# Elisabeth + Cavendish vs Descartes

## January 29th, 2020

- Pre-class scribblings:

        Oh, living laugher
        come to science
        come to the bowl and gaze

        nose in the water
        sip and then saunter
        down to the coral place

- "Okay, I'll try and speak louder over the AC - some students told me it's loud"
- The discussions seemed really good, and the responses all seemed to grasp Descartes' ideas - nice!
    - There were a few posts that went on tangents unrelated to mind-body dualism, but it was mostly quality stuff
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- Okay, today we'll actually talk about Elisabeth of Bohemia's critique of Descartes and Margaret Cavendish
    - Also, what about your discussions? Discuss with your neighbors!
        - Talked about if the mind *could* be an emergent behavior, like how the internet is made up of many different servers without "belonging" to any one of them
    - "Some of you might think this isn't a big question, but for Descartes it's *huge* that physical matter isn't a thinking substance, so we can do science"

- So, Elisabeth of Bohemia - in a very polite letter - raises an objection for Descartes: if the body and soul are different substances, then how can they interact?
    - In other words, how can Descartes as a substance dualist explain how the soul moves the body and makes it do stuff?
        - If extended, physical stuff moves via physical contact, how can material stuff that takes up no space move things?
    - Descartes does a few things to try and get out of this:
        - First, he says we're trying to give physicality to the mind by asking this question when we *can't*; the mind can't be understood as giving physical changes to the body
            - So, he recognizes that the mind can't have physical qualities, and that we can't understand the mind in physical terms (or vice versa), but it doesn't seem he's explained how they DO interact!
        - Descartes appeals to the idea of PRIMITIVE NOTIONS, saying that the soul is a basic unit of the world and can't be broken down
    - It seems Descartes recognizes Elisabeth's problem, but has trouble finding a real solution

- Okay, let's now turn to Margaret Cavendish, who was a self-taught polymath who married a scientist named William Cavendish - "unfortunately, Descartes declined to correspond with her directly, possibly for political reasons, possibly out of sexism - who knows?"
    - Cavendish wants to be a monist and understand everything in terms of matter, but how can we explain living things, then?

- Where does she disagree with Descartes?
    - In Letter 35, she attacks substance dualism based on motion
    - In Letter 37, she says that motion *requires* physical matter, that it *needs* a body since it needs to change location and be somewhere
    - Perhaps weirdly at first, she also tries to take aim at Descartes' view of life
        - For Descartes, living things are just machines, and are just moving like gears
        - But Cavendish thinks that organisms are "animate" and somehow are capable of motion inherently
    - Another question, then: if the mind doesn't occupy space, how can it move? In that sense, "you" don't really move anywhere; your mind stays still in Descartes' world!
        - Cavendish thinks the mind's motion should be correlated with the body - so, to explain that, she says that there isn't a separate mental substance at all, but that everything is matter!
        - How does she explain consciousness, then? By saying that some matter is ANIMATE - in other words, that there's a bit of consciousness inside (at least organic) matter itself!

- Okay, on Monday we'll wrap up Cavendish and start getting into Spinoza - see you later!