Conation is a term that stems from the Latin conatus, meaning any natural tendency, impulse, striving, or directed effort.[1] It is one of three parts of the mind, along with the affective and cognitive. In short, the cognitive part of the brain measures intelligence, the affective deals with emotions and the conative drives how one acts on those thoughts and feelings.
The term conation is no longer widely known—it is in "The 1,000 Most Obscure Words in the English Language," defined as "the area of one's active mentality that has to do with desire, volition, and striving",[2] but a closer look turns up several references to conation as the third faculty of the mind.
Conation is defined by Funk & Wagnalls Standard Comprehensive International Dictionary (1977) as "the aspect of mental process directed by change and including impulse, desire, volition and striving," and by the Living Webster Encyclopedia Dictionary of the English Language (1980) as "one of the three modes, together with cognition and affection, of mental function; a conscious effort to carry out seemingly volitional acts." The Encyclopedia of Psychology "Motivation: Philosophical Theories" says, "Some mental states seem capable of triggering action, while others—such as cognitive states—apparently have a more subordinate role [in terms of motivation] ... some behavior qualifies as motivated action, but some does not."[3]
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While philosophers have known about conation since ancient times, it is only recently that the concept has been understood from a scientific and practical instead of a purely philosophical standpoint.
While a method to measure conation has only been developed recently, the concept has been around since ancient times. The idea of conation, volition and will making up the third, action-driven part of the mind has traditionally been accepted by philosophers and psychologists.
Plato and Aristotle spoke of the three faculties through which we think, feel and act. George Brett in his "History of Psychology" added, "Augustine was not far from the same standpoint ... his language at times suggests the same three-fold division of knowing, feeling and willing."[4]
In the 18th century, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1789) spoke of these three components of human beings in his "Letters of Sensation" (1755), in which he said that the fundamental faculties of the soul are understanding, feeling and will.[4] Johannes Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1805), sometimes called the "Father of Psychology" because of his introduction of the analytical, introspective methods, believed that the three faculties of the mind not only existed, but were an expression of an underlying "respective spontaneity of the mind."[4]
Immanuel Kant's tripartite division of the mind gave psychology the support of the most influential philosopher of his day. In his "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788) and "Critique of Judgment" (1790), he discussed them transcendentally rather than empirically. In his classificatory scheme, pure reason corresponded to intellect or cognition; judgment to feeling, pleasure or pain, therefore affection; and practical reason to will, action or conation.
Kant said,
"There are three absolutely irreducible faculties of the mind, namely, knowledge, feeling, and desire. The laws which govern the theoretical knowledge of nature as a phenomenon, understanding supplies in its pure a priori conceptions. The laws to which desire must conform, are prescribed a priori by reason in the conception of freedom. Between knowledge and desire stands the feeling of pleasure or pain, just as judgment mediates between understanding and reason. We must, therefore, suppose that judgment has a priori principle of its own, which is distinct from the principles of understanding and reason."[4]
The three-faculty concept later showed up in Scotland. In 1854, Sir William Hamilton said, "If we take the Mental to the exclusion of material phenomena, that is, phenomena manifested through the medium of Self-Consciousness or Reflection, they naturally divide themselves into the three categories or primary genera; the phenomena of Knowledge or Cognition, the phenomena of Feeling or of Pleasure and Pain, and the phenomena of Conation or Will and Desire."[5]
Concurrently, Britain's Alexander Bain (1818–1903) was writing of "The Senses and the Intellect" (1855) and "The Emotions and the Will" (1859), which became the standard textbooks for 19th century British psychology.
Bain said,
"The phenomena of mind are usually comprehended under three heads:
I. FEELING, which includes, but is not exhausted by, our pleasures and pains. Emotions, passion, affection, sentiment are names of Feeling.
II. VOLITION, or the Will, embracing the whole of our activity as directed by our feelings.
III. THOUGHT, intellect, or Cognition."[4]
For many of the early philosophers and psychologists, conation was the instigation and regulation of behavior. It was what impelled action, whereas the cognitive compelled.
Spinoza, Hobbes and Descartes were all involved in a goal-directed theory of motivation. An essential part of that theory was Spinoza's delineation of conatus as basic endeavor. He said it was the source of all striving, longing, ambition and self-expression. It was the tendency for a person to persist against obstacles. For these philosophers, conation was the very essence of the person, for, as Spinoza said, it was through conation that one persevered in one's own being.
American psychologist William McDougall was conation's primary proponent in the early 20th century.
As Ernest R. Hilgard notes in "The Trilogy of Mind: Cognition, Affection and Conation" (1980), McDougall "assumed that his reader was familiar with the classification of cognitive, affective and conative as common-sensical and noncontroversial."[4]
In McDougall's "Outline of Psychology" (1923), he refers to the three-faculty concept as "generally admitted."[6] He also described the creative process of these three parts of the mind working together in mental processes, explaining,
"We often speak of an intellectual or cognitive activity; or of an act of willing or of resolving, choosing, striving, purposing; or again of a state of feeling. But it is generally admitted that all mental activity has these three aspects, cognitive, affective and conative; and when we apply one of these three adjectives to any phase of mental process, we mean merely that the aspect named is the most prominent of the three at that moment. Each cycle of activity has this triple aspect; though each tends to pass through these phases in which cognition, affection and conation are in turn most prominent; as when the naturalist, catching sight of a specimen, recognizes it, captures it, and gloats over its capture."[7]
However, McDougall was not the only one. C.F. Stout (1913) said that conation, as goal-directed striving or purposive activity, involved two meanings of the goal or end of the striving. "One is the obtaining of means and the other making affective [sic] use of the means."[8]
Kurt Goldstein (1963) included conation in his concept of "Coming to Terms with the World." He called conation "self-actualization," the matrix of all motivation of "basic drive" which accounts for all human activity.[8]
In Freud's theory of the conative nature of character, he recognized that the study of character deals with "the forces by which man is motivated. That the way a person acts, feels and thinks is, to a large extent, deemed by the specificity of his character and is not merely the rational response to realistic situations. That man's fate is his character."[8]
Yet while the concept of conation and the importance of volitional action were recognized, these thinkers also knew science did not yet have a way of empirically studying this part of the mind. McDougall, as so many others aware of conative traits, expressed the need for giving them specificity, writing:
"...at the standpoint of empirical science, we must accept these conative dispositions as ultimate facts, not capable of being analyzed or of being explained. "When, and not until, we can exhibit any particular instance of conduct or of behavior as the expression of conative tendencies which are ultimate constituents of the organism, can we claim to have explained it (the purposive process)."[6]
R.S. Woodworth added his voice with a call for the need to study willful action, writing in his 1926 investigation into volition that:
"An impelling interest attaches to the study of Human Volition. No other of man's activities reaches so far in its consequences, both to the individual and to society, as does that of his Will. History is a record of its strivings and achievements and failures. The social and ethical sciences are founded on it. Its importance in education can scarcely be exaggerated. Culture, civilization itself, depends on the regulated volitions, repressions, and inhibitions of individuals and nations. All these activities come under the meaning of the term 'Will' as it has been sanctioned by long and universal usage. It is vital, therefore, that our knowledge of Will-activity should be as exact and scientific as possible. Yet there is no field of psychology so slightly tilled as that which deals with volition."[7]
Yet even as calls to study the concept were made, investigation of the conative faculty began to shrink. Many of McDougall's contemporaries were beginning to champion use of cognitive measurements, which rose to prominence as the conative diminished, eventually threatening acceptance of the concept altogether. See Snow & Jackson, Individual Differences in Conation: Selected Constructs and Measures, 1997; Gerdes, Conation: the Missing Link in the Strengths Perspective, 2006; Militello, Gentner, Swindler & Beisner, Conation: Its Historical Roots and Implications for Future Research, 2006. Hilgard traces the retreat from discussion of the three-faculty concept directly to McDougall:
"With McDougall the history of the trilogy of the mind appears to have ended..."[4]
"When we look at contemporary psychology from the perspective of cognition, affection, and conation, it is obvious immediately that cognitive psychology is ascendant at present, with a concurrent decline of emphasis upon the affective-conative dimensions ... some price has been paid for it. Information processing and the computer model have replaced stimulus-response psychology with an input–output psychology. In the process, some dynamic features such as drives, incentive motivation, and curiosity have been more or less forgotten."[4]
Woodworth also noticed the other faculties taking precedence, stating, "We have nothing in this line that can compare with the immense amount of work done on the relation of perception to the stimulus perceived, or ... that can compare in completeness with the work done and still being done in all departments of sensation."[7]
But the 20th century interest in the cognitive cannot fully explain the retreat from discussion of the conative, for it was back in 1878 that Mark Hopkins, who served as president of Williams College, wrote "An Outline Study of Man" (1878), in which he expressed concern about an overemphasis of cognition.
"Until the intellect is placed by the community where it belongs; and made subordinate to the sensibility and the will, we shall find that mere sharpness, shrewdness, intellectual power, and success through these, will be placed above those higher qualities in which character consists, and success through them."[4]
Even though studies of conation were trailing off heading into the mid-20th century, they were not completely forgotten. Erich Fromm in his work on "Human Ethics" discussed the conative nature of man by saying the way man achieves virtue is through the active use he makes of his powers.
"Uncertainty (the cognitive) is the very condition to impel a man to unfold his power. If he faces the truth without panic, he will recognize that there is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by unfolding his powers, by living productively; and that only constant vigilance, activity and effort can keep us from failure in the one task that matters—the full development of our powers without the limitations set by the laws of our existence ... to be himself and for himself to achieve happiness by the full realization of those faculties which are peculiarly his—of reason, love and productive work."[8]
Fromm's "productive orientation" was "a fundamental attitude, a mode of relatedness in all realms of human experience. It covers mental, emotional and sensory responses to others, to oneself and to things. Productiveness is man's ability to use his powers and to realize the potentialities inherent in him ... he must be free and not dependent on someone who controls his powers ... he can make use of his powers only if he knows what they are, how to use them and what to use them for ... they [must not be] masked and alienated from him."[8]
That man's conation, productivity, character or mode of doing comes in modes that are both instinctive and distinctive has also been a prevalent thought among philosophers and psychologists. Michael Malone in his book "Psychetypes" said,
"One of the ways a person can become neurotic (that is, unable to realize his own potentialities) is by failing to develop his natural typology. Furthermore, it is difficult for people to develop happily when their natural typology is not recognized or respected by others. By providing a language for experience, a theory of psychetypes enables us to communicate across our typological worlds and thereby come to understand and accept the validity of our differences."[8]
In "Endeavors in Psychology," Henry Murray uses conation to denote each persistent effort (intention, volition, act of willing) to attain a specific goal, saying:
"Conations are perhaps a long integrated series, deriving their force from one or more needs ... the general motivating factor is need—tension—but the chief integrating factor is the conation which directs the organization of muscular and verbal patterns toward the attainment of a definable effect, or subeffect."[9]
Murray goes on to say, "the personality is almost continuously involved in deciding between alternative or conflicting tendencies or elements ... the most pressing and demanding are conflicts between different conations. Since conations (purposes) derive their energies from needs ... or alternative goal-objects, conations are specific in respect to goal-place or goal-object."[9]
In the late 1940s, Raymond Cattell attempted to explain conational modalities in a complex set he called the "dynamic lattice." What McDougall had called instinct or propensity, Cattell termed an "erg." An erg, Cattell said, was an innate psychological/physical disposition, or inborn disposition, which permits its possessor to acquire reactivity to certain classes of objects more readily than others, to experience a specific emotion in regard to them and to set on a course of action which ceases more completely at a certain specific goal activity. His dynamic lattice analyzes the interconnections among ergs (conative) and sentiments (affective) to show purposive sequences.[10]
His philosophy of dynamic psychology stressed the importance of motivation or fundamental energy in psychic life. Only by looking at man in dynamic rather than static conditions did he feel conation could play its appropriate role.
In the late 20th century, studies of physiological aspects of brain functioning began to reinforce the time-honored three-faculty concept. The micro-genetic theory of action as constructed by Gary Goldberg, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Temple University School of Medicine, Moss Rehabilitation Hospital, Philadelphia, PA, for "The Behavioral and Brain Sciences" (1985), describes in detail the Supplementary Motor Area (SMA) and its role in the cortical organ of movement as viewed by neuroscientists. His research provides evidence that suggests SMA is the significant factor in the development of the intention to act and the specification and elaboration of action through its mediation between the medial limbic cortex and primary motor cortex.
Reviewing Goldberg's work, Jason W. Brown, Department of Neurology, New York University Medical Center, N.Y. (1985), stated:
"The clinical material demonstrates that frontal systems correspond with successive movements in action microgeny. We can infer that an action has a dynamic and hierarchic structure ... the internal context of the action is established through links with limbic cognition, a stage of symbolic and conceptual organization in which drive fractionates to partial affects. Space is volumetric; an external world is not yet present. There is incipient purposefulness attached to the action; it becomes goal directed as its object undergoes simultaneous differentiation."[11]
That neuropsychologists have only recently taken a closer look at the crucial role the SMA plays in the volitional process might be seen, according to Antonio R. Damasio, Department of Neurology, University of Iowa College of Medicine, Iowa City, IA, in his commentary "Understanding the Mind’s Will" (1985), "...as the fate of higher-order integrative systems."[12]
Reitan and Wolfson have been studying brain injury patients through the lens of conation. In their paper "Conation:: A Neglected Aspect of Neuropsychological Functioning"(Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology Volume 15, Issue 5, July 2000, Pages 443-453) they explored through simple experiments, how conation was effected in injured people and the capacity of the medical system to recognise how these injuries effect conation. They proposed that if the conative capacity of a person was negatively impacted, then the capacity for a brain injured person to recover could be profoundly compromised, simply because they had less 'drive', or 'will' to recover and work through the often complex processes of recovery from brain injuries. They have been researching this area at depth since that time.
Piaget had referred to conation many years earlier as the mental domain most difficult to differentiate and thus he laid it aside as, until now, have the neuropsychologists. Piaget used his concept of disengagement to refer to the degree to which cognitive activity is independent of affective and conative relationships.[13] But as Damasio points out, the "...anatomical and functional knowledge about the SMA and its vicinity will permit us to model the neuronal substrates of the will [his emphasis] and thus overcome a persistent objection of those who favor a dualist position regarding mind and brain."[12]
Stanford University's Richard E. Snow said,
"Historically, the concept of 'conation' was coordinated with cognition and affect, the three comprising the main domains of mental life. There has been recent interest in the interaction of cognition and affect ... But the conative seems to have dropped out of modern psychology's consciousness. It deserves reinstatement and research."[14]
And Snow, in his editorial "Intelligence for the Year 2001" (1980), summed up the situation well when he said, "It is not unreasonable to hypothesize that both conative and affective aspects of persons and situations influence the details of cognitive processing ... A theoretical account of intelligent behavior in the real world requires a synthesis of cognition, conation and affect. We have not really begun to envision this synthesis" (p. 194 "Intelligence for the Year 2001").[14]
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