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New Perspectives on Agency in Early Modern Philosophy

The Inner Work of Liberty: Cudworth on Desire and Attention

Pages 649-667 | Published online: 28 Aug 2019
 

ABSTRACT

Ralph Cudworth’s goal in his manuscript writings on freewill is to argue that our actions are in our own power in a robust sense that entails the power to do otherwise. Cudworth’s unorthodox views about desire threaten to undermine this project, however. Cudworth maintains that only desire is able to distinguish good and evil and, consequently, that desire alone motivates our actions. Therefore, since Cudworth holds that desire itself is not in our own power, he appears committed to the conclusion that our actions are not in our own power either. Cudworth’s solution, I argue, is to emphasize our inward responses to desire, which he does take to be in our own power. I focus in particular on attention: by directing attention differently in response to desire, Cudworth holds that we are able actively to influence the way in which desire motivates our actions. Our actions are in our own power, therefore, only because such inward responses to desire are in our own power.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cudworth belongs to a group of seventeenth-century philosophers often called the ‘Cambridge Platonists’. For an introduction to Cambridge Platonism, see Hutton (Citation2015, 136–159). The best general overview of Cudworth’s philosophy remains Passmore (Citation1951). The best overview of Cudworth’s psychology in particular is Hutton (Citation2017).

2. Cudworth produced five manuscripts on the topic of freewill, British Library Additional Manuscripts 4978–4982, hereafter cited in the text by manuscript number followed by page number (Cudworth, Citationn.d.). Since 4982 is composed of three distinct manuscripts that have been bound together, I distinguish these sections as ‘4982 (I)’, ‘4982 (II)’, and ‘4982 (III)’, followed by page number (using continuous pagination). While most of the manuscripts remain unpublished, 4978 was published in 1838 as A Treatise of Freewill and republished in 1996 as ‘A Treatise of Freewill’, in A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality: With A Treatise of Freewill, ed. Sarah Hutton, hereafter cited in the text as ‘TFW’ followed by page number(Cudworth Citation[1838] 1996). Additionally, the final twelve pages of 4981 were published in 1997 as ‘Ralph Cudworth Additional Manuscript N° 4981 (On the Nature of Liberum Arbitrium): Summary PP. 1–12’, in The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context: Politics, Metaphysics and Religion, ed. G. A. J. Rogers, J. M. Vienne, and Y. C. Zarka, hereafter cited in the text as ‘Summary’ followed by page number (Cudworth Citation1997). When quoting published portions of the manuscripts, I follow the published versions in spelling and capitalization and provide references both to the published versions and to the originals. When quoting unpublished manuscripts, I have modernized Cudworth’s spelling and capitalization and I have deleted crossed-out text. The composition history of the manuscripts remains a matter of speculation. The most up-to-date analysis is Burden (Citation2019), but see also Carter (Citation2011, 161–168) and Passmore (Citation1951, 107–113). As Cudworth’s views seem to remain relatively stable across the manuscripts, I treat each as prima facie authoritative.

3. Despite this opening appeal, Cudworth does not take the instincts of nature to be infallible but seeks to confirm their suggestions through argument. See Jaffro (Citation2009, 651–653) on the methodology of this ‘phenomenological argument’.

4. Cudworth distinguishes the kind of liberty necessary for responsibility from the state of ‘true liberty’ (4978, 90–93/TFW, 196–197) in which our actions would be necessarily determined by the good.

5. I italicize ‘in our own power’ to emphasize its status as a term of art in Cudworth’s philosophical vocabulary.

6. Sellars (Citation2012, 945–949) argues that Cudworth inherits this conception of what it is for an action to be in our own power from Alexander of Aphrodisias.

7. Cudworth may concede that desire need not motivate our involuntary actions, but these actions are not in our own power either precisely because they are involuntary. I will leave this qualification implicit in what follows and focus exclusively on voluntary actions.

8. References to Hobbes’s English works are to Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir Wiliam Molesworth, 11 vols, hereafter cited in the text as ‘EW’ followed by volume and page number (Hobbes Citation1839–1845).

9. For an excellent discussion of some of Cudworth’s more specific arguments against Hobbes on liberty and necessity, see Esquisabel and Gaiada (Citation2015, 171–177). See also Zarka (Citation1997, Citation2012).

10. Compare Zarka (Citation1997).

11. Cudworth is not confident about this Hobbesian account of animal agency. In fact, Cudworth’s views about animals seem to vary across the freewill manuscripts. I discuss these variations in Leisinger (Citation2019).

12. See Chappell (Citation1999) for the Hobbes-Bramhall correspondence. Burden (Citation2019) suggests that Cudworth may have begun work on the freewill manuscripts shortly after acquiring the 1658 edition of the correspondence (Bramhall Citation1658).

13. The distortion arises because Cudworth prefers to use the word ‘will’ in a revisionary sense to refer not to a single power of the soul but to ‘the whole soul […] acting upon itself and determining itself’, suggesting that ‘that which is commonly called will’ in fact ‘belongs to’ the whole soul taken in this sense (4979, 6–7). These complications may be set aside for our purposes, but see §3 for further discussion.

14. For Cudworth’s intellectualism, see 4980, 58–60, 288–289; 4981, 108–109/Summary, 225–226. Compare Irwin (Citation2008, 241–249), who recognizes Cudworth’s intellectualism but infers (mistakenly, in my view) that Cudworth’s account of human liberty is compatible with determinism.

15. For the identification of volition and judgment, see 4979, 6–7; 4980, 58–58*; 4981, 107/Summary, 222–223; 4982 (III), 82. There is a relatively large literature on Cudworth’s discussion in A Treatise of Freewill of the distinction between understanding and will (4978, 24–50/TFW, 166–178). See esp. Esquisabel and Gaiada (Citation2015, 180–185), Irwin (Citation2008, 241–243), and Pécharman (Citation2014, 306–313).

16. For the history of this interpretation, see Darwall (Citation1995, 112n9). For a recent defence, see Gill (Citation2006, 38–57, Citation2004). For the distinction between rationalism and sentimentalism in British moral epistemology, see Gill (Citation2007).

17. Passmore and Darwall both base their objections in large part on the freewill manuscripts, and even Gill (Citation2006, 278) acknowledges that they pose serious problems for his rationalist interpretation. Note, however, that the debate about Cudworth’s alleged rationalism has focused primarily on the opening pages of 4982 (I). While these passages do weigh against the rationalist interpretation, they are hardly unique.

18. Cudworth argues for nativism about theoretical truths in Book 4 of A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (Cudworth Citation[1731] 1996, 73–152).

19. Darwall (Citation1995, 126–127) notes a similar passage from A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality in which Cudworth likewise refrains from extending his rationalism from theoretical truths to moral truths (Cudworth Citation[1731] 1996, 145).

20. Cudworth’s invocation of vital principles is part of a broader opposition to mechanism. Cudworth distinguishes generally between the mechanical activity of material bodies and the vital activity of immaterial spirits, and he argues in The True Intellectual System of the Universe that the motions of bodies can only be explained by appealing to the vital activity of ‘plastic natures’ that animate the physical world (Cudworth Citation1678, 146–174). There is little reason, however, to think that the vital principles of Cudworth’s moral epistemology bear any more specific relation to these plastic natures (but cf. Breteau Citation1995b, 28). See Hutton (Citation2017, 469–472, 480–483) on plastic natures in Cudworth’s psychology.

21. There are two pages in 4980 numbered ‘58’. ‘4980, 58*’ designates the second of these two.

22. It is unclear whether inferior reason motivates us to act in such a way as to satisfy as many of our appetites as possible in the long-term, or whether inferior reason instead motivates us to pursue a separate class of more durable, long-term pleasures.

23. Because Cudworth groups appetite and inferior reason together, he sometimes says that the human soul possesses two vital principles – a lower, animal principle and a higher, divine principle – rather than three, as I have claimed (see e.g. 4979, 22 and 4980, 39). Cudworth often emphasizes, however, that appetite and inferior reason can come into conflict with one another in much the same way as the lower, animal principle can come into conflict with the higher, divine principle (see e.g. 4980, 5 and 182). As a result, I think that it is best to read Cudworth as distinguishing three principles, even if he often treats the two lower principles together in contrast with the third, higher principle.

24. See Leech (Citation2017) for further discussion of superior reason.

25. I thus disagree with Jaffro (Citation2009), who seems to conceive of inferior and superior reason as two modes of deliberation rather than as two principles of motivation that prompt deliberation.

26. But note that, while Cudworth does occasionally use the word ‘desire’ in a general sense to encompass appetite, inferior reason, and superior reason, he more commonly uses ‘desire’ in a narrow sense as synonymous with ‘appetite’.

27. See also Breteau (Citation1995a, 238–239, Citation1995b, 28–29), Hutton (Citation2017), and Pécharman (Citation2014).

28. Cudworth thus espouses a kind of proto-sentimentalism. For further discussion, see Passmore (Citation1951, 51–53), Darwall (Citation1995, 109–148), and Leech (Citation2017, 957–958). For Cudworth’s influence on eighteenth-century sentimentalism, see Passmore (Citation1951, 90–106), Gill (Citation2010), and Hutton (Citation2012).

29. Since Cudworth holds that even appetite represents its objects as good or evil, it follows that desire in general is not an infallible guide to good and evil. Indeed, even superior reason can surely be mistaken at least in cases of ignorance.

30. This is not to say that desire is the only factor not in our own power that influences our actions. Cudworth often underscores habit, for example, as another such factor (see e.g. 4980, 61). Likewise, Cudworth recognizes that external circumstances also play a significant role (4980, 141). We can set aside these complications for present purposes, however.

31. For further discussion of the hegemonicon, see Breteau (Citation1995a, 339–341, Citation1995b, 29), Hengstermann (CitationForthcoming), Hutton (Citation2017, 479–483), Pécharman (Citation2014, 308–313), and Zarka (Citation1997, 45, Citation2012, 71–72).

32. For Cudworth on freewill, see Breteau (Citation1995a) and Hengstermann (CitationForthcoming). Note that we ought not to identify the hegemonicon and the power of freewill. Whereas the hegemonicon itself is ‘the soul as comprehending itself’, Cudworth writes that the hegemonicon ‘[has] a power of intending or exerting itself’ (4978, 51/TFW, 178). Freewill, therefore, is a power that belongs to the hegemonicon. For further discussion, see Hutton (Citation2017), who suggests conceiving of the hegemonicon as a ‘super-power’ that itself comprises a number of more specific powers.

33. The entry ‘Suada, n.’ in the Oxford English Dictionary reads: ‘The Roman goddess of persuasion; hence = persuasiveness, persuasive eloquence.’ Cudworth’s point is that the ‘vital congruity’ under discussion here (namely, appetite) does not merely compel action by ‘force’ but also has a certain persuasiveness.

34. Cudworth makes a similar observation when he says that we are ‘conscious of the several congruities in the soul, higher and lower, that of particular animal appetites of inferior reason and of the τὸ θείον the divine principle in us as also of the superiority of these to one another’ (4980, 51; my italics).

35. I am grateful to Ruth Boeker for inviting me to present this paper at a workshop on agency in early modern philosophy held at University College Dublin in September 2018. I would like to thank the participants at that workshop, two anonymous referees for this journal, and Marleen Rozemond for their feedback.

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