Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

4. Where the World First Splits

In his classic Seventies book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says at one point that a lot can be learnt from where people choose to make the first ‘split’ in the world. In philosophy and in science the most obvious split is between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’.

A distinction is made first of all about subjects and objects, with ourselves as subjects, separate from the world around us, which is thus ‘the object’. In other words, the world is ‘objectified’, including other people. To some extent, this kind of split is forced upon us simply in order to survive in the world. Science merely formalises this notion of the ‘detached observer’, which is implicit in so much of our language and thinking. It is a remarkably successful strategy for surviving in the world, but there is now the belief that this split is real — that consciousness and matter really are separate substances. Much of Western philosophy has been about trying to reconcile the two apparently distinct substances and has tied itself in knots in the process.

As an example of the subject/object split, David Bohm, in his book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, looks at the phrase: ‘it is raining’. What — he asks — is the ‘it’ that is doing the raining? Why not just say instead, ‘rain is going on’?

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