Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

fundamentally mysterious, this nurturing can be set against the alternative of sheer indifference or hostility to life. Beyond this, as conscious beings, we can act on the world and to some extent understand and reflect upon the consequences of our actions. In this way, we can either enhance or frustrate the general disposition towards providence — we can be the means of grace, or the means by which grace is withheld. If we set about making goodness and beauty manifest in the world, then as with truth, we can only start from a position of ignorance. The ultimate meaning of these things is hidden from us. We do however act in faith and with at least some potential for acting in humility.

If the Aristotelian view of the soul (that is — the workings of mind and body together with their context) were adopted, then ‘soul’ is just the actions of the embodied self. There is no need to reify everything into the One, universal spirit, world soul and all the rest. This is just to create more splits than are needed. It might work against interbeing rather than for it. As embodied consciousness, we are agents in the world — in fact, it is our choosing and willing, along with that of all other beings, which defines the universe. There is no need to postulate separate meanings or purposes beyond this.

Then there’s the sense of the sacred. I’d suggest that this, too, is a narrative. But what is it that makes — let’s say, the emergent qualities — worthy of being regarded as sacred? What makes anything worthy of being sacred? The sacred (and indeed, its opposite, the profane) occupies a strange position in human thinking. For something to be sacred is to be

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