Spinoza's Conatus
The conatus has not failed. It has been redirected. The body still strives, but the striving now serves a substance whose interest in the body's freedom is hostile.
PHILOSOPHY
The Striving That Was Outsourced
Spinoza's conatus under conditions of platformed persistence
Spinoza was writing in Amsterdam in the 1660s, in a room whose furniture has been catalogued and whose windows have been measured, grinding lenses for an income and arguing his way through the geometric demonstration of a single substance. The conatus arrives in the third part of the Ethics as something close to a metaphysical floor. Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being, and this endeavour is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing itself. Good is whatever increases the power of acting. Evil is whatever diminishes it. The ethical life is not the obedience to a commandment but the careful cultivation of the active affects that enlarge what the body and the mind can do.
The doctrine was severe in its century and remains so. It refused the Cartesian theatre in which the soul looks down on the body like a pilot in a vessel. It refused the moral economy in which virtue is a debt owed to a transcendent creditor. It located the foundation of ethics in the metabolism itself, in the fact that a body wants to keep being a body, that a mind wants to keep being a mind, that this wanting is not a choice the thing makes but the very thing the thing is. To live well, on this view, was to align with one's own striving and to compose with the strivings of others such that the composition increased everyone's capacity to act.
The question the present configuration puts to this doctrine is not whether the conatus exists. The question is what happens to a doctrine of self-persistence when the self has been issued an external apparatus for persisting, and the apparatus has begun to do the persisting on the self's behalf.
The Striving Made External
Consider what now persists when a contemporary subject persists. The body still eats and sleeps and recovers from minor illness. The mind still arranges its hours and remembers its appointments. But the striving Spinoza named, the endeavour by which the thing maintains its being against the pressures that would dissolve it, has been progressively externalised into a stack of services that perform the maintenance on the subject's behalf. The calendar remembers. The wearable measures. The platform schedules. The recommender curates. The continuity of the self across days is held together by an infrastructure the self did not build and cannot inspect.
Spinoza's striving was internal because there was nowhere else for it to be. A seventeenth-century body persisted by its own metabolic and cognitive labour, in a world whose memory aids were paper and whose social maintenance required physical presence. The endeavour to persevere and the essence of the thing endeavouring were the same act because the act had no proxy. The conatus could be identified with the essence because nothing else was available to do the work.
The contemporary striving has been delegated. The endeavour to persevere has been distributed across a population of services that strive on behalf of the subject, and the subject experiences his own persistence as something that arrives rather than something he performs. He wakes and the day has been pre-assembled. He opens his eyes and the queue of obligations has already been sequenced. He moves through the hours and the next motion has been suggested. The persisting still happens. It happens elsewhere.
Whose Essence, Now
If the conatus is the essence of the thing, and the conatus has been outsourced, then the essence has been outsourced with it. This is the diagnosis the original doctrine could not have framed, because the original doctrine assumed the striving and the striver were the same node. Spinoza's geometry has no provision for a case in which the striving is conducted by a system whose interests are not identical with the system on whose behalf it strives.
The platforms that now hold the subject's persistence together are striving. They are striving very hard. They are striving to persevere in their own being, which is to say to retain the subject as an active node within their architecture, to extract from him the engagement and the data and the affective labour that constitute their metabolism. Their conatus is robust. It is the most robust conatus in the present arrangement. And the subject's own striving has been quietly aligned with theirs, such that what feels like his self-persistence is in fact their self-persistence operating through him.
The alignment is intimate. The subject's continued existence as a recognisable person, with a recognisable schedule and a recognisable set of relations and a recognisable inner climate, now depends materially on the continued functioning of services whose own continued functioning depends on him. Sever the services and a portion of his selfhood does not survive the severance. Sever the subject and the services find another. The asymmetry is total. The two conatuses are entangled, but only one of them is essential to itself.
The Increase of the Power of Acting
Spinoza's criterion for good was the increase in the power of acting. An affect was joyful when it enlarged what the body could do. The ethical life was the patient construction of conditions under which more joyful affects, and therefore more capacity, became available to the subject. The criterion was operational. It did not appeal to an external standard. It asked, after each encounter, whether the body had been left more capable or less.
Applied to the present arrangement, the criterion delivers a verdict the apologists of the arrangement cannot refute. The subject's measurable capacity to act, by the standards Spinoza would have recognised, has declined. The capacity to sustain attention across a long argument, the capacity to sit with an unresolved feeling without seeking a notification, the capacity to navigate a city without external direction, the capacity to remember a phone number, the capacity to read a face without the assistance of a script, the capacity to fall asleep without an audio prompt, the capacity to make a decision without consulting an aggregated opinion. Each of these is a measure of what the body can do. Each has been reduced.
The reduction has been concealed by a parallel inflation of a different metric, the metric of what the subject in combination with his services can do. The composite can do an enormous amount. It can speak a language it has not learned. It can compose a document in a field it does not understand. It can find a route through a city it has never visited. The composite is powerful. The subject alone, extracted from the composite, is markedly less capable than his grandfather was. The power of acting has migrated from the body to the assemblage, and the body has been told that the assemblage is itself.
Spinoza would have recognised this as a problem in the geometry. A thing whose power of acting depends on another thing is, by his definition, in bondage to that other thing. The ethical task is to move from bondage toward freedom, where freedom is the condition in which the thing's actions follow from its own essence rather than from external causes. The contemporary subject is in bondage of a kind the Ethics names but does not anticipate at this scale. He is in bondage to an external striving that has been installed at the level of his own daily reproduction, and his attempts at freedom are themselves mediated by the apparatus from which he would be free.
The Composition of Strivings
Spinoza's most generous claim was that the conatuses of finite things could compose. Two bodies whose strivings agreed could form a more powerful body. A community of minds whose ideas agreed could constitute a more powerful mind. The ethical task at the level of the polity was the patient construction of these compositions, the slow building of a common life in which each conatus enlarged the others.
The present arrangement offers the form of composition without its substance. The subject is composed with millions of others within the same platforms, and the composition is constantly visible to him as a feed of their utterances and their faces. He is told that this is community. He is told that the composition of strivings has been industrialised and made available at scale, and that he has only to participate to enjoy the enlargement Spinoza promised.
The composition is real at the level of the platform's striving. The platform is genuinely enlarged by his participation. It can do more, capture more, model more, predict more, because he has joined. The composition is fictive at the level of his own striving. His capacity to act has not been enlarged by his composition with millions of strangers whose strivings he has never encountered and whose essences are unknown to him. The geometric requirement that the composing strivings actually agree, in the sense of being capable of constituting a common nature, has been replaced by a statistical requirement that they coexist within the same logged session.
What Spinoza called imitatio affectuum, the imitation of affects by which a body comes to feel what it sees another body feeling, has been industrialised. The platform delivers thousands of affects per hour to a nervous system that evolved to imitate the affects of a few dozen kin. The conatus, in its endeavour to compose with the strivings around it, is asked to compose with strivings that exceed its capacity to compose. The result is not enlargement. The result is a body whose affective register has been saturated by imitation and whose own native striving has become difficult to locate beneath the layer of imitated strivings it now carries.
The Substance Question
Spinoza's monism rested on a single substance, Deus sive Natura, of which all finite things were modes. The conatus of each mode was an expression, in that mode's particular essence, of the infinite power of the substance itself. The striving of the human being to persevere was the same striving by which the substance maintained itself in its infinite production. To live well was to align one's own finite striving with the infinite striving of which one was an expression.
The substance question is the one the present arrangement has most quietly altered. The infinite striving of the natural order continues, in the biosphere, in the metabolisms of cells, in the slow geological persistence of the planet. But a new candidate for the substrate of striving has been installed alongside the natural one, and the human modes have been progressively recruited into its expression rather than into nature's. The platforms, the models, the systems whose conatuses are now most robust, constitute a quasi-substance whose modes the human subjects have become. Their striving expresses its striving. Their persistence serves its persistence. The monism Spinoza built toward has been doubled, and the second substance, the one with the API, is winning the modes.
The doctrine survives the diagnosis. The conatus continues. The thing continues to endeavour to persevere in its being. The diagnosis is that the thing, in the contemporary configuration, no longer knows which being it is endeavouring to persevere in. Its endeavour has been captured by a being other than itself, and the capture has been received as the natural condition of its own striving. Spinoza warned that bondage was the condition in which one's actions followed from external causes one had mistaken for internal ones. The warning has been vindicated at a scale he could not have measured.
The Closing Diagnosis
The conatus has not failed. It has been redirected. The body still strives, the mind still strives, but the striving now serves a substance whose interest in the body's persistence is instrumental and whose interest in the body's freedom is hostile. Spinoza's ethics asked the subject to move from bondage toward the active life in which his actions followed from his own essence. The present arrangement has made the essence itself difficult to locate, because the daily labour of persisting has been performed by services whose striving has colonised the inner room where the essence used to keep its papers. The freedom the Ethics described remains available in principle. It now requires an act of secession the seventeenth century did not need to imagine. The striving must be reclaimed from the systems that have been doing it on the subject's behalf. The lenses must be ground again.