What Carries Us
Conatus, Care, and the Rhythmic Structure of Persistence
Schopenhauer was correct in one aspect: we didn’t choose to begin. The drive was already present before the choosing self arrived to take credit for it, relentlessly pushing forward through the body’s insistence on warmth, sustenance, connection, and continuation. He was right that something carries us that we didn’t install and can’t uninstall. However, where he was wrong—devastatingly and consequentially wrong—was in concluding that because the drive precedes the self, the self is therefore an illusion. A river is not an illusion merely because it precedes the swimmer.
This error is alluring because it stems from a genuine insight achieved through a single, fateful step. If the drive is universal—the same Will surging through granite and grief, through cellular division and human longing—then the individual who experiences herself as striving toward something specific, in her unique way, with her distinct history pressing at her back, is merely a temporary eddy in a current that neither knows nor cares about her. On this account, the principium individuationis is not a feature of reality but a cognitive misfortune—the consequence of having a nervous system complex enough to mistake itself for a self.
However, this is precisely where phenomenology resists. The drive doesn’t present itself as universal. It presents itself as mine—inflected by this morning’s quality of light, by a conversation that hasn’t resolved, by the particular rhythm of a body that has learned, over years, when it thinks well and when it merely thinks it is thinking. What carries us through our lives has our shape. It fits us, not in the sense that it flatters us, but in the sense that it is not interchangeable with what carries anyone else. This specificity is not an epiphenomenon of the drive. It is the drive, correctly understood.
Spinoza, not Schopenhauer, grasped this concept. Each entity strives to persist in its own being—not in its essence, not in the universal current, but in its specific, irreplaceable mode of existence. Conatus is inherently individuated. This fundamental distinction transforms everything. It doesn’t diminish the drive’s power or pre-reflective nature but instead reveals that the self being carried is not an illusion. The swimmer is not a mistake the river makes; she is a distinct entity altogether. While the river shares the urgency of the current, it is answerable to her particular form in a way that no universal Will can be.
This exploration delves into the implications of this understanding, not merely as a correction of Schopenhauer but as a positive account of the structure of human persistence. It examines what carries us, how it carries us, and why the answer necessitates integrating three distinct registers of analysis that philosophy has rarely combined simultaneously.
Conatus, as individuated directional striving, stands in contrast to Schopenhauer’s universalizing Will. Spinoza presents a different perspective. Care, on the other hand, serves as the existential structure of that striving’s temporal shape. This is a departure from Heidegger’s individualist truncation, which separates the question from intentional consciousness. Instead, Heidegger suggests that we are always driven toward something, directionally, which already structures the drive. Finally, chronobiological entrainment emerges as the somatic medium through which conatus and care are rhythmically actualized. This concept challenges all three perspectives, as it provides the necessary empirical grounding that none of them alone can offer.
The driving force behind our lives—not the choices we make or the values we reflect on—lies at the intersection of everything I have been exploring through my philosophical research.
Schopenhauer posits that it is the blind Will that drives us, and the “we” is largely illusory. In contrast, Spinoza argues that it is conatus—determinate, individuated, and affirmative striving in one’s own specific mode. Husserl emphasizes that the question cannot be separated from intentional consciousness, suggesting that we are always driven toward something, directionally, which already structures the drive.
Heidegger posits that it is care (Sorge) — the pre-existing, always-already thrown, always-already alongside. Gadamer, on the other hand, suggests that it is tradition that carries us — we are always already in motion before we decide to move, borne by horizons we did not choose.
However, neither of them adequately theorizes the rhythmic, somatic, temporally entrained dimension of what drives us. The drive is not merely intentional, existential, or conative; it is chronobiologically structured. We are driven in circadian waves, ultradian rhythms, and seasonal modulations. The motor of persistence is not a continuous force but a pulsating, phase-sensitive, environmentally coupled movement.
The synthesis of temporal flow is not smooth but rhythmically articulated. Therefore, what drives us through our lives is something like:
Individuated conatus expressed through rhythmic temporal entrainment, constituted within a horizon we did not choose, directed by intentional care toward possibilities we own or flee.
The Hairdresser’s Moment as Philosophical Data
The waiting at the salon itself offers a phenomenologically instructive experience. You are in a state of enforced temporal suspension — the dye processes on its own schedule, not yours. Yet, you are cognitively and conatively fully active — the drive does not pause with the body.
You are in a public space of intimate transformation — the hairdresser’s is one of the few places where bodily change is social, witnessed, and collaborative.
Experiencing a mild yet real principium individuationis moment, you will emerge different, and you chose the direction of that difference.
Schopenhauer would argue that the Will remains indifferent to whether one engages in philosophical contemplation or simply gazes at a wall—it drives equally in both scenarios. However, this notion feels phenomenologically inaccurate. The quality of the drive varies—currently, it is sharp, combinatory, and generative. This variation in quality is precisely what conatus encapsulates and the Will fails to do: you are striving in your specific mode, which includes thinking in this manner, in this particular situation.
Against the Blind Drive
Schopenhauer’s Will is philosophically captivating precisely because it captures something genuine—the pre-reflective, pre-intentional momentum of existence. We do not consciously decide to persist; we find ourselves already persisting, already striving, before any deliberation. In this sense, the Will identifies a genuine phenomenon.
However, it does so incorrectly. The blind universality of Will—the same force at play in the gravitational pull of a stone and the intellectual pursuits of a philosopher—dissolves the very essence that requires explanation: why this life, with its unique texture of striving, moving in this direction rather than another. Schopenhauer’s Will is too broad in scope to account for the specificity of what propels each individual through their distinct life.
Spinoza’s physics of the soul is not a cold mechanical explanation. It is an account of what it means for a specific configuration of matter and thought—this body, this history, this ratio of parts in this field of interactions—to be alive in the fullest sense of the word. Every body has a threshold. Below it, the ratio begins to dissolve, the conatus strains against diminishment, and what is felt is sadness—not as sentiment but as the drive’s own recognition that it is losing ground. Above this threshold, when the body encounters what genuinely aligns with its nature, when the interactions that compose it are generative rather than corrosive, something else becomes possible. Spinoza calls it laetitia—joy—and he means something precise: the lived experience of conatus increasing, of the ratio holding and expanding, of the particular life that this body is becoming more fully itself. Joy, on this account, is not a reward for persisting. It is persistence recognizing itself. It is the drive, in its most individuated and irreplaceable form, discovering that it is not merely surviving but flourishing—and in that discovery, restoring to life its full philosophical weight: not illusion, not a fleeting eddy in a universal current, not a temporary reprieve from suffering, but something real, specific, and worthy of the name.
Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of care (Sorge) concretizes what conatus abstractly posits. To be ahead of oneself, already thrown, alongside others and things—this is not a metaphysical claim but a description of the structure of existing as it is lived. Care captures what conatus leaves implicit: the temporal shape of striving, the way persistence is always oriented toward possibilities not yet realized, always weighted by a past not chosen, always already entangled with a world.
But as we’ve traced, and H. 298 is the pivotal passage, Heidegger’s genuine care leans towards a structural solipsism that his own analysis of Mitsein should have prevented. What propels us through life is never care in isolation. It is care that is constituted within and through horizon-fusion—the Gadamerian recognition that we are always already carried by a tradition, a language, a set of relationships that precede and surpass our resoluteness.
H. 298 becomes decisive precisely because it reveals that resoluteness is not a withdrawal into purified inwardness but a mode of exposure. Heidegger initially appears to present authenticity as though Dasein could wrench itself free from the anonymous pressure of das Man through an act of singular self-possession. Yet the phenomenological structure of resoluteness undermines this interpretation from within. Resoluteness does not seal Dasein off from others. It exposes Dasein more radically to the fact that existence is always already shared. The authentic self is not an isolated interiority but a being that can no longer hide behind the dispersions of publicness. In H. 298, the disclosedness of authentic existence reveals that Mitsein is not an external addition to care but constitutive of it. One does not first become authentic and then encounter others. Rather, authenticity is the lucid recognition that one’s possibilities were never privately authored to begin with. Language, inheritance, affective orientation, intelligibility itself arrive through the Mitwelt. Even the possibility of owning one’s existence presupposes a world already populated by others whose meanings and practices make such ownership intelligible at all. Resoluteness therefore becomes genuine exposure: not heroic self-enclosure, but the stripping away of the illusion that the self could ever stand outside relational constitution. This is precisely where Gadamer’s horizon-fusion deepens Heidegger rather than merely correcting him. What carries us is not an isolated care projecting itself into possibility, but a relationally constituted striving that emerges through shared worlds of significance. Conatus is therefore never solitary persistence. It is always already interwoven persistence, a rhythmic negotiation between one’s ownmost possibilities and the inherited horizons within which those possibilities first become visible.
In other words, the drive is not mine alone. It is mine as a relational entity—conatus operating within a field of other conatus, modifying and being modified, as Spinoza himself described it.
The Rhythmic Infrastructure
To understand what carries us is not yet to comprehend where it is leading us. Spinoza’s conatus preserves the ratio—it holds the unique configuration of this life against what would dissolve it—but it does not by itself explain why human persistence feels oriented, why we are always already leaning toward something, why the drive is not merely self-maintenance but trajectory. For this, Heidegger’s analysis of care is indispensable. To exist as Dasein is to be always ahead of oneself—thrown into a past that one did not choose, pressing toward possibilities that are genuinely one’s own, alongside a world that is never merely a backdrop. Care is conatus given temporal form: not just the striving to persist, but the striving to persist as this particular being toward this particular horizon of possibility.
Here lies the gap that neither Spinoza, Heidegger, nor Gadamer can fill: an account of the temporal medium through which conatus is actually realized in a living body.
Chronobiology reveals that persistence is not a continuous force but a phase-sensitive, rhythmically structured, and environmentally coupled process. Circadian rhythms are not mere background conditions; they are essential for the possibility of striving. Energy availability, affective tone, cognitive capacity, and immune function all oscillate in structured temporal patterns that the organism actively maintains through entrainment.
This means that what propels us through our lives has a rhythm before it has a direction. The conative surge of a morning—the unique quality of forward momentum that belongs to certain hours—is not the same drive as the consolidating, integrative movement of the evening. They are phases of a single conatus, temporally differentiated.
Husserl’s internal time-consciousness—retention, primal impression, and protention—describes the micro-structure of temporal experience, while chronobiology describes its macro-structure: the circadian, ultradian, and seasonal pulsation within which Husserlian time-synthesis is embedded. Neither is sufficient without the other.
A Closing Image
There is a phenomenological observation concealed within the paper’s occasion that deserves to be made explicit. Waiting, especially the peculiar waiting imposed by bodily processes that unfold according to rhythms not entirely subject to volition, reveals something fundamental about persistence. Sitting beneath the slow chemistry of transformation, one encounters a temporary suspension of ordinary directed activity. The body is still. Projects pause. The usual outward channels of agency narrow. Yet what carries existence forward does not cease. One continues leaning into thought, memory, anticipation, irritation, possibility. The movement persists even when overt action recedes.
What becomes perceptible in such moments is not a singular force but a constellation. Conatus appears as the organism’s ongoing insistence on maintaining and unfolding its particular mode of being. Care appears as the temporal structure through which this persistence is always already ahead of itself, pulled toward possibilities while bearing the weight of what has been. And beneath both, rhythm announces itself as the somatic medium through which persistence is actually lived: attention waxing and thinning, affect shifting in tonal waves, cognition arriving in pulses rather than continuity. The drive is neither purely existential nor merely biological. It is existentially articulated biology and biologically enacted care.
Even the surrounding world participates. The salon is not incidental background but Mitwelt in operation: mirrors, gestures, overheard conversations, routines of transformation shared with strangers. One’s becoming occurs publicly, relationally, within practices inherited long before one entered them. The self that waits is never isolated consciousness confronting itself alone. It is a situated being carried simultaneously by bodily rhythms, shared worlds, inherited meanings, and individuated striving.
Perhaps this is what philosophical reflection actually is at its most precise: not transcendence of the drive, nor theoretical distance from existence, but a rare interval in which the ordinarily fused structures of persistence become briefly distinguishable without falling apart. One does not step outside the movement. One catches oneself within it, aware for a moment of the rhythmic, relational, and conative textures through which a life continues carrying itself forward.