for ourselves and one another. With any luck, the future will be pink.’ The book will be out in 2025.