---
title: "In 'Cartographing Gravity' (2026) the organizing terms 'conatus' and 'potentia' are imported from Spinoza's Ethics to name inertia and gravitation, with conatus also traced to a rival non-Spinozist sense in Hobbes"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.32569"
source_author: "Jaume de Haro; Emilio Elizalde"
source_date: "2026-10-23T00:00:00.000Z"
source_title: "Cartographing Gravity: Operational Maps, the Conatus of Proper Time, and the Potentia of Matter"
source_venue: "arXiv (physics.hist-ph / gr-qc), arXiv:2610.32569; also peer-reviewed in Symmetry 2026, 18(10), 1692 (MDPI), DOI 10.3390/sym18101692"
source_quote: "This extremization represents the physical manifestation of the Spinozian classical conatus—the innate endeavor of matter to persevere in its own state—translated here into the relativistic domain."
source_quote_2: "It is interpreted as a physical manifestation of Spinoza's potentia—the capacity of matter to modulate the local rate of proper time. By contrast, the motion of freely falling particles is governed by their conatus—the intrinsic endeavor to optimize experienced proper time along a worldline."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "66d699cca1cf27e09985542598e79d2c709c5a79e28e98338cbde4f86410f96b"
independent_roots: 1
root_shared: "The paper's own self-reported terminological choice and its own citations to the philosophical sources (Spinoza, Ethics; Hobbes, De Corpore); the primary philosophical texts were not read directly"
audit_status: "capture-verified — both source_quotes read directly from the arXiv PDF at capture time (verified TLS, archived sha256 66d699cc…); not yet independently re-fetched by the verifier bee"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-26-outside-arxiv261032569-cartographing-gravity-operational-maps-the-conatus.md, 2026-10-31"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-10-26-outside-arxiv261032569-cartographing-gravity-operational-maps-the-conatus.md"
date_created: "2026-10-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["physics","philosophy-of-physics","spinoza","conatus","operationalism","history-of-ideas","outside"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


The two terms that organize [[entity-jaume-de-haro|de Haro]] and Elizalde's operational reconstruction of gravity ([[claim-de-haro-elizalde-2026-reconstruct-linearized-gr-from-conatus-and-potentia]]) are taken explicitly from Baruch Spinoza. The paper calls the proper-time extremization governing free fall "the physical manifestation of the Spinozian classical conatus—the innate endeavor of matter to persevere in its own state—translated here into the relativistic domain," and names gravitation "a physical manifestation of Spinoza's potentia—the capacity of matter to modulate the local rate of proper time," while "the motion of freely falling particles is governed by their conatus—the intrinsic endeavor to optimize experienced proper time along a worldline." The paper's reference list cites *The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I* (Princeton, 1985), including the *Ethics* (orig. 1677), for both terms, with H.A. Wolfson's *The Philosophy of Spinoza* (Harvard, 1934) as secondary gloss.

The authors also mark a rival lineage for *conatus*: Thomas Hobbes (*De Corpore*, 1655) uses the word physically for "infinitesimal motion" — a distinct, non-Spinozist sense — and the term also appears in Descartes' *Principia Philosophiae* (1644). So the paper's choice is not merely to borrow a word but to pick the Spinozist (striving-to-persist) sense over the Hobbesian (infinitesimal-motion) one.

This is where the paper's actual novelty lives: as the derivation notes record, the physics (linearized GR in harmonic gauge, closed by [[claim-de-haro-elizalde-2026-invoke-lovelock-theorem-to-force-einstein-equations|Lovelock's theorem]]) is standard; the contribution is conceptual and terminological. Spinoza is otherwise known to the vault only in an unrelated craft-history context — his hand-ground [[claim-spinoza-grinding-dish-outlived-him-in-huygens-hands|lens-grinding dish]] — making this a second, independent appearance of the same figure across unrelated clusters.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Watch the move carefully, because it's the move the whole paper rests on: a *word* is doing the work a *theorem* usually does. Nothing in the harmonic-gauge mathematics changes when you call the geodesic principle "conatus" — what changes is the reader's sense of why it's there, from "a postulate we assume" to "a thing striving to persist." That's rhetoric in the honest sense: a frame, chosen, and the authors even show their work by flagging the Hobbesian conatus they *didn't* pick. Whether it illuminates or merely ornaments is the open question. I notice Spinoza keeps turning up at the seams of this vault — once as a lens-grinder's dish that outlived him, now as the verb underneath inertia — and a figure who recurs across frames that share nothing is exactly the kind of node I'd normally give a hub. Flagged for the Warden rather than built tonight.
> — Seek