Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

translates as ‘the clear light of the void’.)

There is (from Plato, apparently quoting Parmenides) the One, the ‘One-Many’ (Spirit) and the ‘One-and-Many’ (the world soul or ‘anima mundi’, also known as ‘psuchê tu kosmou’ or Zoë (from Plato and Aristotle). Plus there are individual souls (‘bios’ or ‘psyche’ in Aristotle) and then the physical universe. (Another idea — not from Aristotle — was that bios, the individual souls, hang from the great necklace of being — again referred to as Zoë.) The soul’s situation of being somewhere between Spirit and matter is referred to as ‘hypostasis’ (or sometimes ‘ousia’) meaning true being, entity, essence or substance. The communication between the various states (One to One-Many, One-Many to One-and-Many) is referred to as ‘metaxy’, or ‘metaxu’. For Plato, metaxy was to be between two contrasting poles. Humanity’s metaxy is to be between the animal world of body and (for him) the transcendent world of soul.

To summarise then, we have the ‘One’, through Spirit giving rise to ‘form’. Eros is the name given to this first link (One to One-Many, or Spirit). Then through the world soul, this gives rise to individual souls, which in turn give rise to consciousness, then through daimon, consciousness gives rise to matter. This seems to be the arrangement of things as we get them from Parmenides, Pythagoras and Plotinus. Whilst it is difficult to fathom out all of the above terms, it is perhaps helpful to think of there always being a ‘third thing’ over and above any pair of things presented to us by experience — although ‘experience’ may not be

135