Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

to be arbitrary. If we cannot help following stories then at least we can decide which stories we follow. Or might this too be seen as delusional? Believing the world only to be stories (or such post-modernist views as, there are only texts and there is only interpretation) would, I think, be the deepest of mysterian splits, and this is not what I’m saying. Rather, I’m saying that we need to complement what we know already through scientific theories with ideas that are consistent but go beyond the level of explanation we can so far achieve. We do this anyway, to an extent. But we don’t seem to get stories that allow for consciousness, agency, hierarchy, holism and even of life itself. As I’ve suggested earlier, such ideas seem to be out of favour for now, and the story we are given of the universe is one of a very simple order appearing out of nothing by random chance. It is worrying that this kind of reductionism is becoming the dominant narrative.

Let’s take a look at some of the contradictions in our narratives that are embraced: We reject ‘grand narratives’ yet seek to embrace them. Scientific truth is (in theory) always provisional, but we tend to treat it as absolute. We assume morality to be subjective but refer to an external standard of fairness. We assume beauty to be subjective (‘in the eye of the beholder’) but see beauty (especially in others) as being essential to their nature. We profess a belief in equality but are addicted to power. We like the idea that the universe is One, but then can’t help splitting it up. We often claim no belief in religion, a God, spirituality or soul, but act in a way that suggests we think we have an ‘essential self’. In politics we claim to believe in justice, equality

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