Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and purpose that will lead us to further conclusions.

Along with this procession of thoughts, I’ll also be exploring whether direct links can be made between our themes. Could, for example, value be discovered just by observing the world? And, if thoughts on value could be established, could a system of ethics and aesthetics then be devised, based on our values? The way thoughts are structured just now suggests that such a project might be possible. But it may also be the case that there are other ways to link up our themes that yield better results, or at least useful insights.

So, it could be said, getting a handle on the big themes is one thing. Deciding what might be done in response to what is discovered is quite another. It is important to see this, at least in part, as a separate endeavour. Two themes run through these endeavours — one is narrative, the other is essence. And the two are linked. Things in our heads and things out in the world are seen in terms of narratives. There is also a narrative to be discovered in our interpretations of the facts we’ve discovered (where, I’m suggesting, we search for ‘essential truths’). And there is a narrative in the way ‘established facts’ are described by us and to us. And there’s a narrative in our inner essence — in what is sometimes described as our soul.

The reason for looking for narrative is to understand how people should live and how our communities and cultures should be organised. If somehow truth and knowledge about the world could be got to grips with then could there

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