Anne Conway

English philosopher

• Born: December 14, 1631
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: February 18, 1679
• Place of death: Rangley, Warwickshire, England

One of the few English women philosophers of the seventeenth century, Conway’s posthumously published work proposes a spiritualistic cosmology that attempts to reconcile theories of emanation and vitalism with Christian theology and modern philosophy. An important early proponent of monism and idealism, she influenced the later philosophy of Leibniz and through him the German Idealists of the nineteenth century.

Early Life

The youngest of eleven children, Lady Anne Conway, née Finch, was the posthumous daughter of Sir Heneage Finch, the speaker of the House of Commons, and his second wife, Elizabeth Cradock. Anne was tutored at home but received no formal education, as was customary for girls at that time. However, she seems to have exhibited intellectual curiosity and ability very early on: Being an avid reader, she taught herself French, Greek, and Latin and read extensively about mathematics and philosophy.

Anne Finch was particularly close to her half brother, John Finch, who attended Christ’s College, Cambridge, and was a pupil of the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More (1614-1687). As a woman, Anne was denied a university education, but her brother arranged for her to receive instruction from Henry More by correspondence from 1650 onward. More provided her with intellectual stimulation, introducing her to many philosophers and scientists, and they remained close friends throughout her life.

In 1651, a marriage was arranged between Anne and Edward, third Viscount Conway. Anne’s husband, having been a pupil of Henry More himself, encouraged his wife’s intellectual occupations. However, from her teens onward, Anne had suffered from an illness that made it impossible for her to live with her husband until 1655 or 1656, because of her need for constant medical attention. At the age of twelve, Anne had caught a fever that left her with debilitating and recurring headaches, which tormented her for the rest of her life. The headaches proved to be untreatable, and the pain became so severe that she nearly died on several occasions. Due to her illness, Conway led a withdrawn life, which, however, did not deter her from philosophical studies and from participating in intellectual circles.

Life’s Work

While Conway’s personal life was limited by her pain and illness, her studies and her participation in England’s intellectual circles never ceased. These circles included such members as the Cambridge Platonists Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, Joseph Glanvill, George Rust, and Benjamin Whichcote. In 1658, Conway gave birth to her only child, a son named Heneage. In 1660, both mother and son contracted smallpox. While Anne was able to survive (barely), her son died of the disease.

Conway tried many, sometimes very dangerous, potential cures for her headaches. In 1656, the excruciating pain forced her to travel to France to undergo an operation known as a trepan, in which the skull is opened to release pressure—at that time without anaesthetics, of course. However, the French surgeons seem to have been afraid to perform this surgery and opened her jugular arteries instead, but again without success.

Conway’s correspondence with Henry More, who was also a frequent visitor at the Conway home, indicates that she was schooled in a critical version of Cartesianism. In 1670, during the search for a cure for her headaches, she also encountered the Flemish philosopher and physician Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont. Although he failed to cure her, he was impressed by her personality and stayed with Conway in Ragley from 1670-1679 (with minor absences). Helmont introduced Conway to alchemical thought and the Jewish Kabbala, which finally caused her to depart from the Cartesian dualism of her Cambridge-Platonist schooling.

Helmont also proved influential in fostering Anne Conway’s interest in the Quakers, an interest that progressed from detached intellectual curiosity to close personal contact with Quakers who visited her frequently between 1675 and 1677. In 1677, she finally converted to Quakerism—a courageous decision, since the Quakers were much feared and loathed for their political and social radicalism (which included a belief in the equality of men and women). Conway died in 1679 after torturous suffering. Her epitaph only reads “Quaker Lady.”

After Conway’s death, Helmont took a notebook with him from Ragley in which Conway had written a philosophical treatise. The treatise was eventually translated into Latin and published in Holland under the title Principia philosophiae anti-quissima et recentissimae (1690; The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 1692). The 1692 English edition of the work was actually a retranslation of the Latin version, since the notebook containing Conway’s original manuscript had been lost. The only other surviving source of Conway’s philosophical theories is her correspondence with Henry More and others.

Conway’s theory is both monist and vitalist and sharply criticizes mechanism. That is, she believes that each thing in the world is a monad, which means that it has a single, total, and indivisible nature. This belief opposes that of René Descartes, who put forward a dualism that distinguishes between physical reality and spiritual or mental reality, thereby positing an absolute distinction between mind and body. Conway, as an antimechanistic vitalist, sees the world as fundamentally spiritual or organic, rather than controlled by inorganic, mechanical processes.

The basis of her work lies in the distinction between three different kinds of beings: God, Christ, and creation. These differ mainly in their changeability: God is essentially unchangeable, Christ—as a mediator between God and creation—can only change for the better, whereas creation is changeable for the better or for the worse. All created beings are constituted by one single spiritual substance, which is arranged into an infinite, hierarchically ordered number of monads (that is, indivisible particles of spirit). All creation is alive and endowed with perception and motion. Conway claims that there is no body in the sense of inert matter. She argues that matter and spirit are essentially the same and differ from one another only in mode—matter is made up of congealed spirit.

Conway’s system is presented as a response to the predominant philosophical approaches of her time—in particular, it rejects the dualism of Descartes. According to Conway, philosophical theories that argue for an absolute separation of matter and spirit fail to explain the interaction of body and mind. She believes her system is better equipped to answer the question: Why is it that the spirit also suffers when the body is in pain? Conway also criticizes the pantheist materialism of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, since their approach does not acknowledge a difference between God and creation.

Conway’s natural philosophy is thus at the same time a work of metaphysics, in that it posits a fundamental nature of the universe, rooted in the nature of God, that stands as the explanation for all things, and also a theodicy—an attempt to explain why suffering exists in the world despite God’s benevolence. Consequently, Conway denies the eternity of hell and explains suffering as a process of purification by which a creature achieves a more spiritual and divine state. Her work is also based on the Neoplatonic theory of creation by divine emanation and influenced by the Kabbala and the Jewish mystic Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-1572), whose vision of a perfect universe proved to be influential for Conway. It seems likely, moreover, that Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz appropriated the term monad from Conway, whose work he became acquainted with via Helmont.

Significance

In an age when philosophy and indeed all learned discourses were the almost exclusive province of men, Conway managed to participate in intellectual exchanges and even to produce her own distinctive metaphysical system. Although women’s opportunities were restricted to the private sphere, Conway occupies an important place in modern philosophy. She is also exceptional in having received the equivalent of a university education, a privilege usually denied to women. Her work has suffered from the same neglect as texts by other modern women philosophers, which is partly because of the anonymous and posthumous nature of her treatise’s publication. However, renewed feminist scholarly interest in female biographies, texts, and philosophies from the 1970’s onward has made Conway’s work accessible once again. While she occupies an important place within modern philosophical discourse, she is now also read in her own right as a woman leading an exceptional life. Her scandalous conversion to Quakerism is only one example that testifies to her mental independence and determination.

Bibliography

Conway, Anne. The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends, 1642-1684. Edited by Sarah Hutton and Marjorie Hope Nicholson. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992. Includes detailed introductions to Conway’s intellectual connections and provides information about religious, scientific, and biographical matters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Edited by Allison P. Coder and Taylor Corse. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Accompanied by an accessible introduction focusing on Conway’s critique of Cartesian philosophy, as well as the influence of the Kabbala and Quakerism.

Frankel, Lois. “Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway.” In Modern Women Philosophers, 1600-1900. Volume 3 in A History of Women Philosophers, edited by Mary Ellen Waite. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1991. Compares Conway’s work to that of Leibniz and analyzes her principles of motion and emanation.

Gilbert, Pamela K. “The ’Other’ Anne Finch: Lady Conway’s ’Duelogue’ of Textual Selves.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 26 (1997): 15-26. A feminist reading of The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.

Hutton, Sarah. “Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, and Seventeenth-Century Scientific Thought.” In Women, Science, and Medicine, 1500-1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society, edited by Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 1997. Comparison of Conway’s philosophy with Margaret Cavendish’s approach to spirit and matter. Whereas both are vitalists and monists, for Cavendish this single substance is body, while Conway focuses on spirit.

Merchant, Carolyn. “The Vitalism of Anne Conway: Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (1979): 255-269. Argues that Conway’s treatise influenced Leibniz’s famous concept of the “monad.”

Popkin, Richard H. “The Spiritualistic Cosmologies of Henry More and Anne Conway.” In Henry More, 1624-1687: Tercentenary Studies, edited by Sarah Hutton. Boston: Kluwer, 1990. Analyses the spiritual cosmologies of More and Conway (and their influence on Leibniz and Newton) as a rejection of seventeenth century materialism.