Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

conflicting interpretations of value, with different theologies and ideologies. Perhaps we are best served then if the interpretation of value is an ongoing conversation rather than a fixed point. To have a viable ethic, we have to understand the meanings and purposes that are appropriate to our context.

As with truth and truth-seeking though, there is often something that is unseen or unspoken, and this applies also to a search for value, quality, meaning and choice. We’ve seen the complexity involved in the last two chapters. Our values can be ‘cosmic’ and transcendental, or they can be innate to the universe, or they can be innate to an individual, or they can be a justification for our own personal preferences, or, indeed, some strange mixture of all of these. I’m not intending to come down in favour of any one of these! Given the confusion, any conversation on value is likely to be a tricky one!

What’s missing is that we do not often dig back far enough into all the reasons why people hold particular truths and ascribe to particular values, meanings and purposes. In particular, as noted at the start of the previous chapter, we do not often acknowledge that our perception of the world is primarily phenomenological — dealing in personal, embodied experience, rather than objective observation. Given the complexities we’ve explored however, it’s little wonder that the practicalities of morality, justice and law tend towards the pragmatic! But even with a pragmatic approach, there has to be values applied in deciding what exactly counts as pragmatism, and why. All these concerns —

182