Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

11. Philosophical Views on the

Soul

‘The light of modern consciousness burns brightly, but the earth was never meant to be bare of trees, nor our souls fully exposed to the light of reason. We are meant to include some element of uncharted terrain in our makeup. A clear-cut area becomes drier and less fertile with time, just as we, too, are diminished by a modern mind-set that wants to elevate critical thought and industry at the expense of vision and spirit.’

Mary Reynolds Thompson

The soul is clearly the most decisive expression of our human fascination with essence. If it is difficult to prove the existence of consciousness, things are even more difficult when it comes to the terms soul and spirit. The Greek word, ‘daimon’, for instance, originally seemed to refer to some intermediary between the divine and the Earthly realm, but sometimes referred more directly to the divine. The Greeks also had the word ‘bios’ and then (from Plato’s, Timaeus) there is ‘demiurge’ (Greek for craftsman) that is the intermediary who makes the physical world (from the spiritual world of perfect forms). The closest there is to a word that could be

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