Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

aesthetic one — a theme that will be taken up in future chapters. Remember Plato contrasted his world of perfect forms — the Realm of Being — with the everyday world — the Realm of Becoming. Perhaps the Realm of Becoming is, in fact, enough.

I mention all of this speculation on something and nothing by way of introduction to some of our most perplexing questions. We could add, the idea of infinity, the idea of ‘The One’ and ‘The Many’, the nature of God, the apparent perfection of some of our understanding of the universe contrasting with its less-than-perfect reality, and the notion of time contrasted to a potential view from eternity. As with something and nothing, such ideas take us to the edge of what we know, and it may be that such questions are forever beyond our understanding — but nonetheless, I think, worth grappling with.

Infinity and Eternity

The ancients sometimes believed that if an object was a ‘simple’ object — that is, made of just one kind of stuff — then it was also unchanging. By ‘unchanging’ they often also meant a particular kind of endurance. Such simple, unchanging things would not just endure through ‘clock time’, so to speak. They would rather possess a kind of timelessness and eternity. If, for instance, the universe is considered to be The One, then it exists in this timeless eternity. The notion is still with us — both for the universe at large and also the ‘ultimate substrate’ that might lie beneath what we see and experience.

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