Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

only conjecture and probably still fraught with as many difficulties that arise if we were to take consciousness or God to be the ultimate substrate. Once again, I am not wishing to claim that what I’ve been describing here is exactly Aristotle’s meaning, but I think it is at least in the spirit of his thinking.

As discussed in the Introduction, there are always assumptions in our search for truth. Something at the back of all investigations, which is there as a controlling narrative but which is rarely questioned and sometimes not even acknowledged. Often it’s the assumption of dead matter — and if possible, nothing else of any kind existing — that lurks behind most scientific experiments today, even experiments in biology. So how about starting with an alternative concept — everything is hooked up to everything else, so how is this (whatever it is that’s being investigated) how is this hooked up? Scientists such as Danah Zohar and Rupert Sheldrake try to make these kind of connections. What if science started out with the assumption of the body, the mind and our way of being in the world — started out with the idea of connection? Or started, say, with biology as the primary discipline instead of physics?

What this chapter has been suggesting is that the mysterian version of form, which has been explored in previous chapters, is not actually critical to our understanding of soul. If we were to put Aristotle’s quote from above — 'if the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul’ — together with another of his famous quotes — ‘the soul is the form of the body’ — then we can

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