Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

including scepticism, the existence of God and the nature of the soul. William of Occam included six areas of study for metaphysics — Being, Thing, Something, The One, The True and The Good. (All of these are critical to this work – even the distinction between things and somethings!) Robert Pirsig, in his book Lila, gave a very apt list of questions that metaphysics deals with. These are: Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our consciousness of it? Is reality reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially material or spiritual? And finally: Is the universe intelligible and orderly, or incomprehensible and chaotic? (Pirsig was quoting another author, but a reference is not provided.)

Truth, for Alfred Schopenhauer, is ‘…granted only a very short victory celebration between the two long periods of time when it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial.’ But even so, truth has taken on a special pre-eminence in modern times. Despite a certain scepticism around ‘experts’, somehow people still cling to a belief in an absolute truth in the form of verifiable correspondence with the observable world as being at least theoretically possible. The notion still holds sway even although looking more closely at such truth claims leads inevitably to an ever-receding horizon of possible knowledge about the world. Look close enough at matter, or energy, or force and it simply evaporates. Is there anything absolutely true? Perhaps just the statement, ‘something is going on’! But even that might be up for question! Even the difference between

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