Rediscovering Meaning through the Motion of Life

Reentering a World Alive with Meaning and Purpose

Imagine a man standing on a hill in Athens in the 4th century BC. It’s midsummer, the sun is high, and his throat is parched. He climbs the hill to catch a view of the city and find some peace. Near the summit, he rests beneath a tree. He thanks the tree for giving him shelter, but for him the tree’s utility—its ability to provide him shade from the midday sun—is not its sole or even major significance. Unlike us who see the significance of something as equitable to its degree of utility for us—its instrumentality—this man senses the very life of the tree, its growth, its motion from seed to towering form, as the exhibition of its intrinsic meaningfulness. It, like all beings, is drawn into motion by the Divine thinker’s thoughts and the desire to fulfill them. Its meaning thus lies not outside itself, but in its very essence. From the time it was a seed it had a built-in significance—a purpose it seeks to fulfill, an end it strives to bring into being.

This is the reason for which it germinates in the soil. Why its roots grasp the soil, the trunk widens, the limbs branch out and leaves sprout from the limbs—all of this is part of the motion by which it fulfills its purpose.

As the Stagirite taught him, there is no motion without meaning. From the indeterminate pure potentiality out of which it is drawn into being until its eventual corruption and dissolving into the ground, it participates in the ceaseless dance of becoming—the motion of life.

As his master taught him, the only constant is change. All things are in process—either becoming or decaying. And so, to know what anything is, one must look not merely at its static form, but at the motion by which it comes into itself. A thing reveals what it is by how it comes into being and fulfills the perfection toward which it is called. From late antiquity to the threshold of modernity, this was the prevailing vision of reality: the world was not inert but alive, and to be educated in philosophy or theology was to see each thing as in the motion—living, moving, striving to fulfill a built-in purpose.

In such a world, nature is not simply matter extended in space as we think of it—atoms we mold to fit our designs—but so many beings participating in the motion of life, each one a moment of a larger purpose which it itself unfolds.

This, of course, stands at great odds with our view of nature today. To fully grasp how different it is from our view of nature today it will do us well to move beyond this follower of Aristotle’s encounter with the tree to identify the foundational principles that allowed this vision of nature to persist so long in history—even up until about five or six hundred years ago. This will require us to look at his notion of the four causes or explanations which determine the essence of a being, and how they allowed for meaning which has been taken away from us today.

The Motion of Life

According to Aristotle, the cosmos is full of beings with built-in blueprints, determined by the thinker of thoughts, the divine mind. To speak of nature is, therefore, to speak of both a divine and an inner logic—an intelligible order which imprints itself into things by drawing them with its goodness into being. To understand anything, thus, one must ask not only what it is made of, but why it exists, what brings it into existence, what form it seeks to take, and what end it seeks to fulfill. Aristotle called these the four aitia (causes, or explanations of the essence or nature of a thing).

The efficient cause is what initiates the process of becoming. The sculptor is the efficient cause of a statue. Parents are the efficient cause of a child. The efficient causes of a tree include the germination of the seed, the nourishing action of sunlight and water, and all the conditions that bring the tree into being.

The material cause is what something is made from—the stuff that receives form. Bronze or marble makes a statue. Wood and sap, fiber and cellular structure, make a tree. Living tissue, the flesh and blood, form a human being.

The formal cause is the defining structure or pattern that allows one to identify something as something. It is what makes a statue Athena rather than Apollo. It is what makes a pine tree distinct from an oak tree and a human being different from a horse. The formal cause is the invisible structure or essence defining a thing—the internal blueprint it actualizes.

And, finally, the fourth cause is the final cause: the end toward which a thing naturally moves—the purpose it desires and is drawn into being or begins its motion to become. A tree grows roots and rises out of the ground, limbs and branches to bear fruit, drop its seed, and in doing so completes its cycle. A human being does not merely fulfill its end by existing, but by perfecting its existence through cultivation of virtue and obtaining eudaimonia or well-being—by flourishing.

The final cause is not a mere appendage. It is the governing principle. Without it, the thing would remain unintelligible—like a journey without a destination. A thing’s being is inseparable from what it strives, by nature, to become.

For Aristotle, this ceaseless becoming—this ordered motion of the cosmos—logically entailed an ultimate source: a cause of motion which itself is unmoved. This is where his notion of the Prime Mover is derived, who over time would be seen as pure actuality, the eternal origin of all movement, not by pushing things around, but by drawing them into being, as its thinking of thoughts is the very Good that all things desire. The entire cosmos—every entity, every being—is in motion, is in the process of becoming because it is drawn toward divine perfection, like a lover drawn to its beloved.

This vision, especially of each thing being drawn by desire for the Good, for divine perfection by bring into being the divine thought, didn’t fully get fleshed out until Aristotle’s thought was taken up and further developed by late-antique Neoplatonic pagan and Christian thinkers.^[i] They came to see that beings not only move toward the fulfillment of their formal or final cause, but in doing so toward deeper unity and participation in the source of all. What Aristotle named the Good, they came to understand not only as the Good, but as the One—proceeding and overflowing as what we call Being.

In this vision, all motion is participation: to become what one is, is to draw closer to the source from which all things come and to which all things return. A tree fulfills its nature not only in itself, but in relation to the larger harmony it reflects. A human being becomes more truly human by participating—through wisdom, goodness, and virtue—in a higher, more perfect reality. The end of motion is not merely completion, but henosis or theosis—union with the Divine. To be is to become, and to become is to ascend. The world is not a lifeless chain of causes going back to the big bang—as we now imagine it—but an ongoing movement toward union with the One from whom all things arise and in whom all things find their being and, most of all, their fulfillment.

Meaningless Motion

Yet this vision of purposeful motion—once intuitive, compelling, and universally shared—did not survive intact. By the end of the medieval period and the birthing pangs of modernity, the cosmos gradually ceased to appear alive and meaningful. Something fundamental changed.

Where Aristotle saw intrinsic purpose, a cosmic dance of becoming, the modern mind began to perceive only mechanical interaction. The universe increasingly became but a long row of dominoes knocking into each other in a mechanical chain reaction. Like a billiard table, with balls colliding and ricocheting aimlessly on the felt, so was the universe. A thing remained in motion unless another thing or force with no inherent meaning stopped it. It was motion without direction, desire, fulfillment, or end; effects without discernable purpose. Each collision became intelligible only in isolation from the others. Each event led to the next, but the series it set in motion meant nothing. There was no intentionality or desire in nature. The motion of life was now meaningless motion. The cosmos became a universe, a purposeful whole, a machine explained entirely by physical laws, mathematical regularities, and brute causation. Things happened not to fulfill their natures, but because prior events compelled them.

How Motion Lost Its Meaning

How exactly did this happen? How did a world once vividly alive—a cosmos filled with purpose, intelligibility, and intrinsic direction—gradually become little more than mechanical objects, empty of inherent meaning?

This transformation wasn’t instantaneous. It was a slow shift in perception, unfolding over centuries, changing how people experienced the world itself. Three key steps mark this shift—each one moving humanity further from a cosmos brimming with meaning, toward a universe governed solely by mechanical forces.

First: Losing the Connection to the Divine Mind (Nominalism)

For most of human history, the world appeared to be filled with a deep inner connection. Every oak tree shared in a deeper reality called "treeness," a universal form anchored in the thought of the Divine Mind. Because of this shared essence, each seed moved purposefully, naturally unfolding out of desire to fulfill an inherent purpose. A rose did not merely bloom because conditions forced it to; it blossomed because by nature it was drawn toward fulfilling the potential built into it to display, and thus, participate in Beauty. Everything was connected—not simply by resemblance, but by participating in universal truths anchored in a divine intelligence.

Yet, in the fourteenth century, William of Ockham challenged this vision at its core. He argued there was no real universal essence—no shared "treeness” existed independently of trees and "Beauty" was but in the eye of the beholder rather than put on display by and participated in by roses. For Ockham, each thing was isolated and particular, standing alone.

This seemingly subtle idea had profound consequences. Without universals anchored in the divine mind, each tree became isolated, cut off from a deeper purpose. Without a universal nature, an acorn no longer had any inner blueprint guiding it toward becoming an oak. Each thing simply existed individually, without intrinsic direction or guarantee of any final cause. The inner connectedness, the cosmic dance guided by divine purpose, began to dissolve.

Thus, the meaningfulness of reality itself started to erode: trees, rivers, and stars no longer inherently reflected universal truths or divine purposes—they were merely individual things existing side-by-side, without deeper connection or inherent meaning.

Second: Meaning Withdraws into the Mind (Descartes)

Once nature was deprived of universal, intrinsic meaning, a new crisis arose: where could meaning reside? If the external world lacked inherent purpose, how could anything possess meaning at all?

René Descartes resolved this crisis by splitting reality sharply in two. On one side was res extensa—matter extended in space: measurable, predictable, but entirely devoid of inner life or inherent purpose. On the other side stood res cogitans—the realm of thought, consciousness, and meaning. In this new vision, meaning was no longer something encountered in the outer world. Instead, it retreated inside the individual, becoming the exclusive property of the observing mind.

This radical division changed how humans experienced reality. Previously, meaning pressed upon them from outside, revealed by nature’s participation in divine truths. Now, meaning was projected outward by the human mind, onto an otherwise meaningless, mechanical reality. A tree’s significance no longer flowed naturally from the purpose it’s motion put on display. Rather, it depended solely on how it could be used—how useful it was to each individual human being in fulfilling their particular designs for it.

Reality itself was reduced to something passive and inert. What once was a vibrant cosmos of becoming now stood silent, awaiting meaning imposed from outside—from a consciousness standing apart and above.

Third: Completing the Mechanical Universe (Newton)

Finally, Isaac Newton crystallized this transformation, sealing it permanently. Building upon Okham’s erosion of universals and Descartes’ division of reality, Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation completed the shift toward a purely mechanical universe.

In Newton’s cosmos, motion was entirely explained by external, measurable forces. Things no longer moved due to inner desires or intrinsic direction, but because something else compelled them—gravity, inertia, momentum. The cosmos became a perfectly predictable clockwork, governed entirely by mathematical equations, devoid of hidden essences or deeper meanings.

The trees no longer rose toward fulfillment. They merely responded mechanically to external conditions—sunlight, nutrients, moisture. Stars no longer silently called humans toward awe or contemplation; they burned indifferently in a measurable void. The entire universe, once vibrant with inner purpose and divine participation, had finally become a cold machine: predictable, mechanical, and indifferent.

Thus, nature itself became naturalistic, mechanical, and empty of intrinsic meaning. Everything happened because prior events compelled them. Like billiard balls bouncing off one another across a felt table or dominoes tumbling in sequence, things just simply were moving because of one thing bouncing into (or reacting to) another event. No longer did anything inherently desire or strive toward fulfillment, rather we sought to use it for our fulfillment by tearing it apart and reconfiguring it to a design we thought would make it useful to our plans or increase our comfort.

Through this three-step historical progression—from Ockham’s isolation of particulars, to Descartes’ confinement of meaning within subjective consciousness, to Newton’s copyright of a law based naturalistic machine—the rich, purposeful motion of life finally lost its intrinsic meaning. The cosmos ceased to be a living order guided by divine mind and purpose. It had become the mechanical universe we inhabit today.

Recovering the Motion of Life

Today, when we stand beneath a tree, we typically notice it only as far as it serves a purpose for us. If someone asked us what a tree’s purpose was, we’d likely say something like providing lumber for houses or cabinets, or bearing fruit for us to eat. Rarely, if ever, do we pause to contemplate how the tree’s motion—its slow, patient becoming—is directed toward something more than utility. We seldom recognize how the graceful unfurling of leaves in spring, or their vibrant shift of color in autumn, signifies an intrinsic purpose, a reflection of a deeper reality in which the tree participates: a divine idea or logic independent of any human usefulness, existing purely because it is good, beautiful, and true.

But after journeying through time, clearly seeing the contrast between the ancient perception of reality and our own—and how historical shifts have diminished our capacity to let meaning be expressed tangibly by anything outside us—perhaps it becomes plausible, at least, to wonder if that tree on the hill isn’t exactly like the trees lining suburban streets or the towering redwoods filling Muir Woods in California.

The difference between how people saw things until roughly six hundred years ago and how we see them today is not a necessary development. Rather, it is rooted in the relocation of meaning—from being anchored in the motion of life, in the capacity of beings to impress upon us their intrinsic logic, their beauty, their participation in transcendentals (truth, beauty, and goodness inherent in the thoughts of the Divine Mind)—to being grounded merely in our subjective designs, in our desires about what we can do with things or how we can use them.

But just as we instinctively sense the gravity and integrity of another human being when we look into their eyes—feeling compelled to look away if we intend to deceive or conceal something—so too does the sheer givenness of the world press gently, yet insistently, upon us, inviting us back into relationship. If only we would cease standing apart from and above things, ceasing to reduce them to mere means for our ends, we might again perceive how they, in themselves, are alive—imbued with an intrinsic logic, moving toward their own fulfillment.

A tree, then, is not merely wood to be harvested, but a living being quietly striving to perfect its nature. A river is more than a resource; it is an emblem of life’s ceaseless and purposeful movement. The stars are not just distant fires, but radiant signs calling us upward into contemplation and wonder.

Recovering meaning thus involves a quiet yet radical shift in our gaze. It does not require rejecting science or abandoning what we know about the workings of the world. Rather, it demands only a simple yet profound act of attention, a willingness to let the world itself address us, impress itself upon us, and speak again its own language of form and fulfillment.

In truth, we need not invent meaning or impose it upon the world. It awaits us already—in the patient growth of trees, in the steady rhythm of flowing waters, in the silent, steadfast brilliance of stars, and within our own lives—in the quiet gravity by which all things are drawn toward the Good.

This recovery of meaning is neither nostalgia nor retreat. Rather, it is a rediscovery of reality as it has always been: alive, intelligible, purposeful, and deeply good.

The motion of life never ceased. It is we who forgot how to see. Perhaps now, by remembering how to look again, we might find our place once more—not merely as detached observers or manipulators of nature, but as participants returning to join in its ceaseless, beautiful, and purposeful dance.

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^[i] Nevertheless, as some have shown, it was a logical progression built into his metaphysics. See David Bradshaw’s Aristotle: East and West.