Abstract
The present paper investigates Ralph Cudworth’s reception of Plotinus against the background of Cudworth’s anti-mechanist polemic. Cudworth’s account of plastic nature is clearly indebted to Plotinus (see, in particular, Plotinus’ treatise III.8 On Nature and Contemplation and the One). Both Plotinus and Cudworth argue that motion, life and thought cannot be traced back to matter and require an incorporeal principle. The differences, however, are very important too. Unlike what happens in Cudworth, the rejection of atomism and mechanism plays no central role in Plotinus (the polemic against mechanism is obviously linked to the typical debates on physics in Cudworth’s times); conversely, Plotinus’ gradualist metaphysics and emanative causation are foreign to Cudworth, who regards these views as jeopardising the transcendence of God and the Christian view of creation. That said, Cudworth’s reading of Plotinus against the background of Descartes’ dualism of thought and extension is sensitive to some key aspects of Plotinus’ metaphysics such as the account of incorporeal and intelligible causes. In this respect, Cudworth’s reading is characteristically different from Ficino’s interpretation of Plotinus and his later reception in authors such as Tommaso Campanella.
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Notes
- 1.
Lotti 2006, 2007 offer an extensive and outstanding discussion of the issues tackled in this article, which is substantially indebted to Lotti’s work. On the reception of Plotinus among Cambridge Platonists, see also Petit 1997; Leech 2019; Hedley 2019; Aubry 2020 (on self and consciousness in Plotinus and Cudworth). For qualifications on Cudworth’s label as a Platonist, see Levitin 2015, 177–178, 358–359, 423–424 et alibi. Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (Cudworth 1678) is available online: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A35345.0001.001
The capitalisation, italics and spelling in quotations follow Cudworth’s usage. A new edition is Cudworth 2020 (non uidi).
- 2.
- 3.
Further references in Levitin 2015, 355–368 and Lotti 2007, 388. On Atomism among the Cambridge Platonists, see Mihai 2020. According to Cudworth there are two forms of Atomistic philosophy: the most ancient and genuine Atomism is theistic and religious (this is the Atomism of Moses and Pythagoras revived by Descartes); the adulterated Atomism is atheistic and materialistic and was held by Leucippus and Democritus in Antiquity, by Hobbes and Gassendi in modern times (Mihai 2020, 258–259).
- 4.
As Mihai 2020, 267 remarks, ‘[…] Cudworth uses the same arguments of the atheists against a deity, that nothing can come from nothing, against the atheists themselves, by showing that they themselves hold that there must be something from eternity, and that is matter. But matter cannot create anything, and therefore they themselves bring all things out of the nothingness of matter.’
- 5.
The literature on Cudworth’s plastic nature is extensive. Lotti 2004 offers a comprehensive discussion; also, see Stanciu 2012. As scholars have often remarked, Cudworth’s dualism of matter and plastic nature is different from Descartes’ dualism of thought and extension. Plastic nature cannot be traced back to mechanism but is bereft of conscious thinking (see below). Its agency on passive and extended matter is spiritual and non-mechanical. So Cudworth’s incorporeal substance is connected to (both conscious and unconscious) life and not merely to Cogitatio (see Lotti 2007, 403). Awareness is not essential to life. This type of dualism (spiritual life vs extended matter) is typical of Cambridge Platonists and is close to Plotinus’ characteristic dualism of soul (an intelligible substance provided with life and motion) and body (which as such is inert and bereft of life). Here I will not focus on the differences between More’s and Cudworth’s theories. Suffice it to say that More’s characteristic view that there is a kind of extension proper to spiritual substances (an idea connected to More’s rejection of ‘holenmerism’, i.e. the view ‘that spirit is present to body as a whole in the whole and as a whole in each of the parts of said body’: Leech 2019, 129) is far removed from Plotinus’ thought and finds no echo in Cudworth which is, in this respect, closer to Plotinus (see Leech 2019, 138).
- 6.
- 7.
See Lotti 2006, 472n12.
- 8.
- 9.
I quote Hardie and Gaye’s translation of Aristotle’s Physics in Aristotle 1984.
- 10.
As Petit 1997, 101, remarks: ‘La theologie cudworthienne […] comportant lidee de puissance absolue, parait difficilement compatible, quant au fond, avec la procession plotinienne.’
- 11.
This paragraph is based on Chiaradonna 2014.
- 12.
On this, see Wilberding 2008.
- 13.
- 14.
On this passage, see Levitin 2015, 423: ‘Cudworth made a concerted effort to convert Aristotle into a Plato-style animist’.
- 15.
See Caston 1997. On Cudworth’s attitude to Aristotle, see Stanciu 2012, 719; on Cudworth’s attitude to Strato, see Levitin 2015, 418–420 (Cudworth regards Strato as the chief representative of ‘Hylozoic atheism’ which ‘makes all Body, as such, and therefore every smallest Atom of it, to have Life Essentially be∣longing to it (Natural Perception, and Appetite) though without any Animal Sense or Reflexive Knowledge’: Cudworth 1678, I, 105).
- 16.
On Plotinus’ ‘double activity’, I rely on the excellent discussion in Emilsson 2007.
- 17.
See Porphyry apud Simplicius, in Phys. 10.25–11.3. On the difference between Plotinus and Cudworth, I would again refer to Petit’s judicious remarks: ‘Ce qui était chez Plotin le plus bas degré de la contemplation devient pour Cudworth une forme inférieure d’action providentielle, l’objet d’un vouloir divin qui laisse néanmoins subsister la spontanéité de la nature’ (Petit 1997, 103).
- 18.
For extensive discussion, see Levitin 2015.
- 19.
More details can be found in Lotti 2007.
- 20.
Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis lucentemque globum lunae Titaniaque astra spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet. Inde hominum pecudumque genus uitaeque uolantum.
Text and translation in Virgil 2013, 50–51. Lotti 2019 investigates the reception of these verses in Cudworth and other Early Modern British philosophers.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
See Macrobius, In Somn. Scip. I.14.14 and the classical discussion in Courcelle 1955.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
See Plotinus 2005, 87.
- 27.
Campanella 1992, 525.
- 28.
On this I completely agree with Lotti 2007, 391. Lotti 2007, 396 also emphasises the difference between Ficino’s world soul and Cudworth’s plastic nature (according to Cudworth there is no rational world soul in between God and nature; so according to Ficino nature is subordinate to the world soul; according to Cudworth nature is subordinate to God).
- 29.
See Emilsson 1988, 147.
- 30.
See Lotti 2006, 470.
- 31.
On this, see Tornau 2016.
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Chiaradonna, R. (2022). ‘The Operation of Nature Is Different from Mechanism’: Cudworth’s Account of Plastic Nature and Its Plotinian Background. In: Wolfe, C.T., Pecere, P., Clericuzio, A. (eds) Mechanism, Life and Mind in Modern Natural Philosophy. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 240. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07036-5_7
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