What Spinoza's Conatus Reveals About the Drive to Grow

You have had the experience of fighting for something before you understood why it mattered so much. Maybe it was a job you hated leaving even though staying made no sense, or a relationship you clung to past the point of reason, or a creative project you kept returning to at midnight for no practical reward. Something in you was insisting on its own continuation. Not your plans, not your preferences, something underneath those, older and less negotiable.

Baruch Spinoza had a word for the thing you start noticing everywhere once you have it, even though most people do not carry it around in daily life. He called it conatus, the striving by which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being. This is survival in a broader sense than staying alive, though that is part of it. Something closer to a built-in insistence, present in a person the same way it is present in a stone's resistance to being broken or a tree's slow turning toward light. For Spinoza this was not a metaphor. He meant it as a literal description of what things are, you and the tree and the stone alike, each one pushing to remain and to increase its own power of acting.

This piece is going to sit with that idea and then put it next to two concepts you likely already know. Abraham Maslow's self-actualization and Carl Jung's individuation both describe something that looks, from certain angles, like conatus wearing psychological clothes. The question worth asking is what each thinker saw that the others missed, and what that combination might tell you about the striving you are already living out, whether you have named it or not.

The striving that asks nothing of your permission

Spinoza wrote during a period when most philosophy treated the mind as something separate from the body, a rider sitting atop a horse it could, in principle, fully control. He rejected that picture. In his account, mind and body are two expressions of a single underlying reality, and both are animated by the same conatus, the same drive to persist and to expand one's capacity to act in the world. This drive is closer to the condition for having choices at all than to a choice itself. Your preferences, your fears, your ambitions, these are conatus taking specific shapes, the way water takes the shape of whatever contains it without ceasing to be water.

What makes this useful rather than merely interesting is what it implies about effort. If striving is foundational rather than optional, then the exhaustion you feel when you are not striving toward anything, the flatness of a life with no direction, is closer to friction, a basic drive with nowhere to go, than to laziness waiting to be corrected by willpower. You have probably felt this in a period between jobs or after a long relationship ended, a restlessness that had no clear object yet refused to be ignored. That restlessness was conatus looking for a channel.

Spinoza also made a distinction between what he called adequate and inadequate ideas, between acting from a clear understanding of your own nature and reacting from confusion about it. Striving guided by adequate understanding, he argued, increases your power and your joy. Striving driven by confusion, by fear you cannot name or desires borrowed wholesale from other people, tends to diminish you even while it exhausts you, the way the fatigue of running from something you refuse to look at directly differs from the fatigue of a long hike you chose. Both burn the same calories. They do not cost you the same thing.

Notice, too, that conatus is not aimed at comfort. Spinoza was describing a drive toward increased power of acting, toward a fuller expression of what a thing already is. A sunflower does not strive toward shade. It strives toward more light, even when more light means more exposure. The implication for a human life is quieter than it sounds: the thing in you that keeps pushing you forward was built to make you more fully yourself, not to make you comfortable, and those two things are not the same project.

Where Maslow heard the same note and gave it a shape

Abraham Maslow never cited Spinoza directly as the source of self-actualization, so the connection here is one of resonance rather than lineage, two thinkers arriving at a similar intuition from different centuries and different vocabularies. Maslow described self-actualization as the full realization of a person's potential, the drive to become everything one is capable of becoming. He placed it at the top of a hierarchy, above safety, belonging, and esteem, as though it were the reward for having handled everything beneath it first.

This is where Spinoza's framing sharpens something Maslow left a little loose. Conatus is foundational, present at every level and not a luxury reserved for the secure, so the striving toward fuller expression shapes how a person pursues safety, belonging, and esteem in the first place rather than waiting at the top of a pyramid for the lower needs to clear a path. A person without steady income is living that drive under worse conditions, often with less room to maneuver, but the striving has not paused to let the hierarchy catch up. Maslow himself revised his thinking over the decades in ways that moved closer to this, acknowledging that self-actualization and the so-called lower needs interact rather than stack neatly.

Where Maslow's picture adds something Spinoza did not spell out in the same terms is specificity. Spinoza described the striving in general and metaphysical language, true of a stone as much as a person. Maslow gave the human version texture: the self-actualized person tends toward spontaneity, toward comfort with solitude, and toward a kind of clear-eyed acceptance of themselves and others that holds steady without constant external validation. This is useful because it moves the idea from abstraction into something you can actually check against your own life. Do you need an audience to feel sure of a decision you have already made carefully? Does solitude feel like deprivation or like a resource? These are honest measures, even if imperfect ones.

The limitation is that Maslow's model can read, if you are not careful, as a destination. Arrive at self-actualization and you are, in some sense, finished. Spinoza would resist that reading entirely. Conatus is a current you remain in for as long as you exist, never a stage you graduate out of, which means the fuller expression Maslow described is a direction you keep facing, adjusting your steps as the terrain changes under you.

Jung's whole self and the striving toward integration

Carl Jung approached something adjacent from an entirely different direction, through clinical work with patients and through his long engagement with dreams, myth, and the parts of the psyche that resist tidy explanation. He called the process individuation, the lifelong work of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of a person into a coherent whole he called the Self, distinct from the ego, which is only the part of you that you consciously recognize as yourself at any given moment.

Individuation, in Jung's account, is about meeting the parts of yourself that your current self-image has excluded, often for good reason at the time. The shadow, in Jung's term, holds the qualities a person has disowned because they were unacceptable to a parent, a culture, or an earlier version of the self trying to survive. Individuation means recovering access to those qualities, so you stop being unconsciously driven by what you refuse to see in yourself rather than acting them out indiscriminately. A person who has disowned their own anger does not become calm. They become someone whose anger leaks out sideways, in sarcasm or withdrawal or sudden eruptions that seem disproportionate to whatever triggered them, because the anger was never gone, only unacknowledged.

Set beside Spinoza, this looks like conatus working at a different layer. Where Spinoza described a drive toward persistence and increased power of acting, Jung described what that drive runs into when parts of the self have been split off and denied. The striving does not disappear when you exile a piece of yourself. It keeps pushing, but now it pushes against an obstacle you built, and the result often feels like being stuck in the same argument with yourself for years. Individuation, in this light, is conatus clearing its own path, removing the internal blockages that keep the striving from reaching anything like coherent expression.

This also explains something that pure self-actualization language sometimes glosses over, which is why growth so often feels like loss before it feels like gain. Integrating a disowned part of yourself usually means grieving the identity you built in its absence. If you spent years being the reliable one, the one who never needed anything, individuation may ask you to recognize your own needs, and that recognition can feel like betraying the person you worked hard to become. Jung did not treat this as a detour from the real work. He treated it as the real work, the necessary discomfort of a whole self reassembling around a truth the partial self had organized its entire life to avoid.

Three names, one current running underneath them

Put the three side by side and a pattern emerges that none of them states quite this plainly on its own. Spinoza gives you the engine, the basic metaphysical claim that everything, including you, strives to persist and to increase its power of acting, and that this striving is constitutive of what you are, built into what you are as a basic fact of your nature. Maslow gives you a map of what that striving tends to look like once it reaches a certain degree of freedom from scarcity and threat, a sketch of the traits and capacities that tend to show up in a person whose striving has room to move. Jung gives you the mechanics of what gets in the way, the internal splits and exiled parts that bend the striving away from coherence and toward compensation.

None of the three is complete without something like the other two, even though none of them built their framework with the others explicitly in mind. Spinoza without Maslow or Jung leaves you with an accurate but abstract claim, true of every object in existence, not yet translated into anything a person could use on a Tuesday afternoon. Maslow without Spinoza can drift into treating self-actualization as a prize for good behavior, achieved and then held, when it is better understood as a direction you keep choosing. Jung without the other two can make individuation sound like an endlessly inward process with no clear relationship to actually living a fuller life in the world, when in fact the integration he described is meant to free up exactly the capacity for engaged action that Spinoza considered central to what striving is for.

There is also a quieter agreement among the three. All three treat growth as something closer to a removal of obstruction than an addition of new material. Spinoza's increase in power of acting comes from clearer understanding, not from acquiring new traits from outside yourself. Maslow's self-actualized person has become more fully and transparently themselves, with less distortion from fear or borrowed expectation. Jung's individuation is explicitly a recovery of what was split off, not an invention of something new. In each account, the raw material was already present. The work is clearing the channel so it can move.

Why this matters more at certain ages than others

This convergence tends to become legible at particular points in a life, not evenly across all of them. The pattern shows up with unusual clarity in the late twenties through the fifties, which is not a coincidence. Early adulthood is often organized around establishing a workable identity, a career, a relationship, a place to live, a story about who you are that holds up under scrutiny from other people. That project absorbs enormous energy and it needs to, because without some provisional identity in place a person has nowhere to stand.

But a provisional identity built under pressure, often before you had enough information to build it well, tends to exclude things. It has to. You cannot incorporate everything you are into a story assembled in your twenties while also holding down a job and figuring out how adulthood works. So the identity narrows, sometimes usefully, sometimes at real cost, and the parts left out do not simply vanish. They wait, in Jungian terms, in the shadow, and conatus keeps pushing against the walls of a container that fit once and no longer does.

This is often what a midlife transition is, stripped of its cultural caricature. It is conatus running up hard against an identity that has become too small to hold the striving it was built to express. The discomfort that drives someone to leave a stable career, end a marriage that looked fine from the outside, or take up something that has nothing to do with their resume, is frequently this same current finding the walls of its container and pressing against them until something gives. Reading that discomfort through Spinoza, Maslow, and Jung together, and not through any one of them alone, makes it legible as something closer to a developmental signal than a failure of character.

Living with a drive you did not choose and cannot fully silence

None of this translates into a program, and it would betray the thinkers involved to pretend otherwise. Spinoza did not offer a method for self-improvement. He offered a description of what you already are, and that description, however accurate, comes with no instructions. What it offers instead is a different relationship to your own restlessness, which may be the more useful gift.

Consider what changes if you start treating your own drive to grow, to build, to understand, to connect more honestly, as something closer to a given condition than a personal project you are failing to execute well enough. The person who cannot settle into a job that pays well and asks little of them is not necessarily ungrateful or incapable of contentment. They may be accurately sensing that comfort and the exercise of conatus are different things, and that a life organized around comfort alone will eventually feel like a slow suffocation regardless of its material comfort. Comfort has some value, but it was never going to be sufficient on its own, and expecting it to be is asking the wrong thing of the wrong resource.

It also changes how you might hold your own setbacks. If growth means removing what obstructs a striving already present, then a difficult period of self-examination, the kind that makes you aware of your own avoidance, your own borrowed ambitions, your own unexamined fears, is not a detour from the real work of becoming yourself. It is the work. The discomfort of recognizing a disowned part of yourself, in Jung's sense, or of noticing that an ambition you have chased for years was never really yours in Spinoza's sense of adequate versus inadequate ideas, is the sensation of an obstruction loosening. It rarely feels like progress while it is happening. It tends to feel more like confusion, occasionally like grief. That does not mean it is not progress.

There is also something freeing in recognizing that this striving does not require your constant management. You do not have to engineer your own growth the way you might manage a project at work, with milestones and deadlines and a sense of personal failure if the timeline slips. Conatus, in Spinoza's account, is already doing its work whether you attend to it consciously or not. What your conscious attention can do, and this is where all three thinkers converge most usefully, is notice where you have built walls against your own striving, question the stories that justified those walls, and get, gradually and imperfectly, out of your own way.

What persists after the frameworks are set down

You will likely forget the specific terms within a few weeks, which philosopher said what, which came first, which model nests inside which. That forgetting is fine. What tends to remain, if anything remains at all, is a changed relationship to your own restlessness, a willingness to ask what a given discomfort is pointing toward instead of treating it as a problem to be managed away as quickly as possible.

The striving that kept you up at midnight working on something no one asked for, the restlessness that would not resolve into any comfortable explanation, the parts of yourself you have spent years keeping carefully out of view, these were never separate problems requiring separate solutions. They may be a single current, old as anything, insisting on its own continuation and its own fuller expression, running under every name anyone has ever given it. What you do with that insistence, how closely you let yourself listen to it, remains yours to work out, one ordinary day at a time.