Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

‘ideals’ or ‘forms’, which in turn influence or control our world. (In Plato’s case, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, the transcendental realm is the world of ‘perfect forms’.) Kant, Schopenhauer and others have taken up this idea in their noumenon/phenomenon split. From a modern perspective, this might seem far-fetched. But I suggest that transcendental idealism is still practised, even although its truth is denied. There is still an implicit belief in absolute truth, an absolute standard of morality and sometimes an absolute aesthetic standard. As previously explained, this belief is known broadly as ‘conceptualism’ and conceptualism still holds sway — scientific truth, ‘fairness’ as the standard for ethics and an absolute certainty in what is considered to be beautiful.

Religion — which we’ve looked at over the last couple of chapters — is often seen as a prime example of a meta-narrative. Looking at religious belief introduced the idea of a revealed truth (it could be said, in contrast to a discovered truth) and personal truth. The concern with religion is that its reliance on revelation and personal experience make it difficult to verify. So, we either believe it or we don’t. Mystical traditions often add intuition as a further source of truth. (Knowledge acquired by ‘intuition’ was originally understood to be knowledge of ‘innate’ ideas, or knowledge of the Platonic forms. Now the word intuition is used more to mean sensing something from beyond ourselves — God, Spirit, the Universe — so it carries an even more mysterian meaning.) I’ve suggested including all of these — revelation, personal experience and the mysterian itself — as just aspects of the mysterian category of

159