Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

up that easily! At the moment our worlds of consciousness seem to be resisting! There are still other types of truth-seeking — beyond the empirical and the rational — that we can call upon to try to make sense of transcendence and, in turn, to try to answer those fundamental questions about what grounds the world of experience.

Another thought is that when we map the world (such as by way of devising abstract truths) then we are, in a sense, creating a transcendent realm of truth, even if none had existed before. There are maps and there are maps! So we have to ask, just what does correspondence mean when it comes to our map-making? A phenomenological view of the world is on the verge of suggesting that map-making is really not possible — that there is only experience.

In terms of narrative, people often want to believe in some kind of ‘otherness’ — a separate spiritual realm that would lend legitimacy to values — or at least some sense of the sacred. These notions seem useful to us in that they integrate so many aspects of life and seem to suggest that there is something beyond ourselves in which our beliefs can be placed. This narrative must, in turn, implicitly or explicitly rely on some kind of transcendence. Some kind of ‘bigger picture’ is needed to make sense of our lives — whether that bigger picture is society or belief in a God or belief in a soul.

So, with this notion of transcendence, there is the most radical split into the mysterian realm. Not only that but there is the possibility that our ‘true selves’ — our essence — may actually live

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