Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

being transcendent. Mathematical ‘forms’ are regarded as somehow pre-existent or transcendent and yet such a notion would be rejected wholesale if it were suggested for beauty or goodness. So there’s plenty of narrative going on here! And, as I’ve suggested in earlier chapters, all of the narratives summed up here include quite a bit of ‘essence’. I want to begin by considering metaphysics in general terms and then go on to look at some of the varieties of this and other types of truth-seeking that were looked at in previous chapters.

Metaphysics is the philosophical grand narrative, in various forms. But I’d suggest any metaphysics must acknowledge its inherent and inevitable contradiction. The contradiction is one that we touched on briefly in the previous chapter. Our mathematics and our observation of the world point to the possibility of perfection, but somehow we are unable to see how that perfection could be achieved from within the universe itself. And, of course, we can never step outside the universe to take ‘the view from eternity’, or a ‘God’s eye view’, if you prefer, and see how everything works (and perhaps even that would not solve things). Hence,

metaphysics, which has the intention, as discussed in Chapter 2, of discovering absolute necessary truths, has to deal with the fact that this seems not to be possible. The alternative is that boundaries must be set within which a meta-narrative remains valid. But Western culture is largely under the sway of a belief in absolute truth, expressed now as ‘scientism’. No boundaries to truth or knowledge are recognised. Proper science however — that is, where the scientific method is carefully applied

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