Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

An apparent perfection contrasting

with less-than-perfect reality

The perfection of the One, as I’ve suggested above, must be broken in order to make the Many. For instance, formlessness (the One) for Plotinus, remains formless because it cannot take on the limitation of form. So Plotinus’ concern is that there seems no good reason for the One to become the Many — or to put it in more familiar terms — no good reason for God to have made the world. Therefore, we might conjecture, there could never be a perfect world. The paradox and contingency of our world is the most basic puzzle that the universe presents to us. We could ask of this paradox, is it the difference caused by the Many that is the reason that the perfection of the One leads to a nature that is unsymmetrical and inharmonious — even flawed? But small imperfections seem to make the world more beautiful, not less. In fact, as they say, the cracks are where the light gets in. So is it that the imperfections and disharmonies are somehow deliberate, or are they simply unavoidable?

The Notion of Time and the View

from Eternity

When we looked at contenders for an ‘ultimate substrate’, a few chapters back, we saw how critical an understanding of relation is to the question. This was not to suggest that relation is itself the elusive ultimate substrate — in fact, it is often relation that is the thing we are trying

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