Lady Anne Conway and Mary Astell

Anne Conway (1631 – 1679) and Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) share a sex, intelligence, and the same unsettled century. After a long obscurity, their work has reemerged and invites the reader to consider how reason, belief, and the self might still be brought into harmony.

The Women
Anne Conway, born and raised in London, spent her youth wandering through the vast hallways of what is now known as Kensington Palace. Apart from being a woman, at least two other notable circumstances shaped Anne’s life – she lost a son in infancy and later suffered from severe pain. Pain as a concept found its way into Anne’s philosophy as a purgative, transformative experience. It was while seeking a relief from pain that she came into contact with the Flemish physician and philosopher Francis Mercury van Helmont, who later introduced her to Kabbalistic thought and to Quakerism. Anne converted to Quakerism shortly before she died.

Mary Astell was a native of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. Unlike Anne Conway, Astell remained unmarried and eventually moved to London with little or no financial support. Her early philosophical writings are found in the correspondence with John Norris and were later published as Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695). After publishing the Letters and A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II. (1694, 1697), Astell became somewhat of a celebrity in London. Her two other well-known published works were Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700) and The Christian Religion (1705). In her later years, in keeping with her investment in female education, Astell managed a charity school for poor girls in the Chelsea neighborhood.

The Philosophies
Anne’s only surviving work, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, was published posthumously and anonymously in 1690. It is said that Leibniz had a copy of The Principles in his library with Anne Conway’s name written on the front page. Anne’s vitalist conception of all being may have influenced Leibnitz’s own views, in particular his Monadology. The Principles is often viewed as a theodicy. The existence and nature of God occupy the central place in Anne Conway’s triadic philosophical system. The three “species” are God, Christ, and the “unity of multiplicities” where “the whole creation is just but one substance or entity.” God is the immutable and perfect maker of all things. God “wanted to create living beings with whom he could communicate.” Alas, God’s light was intolerable for his Creatures, and, after dimming the light a bit, God designated the Messiah’s soul as the Middle Nature and “a safe place” for all Creatures. Everything and everyone fall under the umbrella of Anne’s “Creatures.” Everything and everyone is a subject to eternal mutability. Creatures can metamorphose into other kinds of creature, growing more or less spiritual – more or less like God. Under the principle of similitude, Conway maintains, everything and everyone has some semblance to God and therefore must be in some sense spiritual and alive.

Mary Astell sides with Descartes in his dualistic views and in the method of obtaining knowledge through clear and distinct perceptions. In her metaphysics, Astell distinguishes two kinds of beings—minds and bodies that come in various degrees of finitude and corruptibility. God is placed at the heart of her metaphysical system and is the “first intelligence.” Human minds and corporeal particles are finite and incorruptible, while human bodies and physical objects are finite, naturally corruptible entities. Within the created beings, Astell names four categories: minds, bodies, mind–body unions, and the particles that compose bodies. A mind-body union is mysterious. However, we “know and feel” it, and therefore it must be real.

Reading:
We will read and discuss Anne Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy and the second part of Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.

Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 25 pages, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/conway1692_1.pdf

Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm

Additional Reading:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Mary Astell, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/astell/
Anne Conway, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conway/