Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy Redux: 1668–2018
It’s possible that one of these giant Douglas-firs here at the Andrews, towering just outside my window, recruited its first cohorts of needles at the same moment in which Margaret Cavendish drew ink from a jar and quilled the following claim:
[N]o creature or part of nature can subsist singly and divided from all the rest, but […] all parts must live together. And since no part can subsist or live without the other, no part can also be called prime or principal.
For historians of early modern philosophy, the idea of the symbiont is old news. Cavendish was not alone in her anticipation of the current trends in advocating for blurred boundaries, onto-stories, the holobiont and sympoeitic becoming-with. Baruch Spinoza (1632 – 1677) is probably best known for his denial of the idea that anything could arise from out of nothing, needing nothing, having no cause, having no dependencies or avenues of affectation with other creatures (but for the sake of simplicity I will bracket a discussion of Spinoza for now). For Cavendish, “nature is a perpetually self-motivating body, dividing, composing, changing, forming and transforming her parts by self-corporeal figurative motions.” For this reason, we can say that she holds a materialist-vitalist view, “vital,” not because nature is personified being with teleological goals, but because it behaves like an organism with motion and change at its core.
Read Sturdevant-O’Donnell’s “Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy Redux: 1668 – 2018” in full.
