‘Conatus’: political being and Spinoza

Stephen Connelly

I.  The nature and significance of the conatus

Spinoza’s conatus is a signal concept of his thought and one which appears as an axiom of modern treatments, particularly those of a political nature. Famously, the conatus doctrine provides:

Each thing insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.

PROPOSITIO VI. Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur.

Traditionally the source of this doctrine has been identified as an amalgam of Hobbes and Descartes. From Hobbes Spinoza takes the view that this endeavour is an infinitesimal striving which characterises (human) individuality and is the origin of consciousness; from Descartes he draws the idea that this striving is explicable in entirely rational terms as a kind of inertia. The result is a mechanisation of consciousness in which our lived duration is characterised by the struggle of continued being — the resistance to annihilation.

From this reading a characterisation of Spinoza’s philosophy flows in which all is struggle, an indefinite State of Nature in which Natural Right is regarded as a claim that ‘might makes right’ — each thing has as much natural right as it is actually able to exercise in the world.

But, like the rule in Foss v Harbottle (1843), the conatus is actually two principles which seem to have been run together at the expense of one. In fact it is worse — I believe no-one in the modern period has ever remarked that Spinoza posits another conatus, which reads as follows:

In this life therefore we endeavour [conamur] above all that the body of infancy be changed [mutetur] into another body which is capable of a great many things, and which is related to a mind which is very much conscious of itself, of God, and of things. Ethics V Proposition 39

In hac vita igitur apprime conamur, ut corpus infantiae in aliud, quantum eius natura patitur eique conducit, mutetur, quod ad plurima aptum sit, quodque ad mentem referatur, quae sui et Dei et rerum plurimum sit conscia;

Of course it is not enough merely to have spotted this. The question is, why is it there and why should it be granted the architectonic integrality of the classic conatus? After all, this could just be the throwaway comment of a man known for his small Latin. It is this that I would like to explore, with reference to Spinoza’s theory of natural right insofar as this is treated by him as a cornerstone of his political theory.

‘Imperium’: notes on the thought of Spinoza

Stephen Connelly

A practical comprehension of Spinoza’s theory of natural right allows us to begin to use this conceptual tool to construct our world. This is the essence of Spinoza’s ethico-political project: how to use the doctrine of natural right to construct machines that increase our power. Consequently, when we come to the question of the organisation of society, virtuous law and politics amount to the endeavour to build-right augmenting machines, which Spinoza calls imperia.

Let us begin our brief survey with Spinoza’s definition of sovereignty in his Tractatus Politicus (“TP”) II[17]:

Hoc ius, quod multitudinis potentia definitur, imperium appellari solet. Atque hoc is absolute tenet, qui curam reipublicae ex communi consensu habet…

This right, which is defined by the power of the multitude, is usually called the imperium. It is held absolutely by whoever has oversight of the republic by common consensus. (my trans.)

Spinoza thus settles upon the idea that the imperium is an expression of common power, that is, it is an expression of power of a group of individuals insofar only as they act as one. Notice that according to a principle of superposition of powers we do not obtain a ‘new’ consciousness unless those powers determine the bodies on which they act to some existence. It is therefore appropriate to define this mode. We define:

An imperium is a singularity of projection which does not appear in the field of right as an origin prior to that projection.

In Spinozan terms of Extension, this amounts to saying that given any locality there is a transition occurring which is not due to difference of motion and rest at that point i.e. there is no individual in the sense of EIIP13 Lem.1.From this we propose:

The principle of common right: every act of β₁, β₂…β_n in union is a partial solution to the aggregate natures of each of β₁, β₂…β_n, and each such act expresses their common nature as an imperium.

More simply, when people determine to work together, they seem to posit a common power which is localisable in no One, and this seeming power is their common right. Contrary to some interpretations, it is an ethical strength, not a weakness (see the forthcoming article on Multitude).

Now, given that the virtue of any number of humans is variable, it is likewise possible to posit a series of imperia, each of which express common right, that is, the common natures of each constituent, with greater reality. It seems that a form of this principle is readily adopted by Marx in his chapter of Capital on Co-operation, though following John Bellers, he is keen to notice that combination of power also generates a “collective power” where 10 men straining to lift a ton is qualitatively not equivalent to 100 men each using a finger, an observation far beyond Spinoza’s frame of reference [1]. It is this working hypothesis of a series of imperia, each with a common right appropriate to itself, which allows us to understand the flow of Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus, to which we now turn.

Natural right: notes on the thought of Spinoza

Stephen Connelly

When students (res)trained in law approach Spinoza’s theory of natural right (ius naturale) they face precisely the formidable terminological barrier which Spinoza endeavours to teach us how to break through. It is the same barrier which the student of mathematics encounters when reading Euclid’s Elements, a work that directly inspired Spinoza’s method. In both cases the language and method, respectively jurisprudence and geometry, constitute tools by which we construct a machine capable of participating (1) in the world intellect. The tools are not themselves the things to be conceived.

Thus while several legal and political historians have endeavoured to shoehorn Spinoza into the history of natural right theories as an eccentric Hobbist who ‘said what Hobbes should have said if he had been consistent’, this both denies the breadth of Spinoza’s reading, which includes a great interest in Grotius and the De la Court brothers (he knew the latter personally), and simply takes Spinoza’s choice of words at face value. On this view, when Spinoza settles on the final form of his theory in his unfinished Tractatus politicus (c.1676) one might be beguiled by the impression that this theory of natural right serves only as an appendix to Spinoza’s astonishing metaphysics, that is, as an obsolete outgrowth that at best causes discomfort and is better removed.

Such an impression is the objective expression of a diminished power of acting.

Here is the relevant definition from the Tractatus politicus Ch.II[4]:

By the right of Nature, then, I understand the laws or rules of Nature in accordance with which all things come to be, that is, the very power of Nature. So the natural right of Nature as a whole, and consequently the natural right of every individual, is coextensive with its power [potentia]. Consequently, whatever each man does from the laws of his own nature, he does by the sovereign right of Nature, and he has as much right over Nature as his power extends [quantum potentia valet].

This, or its equivalent in the Ethics, tends to be quoted in the literature and then followed by a panegyric to wild abandon and anarchic license, presumably by people who have known neither. Yet very much as with Alfred North Whitehead, the abandonment of mathematical method in a later prose work should be taken as absolute; rather the method continues to inform the conceptual underpinnings. Accordingly, we maintain that what we have here is an extremely concise definition of natural right which brings in Spinoza’s entire metaphysics and which constitutes a complete statement about being. This theory of natural right is not peripheral, but central to Spinozism.

Power ('potentia'): notes on the thought of Spinoza

Stephen Connelly

In this article I will focus exclusively on Spinoza’s theory of power (potentia) which forms a key element of his theories of natural right and imperium [….] My purpose here is to convey the deep structure of the Spinozan concept of power, rather than become too lost in the geometrico-theological terminology he deploys, or the countless interpretations by which he has been determined.

   

Following Spinoza, it is necessary to construct a definition. Firstly, Spinoza posits a self-caused something (substance) which is the cause of all things — this is its essence, which follows from its properties (infinity, immutability, capacity to know etc.). Spinoza calls this something ‘God’.

Secondly Spinoza now considers what this God is doing, the importance of which question is illustrated by the classical logical distinction between capacity to do and act. For example, Cato is able to walk (property and power [potestas]) and Cato walks (attribute) are clearly different things. Though this God must be able to do infinitely many things, for human purposes Spinoza can only perceive two properties enacted, namely the attributes of Thought and of Extension.

Thirdly, Spinoza notes that this God is ‘unrestrained’ save by its own necessity, and being essentially self-caused (so propelled to act, as it were), this God exercises all his properties infinitely; that is, just as Cato, when he walks, is a walking thing, so God is a thinking and extending thing. Spinoza reserves the name God for this thing when it is thinking, and Nature for when it is extending (Deus sive Natura).

Note that because God or Nature is unrestrained save by its own necessity, every attribute is enacted immediately and inexhaustibly: it is eternal. Now, this enactment is perceived as everlasting in the sense that while Cato may get tired of walking, God or Nature does not, but Spinoza wants us to conceive of this enactment as rigorously eternal i.e. not even indefinite duration may properly be ascribed to it. 

Equipped with this construction of substance and its attributes, we are now in a position to conceive potentia by literally ‘plugging’ God or Nature into its attributes. What do I mean? Well, the attributes must be considered as ordering functions — if they are presented with something to function on, they will assign and distribute that something in a single and determinate manner. For example, imagine I took all the letters from this page and jumbled them up into a tiny ball. Now imagine there was a computer program which, if I fed these same letters into it, would distribute them in such a manner as to recreate this text. The attributes operate in something like this way: on their own they are empty, but if we feed God or Nature into them, God or Nature will be distributed in a single, determinate manner to constitute a completed, well-ordered world.

This is easier to illustrate with an albeit misleading example about Extension, where if we posit the Extension function Ext(x), then Ext(Nature) distributes Nature according to a definite coordinate system, in a manner that evolves Descartes celestial fluid model shown in the diagram above. This would be nothing other than Cartesian space, which is why it is misleading — Spinoza in our view is convinced that Cartesian analytic geometry is quite incapable of grasping the subtleties of the ‘infinite series’ of things. Likewise, we can imagine a Thought function T(x), which explicates God as the infinite understanding (every idea). To underline, while we speak of plugging God or Nature into the attributes, the essence of God is such that God does his own ‘plugging’: he self-explicates.