Conatus
conatus
The effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being. In Spinoza, this is not an attribute of the thing but its very essence in action: a stone, a tree, a man are nothing other than the drive by which they maintain themselves in existence. The *conatus* is the axis around which the entire *Ethics* revolves—desire, joy, virtue all reduce to it.
L’effort par lequel chaque chose s’efforce de persévérer dans son être n’est rien en dehors de l’essence actuelle de cette chose.
The Latin conatus—from conari, to strive, to attempt—denotes impulse, tension, the exertion of effort. Spinoza makes it the first principle of his physics of existents: “Each thing, insofar as it lies within it, strives to persevere in its being” (III.6). Not by an edict imposed from without, nor by an instinct grafted onto the thing, but because a thing carries within itself nothing that could destroy it. To exist is already to resist one’s own disappearance.
The decisive step is taken in the following proposition: this effort is nothing apart from the thing’s actual essence. Conatus is not what the thing has; it is what it is. There is no being first, then a tendency to preserve itself; the tendency is the being itself, grasped as power in act. From this follows the rest: when applied to mind and body together, conatus is called appetite; when self-aware, it becomes desire. Joy is merely its increase, sadness its diminution.
To be distinguished from will or conscious desire: conatus is not a choice, not a deliberative faculty. It precedes all consciousness and founds it. We do not desire a thing because we judge it good—we judge it good because conatus already inclines us toward it. This reverses the common order of reasons: appetite comes first, judgment follows.
Also to be distinguished from the biological instinct of self-preservation: conatus is not a vital drive among the properties of a living thing, but the ontological formula of all that exists—finite modes each expressing, in their own determined way, the infinite power of substance. When this power is moved from without and turned against itself, the existent falls into servitude; when it proceeds from its own nature alone, it is virtue and power to act.