Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Morality is now often based only on the way people are observed to behave (hence ‘ought’ from ‘is’ — the naturalistic fallacy). And hence, potentially, meanings and purposes are as a result of the rationalisation of our observations. So we have behaviourism in psychology, and — with no belief in any kind of fundamental moral principles — the only reason to change people’s behaviour, rather than just to observe it, is if it is in some way harmful to a person themselves or to society. Of course, in order to make a judgement about what’s harmful, we’d need to have some moral principles in the first place!

Beauty, it seems, is often taken to be the poor cousin to truth and morality. But in the book we have noted that ‘seeing’ — and the various ways that word can be interpreted — is in fact fundamental to the way we form values. This is a complex story. Perhaps the easiest way to think of it — and to tease out the various types of knowledge we’ve explored — is to consider the various meanings of ‘intuition’. We noted that it can mean a kind of apprehension of truth and value innate to the universe. We also noted that it can be a connection back to instinct. We might also see it as recognising what has come about through emergence. We are a mind in a body in a place, but all of these add up to more than the sum of their parts. Likewise, eco-systems, the Earth’s bio-sphere and human societies and culture can all be considered emergent. We are only just beginning to see what ‘systems thinking’ can deliver, in terms of understanding how these wider fields of experience function. But perhaps, nonetheless, there is an innate understanding here — an

283