Conatus: effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving. From Latin cōnātus (participle: tried, attempted, having been tried).

The asymptote of philosophical inquiry. The sine qua non necessary condition of the whole thing. The creator of all ontological depth—for it is the underlying past causes that are creative, core, and productive of all being now. In fact, grasping presence now grasps the thinnest slice of all. The now is just the last domino to have fallen.

We are not this ephemeral time-slice now. We are, rather, this world-line, this whole history, this underlying mountain of conditions, this preceding chain of causes.

And we are not this world-line as series, not this mountain as collection. We are, rather, conatus—the underlying striving that holds all events together and precedes them in its intentionality and effort and surpasses them by perduring. The real self is not a series of points, but a single, identical, and substantial moving point whose movement precedes and surpasses the line.

A history of the word

The Stoics (333–264 BCE) and even the Peripatetics (c. 335 BCE) gave the term its first technical sense. They used it to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results.

Diogenes Laertius (c. 235 BCE) expanded the notion to include an aversion to destruction. But he limited its valid use to the motivations of non-human animals (but not plants).

Conatus induces emotions: “Humans do not wish to do something because they think it to be good; rather, they call it good because they want to do it.”

John Philoponus brought conatus to physics by countering Aristotle’s view that projectiles are propelled along by the surrounding aether. Philoponus inverted this view and put the motive force inside the moving thing. (Not inertia, which is a kind of non-active principle of conservation, but an inner flowing power.)

Descartes: conatus as force-preserver

Descartes updated this internal version of conatus by defining it as “an active power or tendency of bodies to move, expressing the power of God.” Descartes transformed it from an anthropomorphic power into a mechanical one. (N.B. that Descartes tried to erase teleology from physics generally.) God gives matter the tendency to behave like a force carrier that transmit, take-on, and preserve external forces.

Two interesting applications: conatus a centro and conatus recedendi. The first was Descartes’ theory of gravity; the second, his account of centrifugal force.

One very interesting application: conatus se movendi, or “conatus of self-preservation”—his principle of inertia:

Each thing, insofar as in it lies, always perseveres in the same state, and when once moved, always continues to move.

Hobbes: conatus as homeostasis and Survive!

Hobbes described 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.

How does the conatus work in biology? If there is a ghost influencing the machine, what is the lever of its operation? Hobbes says that conatus enters spacetime at the level of the point and its duration is momentary. He then uses this to derive various helpful mechanical concepts: The concept of impetus, as used by Hobbes, is defined as “a measure of the conatus exercised by a moving body over the course of time.” Resistance is caused by a contrary conatus. Force is this motion plus “the magnitude of the body.”

Spinoza: the big boy of conatus theorists

Spinoza makes conatus the most important ingredient in his lovely and mandala-like ontology.

•  Principle: “Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being” (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6). The organism is on the look-out for threats, and also for goods. This is Leary’s First Circuit and stands at the basis necessarily of any system whose survival is conditional on the choices made by its executive function. When we experience a change of state, we are interested mostly in how it effects “an increase or decrease in our power of acting” or in our “power to persevere in being.”

For Spinoza, the conatus is a kind of existential inertia, what today we call the homeostatic or negentropic orientation of an organism. But it is much more, for the this survival-tropic movement of a thing is also its essence. The essence of the thing is the trans-temporal negentropic striving that holds it together over time and keeps it what it is and, so, creates its very existence.

The thing is not its matter, nor its pattern, nor the dynamic that preserves the pattern over time. Rather, it is the occult clinging or anxiety that is obsessed with keeping this dynamic in place. Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.

For all the ex-Scientologists who come visit MapsElf for its rehabilitative reconstruction and explanation of beloved Scientology principles, Spinoza sounds a lot like LRH here. What drives us, Spinoza says, is maximizing our ability. Evolution has selected for an organism’s executive function (if it exists) to crave things that increase its power of acting, and avoid things that decrease its power of acting. The ultimate good and pan-axiological ground is increased power.

This (more LRH is coming) lets Spinoza create a mechanistic taxonomy of emotions. Emotions are, after all, like everything else in the body, there because they have helped (or not sufficiently hindered) the survival of the particular negentropic dynamic that is the organism.