Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

So our ‘truth’ is a mixed bag. I have delivered the story in this book through a series of truth-seeking alternatives — empiricism, rationalism, mysterianism and pragmatism. As time goes on, and circumstances in the world and in human culture change, so too do the types of truth-seeking that we engage in.

Beauty, it seems, is often taken to be the poor cousin to truth and morality. But in the book we have noted that ‘seeing’ — and the various ways that word can be interpreted — is in fact fundamental to the way we form values. This is a complex story. Perhaps the easiest way to think of it — and to tease out the various types of knowledge we’ve explored — is to consider the various meanings of ‘intuition’. We noted that it can mean a kind of apprehension of truth and value innate to the universe. We also noted that it can be a connection back to instinct. We might also see it as recognising what has come about through emergence. We are a mind in a body in a place, but all of these add up to more than the sum of their parts. Likewise, eco-systems, the Earth’s bio-sphere and human societies and culture can all be considered emergent. We are only just beginning to see what ‘systems thinking’ can deliver, in terms of understanding how these wider fields of experience function. But perhaps, nonetheless, there is an innate understanding here — an innate understanding from the higher forms of emergence — and this is a further meaning of intuition. I will be expanding on these matters below.

To have a fully consistent explanation of the

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