I love philosophy. At least, I think I do. I tell myself that I do. I love ideas—those ethereal things that seem like they should be fragile as a bubble, but endure for centuries in our bodies and brains. I love to trace the changing shapes of ideas. I love to see different writers struggle to articulate the most compelling shape of an idea. I find it sort of unreal that we have these things—ideas!—and that we can squawk at each other, or scribble things down, and suddenly we have a roughly shared understanding of this idea. It feels sort of like magic, to me. And I’ve always loved philosophy because it’s the philosophers who seem to take ideas more seriously than anyone else. Nothing feels more like a workshop for ideas, for shaping and crafting worlds of thought, than philosophy.
But I also have to say that I’ve never actually been part of a social space that’s as misogynistic as philosophy. I know, I know, it’s a huge generalization and accusation to make. But I’ll risk a brief loss of nuance. In my own experience, conversations about philosophy have often been the most male (and the whitest) academic conversations I’ve been a part of. My reading of philosophy—my immersion in philosophical texts—often drives a kind of amnesia about the particularities of my gendered experience of things. The history of philosophy often looks to me like an endless iconography of (white, European) male figureheads. And I’ve been so endlessly disappointed to see the work of women philosophers that’s resurfaced in recent decades still feel so studiously ignored. All of this makes me feel like I hate philosophy.
I’ve been getting lost in early modern ideas, over the past couple of weeks. With my students, I’ve been talking about Spinoza’s ethics. And on my own time, for a research project, I’ve been thinking a lot about the early modern women philosophers Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish. So I’ve found myself thinking about how old, and durable, the misogyny of philosophy is. I’ve also been noticing the way that certain thinkers (maybe especially women) have been defined less by what they say and more by what they don’t say, won’t say, or what they protect themselves from. And I’ve been thinking about how true this is for so many of us today: how we’re shaped (publicly) as much by what we hide as what we actually say. It’s as if our inner underworlds insist upon make themselves apparent.
What We Can be Bold About
Spinoza is one of those early modern philosophers who many of my colleagues (women, but especially men) really adore. Part of it is the fact that he’s been written about, approvingly, by contemporary thinkers who’ve wielded a degree of influence in recent decades (like Deleuze). But part of it is that there’s something that still—in the year 2024—feels kind of radical and surprising about Spinoza’s thought. For my students, his “pantheism”—his argument for the equivalence of Nature and God—sounds radical and bold. But this past week, as we talked about his ethics in a new course I’m teaching, I was surprised by how quickly our conversation about his ethics (which challenged my students’ pretty universal assumption that we have free will, and should take responsibility for our actions) led to conversations about things like prison abolition.
If (as Spinoza has it) we have no free will, if our actions couldn’t have been other than what they were, this challenges the way that many of us make judgements and issue blame. All of this makes Spinoza feel fresh, and relevant. I understand why it is that people find themselves adoring him. He was willing to be bold, and radical, about a lot of things. People today can see themselves, as they’d like to be, in him.
This feels less true about Spinoza’s contemporaries: the 17th century philosophers Anne Conway and Margaret Cavendish.
It’s not that there aren’t radical elements in their thought. Conway and Cavendish illuminate links and bonds between humans and the more than human world in a way that was radical for their time. Neither of them were willing to place humans on a pedestal. They believed it was important to articulate our bonds with nature. Cavendish believed that humans have a bias that leads us to believe we are superior to other animals, and that this bias should be challenged. Conway even thought about us, humans, as collections of creatures in a way that clearly resonates with so many contemporary views that have emerged to question the nature of what we think of as a self—we are assemblages, we are multiplicities, we are our microbiome.
Of course, what they have to say is really nothing new. In countless indigenous cosmologies, and in ancient texts, it’s perfectly commonplace to see human lives placed into resonant, mutually dependent, relations with other animals, with plants, with rocks. But both Conway and Cavendish, in different ways, challenged (male) philosophical views of their own time that placed humans (“men”) at the pinnacle of all creation.
Unlike Spinoza, however, these women aren’t particularly adored today. I do know a number of people who’ve written about them approvingly (like Carol Wayne White). But these women don’t really have a cult of adoration. And I have to say that while I appreciate much about their work, I’m not an adoring reader or fan, either. There are some aspects of their philosophy that I really hate. Cavendish, for one, really internalized the misogyny of her time. She thought that women’s brains were soft, that they were (for the most part) truly incapable of real intellectual work. It enrages me, to know that she made claims like this. I’m offended by it, probably more than I would be if I read the same lines in Spinoza’s work.
Conway and Cavendish also had quite boring takes on theology. Both were staunch defenders of what I find to be theologically uninteresting and problematic ideas (ideas that I’ve spent my entire career questioning and critiquing). For instance, both maintained that divinity is an omnipotent, sovereign force of power. Cavendish’s metaphysic was bold enough to make nature into an infinite female figure. But however much power there was in nature for her, God always had more. Spinoza had bold and radical things to say about God. Conway and Cavendish didn’t. It makes them less interesting, today. Maybe we see ourselves as we don’t want to be (boring, conciliatory) in them.
I’ve always seen the internalized misogyny of early modern women philosophers and their theological conservatism (the fear of directing any radical critiques at the shape of God) as separate things. But what if they are actually entangled, and mutually reinforcing? What if one is the cause of the other? What if Conway and Cavendish’s work was indelibly shaped by the things they tried to hide, and to protect themselves from?
One of the things that’s true of Cavendish is that she worked very hard to separate theology from philosophy. You might think that this was because she (like many other early modern thinkers) wanted to explore nature in a space that was free of theological orthodoxy. She just wanted to be free, to be a scientist. But I’ve been reading an article that argues that this was actually her way of protecting herself against charges of religious heterodoxy.
Stephen Clucas, looking at Cavendish’s critique of the physician and alchemist (and intimate companion/housemate of Anne Conway) Francis Mercury van Helmont, argues that Cavendish attacked his ideas as a way to perform her own orthodox bonafides. Clucas argues that Cavendish’s materialist philosophy was “far from theological orthodoxy” and actually had a lot of overlap with van Helmont’s ideas. But she criticized him publicly for his “disregard of the Christian understanding of the Creation.” By acting as though van Helmont had scandalized her, she essentially used him as a foil against which she could “assert her own unswerving orthodoxy on religious matters.”
Cavendish believed she had a place at the table in conversations about philosophy. Even still, she was ridiculed by her (male and female) contemporaries. This was a time when women were actively excluded from professional societies, and advanced forms of education were essentially inaccessible. It was enough for Cavendish to push for a place at the natural philosophers table. She wasn’t going to risk religious critique as well. She protected herself from critiques she didn’t think she could weather. These acts of self-protection were written into her work, they show up in the shape of her ideas.
What did she really (more privately) think about God? Maybe her most intimate intuitions were exactly what she wrote down, for the public. Or maybe they were completely different, and far more radical. We can’t know. But we can know that she was protecting herself, and that her public ideas were part of this self-protective performance.
Protecting Ourselves From Public Attack
Does this make a figure like Cavendish more, or less, sympathetic? I’m not sure. But I suppose I can’t really blame her, as I’ve probably crafted my own public identity and public words though many acts of self-protection (acts of hiding) as well.
Becoming a public figure, and speaking to the reading/thinking public, was a possibility for Cavendish and Conway because of the networks they were part of. They were noblewomen. They didn’t have access to institutional education. But they could plug themselves into informal networks of men, where they could gain some degree of credibility as thinkers. Once they went public, however, there were risks to navigate. They were subject to a much more savage form of critique than the men in their network. The public was more dangerous, for women.
It would be nice if “the public” (the possibility of being public) were less dangerous for us than it was for them, wouldn’t it?
Today, the possibility of being public, of having our voices and words become public and potentially distributed widely, has been “democratized.” Any of us can do it. That kind of access fed utopian dreams, in the early days of the Internet. But those dreams have faded, crashed, and burned. In some ways, the risks and dangers of the public sphere seems more acute for everyone now. Yes, clearly, it’s more dangerous for some people than others. Some people are more vulnerable than others. But our public spaces don’t feel especially safe for anyone.
Instead of being liberated from the overwhelming sense of risk and danger that people like Conway and Cavendish must have felt, we all get to feel it to some degree or another. We all get to feel the sense of danger, the imminent sense of threat, that oozes around in our public spaces today. We all get to feel the pressure to hide, in some way, from the public: to keep our data away from advertisers, to avoid being hacked, to protect ourselves against the never-ending feed of horrific news, to shield ourselves against going viral for some terrible unintended reason. The sense of a hostile threat that might leave us penniless or pitiful has been democratized.
And yet nothing feels more necessary right now than a great big, shared space where more of us could find some form of real understanding. As we head anxiously into a landmark election year, as we watch the American government sanction and perform horrific acts of violence on the world stage, real understanding and communal care seems so much more crucial than self-protection. But the fragile, ethereal, digital public that’s been carved out for some form of social and political coexistence feels half-dead (at best) and terrifying (at worst).
It’s understandable, to want to hide (or to need to hide). But I find myself more grateful than ever for the voices that are willing to rise up from the safe hiding spaces in those underworlds, to bring us some possibility of real understanding. Perhaps this has never been easier, and yet also more dangerous and difficult.
Wonderful stuff... and you triggered a consciousness-raising trauma I experienced during my first year in grad school. :^)
Nearly 45 years ago now (!) Anne Conway anchored my first exposure to the seemingly built in misogyny in the discipline. It was in a course on Descartes' Meditations and there, at the back of the text, was his correspondence with an astonishing number of the most brilliant women in Europe at the time. The correspondence was, not surprisingly, infinitely more interesting than the Meditations. I remember reading Anne Conway's critique of his work with something like awe at the clarity of her insight -- nodding my head almost off my shoulders in agreement with pretty much every word. (I still feel like this.) She pretty much cut him to pieces... very satisfying, btw. :^)
During our next class I asked what I thought would be an obvious question: "Why in the hell would Descartes persist in publishing what he did, fully aware of the flaws in his argument that Anne Conway had so easily brought to light?"
One of the worst professors I ever had looked up and said, with a slight hint of condescension, "Well, Descartes had bigger fish to fry."
I was floored. "Like what??" I asked.
The Professor turned and said, "let's just get back to the text."
And suddenly, so much became perfectly clear.... plus I learned how no professor should ever answer a student.
Thanks for this.