From Conatus to the War of Nature: Scarcity, Scientific Metaphors, and the Epistemic Rewriting of Biological Persistence

Abstract

Biological persistence is both a biological and an epistemic problem: vocabularies of scarcity, struggle, competition, war, and survival make some dimensions of continuation especially easy to describe while leaving others less direct to articulate. This article reconstructs differentiated historical transformations rather than a continuous genealogy, contrasting Spinoza's conatus with Malthus's population–subsistence problem, Darwin's broad struggle vocabulary, and Spencer's portable language of survival. It argues that historically situated scientific vocabularies can organise attention, comparison, inference, and problem formulation, producing differential epistemic salience without determining biological reality or demonstrating the exclusion of alternative relations. Against this historically motivated problem, the article develops an analytically distinct, qualified account of relational biological persistence: the capacity, rather than a retrospective survival outcome, of a prespecified focal organisation to maintain or restore continuity as specified relations, components, or conditions change, while transition and loss remain possible. Competition, selection, and material constraints remain biologically real, and empirical applications of the reconstruction require prospective specification, comparison with relevant alternatives, and genuine vulnerability to failure.