Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

innate understanding from the higher forms of emergence — and this is a further meaning of intuition.

Essence

Looking to understand the real essence of things is described as ‘eidetic’ in Husserl’s phenomenology. He described us (like Descartes’ thinking thing) as ‘the transcendentals’ or ‘the pure subject of cognition’. In his book, How Pleasure Works, Paul Bloom suggests that it is our perception of an essence to things that brings us the most pleasure. Whether we call it soul or just the authentic self, we believe ourselves to have an essence. In a similar manner, we infer essence in other people, in animals and even in inanimate objects. We have an essentialist approach to truth, morality and beauty and we also seek essence in trying to define a good society.

So we’ve an obsession with essence — but this plays out in different ways. Science, as we’ve seen above, looks for a substrate. Meanwhile, in everyday life, people look for charm, charisma, personality, enchantment and authenticity.

The idea that things have an essence seems to be something that is implicitly assumed. But modern philosophers will often reject this notion. Pragmatic philosophers, such as John Dewey, or, more recently, Richard Rorty, are non-essentialists and instead they suggest that we simply have various narrative truths that suit particular human projects. There is a lot to be said for this approach to life, but, as Rorty

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