Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

mind. It could just as easily be said, ‘thought is going on’. (Another option is, ‘I feel, therefore I am.’ And a further one recognises the need for our continued identity and states, ‘I remember, therefore I am.’) But Descartes’ ideas move quickly into ‘rationalism’, that is, whatever is understood of the world is determined by thought. Science itself, whilst starting from observation, often goes on into rationalism in order to devise theories about the world. We will explore this in more detail later.

The experience of reality is always mediated through our senses. Objective things (that is, things assumed to be ‘out there’ in the real world) were once described as having qualities. Some of the qualities were understood to be inherent, intrinsic or primary, such as size and extension in space, shape, form, number and duration in time. (Sometimes the list is given as, figure, solidity, gravity, motion and rest.) Other qualities were described as emergent, or secondary, that is, not qualities belonging to the objects themselves but rather qualities that resulted from our experience of those objects. Amongst these would be colour, taste and smell. As the nature of physical matter has been further examined it is very difficult to perceive it as in any way solid or ‘real’ in the way in which the common-sense view of reality understands and perceives it. A quality of solidity and extension is therefore more of an ‘emergent quality’. (We will get to emergence later in the work.) As such, the division of qualities into intrinsic and emergent (primary and secondary) has largely been abandoned as the nature of the physical world has been explored by science. (Even John Locke, who seems to have upheld

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