Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

somehow set apart. Where did this idea come from? It’s a little like all the discussions in the book around the origins of values, but harder to pin down. But perhaps we can find its origins again in beauty. Maybe some things just appear so absurdly beautiful that they seem not to belong to our ordinary world. We can see art reaching for this sometimes. The erotic imagery on some Indian temples are symbols of the divine. The pleasures of erotic love are showing us that the true nature of the universe is a pleasure that can never quite find its full expression — it is too far beyond our everyday lives. But some things on Earth are close, and hence, are sacred.

The Tao of Eastern thought is an excellent expression of how all this can be ‘lived’, rather than just acknowledged as an intellectual construct. ‘Chi’ — the name given to the flow of energy through the body — exemplifies our embodiment and our interbeing with the rest of the universe.

Are there any moral principles in the Tao? In a way, no. But there can be thoughts or beliefs that block or frustrate the Tao. This is a bit like asking what is the morality of nature, or does nature act purely on the basis of expediency. Although value and meaning may be built in from the very start, it’s difficult to discern obvious rules (or indeed, whether the rules get obeyed or broken). So the Tao is to be at one with our embodied selves, conscious of our interbeing with the rest of nature.

That’s where I’ll end my speculation! The thoughts above are taken up in a further book —

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