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Freedom, Society, and the Individual in Early Modern Women's Thought University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2019 Freedom, Society, And The ndiI vidual In Early Modern Women's Thought Patrick Leon Ward Ball University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Ball, Patrick Leon Ward, "Freedom, Society, And The ndI ividual In Early Modern Women's Thought" (2019). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 3248. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3248 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3248 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Freedom, Society, And The ndiI vidual In Early Modern Women's Thought Abstract This dissertation describes and analyses several different approaches to the relation between individuals and wider social groupings in the work of Margaret Cavendish, Sophie de Grouchy, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other women of the early modern period in Europe. From these disparate sources—Cavendish’s vitalist metaphysics, Suchon’s practical ethics, Wollstonecraft’s polemical aesthetics—a unifying political concern can be drawn: one of how individuals relate to their societies, and how this relation can be distorted or outright controlled by existing power relations. Each chapter approaches this subject from a different side: the tension of individual freedom and universal order in Cavendish’s metaphysics; the problem of autonomy for socially-constituted subjects in Suchon’s ethics and, by contrast, in the ethics of contemporary relational autonomy theory; the revolutionary solutions to the gendered traps of aesthetic ideology presented by Mary Wollstonecraft; and the practical, activist route to the achievement of freedom in the actions of the radical republican women of the French Revolution. In analysing the political bases of these questions I aim to provide new interpretations of these works of the early modern era, many of which have been unjustly neglected until very recently. But I also motivate changes in the methodology of early modern philosophy that are ongoing and that, I hope, can be pushed yet further. By focusing on the political in early modern women philosopher’s work, and by reading that work politically, I argue, we can effect a wider break with older methodologies and open up many new avenues of inquiry. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Philosophy First Advisor Karen Detlefsen Keywords early modern, feminism, freedom, politics Subject Categories Philosophy This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/3248 FREEDOM, SOCIETY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S THOUGHT Patrick Ball A DISSERTATION in Philosophy Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Supervisor of Dissertation ______________ Karen Detlefsen Professor of Philosophy and Education Graduate Group Chairperson _________________ Errol Lord, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Graduate Chair Dissertation Committee Lisa Miracchi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Alex Guerrero, Associate Professor (Rutgers University) Acknowledgments To reflect upon and record the support that I have received and collaborations I have made over the last several years is a great pleasure but a huge task. I have received a great deal of help from a great many quarters, and I am grateful for all of it, even if I cannot list it all here. First, I am grateful to Karen Detlefsen, my dissertation supervisor, who brought me several years ago to the unexpected field of early modern women’s philosophy, helped me forge my own path through it, and provided invaluable support at every step. I am also grateful to my other committee members, Lisa Miracchi and Alex Guerrero, for their academic and emotional support throughout the process, to my friend and fellow traveller Allauren Forbes, and to Jacqueline Broad, Sandrine Bergès, and Alan Coffee, along with all my colleagues in the University of Pennsylvania philosophy department, the Philadelphia Early Modern Paper Workshop, and in the global early modern women’s philosophy community. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at Riepe College House, and my family, who have supported me throughout. Finally, I would like to thank Hayley Rennie, who first taught me philosophy at Longley Park Sixth Form College more than a decade ago. ii ABSTRACT FREEDOM, SOCIETY, AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S THOUGHT Patrick Ball Karen Detlefsen This dissertation describes and analyses several different approaches to the relation between individuals and wider social groupings in the work of Margaret Cavendish, Sophie de Grouchy, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other women of the early modern period in Europe. From these disparate sources—Cavendish’s vitalist metaphysics, Suchon’s practical ethics, Wollstonecraft’s polemical aesthetics—a unifying political concern can be drawn: one of how individuals relate to their societies, and how this relation can be distorted or outright controlled by existing power relations. Each chapter approaches this subject from a different side: the tension of individual freedom and universal order in Cavendish’s metaphysics; the problem of autonomy for socially-constituted subjects in Suchon’s ethics and, by contrast, in the ethics of contemporary relational autonomy theory; the revolutionary solutions to the gendered traps of aesthetic ideology presented by Mary Wollstonecraft; and the practical, activist route to the achievement of freedom in the actions of the radical republican women of the French Revolution. iii In analysing the political bases of these questions I aim to provide new interpretations of these works of the early modern era, many of which have been unjustly neglected until very recently. But I also motivate changes in the methodology of early modern philosophy that are ongoing and that, I hope, can be pushed yet further. By focusing on the political in early modern women philosopher’s work, and by reading that work politically, I argue, we can effect a wider break with older methodologies and open up many new avenues of inquiry. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Abstract iii i. Introduction 1 i.1 Early Modern Narratives 1 i.2 Freedom and Society 6 i.2.1 Chapter One: Margaret Cavendish’s Sympathetic Metaphysics 7 i.2.2 Chapter Two: The Limitations of Autonomy in Gabrielle Suchon and Contemporary Philosophy 11 i.2.3 Chapter Three: Patriarchy, Beauty, and Revolution in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft 16 i.2.4 Chapter Four: Women’s Militancy and Women’s Republicanism During the French Revolution 20 i.3 Some Assumptions 23 i.4 Concluding Remarks 26 1. Margaret Cavendish’s Sympathetic Metaphysics 31 1.1 Introduction 31 1.2 Sympathy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 35 1.2.1 Sympathy as a Causal Explanation 35 1.2.2 Sympathy as Individual Affection 43 1.3 Cavendish’s Sympathetic Universe 55 1.3.1 Cavendishean Nature 56 1.3.2 Cavendishean Sympathy 59 1.4 The Order of Cavendishean Nature 69 1.5 Conclusion 81 2. The Limitations of Autonomy in Gabrielle Suchon and Contemporary Philosophy 87 2.1 Introduction 87 2.2 Three Axes of Relational Autonomy 90 2.2.1 Self-Governance 93 2.2.2 Self-Authorisation 105 2.3 Society and Freedom in the Philosophy of Gabrielle Suchon 110 v 2.4 Conclusion 116 3. Patriarchy, Beauty, and Revolution in the Work of Mary Wollstonecraft 122 3.1 Introduction 122 3. 2 Beauty and Social Power in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft 126 3. 3 Taste, Femininity, and Power in the Eighteenth Century 139 3.4 Conclusion: Wollstonecraft’s Intervention 152 4. Women’s Militancy and Women’s Republicanism During the French Revolution 162 4.1 Introduction 162 4.2 The Philosophy in Activism 166 4.3 Rationality, Action, and the Use of Force 173 4.4 Militant Women’s Republicanism 179 4.5 Public Participation and Public Virtue 185 4.6 Conclusion 190 5. Conclusion 195 5.1 New Routes 196 5.2 Future Routes 199 vi i. Introduction i.1 Early Modern Narratives The four chapters of this dissertation are all concerned with examining how individuals interact with larger social groupings of which they are a part—societies, governments, even the universe itself—through the lens of the social and political thought of women in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each chapter explores this relation from a different direction and in a different context: through metaphysics, ethics, revolutionary politics, and aesthetics. And though each chapter contains its own strong central thesis, I do not aim to forge from them a single grand claim about how individuals and societies relate, or how they ought to relate, or how we ought to read the early modern women philosophers in the light of this question. Such a claim would, I think, obviate the advantage to be had in using multiple perspectives in the first place: their differences are as important as their similarities. Rather, through the chapters I seek to illuminate again pathways through this subject- society relation that were visible at the time of Margaret Cavendish and Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy, and to think along them again with a view to, perhaps, looking newly at contemporary conditions. This search is informed by, and in turn has informed, a
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