Benedict de Spinoza · Philosophy
Every thing strives to persist in its own being - this striving (conatus) is its very essence. From it Spinoza derives desire, joy, and sadness, and builds a geometry of the emotions that treats love and hate as effects with causes, not sins to be condemned.
Having built his picture of God, attributes, and modes, Spinoza turns in Part III of the Ethics to the human being - and he begins with a single, powerful principle. “Each thing,” he writes, “in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its own being.” This endeavour, this striving, he calls conatus. A stone ‘strives’ to remain a stone, resisting forces that would shatter it; a living body strives to maintain itself, to grow, to keep going; a mind strives to keep thinking. And this striving is not some extra appetite added on top of a thing - it is the thing’s essence. “The endeavour, wherewith a thing endeavours to persist in its being, is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question.” To be a thing at all is to strive to keep being that thing.
This is a profound naturalisation of desire and self-preservation. Where earlier thinkers might have said that the will chooses ends or that the soul seeks the good, Spinoza says: at bottom, every finite mode is simply a quantum of effort to persevere, a force of self-maintenance pushing against the forces that would dissolve it. From this one root - the conatus - he will grow the entire tree of human emotional life. Desire, joy, sorrow, love, hatred, hope, fear, pride, envy: all will turn out to be modifications of the basic striving to persist, as that striving is helped or hindered, raised or lowered, by the things we encounter. The emotions are not invasions of an otherwise rational soul; they are the conatus in action.
From the conatus Spinoza derives three primary affects (emotions), from which all others are compounded. First, desire (cupiditas): the conatus itself, when we are conscious of it - appetite with awareness of itself. Desire is the striving, felt from the inside, reaching toward whatever it takes to preserve and enhance us. Second, joy or pleasure (laetitia): the feeling that accompanies a transition to a greater perfection - that is, an increase in our power to persist and act. When something raises our vitality, strengthens our striving, we feel joy. Third, sadness or pain (tristitia): the feeling that accompanies a transition to a lesser perfection - a decrease in our power, a hindering of our striving. When something diminishes us, we feel sadness.
This is a beautifully economical theory. Joy is not a mysterious quale but the felt registering of our power going up; sadness is the felt registering of our power going down; desire is the striving aware of itself. And from these three, all the named emotions are built by adding the idea of their cause. Love, Spinoza famously says, is simply “joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause” - the pleasure we feel together with the thought of whatever produces it. Hatred is “sadness, accompanied by the idea of an external cause”. Hope is joy mixed with the uncertainty of a future good; fear is sadness mixed with the uncertainty of a future evil. By compounding the three primary affects with ideas of causes, objects, and probabilities, Spinoza generates a whole taxonomy of dozens of emotions - a geometry of the passions.
The conatus theory overturns the ordinary picture of value. We usually think: some things are good, and so we desire them; we recognise a good and are drawn to it. Spinoza reverses the order. “We neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything, because we deem it to be good; on the contrary, we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it.” Good and evil are not features that things have in themselves, prior to all striving; they are names we give to what helps or hinders our conatus. A thing is ‘good’ for me if it increases my power to persist and act; ‘bad’ if it diminishes me. Value is relational, rooted in striving - not an objective property written into the fabric of things.
This does not make Spinoza a nihilist who thinks nothing matters; rather, it relocates the source of value. There is no good or evil sub specie aeternitatis, from the standpoint of God-or-Nature, where everything simply follows by necessity and nothing is better or worse than anything else. But from the standpoint of a finite striving thing, some things genuinely help it persevere and flourish and others genuinely harm it - and that is what good and bad mean. Spinoza will go on to define the ‘good’ in the fullest sense as whatever truly increases our power of acting and understanding, and the ‘free’ or ‘blessed’ life as the life that maximises this. So the conatus is not only the engine of the emotions; it is the foundation of his ethics. What is good is what serves the striving of a being that has come to understand its own nature and its place in the whole - a striving that, rightly guided by reason, leads not to selfish grasping but, surprisingly, to a serene and shared joy.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Spinoza each thing has a conatus , a striving to persist in its being, which is its actual essence. Explain how desire, joy, and sadness follow from this striving, and why Spinoza studies emotions like a geometer rather than condemning them.
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