Conatus is Latin for “effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving” The term may refer to the instinctive “will to live” of living organisms. Often the concept is associated with God’s will in a pantheist view of Nature.
About Conatus in brief
Conatus is Latin for “effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving” The term may refer to the instinctive “will to live” of living organisms. Often the concept is associated with God’s will in a pantheist view of Nature. Conatus is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics uses concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum. It has, however, been a notable influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Louis Dumont. 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. 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 a technical sense or translated and followed by conatus in brackets. 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.
In other words, the cause of human desire is the natural inclination of a body to augment itself in accordance with the principles of conatus. There is a traditional connection between conatus, motion itself, and Augustine’s De Civitate Dei,. They called this force that causes objects to rise or fall, “amor naturalis”, or natural love. For example, Ibn al-Haytham seems to have supported the Islamic world’s view on conatus when there was still the inherent power to keep a body in motion. This was not the modern concept of inertia, which was still set in motion when the world was still in motion, according to Ibn al Haytham. The concept was also challenged in the scholastic world by Aristotelian philosophers who supported Aristotle’s view of motion. In the 6th century, John Philoponus criticized Aristotle’s discussion of projectiles, where the medium, where there is no void of motion, and his view of the discussion of the void of the body. He maintained that motion was not maintained by the action of some surrounding medium, but by some property implanted in the object. This view was strongly opposed by Averroës and many scholastics who supported the Aristotle’s position. The discussion of motion should be maintained by some surrounding action, but some property of the object was not set in action, when some conatus or conatus was set in place. It has been used to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results.
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This page is based on the article Conatus published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
