Chapter I. The Phenomenology of Force
1. Foreword
And we see that a certain force acts in everything.
Nicholas of Cusa
One cannot help noticing that the topic of force never emerged in the history of philosophical thought as a problem that would give birth to various schools, currents or directions of thought. Philosophical battles centered for the most part on the categorical-conceptual pair "matter-spirit" and the related permanent sacramental question: which comes first? The two different answers resulted in the two great directions of philosophy: materialism and idealism, which have been duking it out for over two-and-a-half millennia and continue battle to this day. Force, however, along with the categories of matter, motion, time and space, is constantly present in these arguments under this or that name, sometimes taking place right alongside matter and spirit, occasionally even supplanting them. One notices immediately that philosophers of both directions made use of force as a categorical tool. This mutual interest in force may mean that it stands above ideologies and currents, that it contains, therefore, something universal. If this supposition were proved - or even if only it could be given a theoretical basis - then force could become the base for creating a theory that would unite three worlds: the inorganic, the organic and the social worlds. But that is just my supposition.
First, I would like to present here two opposing views of force from scholars whose weight in the study of the phenomena of life is undoubtedly great. The first one belongs to Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote in one of his works: "Force arises from dearth or abundance; it is the child of physical motion, and the grand-child of spiritual motion, and the mother and origin of gravity."
The other one belongs to the renowned English philosopher George Berkeley who lived a century later than Leonardo. In his text Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher, Berkeley gave an entirely different evaluation of force:
E u p h r a n o r. …Let me entreat you, Alciphron, be not amused by terms; let aside the word force, and exclude every other thing from your thoughts, and then you see what precise idea you have of force.
A l c i p h r o n. Force is that in bodies which produceth motion and other sensible effects.
E. It is then something distinct from those effects?
A. It is.
E. Be pleased now to exclude the consideration of its subject and effects. and contemplate force itself in its own precise idea.
A. I profess I find it no such easy matter.
E. …And that which it seems neither you nor I can frame an idea of, by your own remark of men's mind and faculties being made much alike, we may suppose others have no more an idea of than we.
One has to admit that Berkeley was partly right: to this day, neither the social nor even the natural sciences have developed a clear, precise idea of force. This despite the fact that force is one of the most frequently used words in any branch of science. Moreover, the world has been using for a long time laws of force - in physics, for instance - but the matter of what force is in itself remains a puzzle.
Practically all philosophers of note have addressed the problems related to force, believing that they had grasped the essence of force. Nonetheless, not one of their interpretations of force has become generally accepted, not one has become a universal category or a universal concept - in other words, none became a law that would confer such persuasive strength on the process of cognizing nature and society as, say, Hegel's laws of dialectics.
This conclusion means only that researchers are still facing a wide-open field for analyzing the elusive force. One important tool for this analysis is the determination of predecessors' views on force. Naturally, it is the first stage in approaching the concept of force, so this is where this work starts.
Even though, as noted above, the word "force" - sometimes even with a conceptual or a categorical hue - has been used by practically all philosophers, I shall present here in my analysis the views of only those authors who attempted to give a definition of force, to understand what force is in itself (or force-in-itself), i.e. elevate this word to the level of concept or category. This is precisely why I declined to present in this chapter - with few exceptions - natural scientists' views on force, since the word interested them not from the ontological perspective, but rather in the applied meaning, in accordance with their area of research. As a result, I "dropped" such names as Roger Bacon, William Gilbert, Copernicus, Galileo, Keppler and many others.
Those who made attempts to figure out force on the philosophical level were rather few. I do not intend to criticize those authors; they lived in remote times, immersed in different paradigms of science, and it would be silly to accuse them of failing to understand something from today's perspective. On the contrary, one cannot help being amazed and admiring of their insights, their often-brilliant guesses about the infinite complexity of matter made hundreds or even thousands of years ago. My objective is to present the ideas of these selected philosophers about force, and the context in which they understood or analyzed the word "force". In other words, I show whether they view force as a quantitative measure of something or they see it as a certain quality, as an independent phenomenon of Being. Hence the necessarily abundant quoting (it is hard to retell a philosopher without distorting his thoughts) with some comments and summaries. My own interpretation of force will be given a separate paragraph.
Even though this Foreword has already reached excessive length, I must say here a few words about materialism and idealism.
It is not by chance that Western philosophy starts with the elemental materialism of the Miletian school, since the first stage of the thinking process starts with summarizing sensual perceptions. On this level, the most frequently noticed phenomena became the "primary foundation" of all in existence (water, air, fire, earth). A certain stage of development of philosophical thought was needed to make the transition from senses to the rational ("positive reason", in Hegel's words), which proceeded to form concepts that gave impetus to ideological currents. The combination of the two gave rise to a whole lot of philosophers - the so-called deists - who could not be placed unequivocally in either the materialist or the idealist camp. Materialism, it should be noted, underwent in its development the classic Hegelian triad: from naive materialism through the mechanistic to the dialectical materialism. Idealism, on the other hand, remained basically the same, despite its many varieties, since the idea of God always proves salvational. Whenever a theory cannot be completed or the depths of some problem cannot be plumbed, God comes to the rescue every time. Nonetheless, a tremendous potential for thinking is contained in idealism: its dialectics.
Prior to Marx and Engels, dialectics developed for the most part in the realm of idealism, for sophisticated methods of thinking were needed to prove the "existence" of God or of inexplicable puzzles of Being, while the elemental or metaphysical materialists had no need of that. All this does not mean that the division of philosophers into two camps was precisely defined by their views on matter and spirit. From the very start, elements of both often became intertwined, especially since the early Greek materialists did believe in gods. The place they accorded to these gods - now that is another matter. Hesiod wrote, for example:
Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all.
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)