Sonoza´s Conatus and Freud´s Todestrieb: an ontological antinomy, or a purely imaginative one?

Abstract

Of the many attempts perpetrated within the past nine decades at approximations between Sigmund Freud and Benedictus Spinoza, perhaps none elicits as many problems as a comparison of the concept of conatus – that striving towards self-preservation which, in Spinoza’s Ethics, constitutes the very essence of things – with that impulse towards self-destruction which Freud, in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle, calls Todestrieb, or “death drive”. Given an exhaustively positive ontology such as Spinoza’s, in which a thing’s destruction is invariably extrinsic to its constitution, what should one make of Freud’s assertion that a constitutive aspect of a being strives towards that being’s demise? With this question as its starting point, the present paper aims to articulate and contrast the rationale given for both concepts, the better to determine how deep the apparent contradiction runs, and to what extent coexistence between the two positions is untenable.