Aristotelian Concept of Happiness (Eudaimonia) and its Conative Role in Human Existence: A Critical Evaluation

Despite the challenges of human existence, identifying the major features that sustain man’s striving to persist in life (conatus) is very essential in understanding who man is. This paper critically evaluates Aristotelian concept of happiness (eudaimonia) and its conative role in human existence as it ignites newness of interest in Aristotelian theory of happiness as the ultimate end of all human activities. Aristotle’s notion of happiness connotes conative experiences; actions that signify movements of some sorts for preservation of life. With regard to self-preservation in existence, Aristotle held the opinion that man has the natural inclination to actualize his potentialities through strong efforts of the will towards the right, and at the same time to create new potentialities to sustain his life. Through the activities of the soul (virtuous acts), man propels himself in a distinctive way towards objects of his desire for survival and flourishing. His concept of emotions as having the affective, cognitive as well as behavioural dimensions revealed that emotions have psychological values and vital functions which serve as survival instinct in man. However, they differ in their aims in that they have both attractive and aversive characteristics such that they move him either to seek or to avoid necessary objects that enhance or harm his existence, respectively. Considering the subjective experiences of pains and pleasures of emotions, they dispose man to virtuous actions towards excellence. However, to sustain man’s inner drive to persist in life, this paper objects to the theses that happiness can be restricted to only cognitive activities. Despite the weaknesses of his treatise concerning happiness in relation to man’s striving to persist, it was observed that Aristotle’s notion of happiness aids man’s striving in life. For further studies, it recommended clarification of ambiguous concepts and reconciliation of contradictions inherent in the theory.

Aristotle and Aristoxenus on Effort

The discussions of conatus – force, tendency, effort, and striving – in early modern metaphysics have roots in Aristotle’s understanding of life as an internal experience of living force. This paper examines the ways that Spinoza’s conatus is consonant with Aristotle on effort. By tracking effort from his psychology and ethics to aesthetics, I show there is a conatus at the heart of the activity of the ψυχή that involves an intensification of power in a way which anticipates many of the central insights of early modern and 20th century European philosophy. The first section outlines how Aristotle’s developmental conception of the soul as geometrically ordered lays the foundation for his understanding of effort. The developmental series of powers of the soul are analogous to the series of shapes in mathematics. The second section links the striving of the soul to the gradual acquisition of virtues as a directed activity unifying multiplicity. The third examines the paradigm of self-awareness that Aristotelian effort involves. In the final section I show how ancient Greek theories of music were founded on the experience of striving. The “nature” of music is defined by Aristoxenus, and Theophrastus, in relation to the passion and intentionality of the soul. The geometrical order, as a synthesis of elements in geometry, music, or ethics, is a generative process in which past elements are retained and reintegrated in later stages of development. It requires effort to think geometrically, and the progress of knowledge itself is an integral aspect of all effort. Effort is the lived and self-aware cause which, moving step by step in an orderly and deliberate way, grows and advances upon itself. For both Spinoza and Aristotle, effort is the immanent intelligence which accomplishes what is in the purview of its understanding. Thus, will, in this conception of effort, is not something we already possess innately, but emerges gradually by an effort aimed at improvement.

Conatus, the Will to Persist: An Introduction

The papers collected in this issue address a variety of aspects of the concept of conatus ranging from the explorations of its roots in early ancient Greek thought to its application on modern theories of democratic education. The conatus is a special relation between the parts of a monad and their subparts and the subparts of the subparts to infinity, which ensures that each part and subpart is a part of this monad and not of any other. As a fundamental trait of monadic existence, the conatus is manifested in a multiplicity of facets that sustain the persistence of any real existence. It is thus obvious that there is still a vast field of such manifestations of conatus that awaits philosophical exploration, especially in the realms of Social Ontology and of the Philosophy of Nature.

The Organic Roots of Conatus in Early Greek Thought

The focus of this paper will be on the earliest Greek treatments of impulse, motivation, and self-animation – a cluster of concepts tied to the hormē-conatus concept. I hope to offer a plausible account of how the earliest recorded views on this subject in mythological, pre-Socratic, and Classical writings might have inspired later philosophical developments by establishing the foundations for an organic, wholly naturalized approach to human inquiry. Three pillars of that approach which I wish to emphasize are: practical intelligence (i.e., a continuity between knowing and doing), natural normativity (i.e., a continuity between human norms and the environment), and an ontology of philosophical dialectic (i.e., a continuity between the growth of human understanding and the growth of physis).

Spinoza’s Conatus: A Teleological Reading of Its Ethical Dimension

In this article I examine how the teleological reading of Spinoza’s conatus shapes the ethical trajectory of his philosophy. I first introduce the Spinozistic criticism of teleology and argue contra many critics that Spinoza has a mild approach to human teleology. On the basis of this idea, I develop the claim that conatus is a teleological element pertaining to human nature. From the teleological reading of conatus, I draw the conclusion that Spinozistic ethics is inclusive of objective, humanistic, and essentialist elements. In this sense, this paper emerges to be a challenge against the anti-teleological reading of conatus that is predominantly related to the subjectivistic, anti-humanistic, and non-essentialist interpretation of Spinoza’s ethics. It mainly situates Spinoza in a traditionally teleological context where the human conatus is seen as an act of pursuing objective and essential moral ends that is distinctive to human nature.

The Erotic and the Eternal: Striving for the Permanence of Meaning

The paper presents three conceptions of ‘conatus’ that show the will to persist as being connected to the individual’s participating in a culture or other collective entity and which present human striving as transcending mere biological givenness. The human strife as a movement between the ‘erotic’ and, the ‘eternal’ is analyzed in three conative ‘myths’ – ‘eros’ in Plato’s Symposium, ‘cura’ in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, and ‘Geist’ in Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos.

Spinoza’s Conatus Undoes Bourdieu’s Habitus

Bourdieu’s intermittent allusions to Spinoza’s conatus disclose the weaknesses of his concept of habitus. A thorough inspection of his involvement with the Spinozist legacy reveals a long-lasting inconsistency, for he expects that conatus will assist him in both 1) grounding the habitus and solving the uncertainties that surround this notion by endorsing a strong conatus, impervious to the resistances it will eventually encounter; and 2) re-instating agency in the structuralist mindset, a program retrospectively admitted by Bourdieu in 1987 and bound to a weak conatus, exposed to the interfering resistance of exterior forces and thus determined by the interaction with contingent events. Bourdieu noticed this incongruity around 1993. At that time, he renounced to buttressing the habitus by means of the dynamizing character of conatus. So began the later evolution of his thought, linked to the antithetical demand of both a weak and a strong conatus, a request commanded in its turn by an overarching habitus. One outcome of this conflict is that agency can hardly be summoned if Bourdieu’s conception of a “strong” conatus prevails and the dispositions making up the habitus are irreversible. In contrast, both Bourdieu’s appeal to controlled improvisation, and the ensuing concept of strategy, demand a “weak” conatus. Overall, the notion of habitus has been dubbed “a Trojan Horse for determinism” and endorses in fact what might be called the “mythology of permanence,” that is, the historically long-held belief in an all-embracing everlastingness. Bourdieu’s use of Spinoza’s conatus, in sum, besides highlighting the immutable social reproduction entailed by the habitus, acts as a litmus test for the ambiguities and shortcomings of this notion.

Nature’s Perfection: Aristotle and Descartes on Motion and Purpose

Descartes holds that, insofar as nature is a purposeless, unthinking, extended substance, there could be no final causes in physics. Descartes’ derivation of his three laws of motion from the perfections of God thus underwrites a rejection of Aristotle’s conception of natural self-motion and teleology. Aristotle derived his conception of the purposeful action of sublunar creatures from his notion that superlunar bodies are perfect, eternal, living beings, via the thesis that circular motion is more complete or perfect than rectilinear motion. Descartes’ reduction of circular motion to rectilinear motion, achieved through his theological foundation of the laws of motion, thus marks a crucial break from Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. This paper argues that the shift from the Aristotelian conception of nature as self-moving and teleological to the Cartesian conception of nature as purposeless and inert, is not an empirical discovery but is rooted in differing conceptions of where perfection lies in nature.

Conatus and Dasein: The Problem of an Existential Theory of Motivation

In the article I articulate an interpretation of the findingness (Befindlichkeit) of Dasein in Heidegger as a specific existential drive, basing it on an interpretation of his concept of existence, drawing from his earlier lectures before Being and Time, and relying on the clarification of the existential meaning of relation. Following a related interpretation of understanding and care, I offer some considerations pertaining to the problem of authentic motivation and its possible practical application. Initially, I offer an interpretation of existence as it relates to the meaning of being, understanding the relata in this ultimate sense as two aspects of speech. In this, I understand the meaning of being as a groundless call or address. Building on that, I propose a motivational understanding of findingness as the necessary drive of Dasein toward its self-interpretation as it relates to the enigmatic call of being. I supplement this view with an interpretation of existential understanding as a coequal aspect of the groundless freedom of that relation of Dasein to itself. Finally, I offer an interpretation of authenticity, in line with the aforementioned explicated understanding of existence and the corresponding meaning of the authentic motivational findingness of Dasein. In conclusion, I raise a question of how such authentic motivation could be practically understood in the perspective of life-world interactions.

At War in Swaddling Clothes: Stirner’s Unique One as a Conative Existence

In its simplest and primary sense, conatus is about self-preservation. It further involves the obligation, the duty, the imperative even, deriving from the Law of Nature for man to do whatever within his power to maintain his life. Even though this idea has been an old one, it was reintroduced in a more sophisticated form by modern philosophy as no longer a cruel necessity of life but ontologically tied to Reason and Natural law. It was with Hobbes that the idea of self-preservation was put at the core of his anthropological narration (with well known political connotations) and with Spinoza that conatus was delved into within his ontological universe. Regardless of their ontological starting points, both philosophers ended up eventually in a resolution with regard to that primary anthropological tension between individuals, whether this was a common legislator, the political society or the state. Somewhat radical at the beginning, Hobbes and Spinoza had to make some mitigations in order to arrive at a resolution. Yet, that was not Stirner’s case. On the contrary, Stirner’s opening ontological statement was rather too extreme and inconceivable even: it is also the newborn child that gets to war with the world and not only the other way around. It is the purpose of this paper to argue that this extreme trailhead leads the Stirnerian egoist to his fulfillment as the Unique One through ownership and that this agonistic tremendous striving constitutes the Stirnerian notion of conatus. That notion offers no resolution to the ontological animosity between individuals; on the contrary, that animosity is required as ontological precondition and prefiguration of conatus' conclusion as well.