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This article is about a term in philosophy. For the book, see Conatus (book). For the species of fish, see Platycephalus.
Conatus (pronounced /koʊˈneɪtəs/; Latin: effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving) is a term used in early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics to refer to an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself.Traupman 1966, p. 52 This "thing" may be mind, matter or a combination of both. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated by philosophers. The most important of these include the seventeenth century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz, along with their Empiricist contemporary Thomas Hobbes.LeBuffe 2006 The conatus may refer to the instinctual "will to live" of animals or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia.Wolfson 1934, p. 202 Often the concept is associated with God\'s will in a pantheist view of Nature.Schopenhauer 1958, p. 357 The concept may be broken up into separate definitions for the mind and body, or even split up when discussing centrifugal force or inertia.Kollerstrom 1999, pp. 331–356
The history of the term conatus is that of a series of subtle tweaks in meaning and clarifications of scope developed over the course of two and a half millennia. After its formulation in ancient Greece, successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently such that it now has no concrete and universally accepted definition. The earliest authors to discuss conatus wrote primarily in Latin, and therefore used it not only as a technical term but as a common word and in a general sense. Conatus is, of course, more than simply a Latin participle. In archaic texts, the more technical usage is difficult to discern from the more common one, and they are also hard to differentiate in translation. In English translations, the term is italicized when used in the technical sense or translated and followed by conatus in brackets.Leibniz 1989, p. 118 Today, conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics and evolutionary biology use concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum that have superseded it. It has, however, been a notable influence on nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Louis Dumont and Arthur Schopenhauer.
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The Latin conatus comes from the verb conari, which is usually translated into English as, "to endeavor"; but the concept of the conatus was first developed by the Stoics (333–264 BCE) and Peripatetics (c. 335 BCE) before the Common Era. These groups used the word ὁρμήν (hormê, translated in Latin by impetus) to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results Clement of Alexandria, in SVF, III, 377; Cicero, De Officiis, I, 132; Seneca the Younger, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, 113, 23 . Classical thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Diogenes Laertius (c. 235 BCE), expanded this principle to include an aversion to destruction, but continued to limit its application to the motivations of non-human animals[citation needed]. Diogenes Laertius, for example, specifically denied the application of the term to plants. Before the Renaissance, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274 CE), Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308 CE) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE) expressed similar sentiments using the Latin words vult, velle or appetit as synonyms of conatus; indeed, all four terms may be used to translate the original Greek ὁρμήν. Around 1700, Telesius and Campanella extended the ancient Greek notions and applied them to all objects, animate and inanimate.Wolfson 1934, pp. 196,199,202
First Aristotle, then Cicero and Laertius each alluded to a connection between the conatus and other emotions. In their view, the former induces the latter. They maintained that humans do not wish to do something because they think it "good", but rather they think it "good" because they want to do it[citation needed]. In other words, the cause of human desire is the natural inclination of a body to augment itself in accordance with the principles of the conatus.Wolfson 1934, p. 204
There is a traditional connection between conatus and motion itself. Aquinas and Abravanel (1265–1321) both related the concept directly to that which Augustine (354–430 CE) saw to be the "natural movements upward and downward or with their being balanced in an intermediate position" described in his De Civitate Dei, (c. 520 CE). They called this force that causes objects to rise or fall, "amor naturalis", or "natural love". Wolfson 1934, pp. 197,200
In the 6th century, John Philoponus (c. 490–c. 570 CE) criticized Aristotle\'s view of motion, noting the inconsistency between Aristotle\'s discussion of projectiles, where the medium of aether keeps projectiles going, and his discussion of the void, where there is no such medium and hence a body\'s motion should be impossible. Philoponus proposed that motion was not maintained by the action of some surrounding medium but by some property, or conatus implanted in the object when it was set in motion. This was not the modern concept of inertia, for there was still the need for an inherent power to keep a body in motion.Sorabji 1988, pp. 227,228 This view was strongly opposed by Averroës and many scholastic philosophers who supported Aristotle.Leaman 1997 The Aristotelian view was also challenged in the Islamic world. For example, Ibn al-Haitham seems to have supported Philoponus\' views.Sabra 1994, pp. 133–136
Later, Jean Buridan (1300–1358) rejected the notion that this motion-generating property, which he named impetus, dissipated spontaneously. Buridan\'s position was that a moving object would be arrested by the resistance of the air and the weight of the body which would oppose its impetus. He also maintained that impetus increased with speed; thus, his initial idea of impetus was similar in many ways to the modern concept of momentum. Despite the obvious similarities to more modern ideas of inertia, Buridan saw his theory as only a modification to Aristotle\'s basic philosophy, maintaining many other peripatetic views, including the belief that there was still a fundamental difference between an object in motion and an object at rest. Buridan also maintained that impetus could be not only linear, but also circular in nature, causing objects such as celestial bodies to move in a circle.Grant 1964, pp. 265–292>
In the first half of the seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650) began to develop a more modern, materialistic concept of the conatus, describing it as "an active power or tendency of bodies to move, expressing the power of God."Pietarinen 2000 Whereas the ancients had used the term in a strictly anthropomorphic sense similar to voluntary "endeavoring" or "struggling" to achieve certain ends, and medieval Scholastic philosophers has developed a notion of conatus as a mysterious intrinsic property of things, Descartes uses the term in a somewhat more mechanistic sense.Garber 1992, pp. 150,154 More specifically, for Descartes, in contrast to Buridan, movement and stasis are two states of the same thing, not different things. Although there is much ambiguity in Descartes\' notion of conatus, one can see here the beginnings of a move away from the attribution of desires and intentions to nature and its workings toward a more scientific and modern view.Goukroger 1980, pp. 178–179
Descartes rejects the teleological, or purposive, view of the material world that was dominant in the West from the time of Aristotle. The mind is not viewed by Descartes as part of the material world, and hence is not subject to the strictly mechanical laws of nature. Motion and rest, on the other hand, are properties of the interactions of matter according to eternally fixed mechanical laws. God only sets the whole thing in motion at the start, and later does not interfere except to maintain the dynamical regularities of the mechanical behavior of bodies. Hence there is no real teleology in the movements of bodies since the whole thing reduces to the law-governed collisions and their constant reconfigurations.Grant 1981, pp. 140–44 The conatus is just the tendency of bodies to move when they collide with each other. God may set this activity in motion, but thereafter no new motion or rest can be created or destroyed.Gueroult 1980, pp. 120–34
Descartes specifies two varieties of the conatus: conatus a centro and conatus recedendi. Conatus a centro, or "tendency towards the center", is used by Descartes as a theory of gravity; conatus recendendi, or "tendency away from the center", represents the centrifugal forces. These tendencies are not to be thought of in terms of animate dispositions and intentions, nor as inherent properties or "forces" of things, but rather as a unifying, external characteristic of the physical universe itself which God has bestowed.Garber 1992, pp. 180,184
Descartes, in developing his First Law of Nature, also invokes the idea of a conatus se movendi, or "conatus of self-preservation".Wolfson 1934, p. 201 This law is a generalization of the principle of inertia, which was developed and experimentally demonstrated earlier by Galileo. The principle was formalized by Isaac Newton and made into the first of his three Laws of Motion fifty years after the death of Descartes. Descartes\' version states: "Each thing, insofar as in it lies, always perseveres in the same state, and when once moved, always continues to move."Blackwell 1966, p. 220
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Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), too, worked off of the previous notions of the conatus principle. However, he criticized the previous definitions for failing to explain the origin of motion. Working toward this end became the primary focus of Hobbes\' work in this area. Indeed, Hobbes "reduces all the cognitive functions of the mind to variations of its conative functions".Bidney 1962, p. 91
Furthermore, Hobbes describes emotion as the beginning of motion and the will as the sum of all emotions. This "will" forms the conatus of a body and its physical manifestation is the perceived "will to survive". In order that living beings may thrive, Hobbes says, "they seek peace and fight anything that threatens this peace". Hobbes also equates this conatus with "imagination", and states that a change in the conatus, or will, is the result of "deliberation".Schmitter 2006
| “ | I define [conatus] to be motion made in less space and time then can be given; that is, less then can be determined or assigned by exposition or number; that is, motion made through the length of a point, and in an instant or point of time.Hobbes III, xiv, 2 | ” |
As in his psychological theory, Hobbes\'s physical conatus is an infinitesimal unit of motion. It is the beginning of motion: an inclination in a specified direction. The concept of impetus, as used by Hobbes, is defined in terms of this physical conatus. It is “a measure of the conatus exercised by a moving body over the course of time”.Jesseph 2006, p. 22 Resistance is caused by a contrary conatus; force is this motion plus “the magnitude of the body”.Jesseph 2006, p. 35 Hobbes also uses the word conatus to refer to the "restorative forces" which may cause springs, for example, to contract or expand. Hobbes claims there is some force inherent in these objects that inclines them to return to their previous state. Today, science attributes this phenomenon to material elasticity.Osler 2001, pp. 157–61
Spinoza (1632–1677) applies the idea of a conatus to the human body, psyche and both simultaneously, using a different term for each.Wolfson 1934, p. 199 When referring to psychological manifestations of the concept, he uses the term voluntas (will). When referring to the overarching concept, he uses the word appetitus (appetite). When referring to the bodily impulse, he uses the plain term conatus.Allison 1975, p. 126 Sometimes he expands the term and uses the whole phrase, conatus sese conservandi (the striving for self-preservation).Duff 1903, chp. VII
Spinoza asserts the existence of this general principle of a conatus in attempting to explain the "self-evident" truth that "nothing can be destroyed except by an external cause".Spinoza & 1677 Book III Prop 4 To him, it is self-evident that "the definition of anything affirms, and does not negate, the thing\'s essence."Spinoza 1677, p. 66 This resistance to self-destruction is formulated by Spinoza in terms of a human striving to continue to exist; and conatus is the word he most often uses to describe this force.Allison 1975, p. 124
In Spinoza\'s world-view, this principle is applicable to all things, and furthermore constitutes the very essence of objects, including the human mind and morals, for these are but finite modes of God.Lin 2004, p. 4 As he states in the Ethics (1677), the conatus is of "indefinite time"; it lasts as long as the object does.Spinoza 1677, pp. 66–7 Spinoza uses conatus to describe an inclination of things to increase in power; rather than just continuing to exist statically, all beings must strive towards perfection.Allison 1975, p. 126 Further, all existing things act if and only if such action maintains or augments their existence. Spinoza also uses the term conatus to refer to rudimentary concepts of inertia, as Descartes had earlier. Since a thing cannot be destroyed without the action of external forces, motion and rest, too, exist indefinitely until disturbed.Allison 1975, p. 125
The concept of the conatus, as used in Baruch Spinoza\'s philosophy of psychology, is derived from sources both ancient and medieval. Spinoza reformulates principles that the Stoics, Cicero, Laertius, and especially Hobbes and Descartes developed.Morgan 2006, p. ix One significant change he makes to Hobbes\' theory is his belief that the conatus ad motum, (conatus to motion), is not mental, but material.Bidney 1962, p. 93
Spinoza, with his determinism, believes that man and nature must be unified under a consistent set of laws; God and nature are one, and there is no free will. Contrary to most philosophers of his time and in accordance with most of those of the present, Spinoza rejects the dualistic assumption that mind, intentionality, ethics and freedom are to be treated as things separate from the natural world of physical objects and events.Jarrett 1991, pp. 470–475 His goal is to provide a unified explanation of all these things within a naturalistic framework, and his notion of conatus is central to this project. For example, an action is "free", for Spinoza, only if it arises from the essence and conatus of an entity. There can be no absolute, unconditioned freedom of the will, since all events in the natural world, including human actions and choices, are determined in accord with the natural laws of the universe, which are inescapable. However, an action can still be free in the sense that it is not constrained or otherwise subject to external forces.Lachterman 1978
Human beings are thus an integral part of nature.Allison 1975, p. 125 Spinoza explains seemingly irregular human behaviour as really "natural" and rational and motivated by this principle of the conatus.Dutton 2006, chp. 5 In the process, he replaces the notion of free will with the conatus, a principle that can be applied to all of nature and not just man.
Spinoza\'s view of the relationship between the conatus and the human affects is not clear. Firmin DeBrabander, assistant professor of philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, both argue that the human affects arise from the conatus and the perpetual drive toward perfection.DeBrabander 2007, p. 20–1 Indeed, Spinoza states in his Ethics that happiness, specifically, "consists in the human capacity to preserve itself." This "endeavor" is also characterized by Spinoza as the "foundation of virtue".Damasio 2003, p. 170 Conversely, a person is saddened by anything that opposes his conatus.Damasio 2003, pp. 138–9
The late David Bidney (1908–1987), professor at Yale University, disagrees. Bidney closely associates "desire", a primary affect, with the conatus principle of Spinoza. This view is backed by the Scholium of IIIP9 of the Ethics which states, "...Between appetite and desire there is no difference, except that desire is generally related to men insofar as they are conscious of the appetite. So desire can be defined as appetite together with consciousness of the appetite." According to Bidney, this desire is controlled by the other affects, pleasure and pain, and thus the conatus strives towards that which causes joy and avoids that which produces pain.Bidney 1962, p. 87 Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) agrees with Bidney in interpretation, but states in The World as Will and Representation (1819) that he disagrees with Spinoza because "according to the whole of my fundamental view, all this is a reversal of the true relation. The will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will."Schopenhauer 1958, p. 292
| "[Conatus] is to motion as a point is to space, or as one to infinity, for it is the beginning and end of motion" Arthur 1998 |
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) was a student of Erhard Weigel (1625–1699) and learned of the conatus principle from him and from Hobbes, though Weigel used the word tendentia (Latin: tendency). Specifically, Leibniz uses the word conatus in his Exposition and Defence of the New System (1695) to describe a notion similar that of Hobbes, but he differentiates between the conatus of the body and soul, the first of which may only travel in a straight line by its own power, and the latter of which may "remember" more complicated motions.Leibniz 1988, p. 135
For Leibniz, the problem of motion comes to a resolution of the paradox of Zeno. Since motion is continuous, space must be infinitely divisible. In order for anything to begin moving at all, there must be some mind-like, voluntaristic property or force inherent in the basic constituents of the universe that propels them. This conatus is a sort of instantaneous or "virtual" motion that all things possess, even when they are static. Motion, meanwhile, is just the summation of all the conatuses that a thing has, along with the interactions of things. The conatus is to motion as a point is to space.Gillespie 1971, pp. 159–161 The problem with this view is that an object that collides with another would not be able to bounce back, if the only force in play were the conatus. Hence, Leibniz was forced to postulate the existence of an aether that kept objects moving and allowed for elastic collisions. Leibniz\' concept of a mind-like memory-less property of conatus, coupled with his rejection of atoms, eventually led to his theory of monads.Carlin 2004, pp. 365–379
Leibniz also uses his concept of a conatus in developing the principles of the integral calculus, adapting the meaning of the term, in this case, to signify a mathematical analog of Newton\'s accelerative "force". By summing an infinity of such conatuses (i.e., what is now called integration), Leibniz could measure the effect of a continuous force. He defines impetus as the result of a continuous summation of the conatus of a body, just as the vis viva (or "living force") is the sum of the inactive vis mortua.Duchesneau 1998, pp. 88–89
Based on the work of Kepler and probably Descartes, Leibniz develops a model of planetary motion based on the conatus principle, the idea of aether and a fluid vortex. This theory is expounded in the work Tentamen de motuum coelestium causis (1689). According to Leibniz, Kepler\'s analysis of elliptical orbits into a circular and a radial component can be explained by a "harmonic vortex" for the circular motion combined with a centrifugal force and gravity, both of which are examples of conatus, to account for the radial motion. Leibniz later defines the term monadic conatus, as the "state of change" through which his monads perpetually advance.Arthur 1994, sec. 3
Several other uses of the term conatus, apart from the primary ones mentioned above, have been formulated by various philosophers over the centuries. There are also some important related terms and concepts which have, more or less, similar meanings and usages. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) defined conatus as the essence of human society,Goulding 2005, p. 22040 and also, in a more traditional, hylozoistic sense, as the generating power of movement which pervades all of nature.Vico 1710, pp. 180–186 Nearly a century after the beginnings of modern science, Vico, inspired by Neoplatonism, explicitly rejected the principle of inertia and the laws of motion of the new physics. For him, nature was composed neither of atoms, as in the dominant view, nor of extension, as in Descartes, but of metaphysical points animated by a conatus principle provoked by God.Landucci 2004, pp. 1174,1175
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) developed a philosophy that contains a principle notably similar to that of Hobbes\'s conatus. This principle, Wille zum Leben, or "Will to Live", described the specific phenomenon of an organism\'s self-preservation instinct.Rabenort 1911, p. 16 Schopenhauer qualified this, however, by suggesting that the Will to Live is not limited in duration. Rather, "the will wills absolutely and for all time", across generations.Schopenhauer 1958, p. 568 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), an early disciple of Schopenhauer, developed a separate principle which comes out of a rejection of the primacy of Schopenhauer\'s Will to Live and other notions of self-preservation. He called his version the Will to Power, or Wille zur Macht.Durant & Durant 1963, chp. IX Nietzsche criticized Spinoza\'s conatus principle, arguing that if true, it would allegedly favour a stagnant Universe. He thought "the opposite is true"; every organism strives not to just to persevere, but to "become more" than it is and to exert its creative strength. Spinoza\'s conatus, however, was much more alike to such an understanding than to simple self-preservation, as it was akin to empowerment[citation needed].
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), greatly depended on Spinoza\'s formulation of the conatus principle as a system of self preservation, though he never cited him directly in any of his published works.Damasio 2003, p. 260Bidney 1962, p. 398 Around the same time, Henri Bergson (1859–1941), developed the principle of the élan vital, or "vital impulse", which was thought to aid in the evolution of organisms. This concept, which implies a fundamental driving force behind all life, is reminiscent of the conatus principle of Spinoza and others.Schrift 2006, p. 13
The cultural anthropologist Louis Dumont (1911–1988), described a cultural conatus built directly upon Spinoza\'s seminal definition in IIIP3 of his Ethics. The principle behind this derivative concept states that any given culture, "tends to persevere in its being, whether by dominating other cultures or by struggling against their domination."Polt 1996
After the advent of Newtonian physics, the concept of a conatus of all physical bodies was largely superseded by the principle of inertia and conservation of momentum. As Bidney states, "It is true that logically desire or the conatus is merely a principle of inertia ... the fact remains, however, that this is not Spinoza\'s usage".Bidney 1962, p. 88 Likewise, conatus was used by many philosophers to describe other concepts which have slowly been made obsolete. Conatus recendendi, for instance, became the centrifugal force, and gravity is used where conatus a centro had been previously. Today, the topics with which conatus dealt are matters of science and are thus subject to inquiry by the scientific method.Bidney 1962
The archaic concept of conatus is today being reconciled with modern biology by scientists such as Antonio Damasio. . The conatus of today, however, is explained in terms of chemistry and neurology where, before, it was a matter of metaphysics and theurgy.Damasio 2003, p. 37 This concept may be "constructed so as to maintain the coherence of a living organism\'s structures and functions against numerous life-threatening odds".Damasio 2003, p. 36 This conatus is similar to modern notions of the libido in the Jungian sense, and the animal directive of self preservation.
The Spinozistic conception of a conatus was a historical precursor to modern theories of autopoiesis in biological systems. Ziemke 2007, pp. 6 In systems theory and the sciences in general, the concept of a conatus may be related to the phenomenon of emergence, whereby complex systems may spontaneously form from a multiplicity of more simple structures. The self-regulating and self-maintaining properties of biological and even social systems may thus be considered modern versions of Spinoza\'s conatus principle. Sandywell 1996, pp. 144–5; however, the scope of the idea is definitely narrower today without the religious implications of the earlier variety.Matthews 1991, pp. 110
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