The Moves

Move 4

A new system

To restart, when the old arrangement will not hold.

The old components and relations are set aside together, and the picture is built again from a new base.

• Descartes. He doubted everything that could be doubted and rebuilt from the one certainty left, his own thinking: a city planned by a single architect.
• Hume. He followed experience to its end and reached a different arrangement altogether: all ideas come from impressions, cause is only habit, the self is a bundle of perceptions, and morality rests on feeling, since “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”
• Einstein’s relativity. Absolute space and absolute time, the frame of Newton’s physics, gave way to a single spacetime shaped by matter and energy.

Even a new system never starts from nothing. Descartes kept God, mathematics and much of the old vocabulary. A new system is usually the third move carried to its limit.

Built by Umair Malik while studying Iqbal · Your Commentator