Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

— would see our knowledge as a working hypothesis. This gives us a useful boundary. Most, if not all, of the alternatives discussed below have boundaries within which they express their particular type of truth. But as with scientism, the boundaries often go unacknowledged.

Many of the truth-seeking methods I’ve been describing in this work start with observation and then move swiftly to rationalism — trying to form coherent theories about the way the world works. From this there is sometimes even a leap to deriving meaning, values, ethics and morality from the truth that has been obtained. I have tried below to arrange the descriptions of the various narratives in such a way that they follow this pattern. So the first place to go is with the view that seems the most obvious one from the point of view of the ‘egocentric predicament’ with which we started the book. That is, the view that we know nothing outside our own minds, and thus, must suspect that everything else is illusion.

Idealism is the idea that reality only exists in the mind. Idealism is, if you will, a resolution of all our ‘splits’ — purely on the mysterian side of things. But the theory seems to have to assume some kind of real world in order to argue what it denies — that there is a real world! Idealism in its original form (George Berkeley — A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge) is sometimes termed as ‘absolute idealism’ (the ‘thing-in-itself’ can be known) in contrast to Kant’s transcendental idealism (the ‘thing-in-itself’ cannot be known). Variations on this are: reality being the thoughts of God (Berkeley) and

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