Today was the first meeting of the spatially discontinuous Margaret Cavendish reading group. As foretold in a recent blog post, I will be posting here, alongside the progress of the reading group, so that people who aren’t in the group itself, but want to work through Cavendish’s text, can participate.
The reading for today’s meeting was Cavendish’s “Argumental Discourse”, whose full title is:
An Argumental Discourse
Concerning some principal subjects in natural philosophy; necessary for the better understanding, not only of this, but all other philosophical works, hitherto written by the authoress.
The discourse is written as a quasi-dialogue between Cavendish’s “former thoughts” and her “latter thoughts”. In essence this portion of the text involves Cavendish subjecting her prior commitments to a critical interrogation.
The sorts of questions concerned in the discourse tend to revolve around Cavendish’s commitment to materialism, and the particular details of her materialist system. Here are some examples of the questions discussed (please do not take these formulations as canonical):
- How can there be “several degrees” of matter: animate, inanimate; sensitive, rational?
- How do the various degrees of matter relate with respect to producing/transferring motion?
- Does matter have infinite parts?
- How do the modes of matter relate to matter itself?
- How can inanimate matter be living and possess knowledge?
The section ends with Cavendish herself suggesting that she is inclined towards her “former thoughts”, though officially leaving the adjudication of the dispute up to the impartial reader.
We spent a good portion of the time trying to get clear on several different notions of parthood that seemed to be in play, as well as in trying to understand Cavendish’s commitment to complete blending of sensitive, rational, and inanimate matter.
The plan for next time is to continue discussing the Argumental Discourse, but also to push forward into the main text, with the plan to read through Part 1, Section XII on whether humans could be made to fly as birds do.
I want to get this post up as soon as possible, so people can post to it, but I may post some more of the notes that I took in the comments when I get a chance later today.
beckocopenhaver
Chloe Armstrong
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Colin Heydt
Eugene Marshall
LisaShapiro
Joshua M. Wood
Julia Jorati
juliekrwalsh
Kenny Pearce
Lewis Powell
Antonia LoLordo
Colin McLear
modsquadguest
marcy p lascano
sethbordner
Stewart Duncan
Sydney Penner
Timothy Yenter
Jessica Gordon-Roth
Kirsten Walsh
The Mod Squad 
In the following passage, Cavendish identifies animate (note to those in the Hangout: not just rational, as I think I’d said before Marcy corrected me) matter and self-motion:
“…which animate matter, was nothing else but corporeal self-motion; and if any difference could be apprehended, it was, said they, between these two degrees, to wit, the animate and inanimate parts of matter, and not between the animate part, and self-motion, which was but one thing, and could not so much as be conceived differently” (35).
This passage strikes me as important to understanding the first two bulleted questions in Lewis’s post, and may go some way towards substantiating Becko’s contention about the fundamentality of motion on Cavendish’s view.
Thanks for posting this, Lewis! I’m sorry I couldn’t fit in the chat room.
I don’t suppose you could share some of the speculations around your bulleted questions that came up in the discussion? Same goes for the discussion of mixture. What did people have to say about it? Thanks again!
Eugene, Yes! Sorry. I meant to post something longer, but then time got away from me.
For me, some of the main take-aways from the conversation were this:
Cavendish is working with a variety of notions of parthood. The main distinctions are something like this (I am going a bit from memory so I might be bungling this):
Effective vs. Constitutive:
Effective parts are something like how we ordinarily think of parthood: my arm is a part of my body. At points it sounded like this might be a subjective/conceptual notion, but there are reasons to think it is not supposed to be arbitrary or a matter of convention.
Constitutive parts are harder to make sense of, but this is the sense in which nature has inanimate parts, sensitive parts, and rational parts. It is not that you can divide up nature into parcels of each; this is where the complete blending doctrine comes in. It is rather that any part of nature is going to be a mixture of inanimate, sensitive, and rational aspects(?).
Then there are finite parts vs. single parts. Single parts seem to be defined as the classical definition of substance (its existence does not depend on anything else). For Cavendish, the only single part is the whole of nature itself (and Alison Peterman brought up Spinoza on the worm in the blood and lamented your absence from the conversation at that point). Finite parts are similar (the same as?) effective parts. I am probably mangling this. Becko had been much more careful at laying out the different notions of parthood that seemed to be in play.
As to motion, I found myself in the position where, if asked the structure of her explanation, I could parrot some relevant aspects of the account, but if you asked me what any of that meant, I was deeply confused. I don’t know that anyone was moved by, or helped by, the horse and rider analogy, though, given Cavendish’s framework, it is clear why she shouldn’t think that there is transfer of motion from the horse to the rider.
On the “how do modes relate to matter” issue, we spent some time puzzling it out. It seems like she wants body to be fundamental, but it also seems like motion is doing all this work, and she seems to suggest that motion is not in any way distinct from body, which is a puzzling position. Marcy had a really nice suggestion that we should think about the fundamental stuff(?) as “self-moving-matter” rather than as matter with the property of self-motion, or as self-motion from which matter emerges.
There was some brief discussion of a sort of causal isolation claim that Cavendish makes, where the Horse and the Rider just have correlated but non-influencing patterns of motion. This made me think of Leibniz on monads, but of course, there are lots of other major differences that could undercut Leibniz comparisons.
We didn’t get a chance to talk much about infinity vs. finitude or the charge of double-counting that comes up later.
Could I make a suggestion about the motion-matter issue? It’s tempting to think, to use Cartesian terminology, that Cavendish doesn’t believe there are any distinctions between things apart from real distinctions. (Well, also distinctions between the parts of extended things. But no modal distinctions.) This is inspired by thinking about the discussion of Descartes on motion in Philosophical Letters 1.40.
There Cavendish argues against the transfer of motion from one body to another (i.e., the literal transfer of one numerically identical mode) asking “how can motion, being no substance, but only a mode, quit one body, and pass into another?” This might seem an odd thing to say against Descartes. But it is what she asks, and she follows it by saying that “One body may either occasion, or imitate another’s motion, but can neither give nor take away what belongs to its own or another body’s substance”.
Cavendish does allow one way that there can be transfer from one body to another: “if motion does go out of one body into another, then substance goes too…”. So any transfer from one body to another will have to be transfer of part of that body, where a part is literally an extended part of the body.
A little earlier in the letter, she had said that “there can be no abstraction made of motion from body, neither really, nor in the manner of our conception”. Then picture seems to be that the only parts are spatial parts, and there is no sense at all of metaphysical parthood or thinghood, on which features are things that inhere in substances.
We seemed to agree that the Former Thoughts’ horse-and-rider example doesn’t helpfully support the view that motion doesn’t get transmitted from the horse to the rider.
But if we add the premise that “If X transmits motion to Y, then X loses some motion,” the example might make a little more sense: the Former Thoughts may have been trying to illustrate that the horse doesn’t *lose* any motion in virtue of carrying the rider. Even if this isn’t quite true either, it is more plausible than the claim that the horse isn’t transmitting motion to the rider. Same for the example of the man carrying a stick: he doesn’t (appear to) lose any motion in virtue of carrying the stick.
Alternatively, the Former Thoughts might be trying to demonstrate that the horse doesn’t lose any *matter* in virtue of carrying the rider, granting them the premise that all motion is matter.