Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

these are somehow innate to the universe, or given to us by God, nonetheless we could certainly say that the universe is primarily aesthetic. The appearance of things is not simply a matter of taste. There’s more going on with beauty that that.

Earlier in the book, we noted some different meanings of the word ‘intuition’. We noted that knowledge of the Platonic forms was once considered a kind of intuition. Now, however, we probably see intuition as something of a magical process, and therefore somewhat suspect. But there is a third use of the word, which suggests intuition to be about being in touch with our instincts. We noted, in the last chapter, that value itself might in fact be based on our instincts — tendencies that have evolved in the human species, and stretching way back into our evolutionary past. Unfortunately, we often muddle the meanings of intuition, so can sometimes see something that is from our animal instincts as a profound revelation from somewhere beyond the everyday world! Beauty gets mixed up in this too. The sublime gets connected with the transcendent sort of intuition, whilst more immediate pleasures are seen as intuitions from our instincts. But once again, these can get muddled.

So there is a real distinction we can note here in our values — and especially if we are to regard some of them as deriving from instinct, as I’m suggesting here. Some values seem to be about seeing and evaluating things on the basis of appearances. I recognise this is a tough call — trying to figure out all of the connections is not easy. I am thinking especially of truthfulness,

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