![]() ![]() In fact, the history of thought is dotted with very clever people coming to this seemingly irrational conclusion. At the turn of the 12th century, the Christian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi was so convinced that everything was conscious that he tried speaking to flowers and preaching to birds. Plato and Aristotle had panpsychist beliefs, as did the Stoics. “At a very basic level,” wrote the Canadian philosopher William Seager, “the world is awake.” The idea has many forms and versions, but modern studies of it house them all inside one grand general theory: panpsychism.ĭerived from the Greek words pan (“all”) and psyche (“soul” or “mind”), panpsychism is the idea that consciousness - perhaps the most mysterious phenomenon we have yet come across - is not unique to the most complex organisms it pervades the entire universe and is a fundamental feature of reality. Traces of it can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christian mysticism and the philosophy of ancient Greece, as well as many indigenous belief systems around the world. But Cavendish, Spinoza, Bruno and others had latched onto the coattails of an ancient yet radical idea, one that had been circulating philosophy in the East and West since theories of mind first began. If the dominant worldview of Christianity and the rising worldview of science could agree on anything, it was that matter was dead: Man was superior to nature. Twenty-three years before Cavendish was born, the Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, Giordano Bruno - who believed the entire universe was made of a single universal substance that contained spirit or consciousness - was labeled a heretic, gagged, tied to a stake and burned alive in the center of Rome by the agents of the Inquisition. In Amsterdam, the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote that every physical thing had its own mind, and those minds were at one with God’s mind his books were banned by the church, he was attacked at knifepoint outside a synagogue, and eventually, he was excommunicated. ![]() The world, through her eyes, was blazing.Ĭavendish was not the only one to have thoughts like these at that time, but they were dangerous thoughts to have. In essence, she envisioned that it wasn’t just humans that were conscious, but that consciousness, in some form, was present throughout nature, from animals to plants to rocks to atoms. ![]() And that matter wasn’t mostly lifeless and inert, like most of her peers believed, but animate, aware, completely interconnected, at one with the stuff inside us. She believed that at a fundamental level, the entire universe was made of just one thing: matter. It was a metaphor for her philosophical theories about the nature of reality. It is now recognized as one of the first-ever works of science fiction.īut this idea of a blazing world was not just fiction for Cavendish. In 1666, she released “The Blazing World,” a romantic and adventurous fantasy novel (as well as a satire of male intellectualism) in which a woman wanders through a portal at the North Pole and is transported to another world full of multicolored humans and anthropomorphic beasts, where she becomes an empress and builds a utopian society. “The truth is,” she wrote, “we Live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts and die like Worms.” Cavendish had grown up during the murderous hysteria of the English witch trials, and her sometimes contradictory proto-feminism was fueled by the belief that there was a parallel to be drawn between the way men treated women and the way men treated animals and nature. The duchess drew public attention because she was a woman with ideas, lots of them, at a time when that was not welcome. In his diaries, Samuel Pepys described her as a “mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,” albeit one he was obsessed with: He diarized about her six times in one three-month spell. She made her own dresses and decorated them in ribbons and baubles, and once attended the theater in a topless gown with red paint on her nipples. So did gossip, and the talk of the town was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle.Ĭavendish was a fiery novelist, playwright, philosopher and public figure known for her dramatic manner and controversial beliefs. That’s why the plague spread so easily, as well as the Great Fire. The streets were narrow, the air was polluted, and inhabitants lived on top of each other in small wooden houses. Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |