Abstract
Carol Wayne White explains in her book that Lady Anne Conway was better known for her lifelong headaches than for her profound philosophical thinking (White in The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–1979): Reservations from a Mystical Naturalism, State University of New York Press, 2008, p. 4). By reading not only White’s, but also Sarah Hutton’s book, it is possible to say that Anne’s strong headaches gave her a path to texts and practices that found place in her own philosophy. There are phrases repeated by her friends and family like this one: “though her Pains encreas’d, yet her Understanding diminish’d not” (Van Helmont in Hutton Anne Conway: A Women Philosopher, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 203). But Anne does not think the relationship between mind and body in that way. She writes about the union between spirit and body in human beings and animals, how body and spirit are essentially the same, the strong bond they have. In this paper I intend to analyse this relationship between spirit and body, and the concept of pain related to them, in Anne Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, in order to accept or dismiss the kind of phrases that her friends and family said concerning her condition. I will relate her philosophy to John Scottus Eriugena’s (ca. 810–ca. 870) thought through a comparison of their understanding of the concept of pain in their metaphysics.
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Notes
- 1.
The Cambridge Platonists are hardly known in Argentina, and the interest in women philosophers is growing slowly. I deeply thanks Dr. Silvia Manzo and Dr. Daniel Garber for their encouragement, and Dr. Sarah Hutton for her remarkable comments on the first presentation of this paper in 2019 First Conference on Women Philosophers organized by Katarina Peixoto and Pedro Pricladnitzky in Rio de Janeiro.
- 2.
Mercer (2019, 53) affirms that there are also philosophical reasons, alongside with the biographical ones, that explain her interest in suffering and pain.
- 3.
I did not incorporate her philosophical letters, which is something to study and add in further researches.
- 4.
- 5.
On the difference between Anne Conway’s and Spinoza’s thoughts see Pugliese (2019).
- 6.
Conway 1996 VII, 1: Moreover, because spirit is the more excellent of the two in the true and natural order of things, the more spiritual a certain creature becomes (that is, if it does not degenerate in other ways), the closer it comes to God, who, as we all know, is the highest spirit.
- 7.
Alexander (2018, 4) affirms: “This is a radical alternative to the more common late seventeenth-century idea that pain is a consequence of the fall, not an important part of the soul’s transformations as it reaches the divine.” In this sense, fall is the occasion for body, but not for pain, as Lascano (2013, 328–9) explains.
- 8.
Lascano (2013, 332): “the body plays an important role in our interaction with the rest of creation by influencing our inner natures through the assimilation of outside spirits and by reflecting our inner natures in the transformation process”.
- 9.
On individuation and the binding of love see Detlefsen (2018).
- 10.
Ralph Cudworth also affirms the existence of a spiritual body always joined to the soul, even after death. In his The True Intellectual System he affirms: “But on the contrary, if it be natural to souls, to enliven and to enform some body or other (though not always a terrestrial one), as our inward sense inclines us to think, then can it not seem probable, that they should by a kind of violence, be kept so long in an un-natural state of nakedness and separation from all body; some of them even from Adam to the day of judgment” (Cudworth 1678, 800). In Conway's Principles we can find as well: “for every created spirit has some body, whether it is terrestrial, aerial, or etherial” (Conway, 1996: V, §6).
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Strok, N. (2022). Spirit, Body, and Pain in Anne Conway. In: Lopes, C., Ribeiro Peixoto, K., Pricladnitzky, P. (eds) Latin American Perspectives on Women Philosophers in Modern History. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00288-5_7
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