Into the River

πάντα ῥεῖ

Human life is movement. From one breath to the next. From cradle to grave. From famine to feast. From war to peace, and back again. Beyond ourselves, we see that other life moves too, in ways that often remind us of ourselves. As we move, we inevitably discover different kinds of motion. I am going to separate two kinds here: conscious and unconscious. Some movement we engage accidentally, without thinking or planning. This movement is unconscious. Other movement comes about with some intention from us: a will to act or react, a choice. This movement is conscious.

Unconscious movements are prior to the conscious. A child within the womb is already moving, even before it is a child. Once born, it continues to complete most motions with reflexes that are called autonomic from our observation that they do not require conscious decision as a matter of course. From these unconscious motions--among them, out of them, alongside them--deliberate actions arise, as flowers from the soil, we might say.

Much has been made of the mystery of our will, our ability to act deliberately, and its likeness to or difference from similar will elsewhere, among animals and even plants that respond to their environment with action that looks intentional. For my purposes, close definitions are not needed. All I want is a literary distinction: words to mark the repeated observation that we move sometimes willfully, sometimes not, and that our lives demand both movements. If all unconscious movement in my body ceases, I am dead: the breath of life has left me. If I abandon all conscious movement, I am again dead: what remains is a body with no soul.

As I live and move, consciously and not, I encounter different horizons for deliberate action. Each horizon presents different opportunities, different incentives to make choices. What separates the horizons is scale: some occur very close to me, in the time and space that we observe. I mean close in both senses: near my size, materially speaking, and near to me in time. Other horizons are more distant, so distant eventually that my outlook upon them must change significantly when compared with the way I regard the near. I cannot watch the weather precisely the way I watch my breath, making no distinctions between them, for the weather is much greater: older, in time, and vaster, in its material extent. Historical appreciation for this observed reality leads to a profusion of cosmologies describing the various worlds we know, from the smallest and nearest to the largest and farthest. I shall attempt to summarize them all as depicting four different horizons for human action.  

ante diem XVII Kalendas Octobres, anno Domini MMXIX                                                          --JGM.