Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview
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C O N A T U S
14. Contenders for the Big Picture
‘The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’
Bertrand Russell
This chapter acts as a kind of summary for what has been explored in previous chapters. If anything, it puts even more emphasis on the idea that we live in stories and getting to any kind of genuine truth is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. So, we can only pick our stories.
In picking a personal story, I suspect, we need the guidance of a wider story, a meta-narrative. A meta-narrative is a broad story adopted by a culture, society or nation. It is something that can explain, not just truth and knowledge, but also offer us a guide on how to live and even offer us a purpose for doing so.
The strange situation we face today is that it is often claimed that grand narratives belong to the past, whilst modern folk have somehow got beyond such things and deal in truth — pure and simple. At the same time, Western culture also seems to embrace truth as an ultimate value and quite readily speculates on truth as
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