Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

world that should appeal to those who find religion too awful to contemplate! The Aristotelian soul is all about connection — with our bodies, with nature and with the cosmos. It’s also about context and relation. Alas, all the things that the search for an ultimate substrate is trying to get rid of might actually be the things that most clearly define the universe!

The Viewpoint of Eternity

That last thought takes us to the view from eternity — outslde time and space, as it were. Generally speaking, of course, we do not see the world this way. But I have suggested in the book that in our map-making, we still covertly seek to see things from the outside, even whilst acknowledging it’s not possible!

A view from eternity, like a belief in God, carries with it the problem that it might not actually give us much new knowledge. In fact, eternity, like God, seems to almost raise more questions than it answers. Again, like God, there is the suggestion of perfection, whilst our everyday world seems to be one of broken symmetries and flaws. This is surely the ultimate paradox, and I will say a little more on paradox below.

The Sacred

Then there’s the sense of the sacred. What is it that makes — let’s say, the emergent qualities — worthy of being regarded as sacred? What makes anything worthy of being sacred? The sacred (and indeed, its opposite, the profane) occupies a strange position in human thinking.

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