Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

experience seems to resonate with the most important aspects of life, so although it is a step beyond a philosophical investigation of things, I think it is worth taking time to consider what the mountaintop experience may be telling us. This is purely speculative on my part, I admit! And even a step beyond the somewhat speculative considerations of beauty and values in previous chapters. But the importance of the mountaintop, I think, is that it chimes well with the essential paradox of life that we have explored earlier in the book — the paradox between the imperfect world of the Many and the perfection of the One. The mountaintop is the view from eternity — a God’s eye view, if you will — that gives us the perspective on this. We may not be able to dwell in that place all the time, but we can contemplate the world by imagining the mountaintop perspective.

The mountaintop experience, I think, shows us how the universe really is in its completeness. But we know our lives are not like this. There is an inevitable disharmony because we are caught up in the very things that the mountaintop frees us from — time, self, worry and limited perspectives.

Perhaps then, what is needed is to reconcile these two things — the personal worries and the peace the mountaintop experience seems to promise. We can never be entirely free of our parochial concerns. But at times we can assume the perspective of the mountaintop. And this pertains especially to our dealings with others.

To be ‘the means of grace’ (taking up Schopenhauer’s idea from a previous chapter) is

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