Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

a unique relationship to its surroundings and to other objects. ‘Relation’ may be just another quality, but it is the quality that cannot be removed. It has to be unique to every ‘something’ — and therefore, by our definition, relation is a ‘something’s’ essence. And we could say that this exists even if no-one observes it. Every something has an essence. Being is the same as essence, according to Duns Scotus. As such, individual things can differ from each other in terms of form, but not in terms of matter. This, I think, is as close a description as we can get of the principles that are being explored here.

There are variations, of course, on all of these ideas. It could be said, for instance, that form can vary but matter remains unchanged, so it is this that constitutes the essence of a substance (as with Duns Scotus above). Analogies of melted-down statues (Aristotle) and melted wax (Descartes) seem to take this stance. This appears to contradict at least one of our earlier definitions, but perhaps it could be seen to be consistent if we consider quintessence as matter. The pre-Socratic philosophers in particular used the word ‘archē’ (beginning) for the fundamental underlying source of the being of all things. It’s not clear if this was a forerunner of quintessence or another, and separate, type of matter — or form? All this is very much conjecture on my part, as to how things were understood by the ancients and how we might interpret them today.

A simple way of putting all this is the Stoic view that there is an ordering principle in the universe. (The religious might call it world soul

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