page_title: Conatus
section_title: In Spinoza
hierarchical_section_title: Conatus / In Spinoza
context_page_description: In early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics, conatus is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This "thing" may be mind, matter, or a combination of both. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated, including seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes who had made significant contributions. The conatus may refer to the instinctive "will to live" of living organisms or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia. Often the concept is associated with God's will in a pantheist view of Nature. The concept may be broken up into separate definitions for the mind and body and split when discussing centrifugal force and inertia.
  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. Successive philosophers to adopt the term put their own personal twist on the concept, each developing the term differently. The earliest authors to discuss conatus wrote primarily in Latin, basing their usage on ancient Greek concepts.
context_section_description: Conatus is a central theme in the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677). According to Spinoza, "each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being" (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6). Spinoza presents a few reasons for believing this. First, particular things are, as he puts it, modes of God, which means that each one expresses the power of God in a particular way (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6, dem.). Moreover, it could never be part of the definition of God that his modes contradict one another (Ethics, part 3, prop. 5); each thing, therefore, "is opposed to everything which can take its existence away" (Ethics, part 3, prop. 6, dem.). This resistance to destruction is formulated by Spinoza in terms of a striving to continue to exist, and conatus is the word he most often uses to describe this force.
  Striving to persevere is not merely something that a thing does in addition to other activities it might happen to undertake. Rather, striving is "nothing but the actual essence of the thing" (Ethics, part 3, prop. 7). 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.
caption: Benedictus de Spinoza
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