In the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, conatus (; :wikt:conatus; Latin for "effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving") 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, and is often associated with God's will in a pantheist view of nature. The conatus may refer to the instinctive will to live of living organisms or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia. Today, conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since classical mechanics uses concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum that have superseded it. It has, however, been a notable influence on later thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Definition and origin
The Latin cōnātus comes from the verb cōnor, which is usually translated into English as, to endeavor; used as an abstract noun, conatus is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. Although the term is most central to Spinoza's philosophy, many other early modern philosophers including René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes made significant contributions, each developing the term differently.
Whereas the medieval Scholastic philosophers such as Jean Buridan developed a notion of impetus as a mysterious intrinsic property of things, René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a more modern, mechanistic concept of motion which he called the conatus. For Descartes, in contrast to Buridan, motion and rest are properties of the interactions of matter according to eternally fixed mechanical laws, not dispositions and intentions, nor as inherent properties or forces of things, but rather as a unifying, external characteristic of the physical universe itself. Descartes specifies two varieties of the conatus: conatus a centro, or a theory of gravity and conatus recedendi which represents centrifugal forces. Descartes, in developing his First Law of Nature, also invokes the idea of a conatus se movendi, or "conatus of self-preservation", a generalization of the principle of inertia, which was formalized by Isaac Newton and made into the first of his three Laws of Motion fifty years after the death of Descartes."
Thomas Hobbes criticized previous definitions of conatus for failing to explain the origin of motion, defining conatus to be the infinitesimal unit at the beginning of motion: an inclination in a specified direction. Furthermore, Hobbes uses conatus to describe cognition functions in the mind, describing emotion as the beginning of motion and the will as the sum of all emotions, which forms the conatus of a body and its physical manifestation is the perceived "will to survive". In a notion similar that of Hobbes, Gottfried Leibniz differentiates between the conatus of the body and soul, primarily focusing however on the concept of a conatus of body in developing the principles of integral calculus to explain Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Leibniz later defines the term monadic conatus, as the state of change through which his monads perpetually advance. 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. By summing an infinity of such conatuses (i.e., what is now called integration), Leibniz could measure the effect of a continuous force.