Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

cave such that they can only face one way and can only see shadows on the cave wall. They thus believe this is all there is to life. But if a prisoner were to escape into the real world beyond the cave, they would see a much bigger picture of how the world works.

The cave is a reflection of Plato’s belief in ‘perfect forms’, of which Earthly versions are, in contrast, merely shadows. (Plato used the word ‘eidos’ (Greek for form) to identify those abstract perfect forms.)

For Plato, objects and actions (including moral actions) in the real world are only shadows of a world of perfect forms that exist ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ everyday reality. Thus, for instance, a horse is regarded as only an image of the perfect horse, (eat your heart out, Kung-Sun Lung) and also, somewhat bizarrely, with more abstract things such as an act of courage. ‘Universals’ are, for Plato, taken out of this world altogether and into a perfect and mysterian other world. So there is a much bigger split going on here. For Plato, there are perfect forms of things and the things seen around us are just imperfect copies of those perfect forms.

But there seems no need for this extra layer of reality to exist, either as the Platonic forms or the idea of abstract truths having an independent existence. Other philosophers (from Socrates) believe that the form of an object is somehow imminent in the object itself rather than existing independently as a transcendent form. Thus the form of an object is understood to be known by its particulars. The form of an apple, for instance, is known by

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