Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

reaching for an objective ‘hook’ on which to hang subjective notions of spirituality. Perhaps people want to believe in some kind of real ‘transcendence’. But doing so fails to see that this is just one more way of conveniently carving up reality. Jean Paul Sartre described people like this as ‘the serious’ — that is, they take seriously the reality of transcendent values and abstract truths. Likewise, there is a distinction between ‘transcendent’ ideals such as truth, goodness and beauty and their representations in the world. Values then come to be seen as having some kind of ghostly existence of their own — even sometimes for people who have no religious belief. Again, these kinds of splits will be examined below, in Chapter 7.

Buddhism has a way of speaking about ultimate reality, in that all statements must be qualified by three others. So if it is said, ‘the universe exists’, then a split is made in the universe by suggesting that all non-existent things do not belong to it. Hence, the statement needs to be qualified by also saying, ‘the universe does not exist’, ‘the universe both exists and does not exist’, and finally, ‘the universe neither exists nor does it not exist.’ Clearly, even all four statements about the universe taken together don’t really tell us anything. And that, of course, is the whole point — no statement about ultimate reality really makes any sense. A Buddhist approach to that question of the existence of the universe is very similar to what is known of Parmenides’ thought — the ‘Parmenidean One’. Of course, even saying that ultimate reality is one thing falls foul of the same problems described above. Such

81