Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

himself admits, the ‘common-sense’ view of the world still assumes an external truth and an essence to things. Perhaps this is the legacy of over 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Perhaps it is just too difficult to get away from this notion of essence because of the way our minds process the world.

Narrative

To develop the narrative theme of the book I started out by looking to see if a story of the world could be built up through observation, explanation, meaning, value, purpose and morality. It proved difficult to make that journey, especially that step from explanation to some kind of meaning. So meaning was sought by other routes. Could, for instance, a meaning be found that transcends us? A meaning provided by seeing the universe as conscious? Or via a belief in God, soul and spirit? Or could there be a philosophical view of ‘soul’ that offers us a further route towards explanation?

I suggested we might make better sense of things through a progression — sensation, perception, impulse, image, symbol — a progression very much centred on how we experience the world as embodied selves. It was seen that image — imagination — is how we process the world of our experiences and indeed our actions. And symbol — stories, art, literature — is how we communicate our world-view to others. We can, through symbol, communicate some of our observations, and gain some knowledge of the world surrounding us. It is not all story, ‘text’, or ‘interpretation of text’. But image is how we interpret our

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