Sarah Hutton
Cambridge University Press, 2004
271 pp. ISBN 0 521 83547 x
(Originally published in Philosophy in Review.)
Henry More no doubt was looking to make a compliment when he told his pupil Anne Conway, ‘you write like a man’. A compliment it was, at least to the extent that it was no easy thing for a woman to penetrate into the intellectual elite of the 17th century, to absorb all its concerns and master its style, and finally to contribute lastingly to its legacy. Sarah Hutton’s excellent new study of Conway’s life and thought does a fine job of showing how she managed to do just this, both by lucidly explaining what Conway’s theoretical contributions were, as well as how these were forged in the course of her intriguing life.
Conway could of course not receive a proper education, barred as she was from university study. Her half-brother John Finch had been a student of the great Cambridge Platonist Henry More, and it was through this connection that Conway had the good fortune to begin a correspondence with More that would in time make her an unofficial member of the Cambridge circle. Conway shares with More a distaste for the Cartesian disjunction between ensouledness and materiality. Her preferred alternative is a vitalistic monism, according to which the entire material world is coursing with a vital principle, and indeed according to which materiality is not something radically different from spirituality, but rather is simply a mode of substances that are at bottom incorporeal. For her, matter is congealed or sluggish spirit; it constitutes a state of substance in the same way that ice amounts to a state of water. Substances can move up and down along the continuum of degrees of spirituality, and rarefaction is more than just a chemical analogy for moral improvement. To become better is literally to move from a more sluggish and bodily state to a rarer or more spiritual one.
Conway would more appropriately be described as a ‘trialist’ than a monist, for she believes that there are in fact three kinds of substance: God, which is unchanging; Christ, which can change, but only for the better; and finally all the created substances, which can change either for the better or the worse. This and other aspects of Conway’s metaphysics, particularly as spelled out in her one great treatise, the posthumously published Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy of 1690, are rooted in traditions and figures that by contemporary philosophy’s standards are both obscure and unphilosophical. Hutton ably brings these sources to light and explains their significance for Conway. Her chapter on Conway’s engagement with Kabbalist sources, in particular, is among her richest.
Many of Conway’s friends, and notably among them Francis Mercury van Helmont and Henry More himself, were busy promoting a Christianized variety of Jewish mysticism that incorporated elements of the Pythagorean-Platonic esoteric tradition and that emphasized the impending end of the world with the coming of the Messiah, as well as the hidden connections between all true expressions of philosophical wisdom throughout history. As Hutton shows us, Conway was no dogmatist; for her, Kabbalah was but one source of the philosophia perennis, and she had no trouble departing from it when it proved to be at odds ‘with sound reason and the order of things’ (168). Her tripartite hierarchy of being, in particular, would seem to be more firmly rooted in the Platonized theology of Church Fathers such as Origen, while the doctrine of immaterial substance seems traceable back to Plotinus’s concept of incorporeal matter. One of the convenient things about belief in a philosophia perennis is that sundry elements can be thrown together from different traditions, and one can insist that they all, to use today’s banal expression, ‘say the same thing’. In the 17th century, this conviction was far from banal, for it represented an effort on the part of some brilliant thinkers, Conway and, more signficantly, Leibniz among them, to absorb learning from whatsoever source it may come, rather than resting content with inherited commonplaces.
Conway is one of those sympathetic figures in history who seem to have been driven in their intellectual and spiritual endeavors by the motor of suffering. For her, the fuel came in the form of debilitating headaches. As her husband Lord Conway wrote in moving desperation, ‘her sighs, and grones come so deep from her, that I am terrifyed to come neere her’ (31). Some of the most captivating sections of Hutton’s book concern the 17th-century cultural practices surrounding the health of the body, as well as the beliefs underlying these practices, of which we gain a picture in Conway’s relations with the great medical men of her day, men she hoped in vain might be able to relieve her. Particularly memorable is the story of Conway’s submission to the treatment offered by one Valentine Greatrakes, a colorfully suspicious Irish healer, whose hand-laying technique was backed up by a theory of spirituous effluence that he may or may not have believed himself. Conway also consented to prescriptions from the unlicensed Boyle’s pharmocopeia, and as we learn from Thomas Willis ‘she tried Baths, and Spaw-waters almost every kind and nature, she admitted of frequent Bloodletting, and also once the opining of an Artery’ (120). None of this did any good, of course, but Hutton sharply observes that ‘[t]he failure in efficacy of their treatments did not mean there was a failure in theory’ (130). Conway was at the center of an important period of experimental medical philosophy; indeed, she was both a test subject and a theorist at once, and the fact that she was never cured does not diminish the importance of the figures she interacted with for our understanding of the history of medicine.
Hutton contends that Conway’s ‘personal experience of unrelievable pain certainly impinged directly on her philosophy’ (116). Conway herself asks, ‘Why does the spirit or soul suffer so with bodily pain?’ For her, the answer seems to require a rejection of Cartesian dualism, and Hutton does not doubt the connection for Conway between the headaches and the untenability of a radical split between soul and body. Here, even in light of Conway’s own comments, the effort to tie together life events with theoretical convictions grows dangerously speculative. Descartes himself, after all, was hardly the image of health for periods of his life. But in his case the bodily soucis only seem to have strengthened the conviction that his true self must lie elsewhere than in that unstable vessel. For every thinker who takes an affliction straddling the boundary between the psychic and the physical --headaches, epilepsy, panic attacks, etc.-- as evidence that there is in fact no such boundary, there is another who takes the same maladies as evidence for the view that embodiment itself is a temporary affliction suffered by a soul ‘intimately bound up with’ but not belonging to, let alone identical with, its host. Conway may have interpreted her headaches as evidence for her favored metaphysics, but the headaches do not really explain why she preferred the one theory rather than its opposite.
Hutton is perhaps a bit too concerned to excuse Conway for having been interested in dead-end research programs. But this is less a flaw in her book than a regrettably necessary preemptive response to those critics who still consider ‘greatness’ a criterion for warranting a study of this depth. Certainly, the Cartesian view that the insufficiencies of mechanism could be worked out over time and that we do not need to take hasty recourse to vital principles in nature, let alone to unscientific mystical speculation, would prove to be the more lasting legacy of the 17th century, compared with, e.g., Platonism and Kabbalism. But the prognosis for what will turn out to be a cul-de-sac is not nearly so clear in the present as it is in hindsight, and the only way to thoroughly understand someone else’s present is to bear this in mind.
Anne Conway was not a great philosopher, in the sense often demanded. But she was a sharp and perceptive thinker, and she occupies a node in the intellectual culture of the 17th century that, if given due attention, will reveal to us quite a bit about what was at stake in the great debates of the time and what the range of possible positions was. Hutton shows this succinctly and well. In sum, her book constitutes in itself an argument for the importance of the so-called minor figures in early modern philosophy for anyone wishing to come to a profound understanding of the period.
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