Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

I’m not saying that there’s not also the upwards pull from higher orders of being. To be consistent and fair, the possibility of a genuinely supernatural, mysterian explanation for things needs to be kept open. As such, I’ve included the interpretations involving God in all of the deliberations in this book, as well as supernatural explanations, calling these, collectively, ‘mysterian’.

‘Upwards emergence’ being the same as ‘downwards causation’ — the end being in the beginning — is something of a mysterian concept, certainly. It relates to the notion that the universe, viewed from eternity, is outside of time, so all processes are already accomplished. Before dismissing this as esoteric nonsence, remember something very similar is claimed by determinism — a belief so favoured by modern science. Everything that is ever going to happen is determined by the distribution of energy and matter at the start of the universe. I leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.

But remember the strictly non-religious, strictly not supernatural, Aristotelian soul! Body plus mind plus way of being in the world. The features of deep emergence noted above replicate, on a universal scale, the way that the term ‘Aristotelian soul’ has been adopted for individual beings. What the Aristotelian soul is telling us about meaning and purpose is that she is not some secret, private thing hidden within us. I believe that this way of looking at things — which chimes so well with the embodied cognition and interbeing of phenomenology — gives us a way of seeing the

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