Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

value is built into the universe from the start — and we inherit this simply by being embodied and conscious. This, as a starting point for ethics and morality, would give a very different kind of story.

But we’ve seen in this chapter that values are not all necessarily positive and that there is some ambiguity around what specific values are saying to us. So it is not a question of adopting one kind of position in how we might relate to value — there has to be some more complex understanding of value in order to deal with them. Part of the solution to this, I think, is to recognise that the world is essentially an aesthetic world. By looking at aesthetics, beauty and what constitutes ‘the good life’, we can gain a better understanding of values and how they might be applied. So it is to these matters that we now turn.

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