Cavendish

David Cunning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415819602
• eBook ISBN: 9781317329503
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Margaret Cavendish (1623 - 1673) was a philosopher, poet, scientist, novelist, and playwright of the seventeenth century. Her work is important for a number of reasons. It presents an early and compelling version of the naturalism that is found in current-day philosophy; it offers important insights that bear on recent discussions of the nature and characteristics of intelligence and the question of whether or not the bodies that surround us are intelligent or have an intelligent cause; it anticipates some of the central views and arguments that are more commonly associated with figures like Thomas Hobbes and David Hume.

This is the first full account of Cavendish's philosophy and covers the whole span of her work. David Cunning begins with an overview of Cavendish's life and work before assessing her contribution to a wide range of philosophical subjects, including her arguments concerning materialism, experimentation, the existence of God, social and political philosophy and free will and compatibilism.

Setting Cavendish in both historical and philosophical context, he argues that like Spinoza she builds on central tenets of Descartes' philosophy and develops them in a direction that Descartes himself would avoid. She defends a plenum metaphysics according to which all individuals are causally interdependent, and according to which the physical universe is a larger individual that constitutes all of reality.

Cavendish is essential reading for students of seventeenth-century philosophy, early modern philosophy and seventeenth-century literature.

1

Imagistic Ideas, fallibilism, and the limits of cognition

Cavendish defends an epistemology according to which human cognition is limited and fallible, but functions extremely well for everyday practical purposes. Our ideas are imagistic and imprecise, she argues, and they only capture so much. Our best explanations are not particularly explanatory, though they are quite satisfactory for helping us to navigate the world that surrounds us. Cavendish allows that human minds are within reach of axioms that lead to compelling answers to some of the perennial questions of philosophy – for example about the relation between mind and body, free will, individuation, the nature and existence of God, and whether or not the universe is eternal, among others – but she will be fallibilistic about these as well. We might be mistaken about the axioms that deliver such answers, and indeed Cavendish argues that for all we know we are mistaken about matters that are most evident to us. She also supposes, however, that there is a lot at stake in attempting to figure out the deepest nature of things, and she recommends that we do the best that we can with the faculties that we have at our disposal.

Imagistic ideas

One of the central tenets of Cavendish’s epistemology is that ideas are images that represent their objects by picturing them. She writes,

I take an Idea to be the picture of some object…¹

my opinion is, that figures are as inherent to the minde, as thoughts; And who can have an unfigurative thought, for the minde cannot have thoughts, but upon some matter, and there is no matter but must have some figure, for who can think of nothing…²

Cavendish supposes that ideas are pictorial images that have figure and dimension: they are more or less miniature versions of the objects that they resemble and depict.³ The view appears to be stipulative, at least in part: Cavendish is just declaring that what we are talking about when we talk about an idea is an imagistic picture. But she is also offering an argument: if we attended to our thought and did not encounter a figure of any kind, we would be thinking of “nothing.” Alternately, we might begin an episode of thought by entertaining an idea, and then gradually remove the pictorial content from before our mind; Cavendish is supposing that if we did that to the point of removing all pictorial content, we would be entertaining no idea at all. An idea is an imagistic figure, and presumably a figure with enough content that we are able to read off from it the idea’s referent.

Cavendish holds that ideas are imagistic pictures and then accepts as a corollary that ideas are only as precise and exacting as a physical image is able to be. In the same way that there are no perfectly straight lines in (for example) the triangular figures that we encounter in nature, the borders and delineations in our mental life are not precise either. She writes,

this is to be observed, That all rational perceptions or cogitations, are not so perspicuous and clear as if they were Mathematical Demonstrations, but there is some obscurity, more or less in them, at least they are not so well perceivable without comparing several figures together, which proves, they are not made by an individable, immaterial Spirit, but by dividable corporeal parts…⁴

Here Cavendish calls to mind the passage in which David Hume speaks of the precision of our geometrical ideas and asks us to consider whether we really have ideas of things like perfectly straight lines, perfect equality, and perfect circles. He writes,

When geometry decides any thing concerning the proportions of quantity, we ought not to look for the utmost precision and exactness. None of its proofs extends so far. It takes the dimensions and proportions justly; but roughly, and with some liberty. Its errors are never considerable; nor wou’d it err at all, did it not aspire to such an absolute perfection.⁵

We might introspect and conclude that we do not have ideas of perfect entities, and that our clearest cogitations fall short of what the Platonic tradition would identify as part and parcel of a mathematical demonstration. Cavendish is proceeding along these lines, as is Hume in the passage above. Or, we might make the more reductive claim that we do have ideas of perfections, but that the label “perfect” operates differently than we might have expected:

As the ultimate standard of these figures is deriv’d from nothing but the senses and imagination, ‘tis absurd to talk of any perfection beyond what these faculties can judge of; since the true perfection of any thing consists in its conformity to its standard.⁶

Hume is suggesting in this second passage that since we do talk of “perfection,” and employ a standard of perfection, the idea that we have in mind must be of the imagistic sort of which human cognition is capable. Cavendish would presumably be happy to say the same. What she says explicitly is that our cogitations do not reach the level of clarity of a mathematical demonstration – at least as it would be described by Plato or Descartes.⁷ We do perform mathematical demonstrations, however, and some of our cogitations reach the level of clarity of these. Cavendish is committed to the view that our very best mathematical reasoning is a matter of reasoning through imagistic figures. If she allows that we use terms like “exact” and “precise” as descriptors of features that we actually encounter, she would say with Hume that such terms merit a reductive treatment and that some of our cogitations are precise indeed.

Cavendish takes all ideas to be imagistic pictures that have a specific figure and dimension, but she has to allow that some ideas at the very least seem to be abstract and indeterminate. She proposes an analysis of such ideas that is in line with her larger view. If we allege to have located an example of an idea that does not have a specific figure, she insists that the idea requires a closer look. Just as a painting can depict a fog or haze, or capture a scene that is foggy or hazy, ideas can exhibit a wide spectrum of imagistic content:

Tis true, the minde may be in a maze, and so have no fixt thought of any particular thing; yet that amaze hath a figurative ground, although not subscribed; as for example, my eyes may see the sea, or air, yet not the compasse, and so the earth, or heavens; so likewise my eye may see a long pole, yet not the two ends, these are but the parts of these figures, but I see not the circumference to the uttermost extention, so the mind in amaze, or the amaze of thinking cuts not out a whole and distinct figurative thought, but doth as it were spread upon a flat, without a circumference…⁸

We may not notice all of the determinate details of an imagistic picture, but Cavendish is supposing that they are present even if they are difficult to make out. Every idea has a “figurative ground,” and a figure and boundary whose “uttermost extention” we might not fully register. There are therefore no ideas that are abstract or general in the sense of being indeterminate images. If we do have ideas that represent objects above and beyond the entities that the ideas immediately depict, Cavendish would have to argue along the lines of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume that an idea is never general in its content, but only in its use and application.⁹ If there is no determinate figure that we are entertaining, Cavendish contends that we are not thinking anything at all.

She accordingly disagrees with Descartes and many of her other contemporaries on the question of which ideas are the most perspicuous. For Descartes, the clearest sort of idea is the non-imagistic idea that has no sensory content whatsoever.¹⁰ In his famous Second Meditation wax analogy, he argues that our clearest and also most accurate idea of body is not an imagistic picture: an image cannot capture the multitude of sizes and shapes into which a body can be manipulated, and so an accurate idea of body must be something else. He writes,

But what is meant here by “flexible” and “changeable”? Is it what I picture in my imagination: that this piece of wax is capable of changing from a round shape to a square shape, or from a square shape to a triangular shape? Not at all; for I can grasp that the wax is capable of countless changes of this kind, yet I am unable to run through this immeasurable number of changes in my imagination… I would not be making a correct judgement about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination. I must therefore admit that the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.¹¹

Descartes holds that there are instances in which we are entertaining an idea, but have no image before our mind. For example, we might think alternately of God, finite mind, and then the extension of a body; we have very different ideas in the three cases, Descartes thinks, even though the imagistic content (none) is the same across the board.¹² We might have started our thought process by entertaining an image: Descartes himself arrives at a clear idea of mind by way of subtracting the imagistic and sensory components of his pre-reflective idea of self, and he arrives at a clear idea of body by subtracting the sensory elements of his pre-reflective idea of a piece of wax.¹³ Cavendish sides with Descartes’ opponent Gassendi, however, that the more that we strip our ideas of sensory content, the less we are thinking anything at all. In the fifth set of objections to Descartes’ Meditations, Gassendi writes,

Note, moreover, that the loss of distinctness and the onset of confusedness is gradual. You will perceive – imagine or understand – a quadrilateral more confusedly than a triangle but more distinctly than a pentagon; and you will perceive the pentagon more confusedly than a quadrilateral and more distinctly than a hexagon; and so on, until you reach the point where you have nothing you can explicitly visualize. And because you can no longer grasp the figure explicitly, you do not bother to make a supreme mental effort. …Hence if you want to say that you are simultaneously “imagining and understanding” a figure when you are aware of it distinctly and with some discernible effort, whereas you are understanding it when you see it only confusedly and with little or no effort, then I am prepared to allow this usage.¹⁴

Descartes thinks that we can easily tell apart non-imagistic ideas of mind, body, and God. Cavendish and Gassendi are worried that we would have no basis on which to differentiate such ideas and that in fact they are not ideas of anything at all.

Cavendish’s doctrine of imagistic ideas faces a number of potential problems. One is that a pictorial image is often neither sufficient nor necessary to capture the most central details of an object. For example, we could imagine a case in which a person is looking at a photograph, but they are puzzled, and their first question is – of what is that a picture? The person might entertain an imagistic idea and ask the very same question. To fill in the example, suppose that the person has never encountered a camera, but they see a camera and then later entertain a mental image of it. If we assume that the person has absolutely no sense of what a camera is used to do, it is a stretch to say their idea is of a camera. In a perhaps more extreme case, we might consider an explorer who finds an ancient relic in the desert, where the rituals for which the relic was employed have long been defunct, and where the associated cultural memory has become extinct as well. The explorer pictures the object, but does not have an idea of the object that it is (or was).

We might vary the example still further and raise the objection against Cavendish that there are cases in which we have an idea of an entity even if we have lost the ability to remember what the entity looks like, or if we have difficulty in thinking in terms of pictures at all. We consider for example a person who knows the word “camera,” and is able to think it, even though it in no way depicts a camera. We suppose that the person stumbles upon a camera at her friend’s house, and on the basis of her past experience uses it with extreme proficiency. It would seem that such a person does have an idea of a camera, even if she never entertains a picture of one. Cavendish’s larger system does have the resources to respond to this objection, though she does not develop the response herself – presumably because it amounts to a retreat from the view that ideas are imagistic pictures. The response is that there are non-pictorial elements of ideas and that these are to be understood in terms of embodied skills and know-how. As we will see in chapter two, Cavendish defends the view that generally speaking bodies are sophisticated and intelligent: they possess what is often identified today as embodied intentionality or embodied intelligence.¹⁵ Given the centrality of this view in her philosophical system, it is surprising that she does not develop her doctrine of ideas in line with the view and argue that for all we know there are cases in which we have no explicit image of an object but still have an idea by which we can manipulate the object skillfully and with direction.¹⁶ If so, an idea might sometimes include a picture, but not necessarily.

Another potential p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A couple of prefatory notes
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Imagistic Ideas, fallibilism, and the limits of cognition
• 2. Thinking Matter
• 3. Ideas of God and other immaterials
• 4. The eternal plenum
• 5. Ubiquitous knowledge
• 6. Free will and agency
• 7. Stoical fancies
• 8. A note to the monarch
• References
• Index