Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

what can be known of the ‘real world’, just by the way human beings are constructed. The notion can be linked back to Galileo and his dismissal of things that cannot be measured. (See Philip Goff’s book, Galilieo’s Error.) As we’ve seen above, and in Chapter 2, aspects of our experience that have proven difficult to measure (for instance, taste, odour, colour) were later relegated to being ‘secondary qualities’. Secondary qualities were explored most notably by Robert Boyle and John Locke — although as previously noted, Locke did not hold to this view with complete rigour in his writings. In more recent times, this spit in what can and what cannot be known was adopted wholesale by a branch of philosophy known as logical positivism. The positivists just reject out of hand anything that cannot be defined in this very restricted description of what constitutes ‘truth’.

Kant and Schopenhauer’s ideas are largely ignored today. However, a lot of modern ideas seem to have sprung from Schopenhauer — even if some of them are not such good ideas! The ‘Will’, from Schopenhauer’s work, which could reasonably be called ‘the Will to life’ — and hence our Conatus — has led to the ‘Will to truth’, Nietzsche’s Will to power’, Freud’s ‘Will to pleasure’ and also seems to coincide with a lot of New Age thinking on realising alternative realities by means of ‘will-power’.

Plato’s idea of perfect forms, plus Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s ideas are referred to as ‘dualist’ in that they divide reality into a perfect world of forms and an imperfect world of particular objects (hence ‘form and content’). All the

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