Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

and freedom but in reality we are much less egalitarian. On climate change, we think it should be addressed but we are often unwilling to make any changes that will impact on our lifestyle. We claim to be tolerant in terms of race, religion, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation but we are nonetheless influenced by anything that hinges on identity. We pay lip-service to the idea that we choose friends and partners based on their character, but in fact mostly pick people who have physical characteristics that appeal to us. We pretend that, at most, only one relationship in our lives is non-Platonic!

Lists of our odd behaviour could probably be extended for several more pages! But I’m sure the examples given are enough to show that we all live in multiple stories. But we have to make a distinction between what stories we claim to believe and what stories we actually follow!

In the book we followed a complex route in trying to understand the derivation of values, meanings and purposes. Perhaps the key thought here is that we are a mixture of our mammalian past and the more complex and almost exclusively human workings of the brain. This can explain most, if not all, of the contradictions I’ve referred to above. I think it is best to acknowledge this — indeed, to embrace it — in order to understand how values, meanings and so on are derived. And you’ll remember that all this was tied in with quality. We make a value judgement immediately in receiving a sensation. Moral and aesthetic rules are very much later in this process, when we attempt to go from ‘image’ (our personal

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