Conatus

Conatus ^[1] (lat. Conatus : effort, impulse, intention, inclination, tendency, attempt, aspiration) is a term used in the early philosophical concepts of psychology and metaphysics , suggesting an “innate” tendency of a “thing” to continue to exist and to improve itself ^{[2 ]} . The “thing” can be reason, matter, or both at once. Over the millennia, philosophers have created many possible definitions of the term. A significant contribution to the development of ideas about the conatus was made by such philosophers of the 17th century as Rene Descartes , Baruch Spinoza , Gottfried Leibniz , Thomas Hobbes ^[3] . The conatus is often identified with the instinctive “will to live” inherent in living organisms, or with various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia ^[4] . The term is also often associated with “God's will” as part of pantheistic views on nature ^[5] . The concept of a cone can be divided into its individual definitions for the mind and body, as well as shared with respect to centrifugal forces and inertia ^[6] .

For two and a half millennia, the history of the term “conatus” has been a series of changes in the understanding of its meaning and application to specific areas. Many philosophers, one by one, adapted the term to their own views and concepts, each of them developed his idea in different ways; in this regard, there is still no clear and universally accepted definition of the conatus. The earliest authors who discussed the conatus wrote in Latin, and their conclusions were based on the concepts of ancient Greek thinkers. Thus, the term “conatus” was used not only as a special word, but also as an ordinary word in the general sense. In this regard, in the old texts it is rather difficult to distinguish its specialized meaning from the usual one, which creates additional complexity in the translation. Today, the term "conatus" in its "specialized" meaning is practically not used, because, for example, in modern physics it is replaced by concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum. Nevertheless, the concept of the conat had a significant impact on a number of thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries , including Arthur Schopenhauer , Friedrich Nietzsche and Louis Dumont .