Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

was a quest for freedom. From this, it is also clear that beauty is not simply concerned with the arts or with physical appearance. It is within the province of everyone to make beauty manifest in the world. This might be through the more obvious routes of the arts, but it may equally be in such things as care of others, manners, good business practice and indeed all aspects of life.

I want to return now to the idea that some values are based on seeing and beauty, and thereby act as a bridge from instinct to ideas of meaning and purpose, for which we need language. I recognise this is a tough call — trying to figure out all of the connections is not easy. But I think the key message here is that it helps us greatly to discern where we are just reacting to the world through our primary, instinctual selves, and when we are applying some kind of more advanced discernment. The values we get by way of vision are mostly ones we all agree on. But the distinction between these values and the ones that require language is perhaps easy to state, but a lot less easy to achieve! The difference between equality and equity is a good way to recognise the difference. Equality is very much a visual metaphor — something is the same size as something else — for instance. But to achieve equity we need to work out things like how we balance a creature’s size with its strength or its food intake. There’s a lot more going on.

Let me put all of this another way — if we can discern what are, genuinely, our true pleasures and our true fears and dislikes, then we can start to see our meanings and purposes in a

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