Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

based, there must be an underlying reality to allow this conception to occur. A fixed time and space, cause and effect, substance and our sense of self were all considered by Kant to be ‘a priori’ synthetic truths.

Schopenhauer went on to suggest that there can be some knowledge of underlying reality because each of us has ‘first person privilege’ to a section of it via our own minds. (Hence —The World as Will and Representation — the title of his main work. The ‘Will’ is the unknown aspect of reality made manifest in us. The ‘representation’ is our everyday perception of the phenomenal world.) This belief, in turn, has led to a lot of post-modern views about the nature of truth. The truth ceased to be ‘out there’ — it is now within us. That focus on the true knowledge of things being somehow within us has cast a long shadow over more recent thought. The really fundamental change that Kant and Schopenhauer suggested, along with other philosophers, was that objects must conform to our thoughts — our concepts — rather than our thoughts conforming to objects. That’s a turnaround that is still not really accepted.

Schopenhauer and Kant were not alone in seeing a cut-off point of concepts through which our understanding of the world is defined. Such a cut-off is suggesting that people are limited in what can be known of the ‘real world’, just by the way human beings are constructed. The notion can be linked back to Galileo and his dismissal of things that cannot be measured.

Plato’s idea of perfect forms, plus Kant’s and

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