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Definitions, and Comment:
Being a Description of the World
By Eli Siegel

9. Motion

Motion is the coming to be of a thing other than where it was.

Motion is a primary showing of reality as the same and different. Motion is an aspect of even a larger word, change; which can be defined as the being other of a thing; but there are changes which are not thought of as being just motion. In motion itself, we don’t think of the thing itself as having changed. For example, if a leaf has grown brown and wrinkled in autumn and moves in the air, the motion of the leaf, as such, is not of the leaf “intimately”; while the being brown and wrinkled is of the leaf. The totality of a thing in motion, considered only as being in motion, remains as it was; but if a thing is said to be changed, we think of it as changed in itself, too.

© 1945 by Eli Siegel, founder of Aesthetic Realism
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