Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Clearly, language has created a subject and an object, even where there is not, strictly speaking, the need to make such a distinction.

There is also a split in the world with any kind of description. In fact, any word causes such a split — words themselves represent subtle ways of splitting up the world. There is, for most of us, the implicit notion that the word for something stands as a symbol for a class of objects. To some extent then a split in the world is created between objects that belong to a particular category and those that don’t. As soon as a word is used to describe something, all other things are automatically assigned as being something else. Hence, calling something a table immediately creates a split between things that belong to the description of tables and things that don’t. However, in a way this is no more than just a convenient way to carve up the world. Many things could serve as ‘tables’ for instance, so the description is not really an accurate one — it is just a useful designation that fits our purposes. This will be examined in the next chapter.

Likewise, there is a distinction between ‘transcendent’ ideals such as truth, beauty and goodness and their representations in the world. Values then come to be seen as having some kind of ghostly existence of their own — even sometimes for people who have no religious belief. These kinds of splits will be examined below, in Chapter 6.

There is a sense in which the separation of subject and object is a useful one. The difficult task that this chapter touches upon is to

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