Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

11. Contenders for the Big Picture

‘The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’

Bertrand Russell

This chapter acts as a kind of summary for what has been explored in previous chapters. I want to begin by considering metaphysics in general terms and then go on to look at some of the varieties of this and other types of truth-seeking that we’ve looked at previously.

Metaphysics is the philosophical grand narrative, in various forms. But I’d suggest any metaphysics must acknowledge its inherent and inevitable contradiction. The contradiction is one that we touched on briefly in the previous chapter. Our mathematics and our observation of the world point to the possibility of perfection, but somehow we are unable to see how that perfection could be achieved from within the universe itself. And, of course, we can never step outside the universe to take ‘the view from eternity’, or a ‘God’s eye view’, if you prefer, and see how everything works (and perhaps even that would not solve things). Hence, metaphysics, which has the intention, as discussed in Chapter 2, of discovering absolute

111