Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

trying to reconcile the two apparently distinct substances and has tied itself in knots in the process.

As an example of the subject/object split, David Bohm, in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, looks at the phrase: ‘it is raining’. What — he asks — is the ‘it’ that is doing the raining? Why not just say instead, ‘rain is going on’? Clearly, language has created a subject and an object, even where there is not, strictly speaking, the need to make such a distinction.

There is also a split in the world with any kind of description. In fact, any word causes such a split — words themselves represent subtle ways of splitting up the world. There is, for most of us, the implicit notion that the word for something stands as a symbol for a class of objects. To some extent then a split in the world is created between objects that belong to a particular category and those that don’t. As soon as a word is used to describe something, all other things are automatically assigned as being something else. Hence, calling something a table immediately creates a split between things that belong to the description as tables and things that don’t. However, in a way this is no more than just a convenient way to carve up the world. Many things could serve as ‘tables’ for instance, so the description is not really an accurate one — it is just a useful designation that fits our purposes. This will be examined in the next chapter.

Even that split between Heaven and Earth — the religious split, we might call it — could be of an equally spurious kind. There is always the

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