Introducing the Conatus

(Read this first.)

Spinoza sets up the principles for the Conatus in the second part of the Ethics which deals with psychology or "the nature and origin of mind." Spinoza's reasoning begins with God, which is not the personal God of religion but rather the universe. God is anything that can be attributed to existence as such, and so is infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, anything you can think of. But God is not personal, as taking an individual form would negate the infinite and necessary nature of God, who is not a thing but literally everything. 

Gods's existence is necessary by definition in Spinoza's system because anything that exists describes God, which is defined as everything. 

This is important for his psychology because it entails that only God is a substance. Everything else in the universe is contingent, including human beings. Anything in the universe which we have an idea of are bodies, finite things like ourselves extended in space and time. Our ideas are of something existing, and we not being infinite cannot perceive everything. The only ideas we have that are not of bodies would be ideas of ideas, ad infinitum, eventually leading to a body. 

"..if there were also any other object of the mind besides a body...the ideas of some effect produced by this object would necessarily exist in the mind. But because there is no such idea, and therefore the object our mind is a body existing, and nothing else."

The principles which govern bodies derive from thought, but since thought is of bodies, these principles should apply to all bodies, including our own. Thus Spinoza says to understand the human mind, we must understand the nature of the human body and bodies in general. 

"..everything that we have said of the idea of the human body is necessarily true of the idea of any other thing...therefore, in order to determine the difference between the human mind and other things and its superiority over them, we must first know, as we have said, the nature of its object, that is to say, the nature of the human body."

There are two fundamental principles governing bodies; 

Axiom 1. All bodies are either in a state of motion or rest.

Axiom 2. Every body moves, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.

These are the only things which distinguish bodies, and not substance. Any individual thing in the universe is a body in motion or rest, and if in motion, differing by degree of motion. All things share in this and can affect each other (contrary to Leibniz).

Bodies aim to preserve their state of motion, but can changed by any other body to different degrees of rest or motion.

What gets us to the Conatus are composite bodies. These bodies preserve their total state in opposition to the effects of other bodies because each part moves in the same state. So to change the state of motion or rest requires changing the state of every part together. A good example is a bundle of sticks, or dry spaghetti. Individually they are easy to break, but together it takes more effort. Even if you break one the others remain, and their composite nature reduces the casualties. 

"When a number of bodies of the same or different motion are pressed together by others, so that they lie upon the other, or if they are in motion with the same or with different degrees of speed, so that they communicate their motion to one another in a certain fixed proportion, these bodies are said to he mutually United, and taken together they are said to compose one body or individual, which is distinguished by other bodies by this union of bodies."

The form of a body is maintained by continual replacement. The nature of the whole makes it so all members are the same, and maintains this only by degrees of addition or subtraction. The whole operates differently than the parts, and so can maintain its nature throughout change in quantity. Quantity becomes quality. 

The form of something isn't static and universal like it was for Plato, but a dynamic changing actual thing. A drive which continues the individuated existence of something. The form is a tendency to act in a certain way for self-preservation. The body can change, grow and diminish, but so long as the body can perform the action which it could have done before, it's nature is maintained. 

"if the parts composing an individual become greater or less proportionately, so that they persevere towards one another the same kind of motion and rest, the individual will also retain the nature which it had before without any change of form."

This sets up the Conatus, which is presented to us in part three. 

Prop IV "a thing cannot be destroyed except by an external cause."

A thing cannot be destroyed by itself, but only an external cause. By destroy Spinoza means the dissolution of a body or a change in its "natural" state of motion, or tendency to act. This follows from the law of inertia; a body in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by another object. Because there is nothing substantial to individuals other than their perseverance in total motion or rest, change in this is annihilation. As the essence of a body does not entail existence. 

"the definition of any given thing affirms and does not deny the existence of the thing; that is to say, it posits the essence of the thing and does not negate"

Prop V "in so far as one thing is able to destroy another they are of contrary natures; that is to say, they cannot exist in the same subject."

This is because of the law of the excluded middle. Something cannot be what it is and is not at the same time and place. Motion is defined by these qualities. 

Prop VI "each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being.

it is opposed to everything which could negate its existence."

If things can exist together, then they can share an essence together beyond their separate states. Parts can form a whole by what they have in common. This is very important as composite body's are "synthetic" as they continue in existence, thus higher forms of matter are possible. The Conatus is opposed to reductionism, which views things as static. 

Prop VII "the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself."

The being is the essence, though in "extended" or spatial-temporal terms.

Prop VIII "the effort by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its own being does not involve finite but indefinite time"

This is a major difference between the Conatus of Spinoza and Hobbes. Striving defines the essence of something, not its existence. The beginning and end do not measure the existence of something; its (continual) existence is its essence.  Hobbes says that the impetus "ceaseth only in death," that is in spatial temporal terms. Spinoza's Conatus is a feature of the physical world, not just of organic things. Any individual thing is defined by Conatus.

The Conatus is a way to reconcile the changing nature of the phenomenal world with identity by positing an underlying force which is not extinguished by different time and space. By staking our identity on striving, this concept opens up dynamic and progressive views of human nature. By striving to be actual, we are actual. We can create higher forms of being, not as a static finished product, but continually maintained. 

The Psychology of the Sublime and the Beautiful

(This started as a book review but became a melding of classical associationist psychology with psychoanalytic theory, with some evolutionary theory. Its a book review as well as theoretical work.)

A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke 1757. A very interesting work that attempts to do to aesthetics what Locke tried to do with philosophy. That is to put it on an empirical or scientific basis. Over a century before Charles Darwin, Burke tries to ground the sublime and the beautiful into survival and sexual reproduction. I've come back to this book a second time because some parallels with Sigmund Freud's dualistic theory of drives; Eros and Thanatos. The beautiful is rooted to pleasure and I think ultimately sexuality, and the sublime rooted in pain and aggression, and ultimately death. The work is definitely worth going back to to reconsider the dynamic nature of some of his concepts, much as he tried to root them all in conscious sense impressions.

The introduction on taste is the longest section of the work and understanding the section is crucial toward accepting his conclusions. Burke sets up the work telling us that the standards of taste are the same among all humans and that differences are more "apparent than real." If there were not some standard, we could not communicate with each other as we do on a regular basis. We accept certain measures as objective like money or the law, but continue to declare things like beauty or taste to be "in the eye of the beholder." We have this notion of taste, if there was nothing behind it, its invocation in discourse would be quite absurd. Burke defines taste as the faculty of mind which is affected by something. That something is an object, through sensation. We can safely assume that we humans all experience things the same way. If not we would assume that "the same cause operating in the same manner...will produce different effects, which would be highly absurd."

Language follows this commonality of experience in how we describe certain tastes. Sweetness is pleasant, sourness is unpleasant. Burke then asserts something like Hume's copy principle by saying that the original impression is stronger than any imagination which derives ultimately from the impression. "The power of distinguishing between the natural and the acquired relish remains to the very last." Nobody can think that tobacco is sweet. If one does so, we "immediately conclude that the organs of this man are out of order, and that his palate is utterly vitiated." We can however derive pleasure or pain from the same tastes, dependent on our individual habits and temperament, but not different tastes.

So far this is associationist psychology; our aversion and attraction to things is reinforced by prior experiences. Tobacco is desirable to some because of its effects other than taste "things do not spontaneously present themselves to the palate...they are generally applied to it...they often form the palate by degrees, and by force of these associations."

Besides sensation, the mind can also represent at will ideas of things as they are in memory or create new associations between them. This is imagination, which cannot produce anything new. What imagination does is form expectations about things we experience, such as fear or hope. Intelligence consists in comparison among different experiences.

We prefer similarity in our train of thought (which is why it's so frustrating when music skips). We are more struck by resemblance, as completely different things require no more explanation between them than that they are different (law of excluded middle). "Men are much more inclined to belief than to incredulity." It takes mental acuity to differentiate things. Good taste doesn't depend on greater judgment or intelligence, but knowledge from experience. The difference among taste is a difference in degrees of knowledge. But all have common he criterion of pleasure and pain. And "so far as Taste is natural, it is nearly common to all." We can be more sensitive than others or be more familiar with certain tastes, while all having the same basis for judgement.

(Jeremy Bentham would later say that "pushpin is as good as poetry", which would would only be true if one has the knowledge necessary to understand poetry. John Stuart Mill came up with the great retort "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.")

We then arrive at a fuller definition of taste. Taste because it requires some degrees of knowledge isn't just a "simple idea" or single impression, it is a synthetic unity of sense, imagination, and judgement. "The groundwork of all these is the same in the human mind."

Burke sets out an objective, "scientific" or materialist criterion for discussing aesthetics, in line with the associationist psychologies of John Locke and David Hume. He establishes that it is possible to make rational inquiry into what is usually seen as subjective, provided its basis is in sense impression which for empiricists is the substance of reality.

The main body of the work begins on the surface of emotions; novelty. Novelty or curiosity is the most superficial of emotions as it is chiefly concerned with its object. Once we get to know something, it doesn't grab our attention as something unknown, even if said thing is of worse quality. It is an active feeling, which it can be said motivates us into action like hardly anything else. If we want to learn something, it helps to be curious and not familiar with the subject matter. "Some degree of novelty just be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind." Aristotle himself told us that philosophy begins with wonder.

Next we move to the foundational emotions discussed in the taste section; pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are simple ideas. They cannot be reduced to another; pain is not the absence of pleasure and pleasure is not the absence of pain. Burke labels delight as the absence of pain. The mind can also be in a state of indifference, which is probably the most common state says Burke.

This all struck me as very similar to Freud's nirvana principle, aka the constancy principle, in which the quantity of excitation is zero. This means that stability is the goal of mental processes, an equilibrium. This is also a state of indifference, though stated in thermodynamic terms. A difference between Freud and Burke is that pain and pleasure for Freud are reducible or explainable by disturbances in equilibrium rather than unique positive states. Freud writes in An Outline of Psychoanalysis "It is probable, however, that what is felt as pleasure or unpleasure is not the absolute degree of tensions but something in the rhythm of their changes." The first law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in an isolated system can be transferred to one form to another, but neither created nor destroyed. Pleasure and pain can be interpreted as excitations in the bodily organs from this transfer of energy. Both pain and pleasure for Burke arouse us out of a state of indifference, being at least novel. There is that in common. Freud might have agreed that pain and pleasure are unique conscious states, while maintaining a common physical/unconscious cause for both. Burke however is interested in a more phenomenal treatment of emotions. 

The other link with Freud's drive theory is that the most powerful impressions deriving from pain and pleasure are also dual; the sublime and the beautiful. These two powerful feelings derive from two needs; self-preservation and society. Self-preservation turns by pain, from the state of danger which from expectation of said state brings terror. Society aims at continuing our own existence through the species by generation, and living together in general.

The sublime and the beautiful are for Burke powerful emotions, and he doesn't venture much further than that. He takes the experiences as given and seeks to ground them in sense impressions. His main argument is that the sublime and the beautiful are distinct experiences which can be explained by material/sensual factors.

Self-preservation and the sublime are analogous to the death drive. The death drive aims at equilibrium of the individual with the surrounding environment to reduce excitation. An organism will cannot forever resist this return which takes effort to overcome, making it a very powerful drive. For Burke, pain is a stronger emotion than pleasure, though he doesn't provide an explanation for this other than direct experience. From this he reasons that death is more arresting than pain, by comparison. We are more ready to suffer most pains rather than death. His reasoning I think is from self-preservation. Painful things are harmful to our existence and disrupt a chain of thinking, as Burke said before we prefer similarity to difference and new things to familiar things. So pain puts us into action to return to either indifference or pleasure. Burke said before that indifference is the state we are more often in. By death he probably means the experience of dying and not the actual state of non-existence. Freud's death drive manifests itself in unpleasant emotions and aggression, but aims along with the love drive at a state of indifference. Burke follows the utilitarian logic of action being done to gain pleasure and avoid pain, with indifference being a state of inaction rather an something which takes effort to maintain (equilibrium).

The sublime has its basis in pain, but operates on terror which is an expectation of pain. The sublime is so powerful because it takes hold of all our thoughts, mostly by imagination and expectation. Because of the imaginary and reckoning aspects, at a certain distance, the sublime can be delightful. We can experience the power the terrible holds over us while not being in pain or danger of our lives. The power is our attention because it is disruptive and different. It removes us from a state of indifference without introducing pain, and so can be a source of delight (though not pleasure). By being held in the mental state of terror by the sublime yet not experiencing pain, we can experience delight while avoiding danger.

This ambivalence toward the terrifying and is not unlike feelings toward repressed desires or the superego. In the case of repressed desires like socially unacceptable sexuality or aggression, we still desire to act on them but because we are not allowed to develop an unease when they are aroused or indulged in. Freud wrote that the superego allows aggression to enter into the decision making of the ego, causing this ambivalence as means of extending social control (originally from parents).

The other need is society, the aim of the beautiful, which is divisible into sexual society and general society. Both aim at species life, through generation and maintenance of society. Generation of the species is of course sexuality which has its origin in "gratifications and pleasures." These pleasures are so strong that their loss produces violent and turbulent effects on us which aim at reestablishing said pleasures. These pleasures which seize the mind can be described as love, which like terror forms expectations about its objects and a mental dependency. The pleasure of sexuality and love is far greater than health and maintenance of life. This has to be so, for "the generation of mankind is a great purpose,named it is requisite that men should be animated to the pursuit of it by some great incentive." Without such a reward, it is unlikely that we would undergo the great difficulties in its performance. In this way, love has an aggressive element which introduces ambivalence because it can conflict with our other needs.

The beautiful comes from love which is grounded in pleasure. Brutes and animals attract to each other sexually, but out of instinct rather than choice. For humans, the pleasure others provide us captures our imagination and gives us the need to always have access to them. Love produces expectations for continuation, and to varying degrees reciprocity. "They inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary."

The other social need, to belong with others in general, gives "no positive pleasure". This is puzzling since humans are social creatures. Total isolation, Burke notes, is very unpleasant. From this Burke reasons that social life is motivated more from pain than pleasure. Alienation from society is unpleasant, but keeping in mind that the absence pleasurable is not painful, there is an element of ambivalence in that we do as Burke said require some time to ourselves even while long term isolation makes us unhappy. This ambivalence brings to mind Freud's superego which regulates individual behavior by pain and uneasiness. "When the superego is formed, considerable amounts of the aggressive instinct become fixated within the ego and operate there in a self-destructive fashion."

Another difference between Burke and Freud is that Freud sees our social needs (along with the ambivalent feelings) as also grounded in sexuality. Freud differed from the more established and common view of sexuality, where sexuality is seen as genital pleasure linked to reproduction chiefly if not only among adults. Sexuality Freud argued was dynamic and only becomes linked to the genitals and reproduction later in life in accordance with mental, physical, and social development. Sexuality is at root the pursuit of pleasure in all of its forms (polymorphically). The greatest misunderstanding of Freud lies in the confusion of sexuality with genital pleasure and reproduction, making his claims of infantile sexuality and incest seem strange and perverted. Vis a vis pleasure, social acceptance and rejection are instrumental. It would only be by being able to thwart gratification that we would care about social restrictions since they do inevitably constrain us. Thus, social needs are created by internal acceptance of the negative feelings others have toward your sexual behavior and aims.

The beautiful is like Eros, a formative drive. Eros maintains life in its individual forms, by continually striving to resist equilibrium with the environment. The ultimate aim is the preservation of the species, though this develops later in life and is fraught with difficulties for the individual. Self preservation Burke argued works by pain and danger. Species preservation cannot work like this because the good of the species does not always align with the individual and often runs counter. So there had to develop a way of bringing the individual in conformity with species-life. This parallels with modern evolutionary theory (Neo-Darwinism) which seeks to answer why an individual acting only with the survival of their genes would develop altruistic behavior. This begins with kin altruism as our relatives are genetically close to us. But over time these behaviors become reinforced and moored from their original purpose to apply to others.

This process Freud and earlier Friedrich Nietzsche called sublimation. Sublimation channels socially unacceptable desires into socially acceptable desires, without conscious awareness. In society, only a portion of our sexual energy is free to do with as we will. The rest of our sexual energy is prevented from expression. But rather than being bound up inside of us, which is destructive, we channel the remaining free energy into other socially acceptable ways.

Burke lists three social passions which can be viewed as sublimation; sympathy, imitation, and ambition. Each are ways we can enjoy others while at the same time being separate from them. Sympathy as opposed to empathy involves imagining being someone else, rather than feeling the same as they do. It is a simulation, a substitution. The pleasure gained is from a safe distance where we can either imagine ourselves in another's good situation or avoiding their worse situation. Which is why we enjoy reading or watching the lives of fictional characters. Imitation (or repetition) identifies ourselves with others by copying their behavior and appearance, but by our own will. It is a voluntary identification, a multiplication of the other. This is how we often learn, and knowledge gives us power. Ambition manifests an aggressive impulse towards others, but which is aimed at other's approval or recognition of us, a fixation. "Men must remain as brutes do." This domination is largely imaginary, as we depend on the approval of those separate from us. We cannot overpower them to the point of annihilation as we won't gain their recognition if death. This all reminds me of both Thomas Hobbes' diffidence and glory among men in the state of nature, and Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Both deal with the intersubjective and conflicting nature of our desire to command nature to our needs.

The sublime and the beautiful can be understood as repressed or inhibited means of indulging in primal impulses, as sublimation. Sublime experience puts us in the presence of power external to our own. The sublime connects us to the vast universe, as a sort of reunion. Burke lists greatness, obscurity, and infinity as belonging to the sublime. Freud described religion as providing an oceanic feeling, of limitless, and it is no wonder that the vast ocean is a common source of the sublime. This power derives from our initial connectedness to the world, primary narcissism. At a very young age we haven't divided the world into living and non-living, self and other. As we develop, we lose that direct connection to survive, as ourselves and with others. To return to that state would be self destructive, a major regression. The sublime experience is powerful because it brings back the sensation of that lost power without actually destroying us. The sublime is not comprehensible or controllable. It controls us, and it is only that power over us that makes it attractive.

The beautiful in contrast is small, graceful, elegant. Burke maintains that beauty isn't in proportion or perfection. As beautiful things can be frail or very striking. Babies are weak but are found to be pleasing, and giraffe necks are not in equal proportion with their bodies, but are not considered to be grotesque. What is beautiful, it seems, relates to what we grasp, physically and mentally. We want to keep the beautiful, we want to control it, and we are able to comprehend it in thought. The enjoyment is not from power which makes the beautiful less compelling than the sublime, but more sought after. "For the enjoyment of pleasure, no great efforts of power are at all necessary." We can have power over beautiful things to keep them, for out of our control they are not as beautiful as the expectations associated with beautiful things produce a fear of loss.

Beauty and love drive us to continue and extend the struggle for existence; the sublime and terrible drive us to escape individual existence by experience of both reunion with the world and destruction of the self.

The Science of Individual Existence

It is the cornerstone of my and Schopenhauer's philosophy that causality is what allows us to understand and explain reality. And that causality is ultimately responsible for the separation of ourselves from the world and a source of perpetual strife. The a priori intuitions of space and time, as borrowed from Kant, are not absolute features of the universe but are the result of a sort of division of the world into subject and object. In conjunction with experience these intuitions form our notions of cause and effect; something precedes something else spatially in succession of time and occupies different space during the same time. And yet the world is fundamentally will, known to us through the internal sense of time.

If this all holds up, why exactly is the world like this? Unfortunately this question itself involves causal thinking, and it is a mistake to apply such thinking to existence itself. The division of subject and object, space and time, and cause and effect are the conditions for knowledge as such. Without them there isnt really philosophy at all.

But perhaps one can look to science, the study of material causality, to find out what about this particular universe is responsible for our experience of events. What gives order to our understand of the universe.

The scientific reason for why we exist as individuals and understand the world causally is because particles in this universe have rest mass, which means they cannot go faster than the speed of light.

Remember Einstein's famous equation E=MC^2? Mass energy equivalence means that the inertia of a body depends on its energy content (the title of Einstein's 1905 paper). An object in motion gaining kinetic energy also gains mass. Most of the mass of our atoms is energy, not the rest mass of the quarks. Nevertheless, these particles have rest mass (now just called mass).

Because these particles have rest mass, and photons do not, it takes energy to overcome that inertia. Meaning that it would take an infinite amount of energy to go the speed of light.

The first postulate of special relativity is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. The reason for the strange effects when objects are accelerating at very fast speeds is precisely because they must obey the "cosmic speed limit". In accordance with that limit, time from their frame of reference must be slower as they approach the speed of light.

Photons do not have rest mass, and so everything for them happens in an instant. There isn't a before and after. There are only events. This is a fundamental constant of the universe. If anything went past the speed of light, there wouldn't be anything to "bump" into. Rather, what would probably happen is backwards time travel. Effects would become causes, thus destroying any notion of causality. Knowledge would be impossible.

Since particles have rest mass, they cannot go the speed of light because that would take an infinite amount of energy to overcome that "inherent" resistance. And so events occur causally; causes precede effects. It is as if things are weighed down. Some things have more mass than others and bend space, which is responsible for Gravity according to general relativity. Mass is equivalent to energy, and so bends space. This warping of space also affects time. But if it wasn't for the "inherent" mass of some particles, there wouldn't be any matter.

What all this means is that the reason why we experience the world as we do, as individuals separate from others in space and time greater and lesser than each other, is because of the rest mass of particles which prevent them from going the speed of light where events would be instantaneous. Memories wouldn't form identity as there would be no meaningful order of things that would inherently make more sense than any other.

A current explanation for why particles have mass is the proposed Higgs field, but that's beyond the purpose of this post. Take Brian Greene's summary to help think about it.

Mass is the resistance an object offers to having its speed changed. You take a baseball. When you throw it, your arm feels resistance. A shotput, you feel that resistance. The same way for particles. Where does the resistance come from? And the theory was put forward that perhaps space was filled with an invisible "stuff," an invisible molasses-like "stuff," and when the particles try to move through the molasses, they feel a resistance, a stickiness. It's that stickiness which is where their mass comes from.... That creates the mass....

... it's an elusive invisible stuff. You don't see it. You have to find some way to access it. And the proposal, which now seems to bear fruit, is if you slam protons together, other particles, at very, very high speeds, which is what happens at the Large Hadron Collider... you slam the particles together at very high speeds, you can sometimes jiggle the molasses and sometimes flick out a little speck of the molasses, which would be a Higgs particle. So people have looked for that little speck of a particle and now it looks like it's been found.

Also watch this video, though PBS Spacetime can be hard to follow for novices.

Summed up: for some reason fundamental particles of the universe which are responsible for the fundamental forces of the universe have rest mass. The philosophy that holds that space, time, and causality are only conscious representations of phenomena holds on its own. But it's always interesting to find intersections with current physical theories.

What is interesting to think about is that everything physical has sort of stored energy in it. And as we've seen with atomic bombs and reactors, there is a lot of energy in even the smallest things. Even if not quite the level of an atomic explosion. In our lives, ponder what could be done if we could harness this immense energy. What we could accomplish.

Final Metaphysic

The world is will and perception. Energy and idea. Matter is an idea, energy is alone substantial.

The principle of sufficient reason is the ground of all synthetic judgements. The four laws of thought.

Space and time are representations, a priori. Color, taste, smell, and touch are the product of sensations. Our body is the object known primarily.

Energy is the constant that governs all interactions, which is the potential for transformation, is what everything is made of but is not a thing.

The world outside of consciousness is what can potentially be experienced, or is omnipresent but not currently being able to be represented.

Gravity is a posteriori.

Motion is a synthetic judgement.

Metaphysical Drives

The aim of life is pleasure and the removal of pain. These states are not reducible to each other; pain is not the absence of pleasure and pleasure is not the absence of pain. These states exist to restore internal equilibrium, a balance which perpetuates bodily motion. 

Voluntary motion could not begin nor continue without these fundamental drives, for what "reason" or cause could there be for anything if not the prospect for more or the fear of loss from a state of balance? 

Every action is the result of a prior action and is itself the cause of future actions. This continues for the duration of our existence. 

The means of life are attraction and repulsion, love and death. Love and death are the intrinsic motivators of life as opposed to external forces which change the arrangement of things but do not determine their individual nature. 

Life is not the natural state of the universe. The unliving dominate our world. Taking an individual form requires work, a transfer of the energy of the constantly changing world to perpetuate the motion of a body complex. In a closed system this uses up the energy available for life to manifest. Thus the aim of life is death. 

‘The aim of all life is death...inanimate things existed before living ones’ -Freud

What is good is what the body attracts toward to reduce internal tension or what the body avoids for the same reason. Without hunger food wouldn't be as satisfying. As our needs are satisfied, our drives decrease. Need emerges from the fact that nothing ever ceases to truly exists and things act to preserve themselves in some way. But individual needs results from lack. Drives are driven by an imbalance, driven by external excitation. 

Instinct is the power in the inherent constitution of our being. The potential for action. Objects are the spatial/temporal expression of the universe's potential which instincts aim towards to fulfill needs and which constrain the subject. 

The instincts which promote life are opposed by the universal drive towards death. For existence is either marked by strife, action to remove tension which can result in a state of pleasure or pain, or a state of indifference where needs are satisfied.

To be something means to not be something else, thus the meaning of individual life is judged by its effects. It's essence is its continuation, it's striving. The individual will be no more, just as they were not. The continuation and extension of life's energy is the purpose of life. 

         "Happiness means ending life without being crushed by pain" Oedipus Rex

Conscious life requires an object for its existence, for it is as a living being no longer an object. A cleavage is established in the world, the creation of the subject. Which is not determined to always be a particular object but nonetheless requires an object to identify with to fulfill the prior existing needs. Life's fundamental needs which drive the individual cannot be satisfied. Thus conscious life is a constant struggle between love and death, towards and away from objects.

Sexual energy cannot be destroyed but merely channeled in different ways. In the beginning, the entire world is a source of pleasure. Sexuality is the bodily expression of pleasure, not only associated with genital stimulation. Sexuality drives everything because from the outset the entire body aims toward gratification without any other aim and by any means physically possible. Everybody is born into the world polymorphically perverse. The continuation of life is enabled when pleasure yields to the genitals as the erogenous zone and pursuit of reproduction. 

Life is the process of becoming an individual. Forming a satisfying relationship with the world. Internal balance which must act constantly to maintain itself. 

The Conatus: A Naturalistic Life Force

When the scientific worldview comes to predominate ones thinking, the most difficult thing to contemplate about the world I think are living things. For billions of years there was no discernible life on earth, and so far we haven't discovered much life anywhere else. Evolutionary theory explains the diversity of life, but not its origin.

Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker gave me a simple and for the time satisfying definition of what life is.

"Left to itself-and that is what it is when it dies- the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with the environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings...when we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some compatible work...if they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge onto their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings."

His definition of life is quite simple and had a profound impact on me. A living thing resists its parts returning to the equilibrium conditions of its environment. A living thing is a body in motion doing work to preserve its state of motion.

This seems to necessitate some kind of life force. After all, not everything in the universe acts like this. Quite the contrary. And living things just seem qualitatively different than non living things. And yet everything described in the passage obeys the laws of physics. There isn't anything supernatural occurring.

A couple years later I started reading Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan which despite being a work on political philosophy begins with an outline of human nature from which principles of government are deduced. Hobbes' famous violent state of nature is the result of a pre-Newtonian law of inertia.

"That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it, it will lie still forever, is a truth that no man doubts. But [the proposition] that when a thing is in motion it will eternally be in motion unless somewhat else stay it, though the reason be the same (namely that nothing can change itself), is not so easily assented to. For men measure not only other men but all other things by themselves. And because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and lassitude, [they] think every thing else grows weary of motion and seeks repose of its own accord, little considering whether it be not some other motion wherein that desire of rest they find in themselves, consists"

An object in motion preserves its state of motion until acted upon by another object. Applying this to human psychology, humans are dominated by small internal movements (passions) which cannot be stopped and so will always conflict with each other as individual bodies unless massive force brings them together (the leviathan which is the sum of their wills).

"So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. And from hence it is, that Kings, whose power is greatest, turn their endeavours to the assuring it a home by Lawes, or abroad by Wars: and when that is done, there succeedeth a new desire; in some, of Fame from new Conquest; in others, of ease and sensuall pleasure; in others, of admiration, or being flattered for excellence in some art, or other ability of the mind."

Dawkins and Hobbes brought me closer toward a satisfying naturalistic definition of life. Several properties of living things can be explained by such a "matter in motion" hypothesis. Life is quite frustrating and complete happiness is not fully attainable, and pleasure is fleeting as is pain. Life in some way comes from the inanimate world. Life follows the same laws as anything else in the universe. And ultimately Hobbes' conclusion that social life is defined by conflict rather than harmony, contrary to Aristotle.

This however is where I don't follow Dawkins or Hobbes; that humans are only aggregations of these moving parts, however complex and interconnected.

"The behaviour of the body as a whole will then emerge as a consequence of the interactions of the parts." -Dawkins

His naturalistic definition of life doesn't capture the uniqueness, the dynamism, the wholeness of life. My consciousness isn't reducible to separate sensations. It is one unified synthetic whole. Anything that can ever be known comes to this seemingly infinite understanding, capable of comprehending the vast infinite universe.

Why can't there be a non supernatural life force, that keeps the organism in existence as a whole? And would then apply to the universe itself? No longer a dead mechanical universe, but a driven unified one.

Rejecting the supernatural explanation means several things though.

This life force isn't teleological, that is it is not purposeful.

The life force does not aim at any particular being. There is no foresight, no planning. The existence of individuals no matter how complex is contingent.

The life force isn't itself conscious, as consciousness is defined by its individual objects (as I wrote about before).

The life force isn't a thing or particular being, and as such is not represented by the causal thinking of our own minds. Only individual objects subject to cognition are represented as such.

Accordingly this life force is as practically atheistic as the mechanical explanations of Dawkins and Hobbes.

Luckily for me there was a prominent philosopher who wrote in the same early modern era of Hobbes and had a similar understanding of the universe. Baruch Spinoza, the 17th Jewish-Dutch philosopher. He wrote at about the same time as Hobbes when the Aristotlean worldview was being replaced with the mechanical universe. Spinoza was a determinist and naturalist like Hobbes, but had very important differences in his system of the universe.

Spinoza didn't think mind could be reduced to matter. But unlike Descartes didn't think mind was a separate substance either. Rather body and mind are connected, as different aspects of the same universe. Just as with Descartes, matter is defined by its extended qualities and mind by its thinking qualities.

"A mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state, are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing, which we call decision, when it is regarded under and explained through the attribute of thought, and a conditioned state, when it is regarded under the attribute of extension, and deduced from the laws of motion and rest."

The Conatus, Latin for endeavor, comes to us in Book III of the Ethics. It is something like the will to live of Schopenhauer or the will to power of Nietzsche, though its also like Newton's first law. The word conatus was used by the Stoics like Cicero and was an explanation for the passions. We want something not because it is good, but rather we think something is good because we want it. Which seems pretty Stoic to me.

"Nothing comes to pass in nature, which can be set down to a flaw therein; for nature is always the same, and everywhere one and the same in her efficacy and power of action"

Spinoza was a monist, meaning that human activity follows the same laws as nature and can be understood causally, making him also a determinist. The mind is also determined by without, but can gain knowledge of the causes of its thoughts and actions and find a sort of happiness. What is unique and sort of counter intuitive at first is that Spinoza thinks not only that body and mind are connected, but that they don't actually cause each other. "The body cannot determine the mind to think, nor the mind the body to remain in motion or at rest." The reason they do not cause each other, as in thinking about raising my arm causes my arm to rise, is that they are different aspects of the same thing. "The mind is united to the body because the body is the object of the mind."

So the Conatus is what determines the motivation of the body and what the mind desires. But determined in an individual way for self-preservation.

The Conatus is presented thus;

Prop. IV Nothing can be destroyed, except by a cause external to itself.

Prop. V Things are naturally contrary, that is, cannot exist in the same object so far as one is capable of destroying the other.

Prop. VI Everything in so far as it is in itself endeavors to persist in its own being.

Prop. VII The endeavor wherewith everything endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing else but the actual essence of the thing in question...the power or endeavour, wherewith it endeavours to persist in its own being, is nothing else but the given or actual essence of the thing in question.

Prop. VIII The endeavor whereby a thing endeavors to persist in its own being involved no finite time but an indefinite time. 

Spinoza then reiterates the Stoics. "From what has been said it is plain, therefore, that we neither strive for, wish, seek, nor desire anything because we think it to be good, but, on the contrary, we adjudge a thing to be good because we strive for, wish, seek, or desire it." This is because the mind, though it can only perceive bodies, gains knowledge by the clarity and distinctness of its ideas, thus being ignorant of the particular causes of its desires.

The argument is that something being what it is means not being able to destroy itself, which means that so long as the parts "agree" in not excluding each other, then the whole wil continue to exist. And that the birth and death of this whole does not measure its existence, but rather its actual continual existence does. The whole is greater than the sun of its parts.

If different things can exist together, they belong together in some larger sense, like how the whole world "hangs together". In individual things however, within the same space and time, existence means not becoming something else. Nothingness does exist with the individual. If something continues to persist, it does so because what is opposed to its nature is avoided and what is advantageous is attracted to. From the individual's point of view, this is not a discrete process as this constitutes the essence of the individual. Duration begins and ends with the individual.

One perseveres through change and harm simply because one perseveres as a whole. What the reductionists don't understand is that different parts can become something greater by what they share in common. The omission is that there is a principle that gives an internal nature to things. Self-preservation is that principle. By simply striving to continue to be as an individual, we determine our nature.

The form of life is a pattern, a creation of opposites. 

Why The Dialectic?

One of the most well-known ideas introduced by Plato is "truth is justified true belief". This appears in Theaetetus as the third theory of what knowledge is which is associated with belonging to Plato. 

What is true must be known by the subject, they must believe it. The Sophists appeared to agree with that, and so would relativists today. "Man is the measure of all things" Protagoras is supposed to have said. The Sophists instead of dialectic taught rhetoric, to win the argument through appearances to change the mind of opponent, not to discover the truth or continue the discussion. They did this often for payment, seeing knowledge's value as instrumental.

But belief isn't enough says Socrates. Belief must have external support. The English word truth derives from treowth which means something like good faith. What does good mean, if it isn't just having faith? It is external. But more than that; what is external must somehow also be linked to what is good.

In The Republic book I, Socrates gets Thrasymachus the critic of the utility of justice to accept that the good for any person requires knowledge. A good doctor must have knowledge of medicine and of the human body to be a good doctor. Anything that exists has a nature to it. Living to its full potential is what defines its own good. If one hand does not move, it is not a good watch as it cannot tell accurate time which is what a watch is supposed to do. The good of something entails knowledge of what that thing is. 

For something to be good it must serve some end. The good of a watch for me is that it can prevent me from being late to work among other things. In general the end of anything, the highest good, is happiness. It must be that for the "soul" or mind that it has its own nature that defines its own good which is our highest good. The soul or mind's nature is that which superintends our own actions. All of our actions have the end of our happiness. The good of the soul is to command our actions to the fulfillment of our happiness according to the nature of what we happen to be commanding for that purpose. Thus it is that knowledge requires belief of what is true, of the nature of what we hold beliefs of. (This is essentialism, that the essence of something is the criterion of true statements). This is Plato's specific view of what makes something true. Even if one does not accept essentialism, knowledge still can scrutinize the patterns of our own thinking and the biases within.

To have knowledge is to have belief which is also justified by what is true. What is justification? It is to have a reason for a belief.

The Apology lays ground for why knowledge must be justified. Socrates tells the story of a friend who asked the Oracle of Delphi who is the wisest person. The Oracle answered that it was Socrates. Socrates was puzzled by this as surely other people know more than he does on plenty of things. But there is something that he knows that most others do not. That is he knows he knows nothing. Most people think they know something, where they really just have an opinion or prejudice. Socrates is the wisest because he admits he does not think he knows anything, which is the source of hubris.

Elsewhere in Plato's dialgogues such as Meno is the paradoxical idea that one already has to know something in order to know it. That is have the potential or capacity for knowledge. The task of philosophy is to discern whether one really does in fact already know what they assume to know. 

This need for justification is where the dialectic comes from. A belief is presented, assumed to be true. Then another proposed truth which is acknowledged to be believed by both sides. Then the principle of non-contradiction, over whether it is possible to believe these different things to be true according some common non-conflicting notion of truth. This cross examination begins with the belief and does not end until the belief stands up to asserted criticisms or is denied or changed. 

Just as with Plato's tripartite definition of knowledge as true justified belief, the dialectic asserts belief, demands justification, and ends with the truth contained within this belief which may be naught.