Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

translated as soul today is the Greek, ‘psyche’ and the Latin, ‘anima’. According to Meister Eckhart it is the ‘scintilla animae’ (Latin — ‘spark of the soul’) that allows us to know God.

It seems likely that humanity will always speak of the soul, even if religious belief were to disappear from the world entirely. And maybe therefore things make more sense when they are addressed to our souls rather than to our minds and bodies. It was Emile Durkheim’s idea that people are Homo Duplex. Normally our lives are lived in the ordinary profane world, but our greatest joy is achieved in the brief moments of crossing over into the sacred world — the world of soul.

Descartes (Discourse on Method) gives us the sentence: ‘This me, that is to say, the soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body, and even that it is easier to know than the body, and moreover, and even if the body were not, it would not cease to be all that it is.’ (More modern translations of Descartes usually refer to mind rather than soul, and it is difficult to know exactly what he meant. But the use of soul here — as I’ve explained earlier — harks back to Plato’s distinction of soul and body. See Chapter 8.) Once again, note that despite soul (mind) being absolutely fundamental to Descartes, it’s matter that has become the privileged substance — and Descartes somehow gets the blame!

For Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) the soul is the form of something, therefore somehow of more substance than physical appearance. Aristotle’s view on the soul is, however, quite

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