Like the problem of change, movement is one of the most persistent issues in philosophy. Aristotle also called movement to change and is the one who manages to think it conceptually through the concepts of act and potency. According to his logic, change consists in passing from non-being to being. He considered non-being as being in potency and being he imagined as being in act. Movement is precisely this passage from being in potency to being in act.
A change in potency is a movement from being a beginner to ceasing to be a beginner to becoming a skier, and from not being a skier in act to being a skier in act. It can be inferred that a beginner is a skier in potential, not in act, as he is not yet a skier. Each athlete is what he is in act and is also what he can become in potential: a great athlete, or a non-athlete if he desists.
In sensible skiing, things are subject to change. If we were to change, we would have potency; the potency to change. As all change is movement, all movement is change, such as when we change our posture through a movement or a change of place through a displacement towards that place.
The perpetual change that we observe in each translation, the flow of skiing, is precisely the transition from potency to act. Our movement is a transition from being-in-potency to being-in-act. Potency and act are two states of being a skier that seamlessly coexist without any interruptions in daily skiing.
A beginner who listen to the instructor in the lesson is in act of becoming a skier; the person who decides to take a ski lesson is in potency of transforming into a better skier and who, after the lesson, is in act of being a better skier.
This Aristotelian argument is founded on the Principle of causality. By proving that we pass from potency to act, that is, we move, we confirm the existence of a series of efficient causes, since we cannot pass from potency to act except under the action of a cause.
But, in reality, what is movement? According to physics, movement is the change of position of a body from one place to another within a given time. Movement, also known as motion on snow, is a change of place in space as a function of time. We are in an initial state A, then in an end state B. Each of these states is a place that our body occupies in space and between these two states infinite body states are interspersed, thus obtaining a trajectory, that is, what the displacement decays in space.
We then consider movement and motion to be time divided into states, each of which represents a place where our body would be if we were to interrupt displacement there. This ‘being passing’ from one state to another is movement, or motion if we are in translation.
The following types of substantial change arise:
- Quantitative change, such as the beginner increasing the amount of technical skills; an athlete developing quantitative changes in body weight through physical training of his musculature; a skier increasing the variety of evolutions he masters; or the amount of snow accumulated on a slope.
- Qualitative change refers to the development of our skills.
- Change of place, commonly called “motion”, which in our case is gliding.
So, when we ski, we undergo changes that can be either quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative changes are evolutionary, while qualitative changes are revolutionary.
Concluding, our characteristic as skiers is change, i.e., we move as we are in motion. We develop changes internally in terms of our technique, or externally in the form of displacement. Although this statement appears as implicit, we still resist change. In this circumstance, it is wise to recollect Heraclitus’ statement that the only constant is change.
