Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

or analysis — it is immediate, embodied and empathetic. It’s in this way that value could be said to be built into things from the very start of our interactions with the world — indeed, value could be described as being innate and embodied. So, the ‘valuing’ starts at an early stage — it starts with quality. We ‘enact’ our values at an early stage as well — as impulse. It is only much later — as image and symbol — that our values are described as ethics, morals and aesthetic judgements. (These might then cause us to restrain our impulses, but the progression of causes is nonetheless clear.) But note the complication here. There is a valuing that might be called ‘innate’ — that’s the valuing that might reach us from outside of ourselves — quality innate to the universe. And then there is the ethics and morals that are rationalisations of what we have done by impulse. The impulse side of things comes about very much via instinct, but also, value can reach us from the society and culture — which also might be based on innate, transcendent value, or might also be from experience of quality. So we get some idea of the complexity involved!

It’s at this point of choice, quality and value that we see the various types of truths and truth-seeking methods really start to deviate. Earlier in the book it was suggested that we often profess to having an empirical and rational view of the world, or otherwise to some kind of religious, mysterian approach. But, from the observations regarding sensation, perception and the like, it would be better to describe our apprehension of the world as a phenomenological approach and our later analysis (through image and symbol) as moving

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