Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

consciousness of it? Is reality reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially material or spiritual? And finally: Is the universe intelligible and orderly, or incomprehensible and chaotic? (Pirsig’s book Lila is the sequel to his better-known Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)

Truth has taken on a special pre-eminence in modern times. People still cling to a belief in an absolute truth in the form of verifiable correspondence with the observable world as being at least theoretically possible. The notion still holds sway even although looking more closely at such truth claims leads inevitably to an ever-receding horizon of possible knowledge about the world. Look close enough at matter, or energy, or force and it simply evaporates. Is there anything absolutely true? Perhaps just the statement, ‘something is going on’! But even that might be up for question!

Beauty — or aesthetics — is often seen as the poor cousin of our big three. Again, like truth, there are no grounds for believing standards of beauty to have any absolute validity. In this work however, I will be taking a very broad view of the meaning of aesthetics. There is a thread that we will be following, which links aesthetics into values, meanings and then on into ethics and morality.

When we turn to morality, or goodness itself, this raises further questions. There are those belief systems that would place goodness — along with all judgements of value and quality — in some separate category of existence. So we are as likely to take an essentialist view of

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