Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Image leads naturally into Symbol. Symbol is our spoken and written voices that again, very often, try to justify our behaviour.

Given that we’re so driven, is their any hope?

The first glimmer of hope is that those two final steps in the progression — Image and Symbol — provide a kind of feedback loop. They can generate sensations in us that are not generated purely by our immediate circumstances and emotional state. This, in turn, opens a little gap — at that critical juncture between Perception and Impulse. There is a hope that we will not simply re-act, by Impulse. There is a hope that we can be true agents of our actions — reflective agents. There is a hope that we might actually see the world in terms of truth, meaning, value and morality — the way we had been fooling ourselves that we were seeing the world all along!

Something, though, is troubling here — before we even get into questions about what to do about the dominance of the progression I've been exploring and what it means for our lives. That something is perhaps more of a modern obsession rather than something that’s been with us for centuries or is part of human nature. Let’s call it authenticity.

Let me put the problem like this. If it’s true that we really are led by our bodies and our emotions, then isn’t the authentic way of being in the world simply to accept this and to continue acting on impulse, and then responding to this by a continual process of self-

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