Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

back of perception.

Lawrence Cahoone (The Dilemma of Modernity) suggests there is still some subjectivism lurking behind the scenes of philosophies intending to prove the existence of an objective world. Even a philosopher who denies any kind of ‘real self’, such as David Hume, starts with the assumption of the self. One of Hume’s most famous quotes ‘denying’ the self starts with the words, ‘when I look inside myself…’! The ‘thing in itself’ has to be picked up by the sense organs, then acknowledged by the mind before it can properly be described as an ‘object’ — so even for the out-and-out materialist, there is a lot of subjectivity going on before an objective reality can be arrived at.

Max Weber’s four types of rationality can be taken as a way to summarise our categories (although I’m not really using them in the same way as Weber). These are — Practical (including empiricism and science). Theoretical (rationalism). Formal (the belief that there are underlying concepts that determine how the world appears and how it works. I include ‘revelation’ under the term ‘mysterian’ but the formal category also includes some of the splits in the world that will be explored in future chapters, which are, I’d suggest, mysterian but not of a religious or revelatory sort). And finally, in Weber’s categories, Substantive (phenomenology).

It’s also worth keeping in mind a certain amount of overlap in all of the categories of truth-seeking that I’ve mentioned above. Most obviously, it would be rare, if not impossible, for

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