In the cracks of paving stones, in crevices of distressed walls, a little dirt, blown in and moistened, provides enough sustenance for weeds to root.

I see climbing vines, bindweed, couch grass, bracken, and clumps of moss in the paving lines, delicate chickweed sprouting from damp cracks in the shade.

A leafy spurge sways as the breeze picks up. Oblivious of its precarious exposure, it stands defiantly erect from its concrete base. Its footing comprises minuscule and densely packed roots like rolled tobacco, snug in moist concrete burrows.

Taproots and robust networks of rhizomes worm through plastic barriers and crumbling, weathered brickwork in a multi-generational war of attrition that the weeds would always win.

None of these plants have any business to be there. They have no plan, no ambition. They simply persist to be what they are, and do so with everything they’ve got.

It’s astonishing how fast they rise from such meagre beginnings and flourish to the point that they bow under their own weight. A force of some kind is at work as if the conditions for life have a singular will. A build-up of dirt, moisture, a little sunlight and pockets safe from gusts of wind — whatever this force can get it takes.

It seems a pity to pull it all up. It would only take a matter of years if humans had been extracted from this city, that platlife would overgrow everything, like those lost cities swallowed by the Amazon.

Striving’s Purpose in Spinoza’s System

What is behind this relentless vitality? This endeavour that makes the most of what it has?

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza conceptualised this as conatus, Latin for “striving”. For him it was the most fundamental force of all things—both living and inanimate.

In Spinoza’s philosophical system, everything is part of a oneness that he describes as “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura). Ultimately, nothing is separate from an immanent God, who is not a divine engineer who set the cosmos in motion, but is in fact the cosmos itself — infinite and self-caused.

What we perceive to be parts of the cosmos are “modes” according to Spinoza. In his system, modes are temporary expressions of the one substance — the singular underlying reality that everything is made from — just as waves are an expression of the sea, or ripples are an expression of a river. The ripples and waves are all of the same substance — the river or the sea — they are part of a oneness.

And so people, animals, planets, and grains of sand are all modes of the same one substance.

But if all is part of a oneness, what explains change? Why isn’t everything just static? Why do trees grow, why do cells divide, why do people go about their business? We can explain these processes through science, but what, ultimately on a cosmic level, necessitates them?

Spinoza declares the answer in part three of his Ethics. “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” (Ethics III 6) Spinoza’s philosophy hinges on this notion — it serves to join together his ethics and his account of what reality is (his ontology).

Conatus isn’t a survival instinct; it isn’t something that modes do, and it’s not something added to modes — it’s not a feeling or a behaviour. His claim is that conatus is the essence of all things — everything that exists strives to maintain the integrity of what it is. This is true of rivers and meteorites as much as trees, cells, humans and tigers.

Existing isn’t a choice. Your body is automatically performing millions of tasks: your blood cells are pumped, filtered and manufactured in the marrow, your skin grows ceaselessly, thoughts fizz in your mind, melded together from memories, associations, conjectures. Your conatus is you being you; the striving integral to you.

Everything, to a greater or lesser extent, operates to preserve its being. Spinoza considers this to be a finite expression of the infinite power of God or Nature. If we to return to our metaphor, the wave has momentum but that momentum is a localised and limited power of the overall power of the sea of which it is a part.

Conatus, Ethics and Emotion

Conatus provides the basis for Spinoza’s theories of emotion and ethics. Value isn’t built into the universe itself and waiting to be discovered — it is registered only in the moment of need as something that helps or hinders conatus.

As sunlight and water nourishes a plant growing from the gap in paving stones, aspects of your life that bring you real strength will help you thrive, regardless of the conditions you find yourself in.

Because conatus is essence, everything that enables or expands your power to persist feels good, anything that limits that power feels bad.

When your power to persist increases you feel joy; when it diminishes, you feel sadness. From this simple correlation, we can extrapolate the whole complex of human emotions. Love is joy and the awareness of its external cause, hate is sadness and the awareness of its external cause.

We think of emotions as arising from our own choices. You may think that you simply want a slice of cake because it’s delicious, but your conatus sees that slice of cake as a means by which you can keep persisting.

You think you hate your colleague because they are untrustworthy and hold opinions contrary to yours, but your conatus sees your colleague as a factor in your life that diminishes your power.

But there is a problem with the concept, and we can perceive it in three interrelated aspects from obvious to not-so-obvious.

Firstly, cake isn’t particularly good for you, and your colleague isn’t deserving of hate. To desire sugary processed foods and hate people are unhealthy habits.

Secondly, conatus is committing Spinoza to egoism: it’s obvious that everything seeks advantage for itself, but what of altruism and sacrifice?

Following from this, conatus can also seem circular, that is, it answers its own question: we simply desire what we desire. As such, it may initially seem like a meaningless concept devoid of insight.

The Role of Reason

Spinoza’s response is that reason helps us discern what is truly good for us. To be virtuous is only to act in correspondence with your own nature, but we must fully understand that nature to be virtuous. Our desires do not necessarily identify what genuinely benefits us.

If we properly understand nutrition, we’d second guess the pangs of blind hunger that make us yearn for the slice of cake and instead eat something more nutritious.

While conatus is egoism to the extent that it is self-directed, reason shows the conatus that being pro-social and collaborative is good for everybody, including yourself.

Understanding ourselves and our circumstances allows us to distinguish truly beneficial desires from those that undermine our flourishing. And that understanding shows why rational self-interest needn’t conflict with the good of others.

You would want to work towards a situation where human beings can mutually thrive. What’s truly good for others, is truly good for us. As Spinoza puts it, “There is no singular thing in Nature which is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.” (Ethics 4 P35)

Wisdom is what is most beneficial to conatus, because it allows us to understand and seek out what is truly good for us, not just the things that promise short-term pleasure.

It is most common for people to be imprisoned by their passions. We desire things that do us harm through greed, envy, anger, and obsession, because we don’t understand the causes of those desires. We mistake yearning for choosing.

Conatus is blind, and a poorly-guided conatus will be guided by base instincts and crude desires—it will envy, grab, and hoard what it can. A well-guided conatus is oriented towerd collaboration and compassion, because what seems like sacrifice is a wise pursuit of a shared good. We all thrive in free and compassionate societies.

In this way, Spinoza’s philosophy directly opposes the commonplace notion that people have fundamentally antisocial instincts that need to be tamed.

The very idea of conatus agrees that we are selfish inasmuch that we want to maintain the integrity of our being, but that self-interest guides us ultimately towards a pro-social existence. Ethical work isn’t about suppressing conatus, but rather enlightening it to what is truly good.

This is where conatus becomes a practical concept. The more you understand your own nature and that of the world, the more powerful your conatus becomes. You start to develop an inner coherence that’s no longer distracted by passions. Who is truly free? The magnanimous, or those who are driven by spite?

Conatus and Stoicism

For those acquainted with Stoicism, Spinoza’s conatus bears a striking resemblance to the Stoic concept of oikeiōsis — “affinity” — the sense of self-belonging all living things have.

It is thought to be the root of Stoic justice, we know intrinsically what is good for us, and we strive to maximise what increases our power. For both Spinoza and the Stoics, self-preservation is the starting point: all happiness flows from what is already good.

This is an important foundation for ethics that grounds it in nature: joy isn’t the goal of good acts, but rather the accompaniment of what is good. We feel joy in community and cooperation, when we eat well, when we celebrate and so on. This is a joy of true self-possession — it is beyond the cheap pleasures of selfish gratification which lead to ultimate pain.

Where conatus and oikeiōsis diverge is in the scope of the concepts. For Spinoza, all things, animate and inanimate are driven by conatus. A rock floating in space, a cog in an engine, and a river are all expressions of God or Nature and therefore strive to persevere in their own being.

In Stoicism, oikeiōsis applies to animals, including humans. There is a hierarchy of being in Stoicism, whereby animals have impulse and plants merely have physis.

While the Stoic cosmos is providential (guided by a divine plan) and oikeiōsis is part of a rational design, conatus is not a purpose or a function, it is rather the essence of a thing — it’s what the thing ultimately is.

You don’t have to accept Spinoza’s metaphysics entirely to feel the force of the notion of conatus. You know what it is to persist, to strive, you feel it diminish in all the travails you go through, and take delight in its growth in all your triumphs.

The weeds in the garden don’t know that they are striving. We do, and in that understanding of our nature, and our place in nature as a whole, Spinoza sees a blessedness — not a blessedness bequeathed from above, but a blessedness that grows from within.