Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

beauty with goodness and truth is so deep-rooted that it is very difficult to untangle this, but I think it must be untangled. Otherwise, we will, as so often happens, judge the ugly to be evil. And far worse, judge the beautiful to be good.

So, it seems necessary to return to the thought that there is something that causes us to have this experience of beauty. And this is not necessarily related to truth or goodness, or to usefulness or appropriateness. Whilst some things may be morally neutral, nothing is aesthetically neutral.

Up until this point, we have more or less been following a path from the methods of science — observation and rationalism — through into our behaviour, our values and morals. In this chapter however, I introduce some caveats. The path from normal scientific investigation into human behaviour takes roughly the view that we should observe what people actually do rather than what they think they should do or what they say they do or what they say they believe in. Whilst this is certainly a worthwhile approach, I think it misses out a great deal of the complexity that’s involved in ethics and morality. Perhaps surprisingly, the story needs to start quite a long way back — deep into our evolutionary history. And as some of the authors mentioned above suggest, it starts with seeing.

Beauty is our initial apprehension of the world — it is the starting point on the journey towards value, meaning, purpose and then morality. Even if we do not accept the idea that any of

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