Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

just another step in an infinite regress of trying to discover what things are made of. It would be the ultimate ground, the primary stuff of the universe, the final destination, the ‘thing-in-itself’. In short, and perhaps surprisingly, what science seems to be looking for bears a striking resemblance to the ancient notion of essence.

Essence though is a concept equally as difficult as substrate. To approach it, we are best to examine a few of the other words that had specific meanings in ancient thought — often different meanings to the way we understand the terms today.

Let’s start with substance. What is a substance? Well, to modern thinking, it’s just what I’ve described above as a thing. But the ancients generally did not see it this way. The ancients took substance to mean ‘matter plus form’. There’s a great many ideas that spring from this simple statement.

First, we can note that the word ‘form’ might be used here with one of two different meanings. The more straight-forward meaning is to see form as we would use it in everyday speech today — that is, as a three-dimensional arrangement or shape. On this meaning, the formula — substance equals matter plus form — accords very well with our modern understanding of substances. We need, for instance, a particular arrangement of fundamental particles in order to get the atoms and molecules that make up the chemical elements and chemical compounds. Form, then, is critical in making things. And form, of course, is also a relationship.

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