Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

which, at the moment, we may only be dimly aware. But I think that if we got a better grip on emergence — which currently seems still sort of magical, if not actually supernatural — then this would move things forward. The gap left for us would then be one of providing meaning and a sense of the sacred to the universe rather than arguing over what exists or what doesn’t. I like to think that would be progress! Again, the narratives of science and of religion might one day align — or perhaps some new narrative will emerge that does not even recognise a distinction.

Pragmatism — the view that some particular ‘truth’ is only adopted so far as it is useful for some particular human project — has only been touched on briefly in earlier chapters. Pragmatism might seem like it is the most straight-forward way to look at the world — if it works, then it must be right — but pragmatism itself is a narrative. For one thing, there’s an underlying presumption that something being ‘useful for human projects’ is always going to be morally acceptable. We have to dig down deep into what is considered ‘pragmatic’ and ask what exactly makes a viable human project and how exactly should truth and knowledge be modelled to make sense of this? When we ask these questions I think we start to see that pragmatism is a rather questionable agenda and not the common-sense, straight-forwardness it claims to be. There seems to be a need to appeal to a broader standard of morality in order to prove a theory that itself denies that broader standards exist. Pragmatism may even try to appeal to a broader standard of truth — which, at the same time, is never made explicit.

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