Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

or another — universals of universals of universals. And to insist on their independent reality is to land us with problems. Then there is a plunge into a mysterian realm of ghostly existence, beyond the everyday world of the senses. Unfortunately, a good many Western philosophers took this plunge!

On this mysterian view of universals, we could say that the Platonic forms are the universals behind everyday objects. This puts universals more into the mysterian category of form we examined in Chapter 2. Plato’s forms will be considered in more detail below, along with further ideas that create similar mysterian splits in the way we see the world. But first, let’s take a look at an idea from ancient China. Kung-Sun Lung’s paradox — ‘a white horse is not a horse’ — is a reference to universals. It suggests we cannot infer, from particular instances, that the category to which we ascribe them is a distinct entity. Hence the paradox seems to be saying there is no ‘ideal’ white horse. Or Kung-Sun may have been questioning the idea that there could be an existing archetype or quintessential example of a particular thing. Either way, the Eastern view of things is questioning the splits that Western philosophy seems to see in the world. The paradox pre-dates much of Western philosophical thought and one wonders how things might have turned out if the West had known of Kung-Sun Lung and taken his paradox to heart!

So now, let’s look at the ‘mystification’ of universals through Plato, Schopenhauer and Kant. Let’s think first of the famous parable of the cave from Plato. People are chained up in a

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