Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

being in touch with our instincts. We noted, in the last chapter, that value itself might in fact be based on our instincts — tendencies that have evolved in the human species, and stretching way back into our evolutionary past. What our minds and bodies can achieve through instinct can be truly remarkable. So there is a certain overlap in the meanings of intuition here — instinctual can seem to be magical.

There is a real distinction we can note here in our values — and especially if we are to regard them as deriving from instinct. Some values seem to be about seeing and evaluating things on the basis of appearances. I am thinking especially of truthfulness, equality and fairness. We use visual metaphors to speak of these, even to this day. And I might suggest here that they are indeed based on vision. (See Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just.) Truthfulness, equality and fairness, we might note, seem to be primary when it comes to morality. They are, if you like, the bridge between animal instinct and the meanings and ideologies that humans devise as the next step towards ethics and morals. Arguably, we need language to get to meaning, but truth, equality and fairness, based originally on vision, are more fundamental. Chimps and monkeys seem to be able to discern fairness and certainly understand cheating and lying!

Of course, some might say that we have the instincts we have because value is built into the universe, or because God has arranged things this way, or even that God has arranged evolution such that we ended up with the instincts and values that we have. There seems

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