Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

These are all judgements of quality as much as acts of perception — in fact, the quality seems to step in even before we’re really at that ‘aware that we’re aware’ stage. As we saw, Francis Hutcheson believed that moral apprehension takes place at the perception stage. We might say that the quality stands before any type of introspection or analysis — it is immediate, embodied and empathetic. It’s in this way that value could be said to be built into things from the very start of our interactions with the world — indeed, value could be described as being innate and embodied. So, the ‘valuing’ starts at an early stage — it starts with quality. We ‘enact’ our values at an early stage as well — as impulse. It is only much later — as image and symbol — that our values are described as ethics, morals and aesthetic judgements. (These might then cause us to restrain our impulses, but the progression of causes is nonetheless clear.) But note the complication here. There is a valuing that we might call ‘innate’ — that’s the valuing that might reach us from outside of ourselves — quality innate to the universe. And then there is the ethics and morals that are rationalisations of what we have done by impulse. And also, value can reach us from the society and culture — which also might be based on innate, transcendent value, or might also be from experience of quality. So we get some idea of the complexity involved!

It’s at this point of choice, quality and value that we see the various types of truths and truth-seeking methods really start to deviate. The last chapter suggested that we often profess to having an empirical and rational view of the world, or otherwise we might profess to some

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