Margaret Cavendish

Josh Landy
What would it mean to believe in radical equality?

Ray Briggs
Did Margaret Cavendish really think we’re no better than ants, trees, and rocks?

Josh Landy
And what about the equality of men and women?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s the next episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re talking about the life and thought of Margaret Cavendish.

Josh Landy
Right, so she was Duchess of Newcastle in the 17th century and a fascinating polymath. She had this radical idea that everything in the universe thinks—even amoebas, rocks, trees, dust.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that was incredibly radical for her time. Back then, most philosophers didn’t believe that matter could ever think not even the matter in my brain.

Josh Landy
Right, like Descartes, for example, who’s writing it around the same time. He said your soul is a completely different kind of thing from your body. Your body moves around in space, but it can’t think your soul thinks but it can’t move through space, because it’s not made of matter.

Ray Briggs
But Cavendish said there was just one kind of thing matter. She said, “Whatsoever is not material is no part of nature. And matter is intelligent, sensitive, even rational.”

Josh Landy
Wait a minute, you’re telling me my coffee cup is rational?

Ray Briggs
Well, it’s holding your coffee. Could you do that by yourself? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Josh Landy
Okay, right. But my mug isn’t deciding to hold the coffee. I put it in there and I can pull it out. Again. I’m the one in control here.

Ray Briggs
Ah, there’s where you’re wrong. Cavendish says the mug is deciding to stay there and hold your coffee. And it’s deciding to move to your mouth when you drink. You can’t move things they can only move themselves.

Josh Landy
So you mean the mug has to want to change? I mean, that’s a nice principle for psychotherapy and all but does it really apply to inanimate object?

Ray Briggs
Well look at you, Mr. High and Mighty Master of the Universe. You know what Cavendish says about you? She says he would fain be supreme and above all other creatures. She says we love to think we’re special. But really, we’re no better than anything else, no better than the rest of the matter in the universe.

Josh Landy
Well, there’s a part of that I really like the part where Cavendish says we’re no better than ants or bees. She says I cannot perceive more abilities in men than in the rest of natural creatures. For though he can build a stately house, yet he cannot make a honeycomb AI that is just wonderful. But again, doesn’t really apply to my coffee cup. Next thing you’ll be telling me is it has feelings.

Ray Briggs
Oh yeah, that’s right. It cries every time you leave it in the sink and don’t wash it. Maybe you should be nicer to the dishes.

Josh Landy
I think maybe I’ll start by being nicer to my fellow human beings.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, about that: Cavendish had a lot to tell her contemporaries about how to be nicer to women.

Josh Landy
Right, she saw men treating women as inferior beings capable only of doing housework and being pretty ornaments. We are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses.

Ray Briggs
It’s kind of heartbreaking. She wrote all these philosophical and scientific treatises, and the men around her just ignored them. She wrote letters about their philosophical ideas, and they didn’t write back.

Josh Landy
That’s true. But in her fiction, she got to live out a very different reality. She has this fantastic science fiction novel, The Blazing World, where the main character becomes an empress, and has smart conversations about astronomy and chemistry and even saves her adoring citizens from an attack.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, reading those novels was a great way to exercise her own freedom. I love that line in her preface: “Though I cannot be Henry the Fifth or Charles the second, yet I endeavor to be Margaret. the First.”

Josh Landy
That is so great. But Ray I’m still confused about my coffee cup.

Ray Briggs
Well, I bet our guest can help you understand. It’s Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Josh Landy
But first what do today’s novelists have to say about Margaret Cavendish? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to find out. She files this report.

Virginia Woolf
“What a vision of loneliness and riot the thought of Margaret Cavendish brings to mind!”

Holly McDede
It was in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, that writer Danielle Dutton first encountered Margaret Cavendish.

Danielle Dutton
And she describes her as being like a carnation, I think—no a cucumber, that’s it. That’s what’s so important.

Virginia Woolf
“As if some giant cucumber had spread itself all over the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”

Danielle Dutton
It was such a bizarre and honestly kind of weirdly phallic description of Cavendish.

Holly McDede
Years later, Dutton started her PhD and took a class on the poetics and historiography of the 17th century. She got really into 17th century gardens, but everything Dutton wrote kept leading her back to Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle and a prolific writer.

Danielle Dutton
Like, she was in every garden I was writing about.

Holly McDede
So Dutton spent about 10 years writing a novel about Cavendish called Margaret the First: A Novel. The book is fiction drawn from Cavendish’s real life. All the excerpts you’re going to hear are from her book, like this one.

Margaret the First
For all these fertile inner workings. Margaret was thought plain, couldn’t wear yellow was shy. Yes, seemed younger than her years. Yet Margaret longed for fame. When grown, she would adorn herself like a peacock.

Danielle Dutton
She wrote that stuff about on the one hand, desire and ambition and fame and on the other hand, feeling like they were meaningless. You know, she struggled with that desire, I think, and she was notorious in her own era.

Holly McDede
These were interesting times.

Margaret the First
The King of England was convicted of treason. Then the King of England was dead. It was Tuesday. It was 1649.

Holly McDede
While in France, Margaret met William Cavendish, scholar and the first Duke of Newcastle. The pair wed and 1645 while in exile in Paris. And while Cavendish had little formal education, she read and read and wrote and wrote—she even wrote her husband’s biography. Cavendish loved philosophy. Dutton was intrigued by her thoughts on the French philosopher Descartes.

Margaret Cavendish
“He thought the universe was like a machine the body like a clock. He once hit his wife’s poodle to a board. He believed nothing could think or feel but man. But how could he know a poodle didn’t feel? Or even a magnet? A vase? Now he was gone, and I ate my bread.”

Margaret the First
“Well, one book in the world might be considered an anomaly. Two books, it seemed sounded an alarm. The lady is a fraud! Even if the books were ridiculous, how could a woman speak the language of philosophy at all?”

Margaret Cavendish
“Defending a second book quickly led to a third, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655). In it, I argued, all matter can think a woman, a river, a bird. There is no creature or part of nature without innate sense and reason, I wrote, for observe the way a crystal spreads, or how a flower makes way for its seed. I shared each page with William often before the ink had dried. It put me at odds, he explained, with the prevailing thought of the day.”

Holly McDede
How could the world be bounded like a clock, the fictional Cavendish wonders—pulsing, contracting, attracting and generating infinite forms of knowledge? In 1666, Cavendish published The Blazing World, about a utopian kingdom in another world that could be reached through the North Pole.

Margaret the First
“The blazing world with its blazing sky and river of liquid crystal. It’s gowns of alien star stone. It’s talking bears and spiders. William has told her it’s her finest work, and even composed a poem to include.”

William Cavendish
“You conquer death in a perpetual life / and make me famous too in such a wife.”

Holly McDede
The next year, Margaret became the first woman to attend a meeting at the Royal Society of London, a feat not repeated for centuries.

Danielle Dutton
And then when she got there, she basically didn’t say anything.

Margaret the First
“She’d arrived 20 minutes late, so she sits there still, hook has finished and the room awaits her reply. But the Duchess only sits looking into the device. That hat is too much, Pepys thinks. Still, her shape is fine. At last she lifts her head. What ingenious remark will she make?

Margaret Cavendish
“Gentleman,” she says. “I am all admiration.”

Margaret the First
She rises from her chair.

Margaret Cavendish
“I am all admiration, ” she says again.

Margaret the First
She nods stiffly, as if wishing them well. She looks to Lord Bronker, who stands surprised and leads her to the door.

Holly McDede
People call her “Mad Madge,” but Danielle Dutton wrote her novel with a lot of love and respect for Cavendish.

Margaret the First
Margaret wanted the whole house to move three feet to the left. It was indescribable what she wanted. She was restless. She wanted to work. She wanted to be 30 people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds.

Holly McDede
Cavendish wanted to live in many ages and in many brains, and would likely get a kick out of being resurrected in fiction and on the radio. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that really inspiring report. Holly—what a fascinating and brilliant individual. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Margaret Cavendish.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Karen Detlefsen. She is Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Women in Early Modern European Philosophy. Karen, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Karen Detlefsen
Thanks so much. I’m so glad to be here.

Josh Landy
Karen, you’re an expert on early modern philosophy. How did you get interested in Margaret Cavendish?

Karen Detlefsen
Well, when I was a graduate student, I was tucked away in a dusty Library at the University of Toronto reading through some of Leibniz, his letters, and I came across a line it was almost a throwaway line in one of those letters in which he says that his philosophy resembles closer than any other philosophy that of the Countess of Conway. And I was just stopped in my tracks, I was amazed to see the name of a woman as a philosopher in the 17th century. But I was equally amazed that before that time, I hadn’t even asked myself where all the women were. And that got me going on a really big project of trying to see what other women were writing during the 17th century.

Ray Briggs
So Karen, one cool thing about Cavendish is that she didn’t write only philosophical treatises. She also wrote plays and poems and novels. What made those such a good way for her to engage with philosophical topics?

Karen Detlefsen
So I think that Cavendish experiments in a lot of different genres, partly just because she’s a very creative and experimental thinker, but I also think that she experiments with different genres and different methods in these genres because it allows her to interrogate philosophical questions that are for her really difficult. I’ll give you an example. But there are many, many examples. So, in one of her plays a play called Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet, she has a conversation throughout the play between the young woman, Lady Sanspareille, and her parents. And they’re grappling about a question on what it means for women to be free. And we get three really different views in these three different characters. We never get a final answer on what it is for women to be free. But we get three really different views. And I think that she uses this technique in order to demonstrate how hard it is to answer a question about women and women’s freedom at a time when women’s capacities and their ability to be free was very, very circumscribed.

Ray Briggs
So what are the options? I’m curious.

Karen Detlefsen
So Lady Sanspareille, the young woman says she doesn’t want to get married, she’s gonna get the best education, she can get better than most men. And certainly, as great an education is the best available to men. And then she’s going to use this in order to rise in the intellectual ranks and enjoy life of the mind. Her father is very much in favor of this and encourages her, whilst also cautioning her against what might be difficulties along the way, and her mother is absolutely opposed to this, she thinks that this is a recipe for disaster that lady sends her eyes is going to be thwarted along the way, and only ended up being miserable. And that for a woman, the best way to be free is to cultivate womanly activities like embroidery and such and marry well. And this is the best chance at freedom that a woman in her age could have.

Josh Landy
So that’s a great example of a case where a kind of a dialogue form a play form, is exploiting the possibilities of getting into a question that you deliberately don’t want to answer, that you can’t answer, or you kind of want to leave open. But what about not science fiction, and she wrote one of the earliest works of science fiction The blazing world. Do you have any thoughts on why she chose that genre?

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, I think and this, I think, actually can also be said of any form of fiction that she writes. I think a lot of what she’s doing in her fiction, and I see this in a lot of women writing in this period. And actually, some men too, is trying out hypotheses. As of what might be the case. So what would be the case, if you had a world in which different possibilities for human beings were made available to people? What might be the outcomes of that? It’s a very interesting social parallel to the scientific exploration of this period. The idea of setting a hypothesis and testing a hypothesis was just emerging in the scientific world. And that got picked up in the social writings as well. Let’s set a hypothesis about you know, what if we had different educational opportunities for women, what might be the case, and then playing out the possibilities in this sort of fictional world? So, I think that’s one way in which she uses fiction, including in her, you know, her science fiction or her utopian fantasies.

Josh Landy
Yeah, so kind of fiction as thought experiment.

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, absolutely.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Margaret Cavendish with Karan Detlefsen from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ray Briggs
Are there animals you won’t eat because they have feelings like us? Do you wonder whether spiders have feelings too? How about trees and rocks?

Josh Landy
Mind, matter, and Margaret Cavendish—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Arrogant Worms
Carrot juice constitutes murder, greenhouses prisons for slaves. It’s time to stop all this gardening, let’s call a spade a spade.

Josh Landy
If Margaret Cavendish is right, does that mean carrot juice is murder? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about Margaret Cavendish with Karen Detlefsen, co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of women and early modern philosophy.

Josh Landy
It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, which is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in the series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women.

Ray Briggs
Got questions about this intriguing 17th century thinker? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
So Karen, earlier Ray and I were arguing about Cavendish’s thoughts on matter. Did she really believe my coffee cup is sentient?

Karen Detlefsen
Well, I’m not sure that your coffee cup is sentient for Cavendish, or I think a lot depends on what you mean by that. It is absolutely true that Cavendish thought that all matter in the world is rational, sensitive and inanimate. And that these three aspects of matter are thoroughly blended together. Such a no piece of matter, no matter how small doesn’t have those three things in it. But what she means by rational and what she means by a sensitive is very different than what we might mean by those terms, if we’re thinking about them from a human point of view.

Ray Briggs
So what is it for my coffee cup to be rational exactly?

Karen Detlefsen
So, she has some really, really interesting metaphors that I think are quite helpful in trying to get a grip on this. And one metaphor she has is of how a building gets made. So there are the architects, and they’re the ones who sort of think through the plans get the overall sense of how things are supposed to look in the end, etc., etc., then there are the builders, they’re the ones who take the material and put the building together in accordance with the plan that the architect has come up with. And then there’s the materials out of which the building is built. The architect is like the rational matter, the builders are like the sensitive matter in the material is like the inanimate matter. And so, there’s this really functional sense of what she means by rationality. It’s the feature of the natural world, whether that be a human or a dog, or a fern, or a coffee cup, that is lawful. And that makes sense in terms of repeated patterns that accomplishes certain functions like holding coffee, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s not like the coffee cup is sitting there thinking, Hmm, I wish somebody would put more coffee in me or anything like that. It’s rather functioning as a thing that holds coffee and that doesn’t have coffee flying out into the air or seeping through the matter, et cetera, et cetera. It’s kind of her way of accounting for regularities and patterns in the world, not just the human world, but the whole world through and through.

Josh Landy
That’s super, it’s a super interesting view. One of her lines that I find really interesting is when she says “Life and knowledge is in all parts of all creatures.” So, you know, no matter how finely you slice up the matter of nature, there is knowledge there is this an anticipation of what we’re now calling panpsychism. The idea that, you know, everything in the universe has at least a little tiny bit of consciousness.

Karen Detlefsen
I think definitely she has been characterized as a panpsychist. And I think that I would be comfortable with thinking about her in that way. I don’t know that consciousness is quite the right way to think about it. So I’m not quite sure that she believes that the coffee cup is self aware, for example, even while it behaves in a way that is very pattern oriented, or in a way that is lawful. What’s really interesting about her account of rationality is that it is so expensive. I know what it feels like to be rational as a human. And I know, sort of by proxy, what it’s like for you to be rational as a human. I can kind of guess what it might be like for a chimpanzee to be rational, because they’re pretty close to us. But there comes a point in time when we just don’t understand what it feels like to be rational as something else. And that expansiveness of the nature of rationality is, for me a really, really stunning feature of her philosophy, and one that gets us to think really differently about all things in the world.

Josh Landy
But I like her arguments. You mentioned one of her arguments with which is how on earth otherwise can be explained the orderliness of the universe. And there’s another one I’d like you to say something about, if you’re willing to wear Cavendish is I shall never be able to conceive how senseless and irrational atoms can produce sense and reason. And that sounds like a pretty interesting argument to this idea. Well, look, you know, certainly we know that as human beings, we have a sense and reason. But we’re just made up of atoms. So you have to explain that. And one of the ways she wants to explain it, if I’m understanding her correctly, is by thinking of matter differently is by thinking of atoms differently, Is that about, right?

Karen Detlefsen
It is, she did start out in her life as an Atomist. That is, she thought everything in the world was made up of little bits that were units unto themselves and couldn’t be broken apart. But somewhere along the way, she realized that the world couldn’t be made up of things like that. Because those kinds of things are isolated from one another. And you can’t get regularity and patterns out of things that are isolated from one another that can’t, in some sense, communicate from one another. And so, she ended up in the camp of what we these days called a Plenist. That is, the world is just one continuous chunk of matter. And what you are as an individual is a chunk of matter that is relatively stable within yourself in the same way that the coffee cup is a bunch of matter that is relatively stable, within itself. But all stable units eventually disintegrate. When we die, our bodies disintegrate and get absorbed into other chunks of matter that themselves may become stable. So that quote that you cite, I think might be more about you can’t get patterns out of atoms, you have to have a plenum that is capable of internal communication, to be able to get patterns and lawfulness. Does that make sense?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that makes sense. Although I still have some puzzlement about how Cavendish gets patterns, even with her plenum. So I guess like the way that I understand a plenum is, it’s that there’s no empty space. There’s just like, swathes of stuff, all of which has to kind of be touching each other because empty space she thinks doesn’t make sense. How could you have nothing and have it take up space. But even with her plenum, I’m really confused about how Mater communicates with other matter to make patterns. So, like I think of like, what happens when I lift my coffee cup to my mouth is that my hand grabs the coffee cup transfers some momentum from itself to the coffee cup. And then I guess like the transfer some coffee from the coffee cup to my mouth. But I take it that’s not what Cavendish thinks is happening. What is going on for her?

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, so that gets to the point or the role, the functional role of rationality. Let’s talk about it in a way that’s more accessible to us. Say, I were to say to you, could you please raise your hand and if you were being lawfully obedient, you would go ahead and you would raise your hand. I’m not going over there and picking up your hand and making it go into the air. I’m not transferring any motion to you at cetera, et cetera. I’m giving you an idea and you are picking up that idea and you’re picking it up because you’re rational you can understand what is being asked of you. And then from within yourself from the power within yourself, what you would call the sensitive matter in you your putting your hand up in the air, something like that is happening between you and the cup. Actually, it’s really between you and the hand and then the hand and the cup, your brain is coming up with the idea of, I want my hand to reach over and pick up the cup, that rational matter in your hand, which is rational in a way that we don’t understand, because we are bigger than just our hands, but it is responding to that communication in a way it is reaching out to the cup, and then it’s picking up the cup, but it’s not that the hand is doing the picking up the cup, is receiving some kind of communicative message through its own rationality is responding and lifting up. Once again, we can understand what it’s like for our human brains to be rational, but all those other forms of rationality in that chain of, you know, that causal chain, we don’t understand. But we know that it is happening because it happens all the time. And it happens lawfully. And it happens in accordance with patterns. So that I think is where she’s coming from in the kinds of causal connections that you’ve just mentioned.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the 17th century writer and thinker, Margaret Cavendish, with Karen Detlefsen from the University of Pennsylvania. Now, Karen, I want to get back to something you were talking about earlier, chimpanzees, I happen to be a big fan of chimpanzees. And I’m really interested in Cavendish views about how human beings should relate to the nonhuman world, she has this nice line justly, there can be no complaints made against nature, nor to nature. So, whatever she means by nature in that sentence, She’s clearly a fan. And I’m just wondering, okay, if we’re all kind of made of the same stuff, and there is, you know, certainly rationality in chimpanzees and other non-human animals, maybe even in plants and trees, what does Cavendish think about the way in which we should relate to the rest of the world?

Karen Detlefsen
So I think there’s a lot that can be said about this, I’ll say a couple of things. And one of them is just to mention a poem that she wrote quite early on in her life in which she, in which she extols the virtues of vegetarianism. Since animals have rationality, and they have ways of experiencing the world being engaged with the world. And whatever way of thinking and feeling about the world is, is relevant to the kind of species that they are, we need to show respect for that and not eat those animals. Now, of course, given that this is true of everything in the world, one, I think, could make the argument that we ought not to eat plants, either we not to drink coffee, etc, etc. She did not go that far. But she did, at least in this one poem go far enough to say, We ought not to eat our fellow animals.

Ray Briggs
So she had some other stuff to say about how we should treat animals to please tell us more.

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, sure. I think one of the really other really cool things that we find in her work is how much we can learn from the natural world by observing the natural world. So, you know, you mentioned ants and bees before the awesome things that ants can do the often-awesome things that bees can do. And she has lots and lots of spiders to spiders feature into her discussion. There are lots of examples in which she says, animals in the world can do things that humans can’t get anywhere near doing. And we can learn from them in in so far as we can appreciate the things that they do. And it’s that sort of appreciation of the natural world. That also is another super interesting feature of her consideration of the what one might think is the kind of equity between humans and the rest of nature.

Ray Briggs
Right, so I wonder if you could find some eco-feminist inspiration in this. So, one criticism that I think is pretty reasonable of both Cavendish and fellow Europeans and the enlightenment and probably like my fellow Americans today, is that like they think that nature is this thing to just be exploited for humans. How critical do you think Cavendish is of that view?

Karen Detlefsen
So I think her philosophy allows her and it allows us to be very critical of that view. She’s living at a time and a place in which exploitation of the natural world really started. The first mines were being created or people were first mining the earth right around the time that she was writing. And the reason why this was not seen as an assault on the natural world is that the natural world was understood to be just a machine that could be manipulated and taken apart and broken up at cetera, et cetera, without doing any damage to anything. Her view of the natural world is starkly different than that, if everything in the natural world is alive, is rational, is sensitive in the very particular ways that they are, then violently breaking them apart, is a violation of those things as living rational, sensitive things. So this respect for nature, in and of itself is absolutely something that I think we can find in her philosophy. And we find it also in her writings sometimes as well.

Josh Landy
So it’s a really beautiful and moving view about a kind of live and let live try to have a kind of a light footprint on the world around you. But I’m wondering how it squares with her thoughts about the way in which human society should organize itself because that doesn’t seem quite as much live in that she was a monarchist, if I understand correctly. Pretty similar to Thomas Hobbes, she seems to think that the best form of human society, the best way to organize it is to have a single leader, a monarch that has pretty extensive powers. So how do those two things go together?

Karen Detlefsen
So I agree with your reading on her, I think she was monarchist, a royalist, but I have to mention that there are some folks who read her, who believe she probably in her heart of hearts was not a royalist that she was more like a Republican thinker. But what I mean by that is that nothing should be under the arbitrary power of another. And no human should be under the arbitrary power of, for example, a monarch. So, I think lots and lots of people, including philosophers find themselves in conflict about things. I think her philosophy leads more naturally to an egalitarian social structure that is in keeping with the Republican model, even though I agree with you. She was a royalist, but I think that that comes more from her own personal point of view. She was, you know, worked in the royal court, she married Cavendish and fled along with Hobbes during the interregnum because of the attack on royalism. And I think, you know, she had a personal investment in royalism, even though I think in some moments, she was conflicted about that. And it’s that conflict that is picked up often by folks who think that that she tends more towards a more egalitarian social structure.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the life and thoughts of Margaret Cavendish with Karen Detlefsen, co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of women in early modern European philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Why are some people’s views taken more seriously than others? How can we help those others be heard? What can Cavendish teach us about politics today?

Josh Landy
Cavendish and the contemporary commons—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Chvrches
“Good girls don’t die, and good girls stay alive, and good girls satisfy, but I won’t.”

Josh Landy
In a world run by men, what does it take for a good girl to be heard? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Karen Detlefsen in from the University of Pennsylvania, and we’re thinking about 17th century writer Margaret Cavendish. It’s part of our series “Wise Women,” supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Landy
So Karen, before the break, we were talking about egalitarianism versus monarchism. But what about another form of equality, the equality between men and women? What did Cavendish have to say about that?

Karen Detlefsen
So again, philosophers love to disagree on things. And you’ll get all kinds of views on this, I’ll tell you what my view is, which is that she believes that men and women are equal, certainly from the point of view of intellectual capacities, and therefore from the point of view of the sorts of lives that men and women ought to be able to pursue. And this comes from the same direction that her leveling of humans and nature comes from. We’re all made up of the same kind of stuff. There’s nothing that’s fundamentally constitutionally different in any of us. And this is true of women and men as well.

Ray Briggs
So a lot of Cavendish’s fiction imagines women as having the kind of worldly power that is denied to her and her life into women around her. What do you think that’s telling us about her views of sort of women and men and how they do and could interact?

Karen Detlefsen
That’s a great question. You know, at the very, very beginning of this segment, folks, were talking about Descartes and Descartes is really, really interesting in this question. He, of course, thought that all human beings are essentially an only a thinking soul. And many, many women of the early modern period took this to be hugely promising for women, because there’s nothing bodily about a soul. There’s nothing that gender is a soul. And so, there’s really radical equality there. Cavendish is a materialist and opens up the door to potential inequality between men and women, that is based in different bodies. So women do have different bodies than men. And that biological difference was often used as a way of explaining why women were inferior to men or use to justify the belief that women were inferior to men. And she was open to that criticism. I think she uses her fiction in order to express the view that even though there may be differences in the physical makeup of women’s and men’s bodies, if we were to have social conditions that allowed for everybody to reach their full potential, then we can imagine a world in which everybody does reach their full potential and that that full potential is in no way gendered.

Ray Briggs
So I’m a little bit curious about the relationship between this and her psychological egoism, actually. So she’s got places where she argues that everybody who does anything does it out of self-interest. And I kind of wonder whether this is a healthy self-respect. And a woman who is kind of a little bit being crushed down by her society to keep a hold of something really important in a human soul?

Karen Detlefsen
That’s a great question. And it’s a feature of Cavendish, as an individual that’s really, really interesting. And that is her desire to chase glory and fame, she really, really wants to be recognized. She wrote an enormous amount and enormous amount across great numbers of genres and great numbers of topics. I think all is a part of getting herself and her thinking out there in the world, in order to chase fame in order to be remembered. And I can imagine that that would come from a position of social disadvantage,

Josh Landy
And wanting to be heard. This is something you’ve written about this idea of what we today call testimonial injustice, the fact that some people’s voices are heard and some not. And you’ve written very persuasively that Cavendish was anticipating that conversation 400 years ago. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Karen Detlefsen
Sure. I should actually mention that. I think Cavendish was not the first to identify this, as you know, I think it goes back as far as Marie de Corneille, if not farther, and Marie de Corneille has this really, really beautiful and pithy moment in her work where she said, you know, the stupidest man can say something, and that man will be listened to before the smartest of women and is listened to. And that gets to this idea of testimonial injustice that whether or not a person’s knowledge claims are picked up and taken seriously, often depends upon features of that person, that they cannot be disengaged from features of their identity that they cannot get rid of. And Cavendish has this to that as a woman, her knowledge claims will not be taken as seriously as those of a man simply because she is a woman, and not because of the quality of the claims of knowledge. And that’s found, I think, in many different and interesting ways throughout her work.

Ray Briggs
So that de Cornelle a quote seems depressingly fresh today. I wonder how far you think we’ve come in combating testimonial injustice since the 17th century?

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, so I’ll say a couple of things. First of all, that term testimonial injustice really only entered philosophical lexicon in the late 20th century, maybe early 21st century, that it was picked up and named and theorized in the late 20th century is, I think, a really strong testament. and how dangerous it is to forget the works of philosophers from across the spectrum, had we not? Had we been able to listen to people like Cavendish in the first place and take them seriously, we would not have had to reinvent the wheel, and we might have been able to make greater progress. I do think we have made progress. Absolutely. Women are in universities these days. And this is as professors, and that was not the case in Cavendish his time. But one of the really interesting things about contemporary accounts of testimonial injustice is that it expands the categories of individuals who are not listened to well beyond European women at that expansion project, I think is really important and interesting.

Josh Landy
So that seems to be an area where Cavendish is really ahead of the curve thinking about testimonial injustice along with de Gournay. Another one I’d love to hear from you about is what we might think of as a kind of vicious circle of internalized oppression or something like that. She says that, you know, men claim that women don’t have reason. So if I understand it correctly, she’s saying basically, the danger is we might internalize that sexism and turn to basically homemaking. And as a result, that just reinforces men’s prejudice? Well, look, look at these women, all they’re doing is you know, mending and sewing and things like that. Is that right, do I have Cavendish right here?

Karen Detlefsen
Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really, really interesting phenomenon that one finds in her prefaces. So, I’m thinking about the prophecies that she writes. For texts that we recognize today as more sort of standardly philosophical treaties. And some of those treaties have four or 567 prophecies. And in those prophecies, we got a lot of really interesting framing of the social conditions in which the philosophical treaties were produced. And we get very clear examples of exactly the kind of argument that you’ve just put forward, that it’s really hard not just for men, but for women to, to be able to hear women’s voices and to learn from women and to understand that women have knowledge, because in the case of women, this internalized sense that they don’t have anything to contribute. And in the case of men, having seen that internalized belief manifests in behaviors that don’t back up the idea that women have something valuable to contribute to the knowledge space.

Josh Landy
And then it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But one other thing, there’s a line and I couldn’t quite wrap my head around, because, you know, against the background of what we’ve been talking about, she seems to recommend at one point that women be, as she says, modest, chaste, temperate, humbled patient, and pious housewife. And now is she just sort of being ironic here is she or she just kind of trying to placate a kind of patriarchal public, what’s going on in that line?

Karen Detlefsen
So I think there’s, there’s a really interesting phenomenon that shows up in Cavendish, it shows up in lots of women of this period. So part of it in testimonial injustice is the incapacity of people to take up the knowledge claims of, in this case, women, and that is the audience that many of these women were writing for. And if you’re writing to an audience that cannot hear you, then you have to find ways of speaking that will get your audience to hear you. I think oftentimes, Cavendish is using techniques that will get her heard. And to the degree that in contemporary philosophy, we think of philosophy as needing to be precise and clear and non-ambiguous. We failed to see really, really rich philosophy in the 17th century, because women couldn’t write that way, and get listened to. So I think that’s a really important lesson that we take away from Cavendish, that different people write in different ways in order to gain purchase in the intellectual world.

Ray Briggs
So Karan, we’ve heard so many great lessons from Cavendish, about testimonial injustice, about the value of irony about the value of using a verb idea of genres to explore your imagination. If there was one thing that you wanted our listeners to most take away, what would you nominate?

Karen Detlefsen
Well, so Cavendish is a complicated woman and her desire to chase fame, and glory does sit beside something that I think is really, really valuable. And that is this great humility and looking out at the world that looking at the world’s people, looking at the world’s animals at looking at everything in the world and thinking, There’s something to be learned from everything in the world. And I think that openness to learning from everything around us is a really, really beautiful and lasting lesson.

Josh Landy
Karen, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been really a really illuminating conversation.

Karen Detlefsen
Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed talking about Cavendish.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Karen Detlefsen, Professor of Philosophy and Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-editor of “The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I think I’m just gonna go and spend the afternoon reading a bunch of Cavendish’s poems.

Josh Landy
It’s a great idea. We’ll put links to those and to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And be sure to check out all the episodes in our “Wise Women” series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women. Now, a man made of matter that moves fast: it’s in Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shaoles… Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, was a shy woman, with a secret flamboyance that erupted in her writing, and her fashion choices. Self-educated, she grew up around books, with a brother John who became a founding member of the Royal Society. Another brother, Charles, was killed during the Second English Civil War. She became a maid of honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, Queen Mary, married to Charles 1, until he was beheaded in 1649. Joining the Queen in exile, she met and married widower William Cavendish, a man many years her senior, former Royalist general in the Civil War, and the first Duke of Newcastle. Though his lands had been seized, apparently he was adept at maintaining a lavish lifestyle, through the clever manipulation of creditors. In Paris via the so-called Cavendish Circle, he dined with luminaries like Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Jonson, John Dryden. Though she had always written, after a trip to England with her brother-in-law, in a frustrating attempt to gain some money from the sale of land they no longer owned, she began writing books, thirteen finally, in all, before her untimely demise at 50 – poetry, plays, philosophy, natural science all somewhat at odds with the findings of the Royal Society. She did not hold with a microscopic view of nature, for instance, which she believed was just the male gaze distorting reality with lenses. She called microscopes “deluding glasses.” She took a vitalistic view. All matter has soul, from rocks to kittens. Humans have the most soul, though, having the ability to throw rocks, thus animating them, making us the commanders, the royalty, you might say, of the material world. Beheaded kings and exile seem to reinforce if not inspire her view that the world is made of motion and will. Boldly, she wrote under her own name and sent all her writings to the Royal Society and ilk, hoping to be read and taken seriously. She was not. Her aim, she wrote to a friend, was fame. To regain the status of a royal, and to give status to herself as a woman in this male world. To that end, she became well known in England not only for her odd books, but her singular fashion sense, which incorporated, it seems, mild androgyny in its presentation. She would write letters to any thinker who might listen, asking politely for attention, and appear in public in garb of her own devising, all designed to grab and hold attention. She was called a genius in some quarters and considered an eccentric in others. She finally did attain an audience with the Royal Society, an occasion that caused quite a stir. She was followed to the hallowed meeting by crowd of boys. Samuel Pepys, the observant diarist, was also there. Previously he had written about her “The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she do is romantic.” Seeing her in the flesh, however, disappointed him. She “had been a good comely woman, but her dress so antic, and her deportment so ordinary, I do not like her at all.” Ouch! Further, “not did I hear her say anything that was worth saying.” Certainly, in the centuries since, she has found her measure of fame, a niche you might say, in this world. Her most famous work is her proto-science fiction novel, The Blazing World, another world that you can find at the North Pole if you look for it. The heroine is made empress of this Blazing World, and Margaret Cavendish puts herself in the book, not as empress, but the empresses’ friend. It’s kind of sweet really. I was reminded of the self-published books form the 20th Century with saucers, and space beings, some of which led to strip mall churches in Palm Springs, with guru gals in flowing robes who channel Venusian spirits, not to mention Nostradamus and Robin Williams. Except she was more allegorical and metaphorical that literal or metaphysical. She believed that all motion was governed by wit, the swiftest motion of the brain. If that’s not true, maybe it should be. She brings to mind Madame Blavatsky, Isadora Duncan, Ayn Rand, Phyllis Shlafly, Judith Butler, and yes, even Taylor Swift. Who seems both shy and flamboyant to me, and is certainly queen of her blazing world. If Margaret Cavendish had picked up a guitar. Wow. She could have been the 17 Century Joni Mitchell. We might have had the birth of rock and roll right there, echoing in the abandoned castle halls, with broken hearted boys following their shiny idols down the muddy broken streets. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Support for this episode and all the episodes in our “Wise Women” series comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed—

Josh Landy
…or mis-expressed!

Ray Briggs
—on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Taylor Swift
Look what you just made me do!