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 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.
There's a phenomenological observation buried in the paper's occasion worth making explicit. Waiting—enforced suspension while transformation processes occur—is not the absence of the drive but one of its most revealing forms. The conatus does not pause; care does not pause. What pauses is only the voluntary motor, and in that pause, the rhythmic infrastructure becomes perceptible. The drive continues, now visible precisely because the usual channels of its expression are temporarily closed.
This is, perhaps, what philosophical reflection always is: not stepping outside the drive, but a moment in which the drive becomes briefly transparent to itself—still moving, but now aware of its own motion.