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Conatus
In early philosophies of psychology and metaphysics, conatus (; Latin for "effort; endeavor; impulse, inclination, tendency; undertaking; striving") is an innate inclination of a thing to continue to exist and enhance itself. This "thing" may be mind, matter or a combination of both. Over the millennia, many different definitions and treatments have been formulated. Seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Hobbes made important contributions. The ''conatus'' may refer to the instinctive "will to live" of living organisms or to various metaphysical theories of motion and inertia. Often the concept is associated with God's will in a pantheist view of Nature.〔 The concept may be broken up into separate definitions for the mind and body and split when discussing centrifugal force and inertia.
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 such that it now has no accepted definition.〔 The earliest authors to discuss ''conatus'' wrote primarily in Latin, basing their usage on ancient Greek concepts. These thinkers therefore used "''conatus''" not only as a technical term but as a common word and in a general sense. 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 the technical sense or translated and followed by ''conatus'' in brackets. Today, ''conatus'' is rarely used in the technical sense, since modern physics uses concepts such as inertia and conservation of momentum that have superseded it. It has, however, been a notable influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Louis Dumont.
==Classical origins==
The Latin ''cōnātus'' comes from the verb ''cōnor'', which is usually translated into English as, "to endeavor"; but the concept of the ''conatus'' was first developed by the Stoics (333–264 BCE) and Peripatetics (c. 335 BCE) before the Common Era. These groups used the word (''hormê'', translated in Latin by ''impetus'') to describe the movement of the soul towards an object, and from which a physical act results.〔Clement of Alexandria, in SVF, III, 377; Cicero, ''De Officiis'', I, 132; Seneca the Younger, ''Epistulae morales ad Lucilium'', 113, 23〕 Classical thinkers, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) and Diogenes Laertius (c. 235 BCE), expanded this principle to include an aversion to destruction, but continued to limit its application to the motivations of non-human animals. Diogenes Laertius, for example, specifically denied the application of the term to plants. Before the Renaissance, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274 CE), Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308 CE) and Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE) expressed similar sentiments using the Latin words ''vult'', ''velle'' or ''appetit'' as synonyms of ''conatus''; indeed, all four terms may be used to translate the original Greek . Later, Telesius and Campanella extended the ancient Greek notions and applied them to all objects, animate and inanimate.
First Aristotle, then Cicero and Laertius each alluded to a connection between the ''conatus'' and other emotions. In their view, the former induces the latter. They maintained that humans do not wish to do something because they think it "good", but rather they think it "good" because they want to do it. In other words, the cause of human desire is the natural inclination of a body to augment itself in accordance with the principles of the ''conatus''.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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