Conatus as Ontological Drive
On this page 1 section ›
This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (1)
-
#01
Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.63
4. > Affects and Conatus's Variability
Theoretical move: The passage develops Spinoza's theory of the conatus as the ontological ground of affective life, arguing that affects are not defects of a mind-body split but variations of intensity in a single ontological tendency shared by mind and body—thereby displacing the Cartesian passion/action dualism and recasting desire, joy, sorrow, and wonder as modulations of the power of acting rather than states of a subject.
The conatus is an ontological tendency that implies persistence and perseverance in one's being... The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself.