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Conatus

Conatus is a Latin term denoting an innate striving or endeavor, most prominently developed in philosophy as the fundamental drive of every thing to persevere in its existence, as articulated by Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics (Part III, Proposition 6), where he states that "each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being."^[1] In Spinoza's metaphysics, this conatus serves as the essence of all individuals—whether modes of substance, bodies, or minds—manifesting as appetite when unconscious and desire when conscious, thereby grounding his theories of affect, ethics, and human freedom.^[1] The concept originated in late-scholastic natural philosophy, rooted in Aristotelian physics, where conatus described a body's intrinsic tendency to move toward its natural place, particularly when impeded by external forces.^[2] This mechanistic interpretation was refined in the 17th century by René Descartes, who employed conatus in his physics to refer to the instantaneous tendency of a moving body to continue in a straight line, influencing early modern understandings of motion and inertia.^[2] Thomas Hobbes further adapted it in his materialist philosophy, using conatus to denote the basic "endeavor" of bodies in motion, which prefigures Spinoza's more expansive, teleological application to all entities as a principle of self-preservation and enhancement.^[3] Spinoza's innovation transformed conatus from a physical or psychological mechanism into a metaphysical axiom, integral to his monistic system where it explains the dynamic interplay of necessity, power, and joy in finite modes.^[3] Beyond Spinoza, the term has influenced later thinkers, including interpretations linking it to biological homeostasis and modern vitalism, though its core remains tied to early modern philosophy.^[4]

Historical Origins

Etymology

The term conatus derives from Latin, specifically the supine form of the deponent verb conari, which means "to try," "to attempt," or "to endeavor." This linguistic root emphasizes an active effort or impulse toward a goal, appearing in classical Latin literature as early as the 1st century BCE to denote attempts or strivings in various contexts.^[5] In the works of Cicero, conatus frequently conveys the idea of deliberate effort or impulse, including in ethical and rhetorical settings where it describes human endeavors toward preservation or action. For instance, in his first oration against Catiline (In Catilinam I), Cicero uses the phrase interficere conatus es to refer to Catiline's repeated attempts to assassinate him, illustrating conatus as a directed striving amid threats to personal safety. This usage highlights the term's application to impulses for self-protection or ethical resolve in Roman discourse.^[6] During the medieval period, conatus entered natural philosophy to describe physical tendencies, particularly in explanations of motion. In the 14th century, Jean Buridan's impetus theory portrayed the persistence of motion in projectiles as an innate quality or motive force impressed on a body, akin to an inherent striving (conatus) to continue without external propulsion, challenging Aristotelian views by positing an internal cause for sustained movement. This concept of conatus as a body's impulse to maintain its trajectory prefigured later ideas of inertia.^[7]^[8] In scholastic natural philosophy, Thomas Aquinas referenced analogous notions of striving through his doctrine of natural inclinations (inclinationes naturales), where entities possess inherent tendencies toward their proper ends or places, such as heavy bodies striving downward. These indirect uses of striving in Aquinas's framework bridged classical impulses with medieval physics, emphasizing teleological efforts in the natural order.^[9] Such foundational meanings of conatus as effort and persistence were later adapted by philosophers like Spinoza into a central metaphysical principle.^[8]

Pre-Spinozistic Developments

In the 17th century, the concept of conatus, rooted in Latin notions of effort or striving and medieval ideas of impetus, began to evolve within early modern philosophy as a mechanistic principle explaining motion and change.^[10] René Descartes employed conatus in his Principles of Philosophy (1644) to describe tendencies in physical motion within a mechanistic framework devoid of vital essence. Specifically, in Part II, Principle 39, he introduced the conatus recedendi a centro—the endeavor of a body in circular motion to recede from the center—illustrating this through the example of a stone whirled in a sling, which stretches the cord as it strives to continue in a straight line.^[11] This centrifugal tendency, paired with a centripetal force from surrounding matter, maintained planetary orbits in Descartes' vortex theory, emphasizing determination by divine laws rather than inherent vitality.^[10] Thomas Hobbes developed conatus more systematically in De Corpore (1655), defining it as an infinitesimal motion or "endeavor" that forms the basis of all physical and psychological actions in his materialist system. In Chapter 15, Article 2, he states: "I define ENDEAVOUR to be motion made in less space and time than can be given... that is, motion made through the length of a point, and in an instant or point of time."^[12] This concept unified mechanics and human striving, where all voluntary actions arise from bodily conatus propagated through the senses and organs, reducing passions and decisions to motions originating in the heart.^[10] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz integrated conatus into his metaphysics in the Monadology (1714), reinterpreting it as appetitus—an internal principle of striving or appetition driving change within simple, indivisible monads. In Paragraph 15, he describes: "The activity of the internal principle which produces change or passage from one perception to another may be called Appetition," portraying it as a teleological force bridging perception and action in each monad's spontaneous development.^[13] Influenced by Hobbes, Leibniz's conatus emphasized dynamic force over mere extension, serving as the metaphysical basis for motion and harmony in the universe.^[10] These interpretations reveal key contrasts: Hobbes reduced conatus to empirical motion and material causation, stripping it of teleology, while Leibniz elevated it to an incorporeal, appetitive drive inherent in monads, contrasting Descartes' externally determined, non-vital tendencies in extended matter.^[14] Such developments influenced early modern vitalism by providing mechanistic yet dynamic models for explaining life's persistent striving, as seen in Hobbes' linkage of conatus to physiological processes like the heartbeat.^[10]

Conatus in Spinoza's Philosophy

Core Definition and Role in Ethics

In Spinoza's Ethics, the concept of conatus is introduced in Part III, Proposition 6, where it is defined as the striving by which each thing endeavors, insofar as it is in itself, to persevere in its being.^[1] This proposition establishes that particular things, as finite modes expressing God's attributes in a determinate way, possess no internal capacity for self-destruction and thus actively oppose anything that threatens their existence.^[1] Proposition 7 further clarifies that this conatus, or effort to persist, constitutes the actual essence of the thing itself, serving as the foundational principle for understanding the nature of all finite entities.^[1] Within Spinoza's substance monism, conatus functions as the manifestation of God's infinite power in finite modes, thereby bridging the distinction between natura naturans (nature naturing, or God as the active productive substance) and natura naturata (nature natured, or the passive modes produced by that substance).^[15] Each finite mode's striving reflects the immanent causal efficacy of the one substance, God or Nature, ensuring that perseverance is not an isolated property but an expression of the eternal necessity inherent in the divine essence.^[16] This integration underscores conatus as the dynamic principle unifying the ontological structure of reality, where finite beings participate in the infinite power without transcending their modal limitations.^[15] In Part IV, Proposition 18, Spinoza elaborates on how conatus, as the essence of desire, is shaped by external causes, particularly in the context of affects: a desire arising from pleasure is strengthened by the power of an external cause aiding the thing's perseverance, whereas one arising from pain is constrained solely by the thing's own power.^[17] This determination by external influences highlights Spinoza's rejection of teleological explanations, favoring instead immanent causation where actions arise necessarily from the nature of things rather than any preconceived ends.^[18] Published posthumously in 1677 as part of the Opera Posthuma, the Ethics presents conatus as Spinoza's synthesis responding to the mechanistic conatus in Hobbes's materialism and the mind-body dualism of Descartes, reorienting it toward a holistic metaphysical framework.^[19]^[20]

Relation to Desire, Joy, and Human Nature

In Spinoza's Ethics, conatus is fundamentally identified with desire, or cupiditas, as the innate striving by which each individual endeavors to persevere in its being, serving as the essence of human appetites and actions.^[21] This identification appears in Part III, Proposition 9, where desire is defined as the conscious form of appetite, arising directly from the mind's and body's effort to persist indefinitely, without distinction between the two except in awareness.^[21] Thus, all human desires, whether for self-preservation or external goods, stem from this core conatus, making it the foundational drive of human nature rather than a secondary impulse.^[21] The emotional dynamics of joy and sadness further illustrate conatus as transitions in the power of acting and thinking. Joy (laetitia) is defined as the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection, representing an increase in the conatus's power, while sadness (tristitia) denotes a decrease, diminishing that power.^[21] In Part III, Propositions 11 through 18, Spinoza explains affects as modifications of the body and corresponding ideas in the mind that either enhance or hinder this striving, with joy intensifying desires toward objects that affirm existence and sadness weakening them toward those that negate it.^[21] These emotions are not arbitrary but deterministic outcomes of how external causes interact with the individual's conatus, shaping human responses in a mechanistic yet striving framework.^[21] Ethically, conatus underpins virtue as the rational alignment with one's nature, free from external domination. In Part IV, Proposition 18, virtue consists in acting solely from the laws of one's own conatus, preserving one's being through reason rather than passive submission to passions.^[21] This leads to freedom not as indeterminate will but as deterministic self-mastery, where bondage arises when conatus is swayed by inadequate ideas and external causes, contrasting with liberation via adequate knowledge.^[21] Ultimately, in Part V, the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis) represents the maximal expression of conatus, an eternal joy born of understanding God's essence, enabling the mind to persevere in blessedness beyond temporal affects.^[21] Human nature, in this view, is thus a determined striving toward increasing perfection, devoid of free will yet capable of rational harmony with the divine order.^[21]

Post-Spinozistic Philosophical Developments

18th and 19th Century Interpretations

In the early 18th century, Giambattista Vico adapted Spinoza's concept of conatus in his New Science (1725), portraying it as the innate human striving that underlies societal development and historical cycles. Vico interpreted conatus as the effort of the human will to restrain passions and align them with justice, transforming primal ferocity, avarice, and ambition into the foundations of civil institutions like the family, monarchy, and republic.^[22] This dynamic force, moderated by divine providence, drives the cyclical progression through Vico's three ages—divine, heroic, and human—ensuring the perseverance and evolution of social orders.^[22] Arthur Schopenhauer directly inherited Spinoza's conatus in his The World as Will and Representation (1818), reinterpreting it as the "will to live" (Wille zum Leben), a blind, insatiable striving that manifests as endless desire and underlies all suffering in the phenomenal world.^[23] Unlike Spinoza's affirmative view of conatus as perseverance in being, Schopenhauer saw this force as the root of existential misery, advocating its denial through asceticism to achieve transcendence.^[23] He critiqued Spinoza's pantheistic optimism for sophisticating away the world's evils, positioning his own metaphysics as a more realistic extension of Spinozistic monism into pessimism.^[23] Friedrich Nietzsche evolved conatus further in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), transforming it into the "will to power" (Wille zur Macht), an affirmative and creative drive that overcomes Schopenhauer's pessimistic denial of life.^[24] Nietzsche critiqued Spinoza's conatus as overly conservative, focused on mere self-preservation rather than expansion and self-overcoming, declaring that "life itself is will to power" beyond physiological drives.^[24] While acknowledging Spinoza's influence on his vitalism, Nietzsche rejected the rationalism and teleology he perceived in it, emphasizing instead an Dionysian affirmation of striving as eternal recurrence.^[24] Immanuel Kant contrasted Spinoza's conatus with his own practical reason in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), treating self-preservation not as a natural striving but as a categorical duty derived from moral law.^[25] For Kant, reason commands the preservation of one's animal nature as the first duty to oneself, universally prohibiting suicide even when rationally calculated, unlike Spinoza's allowance under certain conditions of greater evil avoidance.^[25] This shift prioritizes deontological ethics over conatus-guided desire, making moral imperatives accessible through pure practical reason rather than empirical inclinations.^[25] The 19th-century reinterpretations of conatus also influenced vitalism, with thinkers like Schopenhauer laying groundwork for later figures such as Hans Driesch, whose neovitalism in the early 20th century echoed conatus as an entelechy directing organic development beyond mechanical causes.^[26] Driesch's ideas, rooted in 19th-century debates on vital force, portrayed life as a holistic striving akin to Spinoza's perseverance, countering reductionist materialism in biology.^[26]

20th Century and Contemporary Scholarship

In the 20th century, Gilles Deleuze offered a influential reinterpretation of Spinoza's conatus in his Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (originally published in French in 1970 and translated into English in 1988), framing it as a joyful potency that expresses the immanence of being and serves as the basis for ethical affirmation rather than mere self-preservation.^[27] Deleuze emphasized conatus as an active force of composition and increase in power, linking it to affects like joy that enhance compositional relations among bodies and ideas, thereby influencing post-structuralist thought by shifting focus from transcendence to vital, expressive immanence.^[28] This reading positioned conatus not as a static drive but as a dynamic principle of becoming, integral to Deleuze's broader ontology of difference and multiplicity. Analytic philosophers in the late 20th and early 21st centuries further refined conatus through metaphysical and causal lenses. Steven Nadler, in Spinoza's Ethics: An Introduction (2006), interprets conatus as the causal essence of finite modes, arguing that it represents the inherent striving by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its being as an expression of God's power, thereby bridging Spinoza's ontology and ethics.^[29] Building on this, Eric Schliesser proposed in 2010 that conatus functions as an essence-preserving, attribute-neutral immanent cause, suggesting it operates independently of specific attributes like thought or extension to maintain modal identity within Spinoza's monistic framework.^[30] This attribute-neutral view challenges traditional readings by emphasizing conatus's role in unifying Spinoza's parallelism across attributes, fostering debates on the nature of causation and modal essence. Recent scholarship from 2020 to 2025 has extended these interpretations into contemporary philosophical debates, often through interdisciplinary lenses. The Conatus - Journal of Philosophy dedicated its 2021 special issue (Volume 6, No. 2) to "Conatus - The Will to Persist," featuring articles that explore conatus in relation to democratic education, such as by Jasmin Özel, David Beisecker, and Joe Ervin in "A New Conatus for the New World: Dewey's Response to Perfectionist Conceptions of Democratic Education," which reimagines Spinozistic striving as a collective, adaptive force for fostering resilience in pluralistic societies.^[31] By 2025, the journal's Volume 10, No. 1 included discussions on Aristotelian ethics in artificial intelligence, with Alkis Gounaris et al.'s "Virtue in the Machine: Beyond a One-size-fits-all Approach and Aristotelian Ethics for Artificial Intelligence," proposing the application of Aristotelian virtues to AI systems for ethical decision-making.^[32] Critiques of conatus in 20th-century scholarship have highlighted its social and political implications, particularly through feminist perspectives. Genevieve Lloyd, in her 1994 analysis, examined the gendered dimensions of conatus in Spinoza's framework, arguing that the doctrine's emphasis on rational striving reinforces male-associated ideals of autonomy and control, potentially marginalizing feminine associations with passivity and embodiment despite Spinoza's monistic rejection of dualism.^[33] This reading underscores how conatus, while promising a relational ontology, carries implications for power dynamics that feminist interpreters seek to reconfigure toward more inclusive notions of striving.

Modern Applications and Interpretations

In Biology and Systems Theory

In biology, the concept of conatus has been appropriated to describe the inherent drive of living systems toward self-maintenance and persistence, particularly through Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theory of autopoiesis. Introduced in their 1972 work Autopoiesis and Cognition, autopoiesis characterizes living organisms as operationally closed networks that produce and maintain their own components, striving for structural invariance despite environmental perturbations. This process embodies a secularized form of conatus, where the system's "concern to exist" emerges from metabolic self-transcendence and autonomy, as articulated by Varela's enactive approach to cognition. Unlike Spinoza's metaphysical essence, autopoiesis frames this striving as an emergent property of biological organization, enabling adaptation without teleological intent. In systems theory, conatus informs models of self-referential and autopoietic reproduction, extending beyond biology to social and organizational domains. Niklas Luhmann, in his 1980s framework, applied autopoiesis to social systems, portraying them as networks of communications that self-reproduce through operational closure, driven by an intrinsic conatus-like tendency to differentiate from their environment while sustaining complexity. This links to cybernetics, where Stafford Beer's viable system model (VSM) from the 1970s conceptualizes organizations as recursive structures capable of viability—maintaining identity and adapting to disturbances via feedback loops—mirroring conatus as a principle of systemic perseverance. Beer's VSM, detailed in Brain of the Firm (1972), emphasizes requisite variety for survival, secularizing the drive as a functional necessity rather than a divine attribute. Biological interpretations further reinterpret conatus as mechanisms like homeostasis and evolutionary fitness, emphasizing empirical processes over philosophical ontology. António Damasio's neurobiological extension equates conatus with homeostasis, the regulatory dynamics ensuring organismal survival and well-being through emotional and physiological adjustments, as explored in his analysis of life regulation. A 2022 reinterpretation in chiropractic philosophy rationalizes innate intelligence—the vital force coordinating bodily functions—as conatus, a formal striving for unique form preservation, grounded in hylomorphic relations and compatible with autopoietic self-organization.^[34] Recent ecological extensions apply conatus to ecosystem resilience, viewing it as the collective persistence drive enabling adaptation to stressors, as in deep ecology frameworks that draw on Spinoza to advocate intrinsic value in natural systems, though critiqued for anthropocentric leanings. These applications distinguish modern conatus as an emergent, measurable property of complex systems, detached from its original Spinozistic essence.

In Psychology, Neuroscience, and Other Fields

In psychology, Antonio Damasio has prominently linked Spinoza's concept of conatus—the innate drive to persist and flourish—to modern understandings of emotion and decision-making. In his 2003 book Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Damasio interprets conatus as the foundational striving that underlies somatic markers, bodily signals that guide rational choices by associating past emotional experiences with potential outcomes. This framework posits that emotions, as expressions of conatus, regulate behavior to enhance survival and well-being, preventing maladaptive decisions in uncertain environments. Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis thus extends conatus into empirical psychology, emphasizing how emotional homeostasis supports adaptive persistence amid life's challenges. In neuroscience, conatus has been reframed as a neural mechanism for striving toward homeostasis, particularly in motivational systems that sustain organismal integrity. A 2022 study explores conative features such as aboutness and directedness akin to conatus as part of the brain's intentional system.^[35] This aligns with behavioral neuroscience views where dopamine signaling drives persistence, as seen in the SEEKING system, which energizes goal-directed actions to maintain vitality and counteract entropy. For instance, midbrain dopamine neurons facilitate reward prediction and motivational vigor, embodying conatus as a neurochemical push for prolonged engagement in survival-relevant behaviors.^[36] These insights, drawn from 2022-2023 research, highlight conatus not as abstract philosophy but as a dynamic neural process integrating emotion, cognition, and action for homeostatic regulation.^[37] Beyond core mental sciences, conatus informs interdisciplinary applications in ethics, education, health, and environmental psychology. In education, a 2021 analysis reinterprets conatus through John Dewey's lens, framing it as a "will to persist" that fosters democratic resilience, where learners cultivate collective striving to navigate pluralism and sustain civic engagement.^[38] Chiropractic philosophy invokes conatus to rationalize innate intelligence, as a 2022 paper argues that the body's self-regulating efforts—manifest in neural and musculoskeletal adaptations—represent a formal striving for health equilibrium, distinct from external interventions.^[34] Extending to environmental psychology, post-2010 works apply conatus to human-nature interactions, viewing sustainability efforts as an extension of individual and collective drives to persist amid ecological threats, promoting self-knowledge as a tool for resilient environmental stewardship.^[39] These applications, building on empirical studies since 2007, bridge conatus to practical domains, emphasizing its role in fostering adaptive, virtue-oriented responses in complex modern contexts.

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