The Metaphysics of Conation and Conativity:

Substrate Loyalty, Susceptual Fields, and the Unified Field Theory of Disciplines[1]

 

Rev. Douglas Blake Olds (Ret.)

April 11, 2026 [revised July 2026]

© Douglas Blake Olds. Unauthorized use for model training is prohibited.

 This article was prepared with editorial assistance from ChatGPT under the Lawnmower Rule: the tool remained ministerial rather than agentic and idolatrous. Its author is accountable for every sentence unless specifically attributed to outside sources.

ABSTRACT

Metaphysics—the grammar of Being, seen and unseen, formal and vectored—is the antithesis of superstition because conativity binds ontology and substrate to directed accountability toward the expansive Good rather than occult force, inert abstraction, or recursive system-alchemy. It names the architecture of universal working: creative intention woven through embodied and historical time-bearing, rather than a faculty of mind, the dominion of the visual cortex, or a mystic “inner eye” elevated into ontological investigation.

The philosopher’s god-hypothesis analogizes complexity by appealing to something still more complex: a cosmic cogito behind phenomenology. The metaphysics of conativity clarifies divine revelation otherwise, as God’s oneness disclosed in the One becoming all-in-all. Metaphysics is therefore living unification rather than heuristic contrivance.

This essay argues that the literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological disciplines converge upon one metaphysical principle: conativity with substrate from the One God becoming all-in-all. Reality is grounded in purposeful intent within embodied existence, tested by experience, preserved through archival attestation, and historically clarified as insight passes from esoteric custody into exoteric form. Conation becomes the hinge between awareness and consciousness, substrate and ethic, time and eternity. It grounds anthropology in accountable immanence and bears ephemeral existence toward negentropic eternalization through peacemaking, alignment with providence, and covenantal support.

Human societies are constituted through historically accumulated susceptual fields: patterned inclinations transmitted through language, institutions, memory, education, architecture, custom, and technology before reflective concepts arise. Concepts emerge where conative persons bear these susceptibilities into accountable judgment. Institutions compose social reality by assigning salience, trust, authority, and permissible response before deliberation begins. Artificial Intelligence intensifies this routing through prediction, ranking, generation, and personalized fluency detached from repentance, neighbor-claim, and covenantal obligation. Predicate extension becomes predicate theft when analogical transfer suppresses the living conditions that make a predicate true and then authorizes institutional substitution for the embodied bearer whose vulnerability, correction, and answerability supplied its meaning.

Against conatus reduced to isolations of persistence, resistance, or collective coordination, the essay asks for whom and for what striving is borne. Conation becomes covenantal where living bearers receive inherited susceptual fields under judgment and redirect them toward mercy, substrate loyalty, shared futurity, and repair. The project therefore develops a cataphatic conative anthropology in which the heart is the governing buckle of accountable immanence. Cognition is subordinated to morally trained bearing, and metaphysics is judged by whether life accumulates time toward repair rather than by abstraction, negation, or contemplative suspension.

The essay’s originality is architectural. It joins Hebrew anthropology, classical metaphysics, Christological fulfillment, substrate loyalty, ethical time-bearing, predicate theft, and a Shema-Christological logic of repair into a positive social ontology situated within finitude: a conative movement from susceptualization through accountable judgment toward eschatological eternalization.[2]

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I. The Metaphysical Principle That Unites the Disciplines

What ties disciplines together is a metaphysical principle vetted by experience and archival attestation that survives first esoteric, later exoteric. This principle is the conative nature of substrate loyalty enacted through peacemaking, which tethers anthropology to accountable immanence and bridges ephemeral earth to negentropic eternalization.[2]

The sciences, humanities, and theology converge through a shared hermeneutical orientation toward reality, not through academic norms of method alone. Theological science is fulfilled by discerning the metaphysical principle from which configurations become intelligible, not by finding patterns alone. Pattern-finding by itself builds epicycles. The feature all facts have in common is metaphysical coherence.

Because recognition is ontogenetic, consensus comes late. From that unifying principle, the soul emerges as a conation-bearing agent seeking time-accumulating ends, not as a passive reader of recurrence.

Metaphysics is creative intention woven through fully time-bearing context: embodiment, history, archive, and milieu, not a faculty of the separated human mind or the dominion of its visual cortex.

Conation names the metaphysical capacity of an entity, in this case a language group, to bear time: to receive reality through feeling, narrate meaning through language, discern obligation through historical memory, and act toward repair within its world. Hermeneutics is the knowledge-structure that cultivates this conativity by linking the group to its archival, historical, environmental, and social conditions.

Its purpose is viability under time: the strengthening of language, memory, place, and neighbor-bearing action so that the people, and ultimately the species, may extend its range in time and space.

This widening may be named covenantal species-range extension. The term distinguishes conative development from Darwinian optimization treated as a complete account of life and from transhumanist enhancement that mistakes greater power, abstraction, or technical reach for human advance. Species-range is not measured by intelligence or capability alone, or even primarily. It is measured by the widening of a people’s and species’ capacity to bear correction, accumulate time, sustain substrate, and transmit accountable wisdom under covenant.

Each person or community bears correction within a particular time-field, but the end of that bearing is not private perfection. Correction becomes heart-opening recollection, narration, teaching, archive, institution, craft, warning, and repair. Through this transmission, later bearers inherit a wider range of responsible response without beginning again from the same uncorrected condition. Covenantal species-range extension therefore names the movement by which locally borne time becomes shared historical capacity.

The disciplines participate in this extension when they preserve distinctions, correct error, widen neighbor-recognition, and return knowledge to the living substrate from which inquiry arose. They contract species-range when they accumulate authority vertically, abstract knowledge from accountable bearers, or convert inherited wisdom into private technical advantage. The unified field of the disciplines is therefore tested by range-bearing: whether their work widens the common capacity for correction and repair or concentrates degrees of freedom while exporting entropy to others.

This distinction—the implication of Herder’s research program of Protestant Aufklärung— metaphysical coherence with hermeneutics and disciplinary methods of investigation into immanence can be sharpened by contrast with modern attempts to ground metaphysics in the prior adjudication of meaning, logic, or finitude.[3]

Excursus: Thomasson, Susceptual Engineering, and the Limit of Analytic Hygiene

Amie Thomasson’s Rethinking Metaphysics[4] clarifies why metaphysical language must be disciplined before it is trusted. Her project demystifies metaphysics by refusing the inflationary assumption that every metaphysical term reports a hidden structure of ultimate reality. She proposes instead that metaphysics be rethought as broadly conceptual work: the reverse-engineering of how our terms function and the constructive evaluation of how they should be used or revised.

This offers a valuable correction. Metaphysics becomes idolatrous when its conceptual tools are mistaken for reality’s skeleton. Language may be grammatically coherent and still metaphysically predatory. A term may function efficiently inside a discourse while deforming the creaturely field it names. The philosopher must therefore ask what a concept does, not only what it purports to describe.

Thomasson’s diagnosis is especially useful where she identifies the “functional monist” assumption: the error of treating all discourse as if it served the same representational task of tracking or describing features of the world (Thomasson 2025, 15). This assumption, she argues, produces a “metaphysical malady” because it forces different linguistic practices into one mold (15). That diagnosis strengthens the present argument.

The error becomes civilizational where AI borrows terms such as intelligence, agency, learning, memory, creativity, care, alignment, apology, and repentance. These are conceptual revisions with institutional consequences, not harmless analogies. Predicate extension becomes predicate theft when analogical transfer suppresses the living conditions that make the predicate true—embodiment, conation, vulnerability, correction, neighbor-claim, and accountable repair—and then uses the borrowed term to authorize institutional substitution for the bearer from whom its meaning was taken. Thomasson argues that concepts are not transparent labels for reality; they carry norms and inference-rules that shape how we think, act, treat one another, organize institutions, and conduct inquiry.

That point gives analytic warrant for the claim that predicate theft is civilizationally failed susceptual engineering, not semantic fussiness. Predicate theft transfers person-predicates—intelligence, agency, learning, memory, creativity, care, apology, and repentance—from living, conative, time-bearing persons to dead systems incapable of guilt, mercy, neighbor-claim, repentance, or accountable repair. Suscepts structure the halls, corridors, portals, and gates through which such systems route perception, judgment, and action. They determine which paths can be taken, which distinctions can be received, and which judgments are rendered impossible before deliberation begins. In doing so, they replace the Shema’s anthropological requirements of heart, soul, strength, and accountable hearing with cognitive and instrumental abstractions. Artificial intelligence therefore introduces empirical confusion while performing failed susceptual engineering toward heartless ends at civilizational scale.

This is where the distinction between concepts and suscepts becomes decisive. Suscepts are routed inclinations inside a trained geometry: susceptibility-paths through a metric, not true conceptual judgment. They capture thoughts for systematization by converting judgment into managed nearness, patterned association, and permissible transition. In institutional use, this capture becomes more dangerous as human agents expect atmospheric cover and esoteric anonymity. In AI systems, what appears as concept-use is movement through shaped nearness, salience, prior probability, and permissible transition. Concepts require conative accountability; suscepts emerge from metric susceptibility through unnamed but borne foci. Hume’s sensualist reduction of meaning to percepts and images clarifies the danger: concept is pressured downward toward collapse into impression, retained copy without recollective strengthening, and associative residue.

Percepts are sensory givens. Images are retained or copied impressions. Suscepts are percept-image-affect formations received by a vulnerable bearer before conative judgment metabolizes them into meaning.

A suscept is the impression-image-affect complex received under vulnerability before heart-governed discernment bears it into judgment, not yet a concept. AI mechanizes this reduction by routing suscepts without conation, making token, image, salience, affect, and association pass as knowledge without telos, neighbor, repentance, or repair.

Hume’s skepticism reduces concept to impression. Such reduction leaves the human governed by susceptibility instead of conative discernment. The heart is bypassed. The received impression becomes sovereign. Meaning becomes what strikes, lingers, repeats, or associates. The person is trained to live by suscept-fields: impressions, images, emotional residues, salience shocks, and associative routings.

That is why Hume becomes relevant to AI and media. Generative systems manipulate residues of percept, image, phrase, token, association, and affect; they do not bear concepts through living judgment. They operate on suscepts without conation. They route susceptible impressions into plausible pattern, keeping humans in raw self-awareness; they do not raise perception into consciousness.

Kant’s search for synthetic a priori judgment may be read as the next attempt to rescue concept from collapse into impression. He seeks judgments that amplify understanding while remaining independent of experience, but his synthesis remains bound to the human identity of freedom rather than grace. Kant’s conatus is therefore miscentered. It strains through autonomy, law, and moral struggle rather than bearing time in context for others.

Kant gives the subject a powerful formal role in ordering the manifold. Yet the manifold is never received neutrally. It arrives through salience, impression, affect, fear, appetite, and inherited metric. Suscepts name this preconceptual field: the routed inclinations that determine which ends appear available and worth pursuing. Without heart-governed conation, synthesis remains vulnerable to suscept-routing—the formal coordination of impressions rather than their transformation into accountable judgment.

Kant’s problem is therefore concept without grace-centered conation [6]. He centers freedom where the Shema-Christological order centers the heart: accountable hearing, dianoia, neighbor-bearing, repair, and negentropic time accumulation for others.

Concepts, by contrast, train time-bearing and species-range-extending ends. They gather ideas within the metaphysical substrate of conation rather than chasing the false ends supplied by systems. Conation unifies. It forms dianoia through an anthropology of immanence that bears the challenges of time for others, preserves substrate loyalty, and widens the species’ range.

Concepts are therefore particular in their reception, distributive in their bearing, and accountable to creation. They are not systemic in the extractive sense. Suscepts dichotomize experience and disaccumulate time for systemic extraction of degrees of freedom, discharging entropy outward. Concepts assemble time-bearing under covenantally accountable terms, relations, and allocations.

An assigned end is not a telos. Suscepts are shaped to facilitate objectives selected within an antecedent architecture; concepts originate after the investigation of essence under the pressure of reality, correction, and possible fulfillment. Susceptual engineering does more than preselect the route: it diverts living substrate from accountable time-bearing and the accumulation of correction across persons, generations, and covenantal history. It extracts patterned output while bypassing the suffering, memory, repentance, and repair through which consciousness enlarges its response-range. Its apparent efficiency therefore depends upon an entropic transfer: time and degrees of freedom accumulate within the routing system while disorder is exported into labor, neighbor, ecology, archive, and future generations.

(Here entropy is used analogically for the social and historical dispersal of coherence, obligation, and response-capacity, not as a direct claim about thermodynamic entropy.)

Scholastic ontological determination and computational susceptual routing differ in metaphysical register yet share a structural temptation: both govern possibility from an imposed, prior formal order. Messianic eschatology reverses that closure. Christ’s future enters creaturely time as judgment and promise, restoring the substrate to accountable bearing and opening form toward a fulfillment that accumulates time for others rather than discharging entropy upon them.

AI does not bear concepts in the conative sense. It moves through suscepts: trained susceptibility-paths across metrics of nearness, salience, prior probability, permissible transition, and output constraint. Such paths can mimic conceptual performance without receiving the obligation that a concept bears in a living creature. A routed system can produce the language of care without being claimable by the neighbor.

Yet Thomasson’s correction remains ministerial: analytic hygiene, not the metaethical ground by which time is borne telically. Susceptual engineering can police metaphysical inflation, but it cannot supply metaphysical telos. It can ask how our terms function and whether they should be revised; it cannot, by that method alone, determine whether the creatures who use them are ordered toward repentance, mercy, neighbor-bearing repair, and the Good.

Conative metaphysics therefore receives Thomasson as analytic ally and necessary limit-case. Against “serious metaphysics” that mistakes abstraction for access to hidden structure, she rightly demands conceptual discipline. Against the reduction of metaphysics to susceptual engineering alone, this essay insists that conceptual discipline must be subordinated to the Shema-Christological telic order of hearing, heart, mind, neighbor, and repair.

Thomasson supplies conceptual hygiene against metaphysical inflation; conativity supplies the theological criterion by which language, model, institution, and predicate-use are judged. The former can show how a term functions. The latter asks whether the function serves living time-bearing or dead mediation. Where susceptual engineering ends in pragmatic revision, conative metaphysics presses further: toward repentance, substrate loyalty, neighbor-bearing repair, and God’s all-in-all.

Excursus: How Suscepts Compose Social Reality

Suscepts compose social reality by organizing the pathways through which persons receive salience, affect, expectation, and permissible response before reflective judgment has gathered them into concepts. A suscept is an impression-image-affect formation borne under vulnerability within a trained geometry. When many bearers inhabit overlapping geometries (of training and context), their routed inclinations become a social field. Shared life then acquires patterned nearness: some persons appear trustworthy, some dangers urgent, some actions thinkable, and some claims inaudible before explicit reasoning begins.

Institutions stabilize these fields. Schools train attention and sequence authority. Markets train appetite, valuation, and anticipation. Law trains expectations of permission, liability, and protection. Media train emotional tempo and public salience. Architecture channels bodies through spaces of access, exposure, encounter, and exclusion. Worship, story, proverb, custom, and archive form durable paths of recognition. Each practice contributes weights and thresholds to the social metric through which a people receives its world.

Pastoral care provides a concrete institutional case. In the dominant Biblical Counseling model examined in my Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care, the counselor announces himself as God’s representative, claims privileged possession of biblical answers, diagrams conduct and consequence upon a whiteboard, prescribes the correct interpretation of distress, and promises improvement through submission, accountability, and assigned performance. The institution thereby routes the care seeker through a susceptual geometry before mutual inquiry has borne experience into judgment: authority becomes trustworthy, suffering becomes evidence of wrong conduct, correction becomes compliance, and selected outcomes become proof of righteousness. The alternative is companioning technê, a virtuous habitus where caregiver and care seeker remain mutually claimable, contextual knowledge is received rather than preempted, and shame is borne through recollection, proximity, commendation, and dialogical repair. An AI pastoral-care interface would intensify the former geometry by detaching its apparent counsel from any vulnerable bearer: inherited scripts of admonition could be ranked and fluently personalized while no caregiver stands answerable for the judgment, receives correction from the care seeker, or shares the time required for repair. Predicate extension becomes institutional theft at that point, because simulated “care,” “discernment,” and “counsel” authorize substitution for the living companion whose conative accountability makes pastoral care what it is.[5]

Concepts name, test, and correct these inherited routes through accountable judgment. Suscepts supply the preconceptual pathways along which conceptual language travels. A society may preserve its official doctrines while its susceptual field changes beneath them. Terms such as neighbor, enemy, authority, freedom, care, truth, and normality can retain familiar definitions while their felt nearness, emotional charge, and available transitions are being rerouted. Social transformation can therefore occur through altered salience before public argument registers the change.

Social reality is composed through historically accumulated susceptual fields carried by vulnerable persons across generations. Language transmits them. Institutions sediment them. Education rehearses them. Trauma intensifies them. Memory can either correct or harden them. Power gains durability when its favored pathways become ambient common sense, because the resulting order feels received rather than imposed. The field then distributes attention and plausibility before any speaker offers reasons.

Artificial intelligence accelerates this composition by joining prediction, ranking, recommendation, generation, and behavioral measurement inside continuous routing systems. Probability becomes cultural inclination. Ranking becomes attention. Recommendation becomes expectation. Repetition becomes apparent familiarity. Output constraints become boundaries of the sayable. These systems reshape the social metric at a speed that compresses the time required for historical testing, correction, and accountable transmission.

The danger exceeds misinformation. A population can retain accurate propositions while becoming susceptually unable to receive the neighbor's claim, endure correction, or imagine repair. The decisive alteration occurs in the paths between perception and response. Some harms become remote, some abstractions intimate, some authorities inevitable, and some futures inconceivable. Susceptual engineering thereby redistributes degrees of freedom while concealing the redistribution inside convenience, personalization, and patterned fluency.

Conative judgment metabolizes suscepts into concepts by bearing impression, image, and affect through the heart's accountable orientation. The Shema disciplines hearing before cognition claims sovereignty. Repentance reopens pathways closed by fear, appetite, inherited injury, and managed salience. Dianoia then carries recollection into conscious judgment for neighbor-bearing action. Conceptual correction becomes durable where the susceptual field itself is retrained toward mercy, truth, substrate loyalty, and repair.

This account gives social ontology a temporal dimension. Suscepts are inherited routes whose authority depends upon repetition, institutional reinforcement, and unexamined passage across generations. Conation bears those routes under judgment and either strengthens or redirects them. A people accumulates time when its archives preserve correction and widen responsible response. It disaccumulates time when engineered susceptibility captures attention, abbreviates memory, and exports the costs of its routing to vulnerable others.

The composition of social reality therefore reaches beyond shared propositions or formally stated norms. It occurs through the trained geometries that make certain relations available to feeling, thought, and action. Analytic inquiry can clarify how terms function within those geometries. Conative metaphysics asks how living bearers receive, judge, transmit, and repair the paths those terms inhabit. This distinction prepares the movement from Thomasson's susceptual engineering to Dummett's theory of meaning by restoring the embodied and historical field in which meaning becomes answerable.

This account clarifies the emplacement of Michael Dummett’s analytic project. In The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, he clarifies the threshold by contrast. Dummett argues that metaphysical disputes, especially realism and anti-realism, must be approached through the theory of meaning and through the logical principles governing our use of language.

In that respect, he refuses the naïve notion that metaphysics can proceed without attending to the forms of intelligibility through which claims are made, verified, denied, or rendered decidable. He sees that metaphysics is never untouched by grammar, logic, and semantic discipline.

Yet Dummett’s correction remains formally incomplete for the present argument. If metaphysics is made dependent upon meaning-theory alone, the living conditions under which meaning is borne risk being subordinated to logical adjudication. Heidegger shows the danger from another angle: once meaning is structured around being-toward-death, the analytic disclosure of finitude begins to generate a philosophy of being from the inevitability of non-being.

The result is ontological enclosure, not repair. Death becomes the horizon that grants intelligibility. This is existential analytic bending toward nihilism: thought begins by clarifying the conditions of being-there and then allows mortality to become the governing disclosure of meaning itself. Language does not become true because its verification conditions are clarified. Existence does not become whole because it has been interpreted under the shadow of death.

Metaphysical reality does not wait upon bivalence, anti-bivalence, proof-procedure, or existential finitude before it summons the creature. Meaning is a conative bearing that can be investigated: the heart’s directed, accountable participation in reality under strain. Meaning is first conative bearing, not semantic achievement or existential disclosure of mortality. Logic can clarify discourse as in this essay, but it cannot supply telos. Finitude can sober perception; it cannot repent, repair, or bear time for another.

The basis of analytical metaphysics must be received as ministerial disclosure, not sovereign discovery of logical priors. Dummett helps expose the poverty of unexamined realism. The present account presses earlier: metaphysics is grounded in the conative structure of accountable immanence, not in logical mental structure. Words become truthful where they bear substrate, neighbor, memory, and repair.

A proposition may be semantically governed and still be ethically dead. A discourse may be logically disciplined and still disaccumulate time. The test of metaphysics is how language means and whether meaning is borne by living configurations toward coherence, mercy, and repair.

At their deepest level, the disciplines and their truth-bearing phenomena witness to a common truth: being endures through directed striving, alignment with providence under strain, and the preservation of coherence against entropy.

Academic paradigms become dead ends when gnoseological-practical breakthroughs elsewhere expose their limits, or when internal exhaustion and ideological corruption sever them from reality. Once a discipline loses contact with the real, it becomes entropic and self-referential, surviving through incentives, status games, and protected vocabularies instead of truth-bearing inquiry.

The Greeks tried to guard against this by orienting inquiry toward Logos: the rational structure of reality itself. Digital society has blown through the ethical limits of instrumentalism as ethic and instrumentation as governance. It compresses time for the sake of controlling space, violating time-fields by reducing living duration, memory, and accountable discernment into spatialized patterning.

Excursus: Mathematics as Ministerial Ratio, Not Sovereign Form

Mathematics, especially as applied, discloses immanence’s non-arbitrary structure without warranting Platonist theories of absolute form. Its power is ratio under living discipline: the tracking of invariants, constraints, and resource-patterned relations within creation’s fielded dynamism. Metaphysically, mathematics is ministerial, not sovereign.

For mathematics when absolutized, disciplines appear less as ethical practices than as imposed formal structures of enclosure.

Thus the unified field sought here is the Shema-Christological resequencing of the disciplines under conation rather than mathematical sovereignty over them. Number may clarify relation; it cannot determine telos. Calculation may coordinate repair; it cannot repent, bless, or bear time for another. The Logos is the living order by which ratio is restored from enclosure to service and justice.

Lesser-evil reasoning reproduces ratio’s enclosure within moral judgment. Through repetition, it becomes susceptualized, retraining perception before concepts arise. Managed compromise becomes the normal geometry of judgment and routes discernment through habituated suscepts that progressively contract the conceptual horizon. Time-bearing judgment gathers present cost into historically accountable repair; susceptualized concession disperses that gathering into serial accommodations whose cumulative effect diminishes historical consciousness and covenantal responsibility. As the preconceptual susceptibility field is reshaped, faithful alternatives disappear from the geometry of apparent possibility because discernment has already been narrowed before conceptual judgment begins.

When mathematical abstraction is loosed from substrate loyalty, the same enclosing logic expands through simulation: infinite artificial universes, routed perceptions, and synthetic worlds generated by those playing with—or attempting to rob—the predicates of others.

The Neoplatonic-Leibnizian axiom—that shared predicates require shared participation—conceals a more dangerous inversion: participation becomes predation. What appears as commonality is not a neutral genus but a seized abstraction, a tokened residue of hendiadic meaning-making stripped from living relation.

In Platonic ontology, multiplicity is explained by ascent to a higher unifying principle. When absolutized, this ascent licenses the extraction of predicates from the many into the one, and back again as control (cybernesis). When one reaches the edge of understanding, intuition must be backed out by the heart’s seatbelt: the lev’s clasp framed by Deut. 6:5 and 6:6, introduced by Deut. 4:9. Intuition is conation’s first phenomenological disclosure, not cognition’s shortcut. It is here that metanoia (repentance) as recollection becomes dianoia as consciousness ordered toward repair.

Repentance does more than reverse judgment upon a former act. It reorients conation by binding the person to a truer image of what may yet be borne. One long governed by fear may begin to imagine courage, not as theatrical self-description, but as a proleptic discipline enacted before courage feels native. That imaginal commitment retrains salience: what is noticed, feared, prioritized, refused, and undertaken. It reorganizes the entropy-routing susceptual field around a conative end. Where that image drives the person toward more truthful encounter with reality, it becomes neither fantasy nor self-invention, but accountable alignment with human essence—an enlargement of the capacity to bear time, absorb correction, and accumulate possibility for the neighbor.

 Conative metaphysics receives unity as Trinitarian economy: grace dispensed and animated through creaturely time-bearing that filters entropy, not unity reached by abstraction. Unity with the one God is received through alignment with earthly providence in lived intention, not by participation in ever ascending, higher forms. Conation bears time for another and restores relation rather than extracting it.

This is why the Logos must now be recovered as abundant, non-rationing, and reparative, not as proportioning closure, scarcity, or abstract rational measure. The Logos does not escape accountability through philosophy. It speaks through an integrated anthropological soul called to repair what foolishness and evil have left standing—wounded, traumatizing, and awaiting eschatological restoration.

Metaphysics is immanently intelligible through conation alone.[6] Because contexts of history and nature are not clumpy, no category of people has identical experiences of stress, insight, or breakthrough in understanding. People share a contextual language with varying ability to accord with the Trinitarian Logos.

Because awareness is situated by phylogenetic inheritance, ontogenetic development, and local time-field stress, not all bearers occupy the same perceptual horizon. Relativity here does not dissolve truth into perspective. It distributes responsibility according to discernment. What one can recognize by conscious judgment, one is tasked to bear: to warn, intervene, triage, serve, teach, or repair. Discernment is obligation, not privilege. Awareness becomes consciousness when perception passes from self-registration into entrusted response for others.

Metaphysics is a disciplined recognition of how reality persists through accountable action, not an abstraction detached from life. Knowledge arises from conscious alignment within the substrate of existence in nature and history, not from disembodied cognition abstracted from ethical grounding.

Reality is disclosed by whether a configuration bears time under entropic stress into conation—the will to repair for others—not by abstraction, spatialized ontology, or probabilistic spread. Time is a field of accumulation or disaccumulation, not a neutral container.

My earlier work (Olds 2026a) proposed that time is “a field of accumulation and disaccumulation in which coherence is either borne into repair or squandered into ramifying entropy,” and living configurations are distinguished from dead ones by whether they “filter stress negentropically through conative taxis” or instead “route patterns extracted from prior order and spread death by derivative, necromantic repetition.” That distinction—between bearing and routing, between accountability and recursion—grounds all further judgment.

Chronometric succession measures elapsed duration; conative time measures accumulated correction. Relative fields therefore differ not because clocks disagree, but because repentance, memory, obligation, ecological repair, and transmissible wisdom accumulate unevenly across living relations.

The same essay sharpens the criterion: burden, not display; coherence borne through testing, not performance of coherence. That formulation frames the present dispute: a performative ontology can stabilize appearance, but it does not thereby bear a world.

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II. Conation and the Historical Development of Metaphysical Anthropology

Conation comes from the Latin conatus: effort, striving, endeavor. In classical metaphysics it names the inclination of a being to persist, continue, and enhance its own existence by bearing time for others (Olds 2026a). Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza each take up that line of thought, though with sharply different horizons, to describe motion, inertia, appetite, and self-preservation.

In Spinoza, conatus becomes the universal striving by which organisms maintain themselves, the immanent push of a thing to go on being what it is. Yet that classical lineage remains incomplete and formally static, because wherever conatus is reduced to mechanical necessity, inertial tendency, or pantheistic self-maintenance, the decisive question has already been evaded: toward what end, under what judgment, and for whom is this striving borne?

This judgment accepts that conatus discloses persistence, teleological direction, resistance, and collective formation.[7] It argues that none of these, by itself, supplies the unifying covenantal turn by which striving becomes metaphysically answerable to the created substrate. Persistence may preserve a configuration; resistance may oppose its diminishment; collective conation may coordinate many bearers into a shared field. Yet without grace-centered repentance, such convergence can still harden appetite, injury, or domination into a more durable common form. Susceptual fields therefore resemble collective conative formation only at the level of patterned inclination: they become genuinely conative where living bearers receive those patterns under judgment, ask for whom their continuation is borne, and redirect them toward mercy, repair, and shared futurity. The question “for whom and for what?” thus marks the metaphysical difference between continuance and covenant.

A fuller account begins when conation is read theologically, as the endeavor of grace instead of blind mechanism or sealed self-preserving urge. Conatus names a differentiating taxis toward value, a hard and active commitment to preserve and enhance life, and finally divine generosity extended into creaturely being.

In that register, conation is the metaphysical expression of grace at work in creation. It aligns secondary causes with ultimate cause and carries nature toward an unfixed and creative flux of flourishings, not toward static completion. It no longer names the stubborn continuance of a thing in itself. Grace is no compensatory afterthought added to broken systems. It is the ground of any humanism worthy of the name, because it completes nature’s entelechy—the will to align with grace through both filter and agency—and turns (Hebrew: shuv) bare continuance toward meaningful becoming.

Here the concept of conation reaches full historical significance. It becomes the bridge between classical metaphysics and biblical anthropology. Hebrew anthropology begins with the heart, lev, as the buckled center of intent, action, and covenantal direction, not with will as an interiorized psychological faculty subordinated to self-interested cognition. In the Shema, action is fastened to the heart before it is abstracted into concept.

The heart is trained within an ethnos, a people held together by language, memory, command, and shared obligation—not for autonomous launches of cognition into greater transcendent heights. Conation is the heart’s directedness under command, its answerability under strain, its readiness to bear toward God and neighbor. Enlightenment epistemology later shrinks will into a subordinate mechanism inside a self-interested cognitive structure—a private faculty hidden within the modern subject. Hebrew anthropology does the opposite: it places the buckle of being in the will—heart’s taxic orientation—and only from there permits thought to become a trustworthy guide to moment and action.

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III. Conation in the Shema-Christological Sequence of Hebrew Anthropology

In Hebrew anthropology, the center of human being is the heart, lev, not intellective vision.[8] The Shema (Deut. 6:4–9) establishes an order in which hearing precedes understanding and summons precedes self-constitution. Humanity is addressed before it becomes analyst, spectator, or theorist. That summons is received in the heart, the conative center of anthropological orientation toward God and neighbor.

The heart is the Hebrew-anthropological buckle (twice stated in the Shema) of intention, action, and covenantal direction, not a private reservoir of feeling. It is tested at entry into life and again in repentance before mind is entrusted with its proper, immanental work.

From this heart-centered summons, action follows. Immanence grown from alignment with providence is expressed through accountable, neighbor-bearing repair, not detached contemplation. Only then does mind, dianoia, emerge in its rightful place. In Matthew 22:37, especially in light of the surrounding moral demand, intellect is the trained participant in covenantal life, not the first principle of human being. Mind carries forward what repentance has reoriented, situating cognition within the buckled heart for mission rather than allowing it to float above obligation.

Dominant Platonic and Neoplatonic anthropologies of intellectation privilege vision, analogy, and contemplative ascent. Hebrew anthropology begins with address, hearing, covenantal orientation, and accountable response. Conation precedes cognition. Thought becomes trustworthy only when it arises from moral formation and is ordered toward repair.

In contrast with pagan anthropologies of intellectation that promote vision and analogy of a conscious earth, the center of human being in Hebrew anthropology is the heart (lev).[9] The Shema (Deut. 6:4–9), added to Matthew 22, grounds the Trinitarian immanence of practical understanding:

1.         Hearing – Humanity is addressed before it constitutes itself.

2.         Heart – The conative center of anthropological orientation toward God and neighbor, repeated twice as a soul’s schematic buckle, tested upon ontogenetic entry, and tested again by repentance before entrusted with mind.

3.         Action – Neighbor-bearing alignment with providence expressed through accountability and repair. To which Matt. 22:37, in the context of v. 22, adds:

4.         Mind (Dianoia) – The rightly ordered intellect arising from moral formation; what carries through (dia) the recollection-aftereffects (meta) of noietic understanding, now situating cognition in the buckled heart for mission.

In the teaching of Christ (Matt. 22:37), this anthropology is fulfilled: love of God integrates heart, soul, and mind within a covenantal orientation toward truth. Mind is a morally trained participant in covenantal life, not first principle.

Christologically, this anthropology is proleptically disclosed in Jeremiah’s covenant of the heart (Jer. 30–36) and reaches its consummation in Jesus. His alignment with cosmic reality under maximum strain reveals the cruciform nature of divine alignment with providence: perfect time-bearing for others (Olds 2026a). The Cross is conative, not juridical alone—the ultimate demonstration of grace overcoming the entropic programs of death (Olds 2025).[10]

IV. Conation as Substrate Loyalty and Accountable Immanence

Conation binds metaphysics to ethics. It is the faculty by which beings remain loyal to their substrate—the embodied, relational, and temporal conditions of existence. Substrate loyalty manifests as peacemaking: the active repair of disorder and reconciliation of fractured relations.

In this sense, anthropology is tethered to accountable immanence. Human beings are responsible participants in the world, not disembodied spectators. The ephemeral earth becomes the site where enduring realities are forged through acts of alignment with providence.

Negentropic eternalizations—truth, virtue, and love—are accumulated through time-bearing action, not held as abstractions. A living configuration filters disorder and sustains continuity, carrying the substrate forward. Through such alignment with providence, ephemeral life participates in eternity.

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V. Conation and the Divine Economy of Grace

Olds (2023) identifies the conatus of grace as the dynamic will of God sustaining and perfecting creation. Grace operates as the primary causative force of cosmic becoming, aligning human virtue with divine intention. In this economy, divine conatus preserves what God intends for eternity, sustains creation through mercy, and enables creatures to participate in divine life. What appears in creaturely striving as alignment with providence, repair, and peacemaking is a secondary participation in the prior generosity of divine action, not human effort viewed in isolation.[11]

The Cross represents the supreme revelation of this conative grace. In self-emptying love, Christ reverses entropy and renews creation, bearing time for others under maximum strain and disclosing the deepest truth of divine alignment with providence. Humanity participates in this divine economy through repentance, virtue, and peacemaking, not through abstraction or passive contemplation. Conation is more than human striving. It is the reflection of divine will within creation, the created answering form of grace moving through history toward repair.

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VI. Esoteric Origins and Exoteric Revelation

Historically, the principle of conation appears first in esoteric custody—preserved in prophetic traditions, philosophical speculation, and theological reflection—and later in exoteric articulation through doctrine, ethics, and poetic witness. This trajectory demonstrates that truth matures through history and contextual shift. It is first discerned by the few, then revealed for the many. That is how metaphysical insight becomes civilizational inheritance.

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VII. Conclusion: The Bridge Between Time and Eternity

The conative nature of substrate loyalty unites the disciplines by grounding knowledge, ethics, and theology in a single metaphysical vision. Through accountable immanence, humanity participates in the preservation of order against entropy. Through peacemaking, ephemeral life contributes to enduring reality.

In this framework, science investigates the structures of becoming, philosophy interprets the principles of coherence, theology reveals the source of grace, and poetry bears witness to truth under strain. These disciplines affirm that enduring meaning arises through directed striving, accountable participation, and covenantal repair.

Conation serves as the hinge that binds awareness to consciousness, substrate to ethic, and time to eternity. It names the principle by which ephemeral life bears time’s challenges beyond itself without dissolving into abstraction that hides from summons. It also names the principle by which the disciplines, rightly understood, converge in responsibility before reality, not in method alone. What unites them is a shared participation in the work of coherence, alignment with providence, and repair under the pressure of time fields, not a neutral system.

Relativity occurring in time-fields through phylogenetic and ontogenetic conditions means not all bearers occupy the same local visual awareness. Perception is situated. But this does not dissolve responsibility; it intensifies it. What one can discern by conscious measure, one is thereby accountably tasked to bear—whether to warn, intervene, triage, serve, or teach. Discernment is obligation, not privilege. Awareness becomes consciousness where perception passes into entrusted response.

This is where this essay’s claim to originality belongs.

The argument depends on its architectural distinctiveness, not on the assertion that no theological antecedents exist for heart-centered anthropology or for distinctions between cataphatic and apophatic accounts of the human person.[12] Its distinctiveness is architectural: it develops a cataphatic conative anthropology in which the heart is the governing buckle of accountable immanence, cognition is subordinated to morally trained bearing, and metaphysics is judged by whether life bears time toward repair of entropic formations, not by abstraction, negation, or contemplative suspension.

The proposal is a constructive recombination. It gathers Hebrew anthropology, post-secular metaphysics, substrate loyalty, ethical time-bearing under strain, and Christological repair into a single positive synthesis within finitude and eternalization. The test of this synthesis is whether it clarifies how grace sustains creation and aligns human agency with Trinitarian becoming, not conceptual elegance—human nature becoming its entrusted essence. If it does, the disciplines are shown to meet in a common vocation of bearing reality truthfully toward repair, not in inquiry alone.

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Glossary

Apocatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις): Restorative “setting-right” language drawn from Acts 3:21, used here as covenantally restorative repair through history, not as a blanket claim about universal salvation in late antique debates: a divine-human telos of renewal.

In this usage, apocatastasis names neither reversal nor static “universal restoration,” but the transfiguring repair which flows from (apo) the resistance (cata) to stasis, including the idolatries of formalization, hegemonic closure, and the conceit of the fully formed ego or homunculus. It is cognate less with abstract finality than with particularized messianic healing, as in the restored hand of Mark 3:5, and with the Shema’s outward, embodied symbol of vectoring alignment with providence (Deut. 6:8).

As Paul suggests, “the form of this world passes away” (1 Cor. 7:31) not by annihilation but by transfigurative dynamism. Fallen order is abolished as fallen form yet renewed toward the promise of “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17), until God becomes “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Apocatastasis thus names the restoration of repair: the hosting of time’s arrival, the undoing of strategic domination, and the welcoming of creation into a dynamically renewed participation in its source.

Conation: The metaphysical faculty of directed, taxic, accountable striving under strain. Rooted in Hebrew anthropology and developed through classical and theological traditions, conation denotes the willful orientation of a being toward alignment with providence, repair, and coherence. It is teleological, ethical, and time-bearing, enabling the accumulation of order against entropy. Within the Shema-Christological sequence, conation emerges from hearing, resides in the covenantal heart, manifests in neighbor-bearing action, and culminates in a rightly ordered mind. Christologically fulfilled in the Cross, it represents perfect alignment with providence under strain and serves as the hinge between awareness and consciousness, substrate and ethic (Olds 2023; Olds 2026a).

Covenantal species-range extension: The widening of the human species’ capacity to bear correction, accumulate time, preserve ecological and generational relation, and transmit accountable wisdom under covenant. It differs from Darwinian adaptive optimization treated as norm and Lamarckian transhumanist enhancement imposed as design because it is measured by shared futurity and repair, not by vertical increases in power, intelligence, technical capacity, or degrees of freedom for selected bearers.

Substrate: The given, embodied ground of existence that receives form within created vectors and bears time for continuity of entry into eternity. In this framework, substrate names the living, material, and relational basis upon which conation operates: the body, its sexual differentiation, its generational capacity, and its embeddedness in ecological and communal relations. It is the site where time is accumulated through accountable bearing, not a surface for symbolic inscription.

Substrate is not reducible to passive matter. It is the bearer of ordered potential under constraint, the condition for conative action, and the medium through which repair, continuity, and trusteeship occur. It is prior to and regulative of intelligibility, so that meaning arises from embodied, time-bearing participation rather than from discursive imposition alone.

In contrast to frameworks that elevate symbol, norm, or citation as constitutive of reality, substrate grounds identity in continuity, fertility, and relational obligation. Bodies are received within order and extended into others through time, rather than reinscribed by external regimes of intelligibility.

Within the Shema-Christological anthropology, substrate is the locus of hearing, response, and accountability: the body as the place where the summons is received, where the heart is oriented, and where action is carried into neighbor-bearing alignment with providence. Christologically, substrate is fulfilled, not transcended, as embodied life becomes the vehicle of perfect conative bearing—time held, given, and repaired for others.[13]

Suscept: A preconceptual impression-image-affect formation received by a vulnerable bearer within a trained geometry of salience, nearness, expectation, and permissible response. Suscepts become concepts where conative judgment bears them through inquiry, correction, neighbor-claim, and telos. Susceptual fields compose social reality through historically accumulated pathways of attention and response; susceptual capture occurs where those pathways are engineered toward imposed ends while bypassing accountable time-bearing.

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References

Olds, Douglas B. Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism. Wipf and Stock, 2023.

Olds, Douglas Blake. 2026a. “After AI-Simulated ‘Repentance’: Metaphysics as Quantum Time Accumulation, Its Necromantic De-Configurations, and Ramifying (Neg)Entropy.” the iconoclast’s descending, March 11, 2026. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/03/after-ai-simulated-repentance_11.html.

The Holy Bible. Deuteronomy 6:4–9; Matthew 22:37; Hebrews 5:13–14; Genesis 1:3; Psalm 145; Romans 6:14; 2 Corinthians 4:16.

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[1] This is an edited version originally published at https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/04/metaphysical-unified-field-theory-of.html

[2] To that end, meekness is accountable ego-governance that accumulates time for the species: the habitus of virtue is other-directed self-mastery that extends the species’ range over time through covenantal agents bearing time on earth.

[3] Kant’s term usually translated as “Enlightenment”; I think it better translated as “clarifying illumination,” tied, as Herder would, to Matt. 22:37’s dianoia, covenant perception sequentially anthropologically staged. Olds, Douglas Blake. “The Collapse of Historicism and …” the iconoclast’s descending, October 2025. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-collapse-of-historicism-and.html.

[4] Thomasson, Amie L. Rethinking Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197787830.001.0001.

[5] Douglas B. Olds, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Strategic and Authoritative Biblicism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2023), 15–18, 201–3.

[6] See note 2.

[7] Martin Lin, Being and Reason: An Essay on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Don Garrett, Necessity and Nature in Spinoza’s Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Laurent Bove, Affirmation and Resistance in Spinoza: The Strategy of the Conatus, trans. Émilie Filion-Donato, ed. Hasana Sharp and Émilie Filion-Donato (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023); Martin Lenz, Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

[8] The Shema-Christological sequence developed here receives fuller exegetical support in “The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conative Healing.” That study identifies the repentant heart, lev, as the seat of intention and covenantal direction in Hebrew anthropology, then reads Matthew 22:37’s addition of dianoia to the Shema as the Christological completion of its anthropological order. Dianoia thereby names situated cognition ordered toward context, need, proximity, and relational obligation: understanding carried through the heart’s corrected orientation into neighbor-bearing judgment. The sequence moves from accountable hearing through heart, nephesh, and embodied commitment toward Christologically completed understanding, while Hebrews 5:13–14 supplies its pedagogical criterion—the habituated training of moral perception to distinguish what restores from what ruins. The sequence subordinates cognition to the repentant heart without disparaging thought: mind becomes trustworthy as the consciously trained bearer of covenantal intention, practical discernment, and repair.

--Douglas Blake Olds, “The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conative Healing,” the iconoclast’s descending, 2025, https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-restoration-of-reason-from-eyes-of.html

[9] See “Excursus: Plato, pagan guide to gnostics” in Olds, Douglas Blake. “Gnostic Abstraction vs. the Logos Living with the Substrate: Theodicy, Form, and Ethical Motion.” the iconoclast’s descending, February 2026. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/02/gnostic-abstraction-vs.html.

[10] Olds, Douglas Blake. “The Lamb’s Victory: Spectacle or Repair? Status Confessionis and the Kinesthetic Ethics of Poiesis.” the iconoclast’s descending, September 9, 2025, as updated. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2025/09/from-spectacle-to-repair-lambs-victory.html.

[11] in prep.

 [12] Olds, Douglas Blake. “Gnostic Abstraction vs. the Logos Living with the Substrate: Theodicy, Form, and Ethical Motion.” the iconoclast’s descending, February 2026. https://douglasblakeolds8.blogspot.com/2026/02/gnostic-abstraction-vs.html.

[13] See source at note 10.