Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

something and nothing might not ultimately be real.

Goodness — or morality — raises further questions. There are those belief systems that would place goodness — along with all judgements of value and quality — in some separate category of existence. Perhaps there is a moral universe, distinct from our everyday experience — a transcendent morality. But there does not appear to be any way to demonstrate this. Even if the existence of a transcendent world or just a subjective world separate but equally real as the material world could somehow be demonstrated, this would not give any validity to the notion of a separate or an absolute morality.

Similar concerns to those raised for morality above could equally be applied to beauty — or aesthetics. Again there are no grounds for believing standards of beauty to have any absolute validity.

So the hope of finding absolute truth, goodness and beauty is, to say the least, optimistic! But we still cling to a hope — and even live out in practice — the idea that all these big three are indeed solid and immovable. Of necessity, a start must be made from the knowledge of the world that seems to be available — with the intimate presence of our own minds and the seeming endurance of an external reality. Perhaps our brains are hard-wired to process the world in particular ways. Or perhaps something about the way the world is in itself leads us inevitably to see it in the way that it is normally seen, even if the underlying reality is different.

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