Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

thought of separately. The danger in doing so however is that we lose something along the way. To get to the essence of who we are we need to consider all three together. If we do this then it can simply be said that soul is what emerges when mind, body and manner of being are considered together. It’s also worth noting that this concept of ‘soul’ — what I will henceforth term as the ‘Aristotelian soul’ — results in all manner of creatures being ‘ensouled’. In fact, anything that has a measure of sentience and interacts with its environment has a ‘soul’, by this definition. Such a view of soul — the Aristotelian soul — suggests that soul is more fundamental than anything. Perhaps it should not be said that our body contains our soul, rather that our soul contains our body.

Emergence is a key word here. There’s a whole lot of emergence going on! From formlessness emerges form — that’s probably the most basic. Today we may say something like — from the quantum void, particles emerge. Then from particles, elements. The elements have properties that their constituents lack by themselves. From elements, chemical compounds — and again, properties emerge that are lacking in individual elements. Then, from chemicals — life. From life — consciousness. From consciousness — self-awareness. It’s difficult to avoid the reality of this cascade of ever-increasing wonders. We can speculate on further emergence. There may be wider circles of emergence — eco-systems, the bio-sphere — having an influence on the lower levels. Downwards causation, as it were, as well as upwards emergence. But oddly, today, all this emergence is downplayed, to say the least.

89