Conatus

In early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics, conatus (/koʊˈneɪtəs/; 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. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated. Seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes made important 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.I define to be motion made in less space and time than can be given; that is, less than 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.It was a permanent force whose effect got dissipated only as a result of external agents such as air resistance. He is apparently the first to conceive such a permanent type of impressed virtue for non-natural motion.Indeed, self-motion of the type conceived by Ibn Sina is almost the opposite of the Aristotelian conception of violent motion of the projectile type, and it is rather reminiscent of the principle of inertia, i.e., Newton's first law of motion. In early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics, conatus (/koʊˈneɪtəs/; 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. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated. Seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes made important 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. These thinkers therefore used 'conatus' not only as a technical term but as a common word and in a general sense. 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. Today, conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics uses 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 Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Louis Dumont. The Latin cōnātus comes from the verb cōnor, 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 ὁρμή (hormê, translated in Latin by impetus) to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results. Classical thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Diogenes Laërtius (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. Diogenes Laërtius, 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 ὁρμή. Later, Telesius and Campanella extended the ancient Greek notions and applied them to all objects, animate and inanimate. First Aristotle, then Cicero and Laërtius 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. 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. 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'. 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. This view was strongly opposed by Averroës and many scholastic philosophers who supported Aristotle. The Aristotelian view was also challenged in the Islamic world. For example, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) seems to have supported Philoponus' views, while he developed a concept similar to inertia. The concept of inertia was developed more clearly in the work of his contemporary Avicenna, who conceived a permanent force whose effect is dissipated only as a result of external agents such as air resistance, making him 'the first to conceive such a permanent type of impressed virtue for non-natural motion.' Avicenna's concept of mayl is almost the opposite of the Aristotelian conception of violent motion and is reminiscent of Newton's first law of motion. Avicenna also developed an idea similar to momentum, when he attempted to provide a quantitative relation between the weight and velocity of a moving body. Jean Buridan (1300–1358) also 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. 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'. Whereas the ancients used the term in a strictly anthropomorphic sense similar to voluntary 'endeavoring' or 'struggling' to achieve certain ends, and medieval Scholastic philosophers developed a notion of conatus as a mysterious intrinsic property of things, Descartes uses the term in a somewhat more mechanistic sense. 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. 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. 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.