cudworth on self-consciousness and the "i myself"

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Cudworth on Self-Consciousness and the I Myself

Martine PécharmanCNRS-CRAL

Abstract

In the last two decades, Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) has been acknowledged as one of the paramount figures in the history of theories of consciousness. This paper discusses the interpretation defended by Udo Thiel (1991) and Vili Lähteenmäki (2010). Both contend that, for Cudworth, the reflexivity defining consciousness does not constitute self-consciousness, which, they say, requires self-determination for practical ends. On the contrary, I argue that for Cudworth any degree of consciousness implies a spe-cies of self-perception that must be considered a degree of self-consciousness. To do justice to Cudworth’s full position, I claim, we must take into account a kind of con-sciousness that I call ‘to-oneself ’ consciousness. Furthermore, I argue, the problem of the ethical self-formation of every human soul as one personality (which Cudworth calls “I myself in every man”) should be seen as going beyond the mere consideration of practical rationality.

Keywords

Cudworth – free will – personality – self-consciousness – self-formation – self-percep-tion – self-reflexivity

* Earlier versions of this paper were given in 2013 at the workshop “Revisioning Cambridge Platonism” at Cambridge University and at Daniel Garber’s seminar at Princeton University. I would like to thank the audiences there, but especially Lesley-Anne Dyer, Daniel Garber, Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton, Susan James, David Leech and Shelley Weinberg, for their helpful discussion.

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1 Toward a Reconsideration of Consciousness and Self-Consciousness in Cudworth

Ralph Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe (henceforth TISU), published in 1678,1 seeks to defeat those (called “Corporealists”) who are so possessed with “Pneumatophobia” or “Hylomania”2 that they deny the exis-tence of any substantial being but body and allow the soul only a derivative being, as a mode that depends on the unique material substance. Regardless of their doctrinal differences—some of them conceive matter as totally dead, others as endowed with bare vegetative life—all corporealists agree that con-sciousness consists in “a Secondary, Derivative and Accidental thing.”3 Their common thesis is that “all Animal Life, Sense and Self-perception, Conscious Understanding and Personality, are Generated and Corrupted.”4

One kind of corporealist that particularly concerned Cudworth was the hylozoist, who holds that “Life, Perception and Self-active power”5 are essen-tially inherent in any material atom.6 For Cudworth, the absurdity of hylozo-ism is not due to the separation of the “Natural Perception” that is supposed to belong to matter from “Animal Sense” and from “Reflexive Knowledge,”7 which both imply consciousness. To be sure, hylozoism is wrong in endow-ing matter itself with such a natural perception. But even so, the very notion of a perception which is merely a natural perception without being an ani-mal perception or an intellectual perception should not be dismissed out of hand. In the TISU’s lengthy Digression concerning the Plastic Life of Nature,8 Cudworth appeals to Plotinus’s conception of nature as inferior to imagination (“Nature hath not so much as any Fancie in it”; “Nature hath no Apprehension nor

1 It was printed in 1678 at London under the full title The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; wherein, all the reason and philosophy of atheism is confuted; and its impossibility demonstrated. By R. Cudworth, D.D. The Imprimatur is dated seven years earlier (29 May 1671). All quotations are from the facsimile edition in Collected Works of Ralph Cudworth (Hildesheim and New York, 1977), volume I—italics are always Cudworth’s own.

2 TISU, III, XXX, 135.3 TISU, III, XXX, 136.4 TISU, III, XXXI, 137.5 TISU, III, II, 105.6 Ibid., 106: “every Atom of Dust or other Senseless Matter.”7 TISU, III, I, 105.8 The whole section XXXVII, divided into 26 subsections, is devoted in TISU III to this

Digression.

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Conscious Perception of any thing”)9 to support the point that, although nature lacks “συναίσθησις, Con-sense and Consciousness,” which involve “Duplication,” yet “some Obscure and Imperfect Sense or Perception” may pertain to it.10 So, while the separation of animal perception not only from the consciousness of something external, but also from self-perception, would be utterly absurd,11 the distinction between natural perception and consciousness is not the rea-son why hylozoism is absurd.

In part, its absurdity rather follows from the fact that hylozoism ascribes a knowledge of all its “Capabilities and Congruities” to every material atom, something that lacks “any Knowledge or Consciousness of itself.”12 Perfect wisdom must involve “full Consciousness and Self-enjoyment,” while the life of matter “as such,” and therefore of “every smallest Atom of it,” is “devoid of all Consciousness and Self-enjoyment,”13 even of animal consciousness and self-enjoyment. Matter that is omniscient, indeed, omniscient in all its parts, must involve a contradiction.14 Furthermore, hylozoism endows every omni-scient material atom with an immediate capacity for artificial self-formation and improvement, “without any Deliberation or Attentive Consideration.”15 Now, as we shall see, for Cudworth self-formation makes sense only with respect to man, who has the individual ability of practical self-determination. Self-formation requires something—personality—that goes beyond the self- perception and conscious understanding that derive from mere matter as such according to corporealists: something which brings it about that “deliberation”

9 See, for this passage quoted in TISU, III, XXXVII-15, 159: Enneads, IV, IV (Problems of the Soul II), 13. The Greek words which Cudworth translates as apprehension and conscious perception are ἀντίληψις and σύνεσις.

10 TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 159 (“that Duplication [. . .] included in the Nature of συναίσθησις, Con-sense and Consciousness, which [sc. Duplication] makes a Being to be Present with itself, Attentive to its own Actions, or Animadversive of them, to perceive itself to Do or Suffer, and to have a Fruition or Enjoyment of itself”) and 160.

11 See TISU, III, XXXVII-15, 159, concerning the difference between animals, that have “Self-perception or Self-enjoyment” and nature, that has not.

12 TISU, respectively III, II and III, III, both 106.13 Respectively TISU, III, III, 106, III, I, 105, and III, III, 106 again.14 “[T]hat Prodigious Absurdity, of making every Atom of Senseless Matter Infallibly Wise or

Omniscient, without any Consciousness” (TISU, III, XXXIV, 143)—“Perfect Knowledge and Understanding without Consciousness, is Nonsense and Impossibility” (TISU, III, XXXVII-26, 173)—“[A]s nothing can be more Prodigiously Absurd, than thus to attribute Infallible Omniscience, to every Atom of Matter; so is it also directly Contradictious, to sup-pose Perfect Knowledge, Wisdom, or Understanding, without any Consciousness or Self Perception” (TISU, V, Sect. IV, 871).

15 TISU, III, I, 105.

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and “consideration” themselves are the objects of a higher kind of conscious-ness than the one assumed when merely exercising those rational acts.16

In contrast with hylozoist corporealism, Cudworth’s first aim in the TISU is to assert that the conscious and self-relative perception belonging to any sen-tient or animal being cannot be derived from an unconscious natural percep-tion that belongs to matter as such. Should conscious perception arise from an “Accidental Modification” of matter, it would constitute a creation ex nihilo, “which is an Absolute Impossibility.”17 Moreover, since matter is divisible into innumerable atoms, the hylozoist thesis would seem to be in contradiction with the monadic nature of every animal as percipient. Indeed, every animal is one single percipient, whereas, following the hylozoist thesis, every animal would have to be made up of a multitude of “natural” percipients—actually, of as many percipients as there are material parts in the body, and thus of “Innumerable Percipients”; otherwise it would not be endowed with sense at all.18

Through this refutation of hylozoism, I would claim, Cudworth sketches out a theory of different orders of consciousness, starting from the first-order consciousness of animal sense and culminating in his account of personal-ity. Sense perception involves a kind of life—the animal life—which can only be “Conscious and Self-perceptive”;19 “Conscious Intellectuality” or “Conscious Understanding” is another degree of conscious life, that of “Universal Reason and Reflexive Knowledge in Men”;20 and “humane Personalities”21 are still another and higher level both of life and of consciousness. Cudworth’s line

16 The difference between those two degrees of consciousness overlaps with that between two kinds of human actions: technical actions, which require that “Humane Artists [. . .] Consult and Deliberate” (TISU, III, XXXVII, 10; see also 11-14) and moral actions, which sup-pose in man’s soul a power of ruling more or less the rational acts of consideration and deliberation, so that the final choice is liable either to praise or to blame. The actions of brutes are below both the technical and the moral levels (see TISU, III, XXXVII-14 and TISU, V, Sect. IV, 869).

17 TISU, V, Sect. III, 839.18 Ibid. See also V, 830, for the opposition one/multitude: “A Thinker, is a Monade, or one

Single Substance, and not a Heap of Substances” (cf. V, 828). The absurd proliferation of percipients if perception were the attribute of matter is deduced from the thesis that “no Extensum whatsoever [. . .], is Truly and Really, One Substance, but a Multitude or Heap of Substances, as Many as there are Parts into which it is divisible” (V, 829). For a Plotinian source linked to this opposition, see V, 823 (cf. 826), where Cudworth quotes and trans-lates Enneads, IV, VII (The Immortality of the Soul,) 2: “it [is] impossible, that Life and Soul should result from a Congeries of Lifeless and Souless things.”

19 TISU, III, XXXI, 137: “Animal, Conscious and Self-perceptive Life”; see also TISU, III, XXXVI, 146: “Animality or Conscious Life.”

20 TISU, respectively III, XXVIII, 133; III, XXXI, 137; III, I, 105.21 TISU, III, XXXII, 138.


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of argument seems clear: starting from animal perception, degrees of life are also degrees of consciousness. In this paper, I would like to show both that Cudworth’s seemingly linear argument is not as unproblematic as it might be held to be and that for him degrees of consciousness, beginning with “Animal Consciousness,”22 are also degrees of self-consciousness.

So far, the two main interpretations of the issue of consciousness in Cudworth, that of Udo Thiel and that of Vili Lähteenmäki,23 have distin-guished the form of subjective awareness involved in self-consciousness from the kind of relation to oneself or self-reference involved in conscious-ness (the Duplication of TISU, III, XXXVII-16—quoted above). Their common contention is that “only rational beings can have self-consciousness,”24 or that Cudworth “reserves self-consciousness for higher beings” than animals.25 For both Thiel and Lähteenmäki, self-consciousness is relevant only when self-reference involves not mere reflexivity, but reflection upon oneself, which happens when it is linked to “the possibility of self-determination with respect to action,”26 that is to say to the subject’s “lucid awareness of herself as the subject of action.”27 Thus, both of these interpretations fully agree in the need to attribute to Cudworth a distinction between consciousness and self- consciousness. The only difference between the two commentators is related to the specific or generic status of consciousness in the grades leading to self-consciousness. The ascent to a higher level can be understood either as a gra-dation within self-reference or as a gradation within consciousness. In the first case (Thiel), consciousness is the basic species of self-reference, “the most fun-damental relation of oneself to oneself,” while self-consciousness, or reflection, constitutes “a higher, rational level.”28 In the second case (Lähteenmäki), the gradation displays itself in “types of consciousness” reducible to the dichot-omy between “elementary consciousness,” which relies on “simple subjective

22 TISU, III, XXXVII-21, 165.23 I am evoking here the two excellent articles especially devoted to Cudworth by those

scholars: the pioneering study ‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’ published by U. Thiel in The Uses of Antiquity, ed. S. Gaukroger (Dordrecht, 1991), 79-99, and the careful as well as insightful reapparaisal of the topic by V. Lähteenmäki in ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2010), 9-34.

24 Thiel, ‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’, 92.25 Lähteenmäki, ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 25.26 Thiel, ‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’, 93.27 Lähteenmäki, ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 27.28 Thiel, ‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’, respectively 93

and 92.

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experience,” and “self-consciousness,” which is “inner-directed” and “particu-larly relies on the subject of experience.”29

The second reading helps to clarify and extend the first one, by explicitly stat-ing that consciousness goes through different stages or degrees.30 To my mind, however, we must make yet another shift, with the thesis that in Cudworth levels of self-reference/consciousness are all levels of self-consciousness. Instead of confining self-consciousness within one rank of self-reference/ consciousness, corresponding to the relation of a rational subject to herself as to a moral agent, I shall argue that the self-perception which Cudworth associates with animal perception can be considered as a first-level self- consciousness. I do not separate self-perception from self-consciousness, since in TISU there is no textual evidence that they should be distinguished.31 I think that this identification does not compromise the moral dimension of what is for Cudworth not the only self-consciousness—as Thiel and Lähteenmäki contend—but the highest species of self-consciousness: the human agent’s self-determination. Instead, it highlights the major difference introduced by this last additional component in the series constituted by the sundry forms of conscious life.

The synonymous triad “Animality, Sense and Consciousness”32 that corpo-realists claim to derive from matter is replaced in TISU with the equivalence relation between Animal Sense and Self-perception.33 The kind of conscious-ness animal sense testifies to has to be placed in the same rank as a first spe-cies of self-perception, so that the first synonymous triad evolves into a second

29 Lähteenmäki, ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, respectively 23, 24, 30 (italicization of experience and subject is my emphasis).

30 Thiel’s reading, by focusing on consciousness as the first subdivision of self-reference, never makes explicit this notion of degrees of consciousness.

31 Lähteenmäki (‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 28), when he attributes to Cudworth the thesis that self-consciousness requires the “experience of agency,” writes: “This may seem a rather strong notion of self-consciousness, for to regard one’s thoughts as one’s own [. . .] would be enough for self-consciousness in some basic sense.” It seems to me that Cudworth’s texts allow for what might be called a degrees-theory of self- consciousness, rather than a limitation of self-consciousness to such an exclusive “strong notion.” Unlike Thiel and Lähteenmäki, I do not presume that reflexivity alone for Cudworth cannot give content to the notion of self-consciousness.

32 TISU, III, XXX, 135 and 136; III, XXXI, 137.33 TISU, III, XXXI, 137: “Animal Sense or Self-perception.” In TISU, V, Sect. IV, 871 (where

“Consciousness and Self-Perception” is strictly the same expression as “Consciousness or Self Perception”), this equivalence relation is explicitly that between “Animal Consciousness and Self-Perception.”


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one—“Animal, Conscious and Self-perceptive Life”34—which constitutes the fundamental degree in the hierarchy of perfections culminating with “Personality” in man.35 Cudworth grants “Consciousness and Self-perception” to the animal or sensitive soul, not only to the human or rational soul.36 The consciousness and self-perception which accompany “that wisdom by which our Actions are directed” and which are the feature of human actions made “Electively and Intendingly”37 in TISU do not form the first-order relation to oneself, but a second-level self-reference or self-consciousness. The “Conscious Reason and Understanding” that actions done upon deliberation suppose must be correlated with “a higher Degree of Life and Perfection” than the “Redoubled Consciousness or Self-perception” intrinsic to the life “of Sense or Animality.”38 Yet, for Cudworth, human redoubled consciousness or self-consciousness is not restricted to the comprehension of one’s reasons for acting. Beyond rational deliberation, there is still another higher degree for both consciousness and self-consciousness.39

34 TISU, III, XXXI, 137. Benjamin Carter, who has investigated the role of theological disputes in Cudworth’s account of human consciousness in his article ‘Ralph Cudworth and the Theological Origins of Consciousness’, History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010,) 29-47, at 30, reads this formula as meaning that Cudworth “splits human activity into two parts: the first [. . .] ‘Animal Sense’, the second ‘Conscious or Self-perceptive life’.” Cudworth’s whole argumentation against corporealism shows that this reading is mistaken.

35 Ibid. (on the corporealist contention—which I have mentioned at the beginning—that “all Animal Life, Sense and Self-perception, Conscious Understanding and Personality are Generated and Corrupted”).

36 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160.37 TISU, III, XXXVII-19, 162: “we act according to a Knowledge of our own, and are Masters of

that Wisdom by which our Actions are directed, since we do not act Fatally only, but Electively and Intendingly, with Consciousness and Self-perception.” By contrast with actions done with deliberation, habits in men (like natural instincts in animals) are done only “fatally,” on account of the “Mutual Sympathy [. . .] betwixt our Soul and our Body” (see TISU, III, XXXVII, 13-19).

38 TISU, III, XXXVII-26, 173. The animal life, or “Li[ fe] of Sense” is the most fundamental conscious life, while the “Senseless Life of Nature” is unconscious life.

39 Both Thiel (‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’, 92) and Lähteenmäki (‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 20), when separating self- consciousness from consciousness (Thiel) or from elementary consciousness (Lähteenmäki), seem to identify self-consciousness with the human agent’s knowledge of the ends and reasons of her actions. Now, as we shall see below, the Treatise of Freewill and the other (unpublished) ethical manuscripts by Cudworth show that this knowledge does not constitute the highest level of self-reference and that the “reflection” upon oneself resulting in self-determination goes beyond deliberative rationality.

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2 Against Descartes’s Division of Being

Before making my main argument, I would like to recall the way in which Cudworth separates consciousness from thought. The Digression concerning the Plastic Life of Nature in The True Intellectual System of the Universe combats “the Narrow Principles of some late Philosophers” who admit no other onto-logical division than the opposition between matter and a “Cogitative” being whose thought cannot be but with “Express Consciousness.”40 The target here is obviously Descartes, and his distinction between extended substance and thinking substance. Descartes’ claims that the essence of the soul consists in thought (“Cogitation”) and that the essence of thought consists in “Clear and Express Consciousness” make it impossible that the soul can ever be “with-out Expressly Conscious Cogitations.”41 The Cartesian thesis that all thought is conscious results in making the actual existence of conscious thought in the soul necessary for the very existence of the res cogitans: to lack conscious thoughts would be to cease to think, and to cease to think would mean inevita-bly to cease to be.42 Meditatio Secunda suggests indeed that “it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.”43 Cudworth rejects this, insofar as this assumption is coupled with the thesis that each time that I have the express consciousness of the proposi-tion Ego sum—in other words, each time that my mind has the clear concep-

40 TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 159.41 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160.42 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160: “if [the Souls of Men] were [one moment without Expressly

Conscious Cogitations], [. . .] they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being.”43 See Œuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, revised edition (Paris, 1964), VII, 27:

“forte etiam fieri posset, si cessarem ab omni cogitatione, ut illico totus esse desinerem.” I quote the translation in The Philosophical Works of Descartes rendered into English by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross in two volumes (Cambridge, 1911), I, 151-152 (my emphasis). This passage is not quoted in TISU, III, XXXVII-17, where Cudworth does not explicitly mention Descartes: this would be needless, since Descartes is clearly recognisable in sec-tion 16, 159, under the label “some late Philosophers” applied to those “making the first General Heads of all Entity, to be Extension and Cogitation, or Extended Being and Cogitative, and then supposing that the Essence of Cogitation consists in Express Consciousness” (for a more direct critique, which at the same time merely recalls what has just been stated in the Digression, see TISU, III, XXXVIII, 175, on the reasons why the “Cartesian philosophy” is “highly obnoxious to Censure upon some Accompts”—the main reason being that it “acknowledg[es] only Two Heads of Being, Extended and Cogitative, and mak[es] the Essence of Cogitation to consist in Express Consciousness”).


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tion of this proposition—I also have the certainty that it is necessarily true.44 According to TISU, the certitude of my existence when I am conscious of some thought does not entail that there is a necessary connection between the exis-tence of my soul and my having conscious thought. As a matter of fact, even though I may not be conscious of what is in my soul,45 this does not endanger the existence of my soul. The fact that I am intermittently without any con-scious thought implies only that my soul’s uninterrupted thought goes beyond my soul’s uninterrupted consciousness of itself.

What matters to Cudworth in his Digression with regard to the distinction between consciousness and thought is that we focus on something other than acts or operations of thought. The question must be: does knowledge remain the same when the knower happens not to be actually reflecting on it, for instance while sleeping? The reply is that a deep sleep does not result in the destruction of the knowledge a soul might have before being unconscious, and accordingly the knower’s being does not pass out of existence when knowl-edge is not conscious. Every science or art remains in the sleeping knower’s soul even while asleep: “even the Sleeping Geometrician, hath at that time, all his Geometrical Theorems and Knowledges some way in him; as also the Sleeping Musician, all his Musical Skill and Songs.”46 The sleeping geometri-cian and musician seem to be viewed from an Aristotelian standpoint:47 they are examples of ἕξεις which have to be acquired before constituting δυνάμεις capable of certain definite operations. Aristotle differentiates mere posses-sion of knowledge without exercising it from its actualization or exercise. Also he differentiates it from another mode of not exercising one’s δύναμις, when

44 Again, the subordination in Meditatio Secunda of the supposition “if I ceased entirely to think, etc . . .” to the consciousness of the truth of the proposition asserting my existence (“I am, I exist”) whenever I conceive it is not denounced in the Digression through an explicit mention of those Cartesian passages.

45 See on the contrary the Cartesian assertion in Meditatio Tertia that “since I am nothing but a thinking thing,” then, if the power of being myself the author of my being “did reside in me, I should certainly be conscious of it” (Haldane-Ross I, 169; cf. AT VII, 49). Arnauld’s Objectiones Quartae have raised the objection that many things may be in the mind of which the mind is not conscious: “the mind of an infant in its mother’s womb possesses the faculty of thought without being conscious of it,” and “innumerable similar instances” might be cited as well (Haldane-Ross II, 93; cf. AT VII, 214). Before and in preference to the instance of the souls “of Embryo’s in the Womb,” Cudworth’s Digression focuses on the instance of “the Souls of Men in all profound Sleeps, Lethargies and Apoplexies” (TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160; see also TISU, V, Sect. IV, 868).

46 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160.47 See De Anima II, c. 5, 417a22-29; Nicomachean Ethics VII, c. 3, 1147a10-22.

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external factors (e.g., physiological ones) distance it from its acts. There are different degrees of the relation δύναμις-ἐνέργεια. These different potentialities themselves suppose a previous potentiality, the most fundamental δύναμις of any man insofar as this individual is rational.48 Now, with Cudworth, the case of sleeping knowers shows not only that the knowledge still present in them is determinate, consisting both in a definite method and in a definite stock of items produced by this method, but that this permanent knowledge in the soul is founded upon an “Actual energie” which the soul “is not Expressly Conscious of,”49 not upon a naked potentiality. In the Digression, the Aristotelian δύναμις cannot be anything but an ἐνέργεια. The persistent capacity for a definite knowledge is itself an actuality, a proto-actuality in regard to the actuality of its conscious apprehension or exertion. Actual energy, not the Cartesian consciousness, constitutes for Cudworth the essence of thought.

The denial that conscious thought is essential to the existence of the soul implies in TISU a total reshaping of the ontological division between mate-rial and immaterial substances. This makes it possible for the essential dif-ference between extended being and thinking being not to be conflated with an essential difference between unconscious being and conscious being.50 The distinction body/soul, matter/thought—i.e., the “first General Heads of all Entity”—must be restated from the viewpoint of the contrary actions of which the material and immaterial substances are capable: not “Local Motion” and “Expressly Conscious Cogitation” (this would be the Cartesian ontological division), but “Local Motion” and “Life or Internal Self-activity.”51 Thought, the action of the immaterial substance, consists in a “Vital Energy” or “Internal Energy” which is not restricted to the duplication belonging to consciousness: the “Vital Autokinesie” can be “a simple Internal Energy.”52 Hence the possibil-ity that definite knowledge can persist in the soul even though the soul is not conscious of possessing it, nor exerting it. The interruption of consciousness

48 De Anima II, c. 5, 417a24.49 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160.50 In TISU, V, Sect. IV, 871, the thesis that “Consciousness [is] Essential to Cogitation” is

prompted against the absurd supposition in hylozoism of “Perfect Knowledge, Wisdom, or Understanding, without any Consciousness or Self Perception.” This does not mean that Cudworth finally espouses the Cartesian thesis denounced in the Digression. In this pas-sage of TISU V, Cudworth is dealing with the “Topick of Cogitation, Knowledge or Understanding” in order to demonstrate the existence of “One Perfect Understanding Being” that is “Comprehending it self, and all Possibilities of things virtually contained in it” (871-872).

51 TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 159.52 Ibid.


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does not destroy the thinking being, but what happens instead is the soul’s regression to a simple self-activity. Hence also, mere natural perception with-out self-perception becomes possible, described by Cudworth as “a kind of Drowsie, Unawakened, or Astonish’d Cogitation,” about which the Digression agrees with Plotinus that it “differs as much [of animal sense] as the Sense or Cogitation of one in a profound sleep, differs of that of one who is awake.”53

3 Beyond Matter and Nature: Self-Consciousness

Cudworth’s distinction between matter (the extended being) and nature, which is a thinking being, allows him to divide “life or Internal Self-activity” into a simple and a duplicated internal energy, namely an unconscious and a self-conscious thought.54 While the self-activity or unconscious life of nature must be considered, in a Plotinian mood, as the activity of “the Last thing of the Soul,”55 and therefore as “the Last and Lowest of all Lives,”56 animals are aware of what they are doing, even though they have no comprehension of the reasons and the ends of their actions.57 The sensitive and imaginative faculties of animals involve more than the conscious perception of present things or the conscious representation of absent things: self-consciousness begins with the animal consciousness of anything perceived or represented to the soul in relation to the action that is being done. This objective consciousness cannot be a distinct consciousness without being a subjective consciousness or self-perception. For Cudworth, who denies that the essence of thought consists in self-consciousness, the clear and express consciousness which necessarily

53 TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 160. For the quotation from Plotinus translated by Cudworth, see Enneads, III, VIII (Nature, Contemplation and the One), 4.

54 See TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 159, on the notion of Cogitation “enlarged so as to comprehend all Action distinct from Local Motion, and to be of equal Extent with Life.” Cf. TISU, V, Sect. III, 830: “Life, Self-Activity, or Cogitation.” For Cudworth, non-thinking matter and thinking nature cannot be granted the same kind of unconsciousness (Étienne Balibar is mistaken when he writes about Cudworth’s TISU in the Introduction to John Locke, Identité et dif-férence. L’invention de la conscience [Paris, 1998], 61, that “[l]a nature est une montée de la matière vers la pensée, parce qu’elle est une montée de l’énergie inconsciente vers l’énergie consciente”).

55 TISU, III, XXXVII-12, 156—Cudworth quotes and translates Enneads, IV, IV (Problems of the Soul II), 13.

56 TISU, III, XXXVII-19, 162-163. Cudworth illustrates this qualification of nature with a quo-tation from Enneads, III, II (On Providence), 16.

57 See TISU, III, XXXVII-15, 158.

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goes with “Animal Sense and Fancy”58 must be recognized by contrast as indistinguishable from self-perception.59 Animal sense or fancy and express consciousness on the one hand, and express consciousness and self-perception on the other hand, are put on a par in the Digression. Conscious self-activity in animal sense apprehension and imagination brings with it the duplication of self-consciousness as its essential element. Only the self-activity consisting in the simple internal energy of nature, that is to say, only the “Plastick Nature, or Life distinct from the Animal,”60 is lacking self-consciousness, since it is lacking the clear and distinct consciousness of what it does. Unlike nature’s vital energy, which is self-activity without self-perception, animal self-activity in sense perception and imagination is endowed with self-relative consciousness— in Cudworth’s terms, “Reflexive Consciousness.”61 In the Digression, that self- reference which constitutes the first kind of self-consciousness is the rea-son why the difference between “the Lower Senseless Life of Nature” and the “Higher Lives of Sense or Animality, and of Reason or Understanding” can be called by another name for animal sense and imagination than merely con-sciousness or express consciousness: given that consciousness can only be at the same time self-reference, the right name for this phenomenon which begins with animal life is “Redoubled consciousness,” which is, for Cudworth, synony-mous with Self-perception.62

The psychic phenomena in animals that are not conscious, or not always conscious, must then be considered manifestations of an inner actual energy of the soul which is not doubled. The division between simple self-activity and the duplication of self-activity (which is the emergence of self-perception

58 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 160: “Animal Sense and Fancy, or Express Consciousness.” See TISU, III, XXXVII-16, 159: “Animal Fancie or Express Consciousness.”

59 TISU, III, XXXVII-26, 173: “Express Consciousness or Self-perception.” For the whole series of equivalences, see XXXVII-17, 161: “Animal Fancy or Synaesthesis, express Consciousness and Self-perception” (cf. 160: “Clear and Express συναίσθησις, Con-sense and Consciousness, Animadversion, Attention, or Self-perception”).

60 TISU, III, XXXVII, respectively 16, 159 and 1, 146.61 TISU, II, III, 62 (“a certain Kind of Natural (though not Animal) Perception, such as is

devoid of Reflexive Consciousness”).62 See TISU, III, XXXVII-26, 173, for the equivalence between “Redoubled Consciousness or

Self-perception” (or “Animal-sense, Self-perception and Consciousness”) and “Express Consciousness or Self-perception.” Obviously, “Redoubled Consciousness or Self-perception” is a qualification of animal life in the argument against hylozoism which intends to stress that “Triplication” or even “Milleclupation” of material parts cannot improve the life of nature into a rational soul, no more than their “Duplication” can improve it into “Redoubled Consciousness or Self-perception.”


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or self-consciousness) can be used therefore as the basis of a taxonomy of the acts of the soul. In both The True Intellectual System of the Universe and A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (henceforth TEIM, which remained unpublished during his lifetime), Cudworth insists on a power of the human soul “whereby it is Formative of its own Cogitations, which itself is not always Conscious of; as when in Sleep or Dreams, it frames Interlocutory Discourses betwixt itself and other Persons, in a long Series, with Coherent Sense and Apt Connexions.”63 This “fantastical power of the soul,” as he calls it, does not belong to the same kind of internal energy as sensible perception and imaginative representation do: like mere natural energy, it constitutes a self-activity without self-perception. However, a kind of consciousness is asso-ciated with this power. This forces us to widen the range of self-awareness with which Cudworth deals. (This point, to my knowledge, has not yet been empha-sized by commentators.)64

Instead of merely leading to a demarcation between unconscious natural life and conscious animal life, the analysis of sense and imagination mainly developed in TEIM opens another area for consciousness, one different from the kind of self-perception involved in animal perception. The nature of sense consists in mere appearance: there is sense when the soul “seems to perceive some corporeal things existing.”65 This seeming is for the soul itself, which is

63 TISU, III, XXXVII-17, 161. Beyond the demonstration (1) of the existence of God in the First Part, The True Intellectual System of the Universe should have included two other separate demonstrations: (2) that the difference of moral good and evil is natural, and (3) that men have power over their actions. The second one is partially achieved in A Treatise concern-ing Eternal and Immutable Morality, published posthumously in 1731. For the third one, only manuscripts existed (London, British Library, Additional Manuscripts 4978-4982). Manuscript 4978 was published in 1838 under the title A Treatise of Freewill. For those two Treatises, abbreviated hereafter as TEIM and TFW respectively, I quote the annotated edition provided with a critical introduction by S. Hutton: A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. With A Treatise of Freewill (Cambridge, 1996). For the passage in TEIM corresponding to the present quotation in TISU, see III, IV, 3, p. 67: “that dreams are many times thus begotten or excited by the fantastical power of the soul in itself, is evi-dent from the orderly connection and coherence of imaginations, which many times are continued in a long chain or series; with the fiction of interlocutory discourses and dia-logues consisting of apt answers and replies made interchangeably to one another, and contain such things as never were before printed upon the brain in such a series or order.”

64 In what follows, I will rely on some texts which in Lähteenmäki’s perspective (see ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 29) argue for a distinction between an elementary consciousness whose main feature is “phenomenality” and self-consciousness.

65 TEIM, III, IV, 2, 65 (my emphasis).

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“so affected as if there were such a corporeal thing existing.”66 The case is the same both when there is no object existing without the soul and when there are objects really existing without it: with regard to the seeming nature of images, there is no difference between sense perception in dreams and when we are awake. In both cases, the images in the soul are images of things “as existent.”67 Yet, when we are awake, the soul differentiates sensations of present corporeal things from mere imaginations which can occur at the same time. Our soul, indeed, sometimes wanders through “a long thread or concat-enated series of imaginations or phantasms of corporeal things” when we are awake too.68 Now, although the soul is affected in the same way by all those images, although those images have in themselves the same nature—they are mere appearances or seemings—, however, the soul distinguishes those which are its “own cogitations” (and thus purely imaginary) from those which are images of real things.69 When we are dreaming phantasms appear to us as if there were objects really existing without us, while when we are awake they do not appear as “real things or sensations,” but as “counterfeit and fictitious imaginations,” compared with those sensations which are simultaneous with them.70 The “animadversive part of the soul”71 does not mistake fancies with sensations when we are awake. Thus, Cudworth’s analysis of sensation as a seeming to the soul is developed into the distinction between images which according to the verdict of the soul seem to be sensations and images which do not seem to be sensations.

According to TISU, “the Phancy, Apparition, or Seeming of Cogitation, [. . .] is the Consciousness of it.”72 From this viewpoint, psychic phenomena caused by an energy of which the soul is not conscious also fall within the extent of con-sciousness. Animal perception and self-perception are not enough to explain the difference for the soul itself between sensations and imaginations, and between imaginations in sleeping dreams (which appear as images of things really existing) and imaginations in waking dreams (which appear as images of non-existing things). Cudworth introduces another dimension with regard to consciousness concerning what the soul is “conscious to itself ”73 about the

66 Ibid. (my emphasis).67 TEIM, III, IV, 2, 66.68 TEIM, III, IV, 4, 67.69 See TEIM, III, IV, 4-5, 68-70.70 TEIM, III, IV, 4, 68.71 TEIM, III, IV, 4, 69.72 TISU, V, Sect. IV, 846.73 TEIM, III, IV, 5, 69 (my emphasis).


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seemings or appearances which occur in it. Even the fantastic power of the soul, which must be attributed to the simple internal energy of nature the soul contains (as opposed to being associated with the duplication involved in consciousness), requires for its explanation some form of consciousness. This form of consciousness might be called to-oneself consciousness. For Cudworth, the soul makes a silent comparison between images of sense and phantasms which “come into the mind we know not how and bubble up of themselves” at the same time as sensations are produced.74 This requires another kind of consciousness besides self-perception in sense. Also, when the soul voluntarily compounds different images into a mere fiction (e.g., a golden mountain, a centaur,) it is conscious to itself, or “inwardly conscious,”75 that such an image is the result of its own arbitrary activity. This image does not appear to the soul as a sensation, or as a thing really existing extra. Whether the images are invol-untary or voluntary, the soul has always to-oneself consciousness of a quality of its images; it looks at them either as real or as merely unreal and imaginary.

Now, this extension of consciousness through the addition of to-oneself con-sciousness is counterbalanced in Cudworth’s analysis of sense by a reduction of the self-perception or self-consciousness involved in sensible perception. As an objective consciousness, in TEIM sense is limited to a “natural sympa-thy and compassion” between an individual soul and an individual body,76 so that the soul gets a “cogitation, recognition, or vital perception and con-sciousness” of motions in the body to which it is vitally united, without getting any knowledge about them.77 The soul is a fortiori deprived of the knowl-edge of the “absolute natures” of external things: when sensing, it perceives only its “own passions” or compassions with its body, which result mediately from the actions of those individual corporeal things on its body.78 The soul’s

74 TEIM, III, IV, 5, 69-70.75 TEIM, III, IV, 5, 69.76 TEIM, III, I, 4 51. Against Plotinus’s characterization in Enneads, III, VI (The Impassivity of

the Unembodied), of sensations as being not passions (πάθη), but activities and judgments concerning passions (ἐνεργείαι περὶ παθήματα καὶ κρίσεις), Cudworth defends their defini-tion as “passive energies of the soul” (ibid.). Cf TISU, I, XXVII, 29: “the Sensible Ideas of Hot and Cold, Red and green, &c., [. . .] may be easily apprehended as Modes of Cogitation, that is, of Sensation, or Sympathetical Perception in us” (see also TISU, V, Sect. IV, 856, on sense as sympathetical perception, as well as TEIM, IV, II, 3, 85).

77 TEIM, III, I, 3, 50.78 TEIM, III, IV, 1, 62. The nature of sense consists in “idiopathy”: “by external sense we [. . .]

do not comprehend the nature of the thing as it is absolutely in itself, but only our own passion from it” (TEIM, IV, V, 1, 134; cf. TEIM, IV, II, 4, 85, where the difference between a “sentient eye” and a “crystal globe or mirror” in which the external objects are reflected

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self-perception is then as limited as its perception. Sense perception, although qua thought or self-activity it possesses something of the vital energy of the soul, constitutes such a low degree of this internal energy that Cudworth, following Plotinus, describes it as “a certain kind of drowsy and somnolent perception.”79 Sense is an energy of the soul “immersed into the body” and thus “as it were asleep.”80 Because the soul is not an “indifferent by-stander”81 relative to its body’s passions, but sympathizes with them, its life is merely a sleeping life within the compositum. Sensible ideas of this soul “as it were half asleep and half awake (anima semisomnis)”82 are themselves to be reckoned among the sort of thought consisting only in “an half-awakened perception.”83

The kind of reflexivity involved in intellectual knowledge is quite different. The mind understands the natures of external things (those natures whose knowledge cannot be given by sense perception) by “revolving within itself upon its own inward notions,”84 that is to say, according to Book IV of TEIM, by “reflecting inwardly upon itself” and “retiring into it self, that so it may the bet-ter attend to its own inward notions and ideas.”85 In the case of the intellect’s cognitive power, objective consciousness is the same as the mind’s conscious-ness of its “native and domestic” ideas.86 Self-consciousness does not differ then from looking into one’s own interiority. When perceptions are “awakened” instead of being “cloudy and confounded” as they are in sense,87 the intellect has the knowledge of the things themselves “within itself,”88 it comprehends things by comprehending itself.89

lies in the living eye’s being “conscious or perceptive of [. . .] its being variously affected” from the outside).

79 TEIM, III, II, 4, 56 (cf. III, II, 1, 53).80 Ibid. Those expressions are translated by Cudworth from Plotinus, Enneads, III, VI, 6

(ψυχή εὑδουσή, ἐν σώματι ψυχή).81 TEIM, III, II, 3, 55.82 TEIM, III, II, 4, 56.83 TEIM, IV, III, 5, 105.84 TEIM, IV, III, 3, 103.85 TEIM, IV, I, 4 and 6, respectively 77 and 78.86 TEIM, III, II, 4, 57 (cf. IV, I, 2, 74, for the characterization of innate ideas—which are for

Cudworth proleptic ideas—as “something domestic of its own” for the soul; IV, III, 2, 103).87 TEIM, III, II, 4 and 2, respectively 56 and 55. Cf. TEIM, IV, III, 4, 104: “the awakened mind or

intellect revolving its own inward ideas”; TEIM, IV, III, 14, 116: “awakened energy, as intel-lections are.”

88 See i.a. TEIM, III, III, 4, 60.89 See TEIM, IV, V, 2, 135.


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In the Cartesian doctrine, the unification of sensible ideas and intellectual ideas qua ideas results from the identification of thought with conscious-ness. From Cudworth’s viewpoint, this risks a tyrannical usurpation of the cognitive function of ideas by modifications of the soul which cannot at the same time be intellections of the essences of things. In order to prohibit any such perversion, one must distinguish different kinds of self-consciousness, the one pertaining to the soul’s consciousness in sense, the other pertaining to the soul’s consciousness in reflexive knowledge. Conscious perception by the intellect involves a superaddition90 of something to conscious perception in sense: there is “more taken notice of” in the intellectual perception of the individual corporeal things than in their sensible perception,91 and this sur-plus cannot be derived from sense itself, because sense has no consciousness of it. In sense perception of an external object, the soul is conscious both of things which affect it from this object (colours, figures, motions, etc.) and of its being affected by them. In intellectual perception of the same object, the soul is conscious of things (the logical relations between the several parts of this external object) of which sense is not conscious.92 Therefore, for Cudworth, the conclusion must be that those additional things perceived in the external object which the soul does not notice in sense perception can be known only from within the soul itself. What the intellectual perception is conscious of in the external object is primarily what the mind is conscious of within itself: it is known by the mind’s reflecting upon itself.

On this topic, Cudworth incorporates both the thesis he takes from Aristotle’s De Anima that “actual knowledge is in reality the same with the thing known, or the idea of it,”93 and Plotinus’s assertion in the Fifth Ennead that “the

90 I borrow this term from TEIM, IV, II, 2, 84 (the “mind or intellect superadded to [the] living eye or seeing mirror”—that is to say, to the “seeing or perceptive mirror or looking-glass” formerly distinguished from a non-perceptive mirror or looking-glass consisting merely in a “crystal globe”). See also TEIM, IV, II, 4, 86 (“the mind or intellect being superadded to this sentient eye, etc.”).

91 TEIM, IV, II, 14, 97.92 See in TEIM, IV, II, 4, 85-87, the example of the different perceptions by sense and by intel-

lect of “some ingenious piece of mechanism,” such as a watch.93 Cudworth’s translation and gloss in TEIM, IV, I, 3, 76 for De Anima III, c. 7, 431a1-2: “Τὸ

δ’αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν ἐπιστήμη τῷ πράγματι.” Other excerpts from De Anima III, c. 4, 430a4-6, and c. 5, 430a19-20, asserting the same identity between that which knows and that which is known, are quoted and translated in TEIM, IV, V, 2, 135.

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immediate objects of intellection are not without the mind that understands.”94 In TEIM he combines those two theses with Boethius’s comparison in De con-solatione philosophiae (V, Prosa IV, 31-32) of the intellectual comprehension of an individual thing with “an eye elevated to a higher station, and from thence looking down.”95 The mind’s “descending” perception of external objects is, first of all, the mind’s reflexive knowledge of itself and of its ideas.96 Those ideas indeed are “nothing but modifications of the mind itself,”97 but this does not mean for Cudworth that as conscious events in the mind they can-not be differentiated from sensible ideas. (The Cudworthian mind, unlike the Cartesian mind, is not the whole of the soul, but rather that “superior, interior noetical part” of the soul “which is free from all passion or sympathy.”)98 The meaning here is that universals are mental objects from which the essences of individual things can be known: the mind’s “own ideas” are its “immediate objects,” while individual things comprehended under them are only “second-ary objects” for intellectual knowledge.99

Cudworth’s distinction between a perception (sense perception) at the same level as the thing perceived and a perception (intellectual perception) exerted from an elevated station supposes different degrees of consciousness and self-consciousness, as opposed to the Cartesian attribution of uniform consciousness to all kinds of cogitation as their essence. Egalitarianism has no place in the common definition of all psychic phenomena as manifesta-tions of a vital energy, because the soul’s vital energy has degrees. The “pure noetical energies” of intellectual perceptions are more real and substantial than the “passive and sympathetical energies” of adventitious perceptions; the ontological or modal status in the soul of intelligible ideas is not that of phan-tasms, so that the self-reflexivity of the knowing soul cannot be the same sort of self-perception as the one included in the sensations of the soul “slumber-ing” in its body.100 Such a gradation leaves room for another manifestation of the to-oneself consciousness. When intelligible essences and relations, instead of mere sensible qualities, are the objects of perception, the soul is conscious

94 TEIM, IV, I, 3, 76. The Plotinian assertion translated by Cudworth constitutes partially the title of the Fifth Tractate in the Fifth Ennead: That the Intellectual Beings are not Outside the Intellectual Principle (Enneads, V, V).

95 See TEIM, III, III, 1, 58.96 TEIM, IV, III, 13, 114.97 TEIM, III, III, 4, 60.98 TEIM, IV, III, 13, 113.99 TEIM, IV, III, 13, 114.100 TEIM, IV, VI, 10, 149.


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to itself that sense has no conscious perception of them, that their perception is different and only requires reflecting upon oneself. In the same way as the to-itself conscious soul differentiates in itself what is purely imaginary from what is an object of sensation, it differentiates what is known by intelligible ideas from what is perceived by phantasms.101 The mind is then “naturally conscious of its own active fecundity” and of the inherence in itself of the criterion for objective knowledge.102

4 Self-Consciousness and the “I Myself”

The gradation of consciousness from sensible perceptions to “objective ideas of the mind,” which are purely “several modifications of intellect,”103 and to the additional to-oneself consciousness linked to the latter does not exhaust for Cudworth the degrees of self-consciousness. Cudworth’s A Treatise of Freewill, published by John Allen in 1838, requires going farther still, as do his other (still unpublished) writings on the matter of liberum arbitrium.104 I turn now to this part of Cudworth’s work, upon which, if I have read them correctly, both Thiel and Lähteenmäki ground their interpretation of

101 See TEIM, IV, I, 8, 80: “if we reflect on our own cogitations of these things [sc. objects which cannot be perceived by phantasms], we shall sensibly perceive that they are not fantastical, but noematical.”

102 TEIM, IV, I, 6, 79.103 TEIM, IV, I, 4, 76. See TEIM, IV, IV, 7, 128, for the thesis that “all particular created intellects

are but derivative participations of [the first intellect],” of which “the intelligible essences (rationes) and verities of things” are “nothing but modifications.”

104 See above note 63. TFW (London, Additional Manuscript 4978) as well as the yet unpub-lished London, Additional Manuscripts 4979-4982, are those texts which I alluded to pre-viously where Cudworth argues that the definition of personality requires a form of consciousness in man beyond rational consciousness. For the history of Cudworth’s unpublished writings, see J.A. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth. An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1951), Appendix, 107-113. Passmore’s comments on manuscripts on free will are on pages 110-113; quotations of some passages from those specific manuscripts can be found passim in chapter 5 of his book. Yet the most abundant quotations are made in S. Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’. 1640–1740 (Cambridge, 1995), 130-147. The ‘Summary’ annexed as an Appendix to Manuscript 4981 (‘On the Nature of Liberum Arbitrium’) has been printed with a presentation by J.-L. Breteau in The Cambridge Platonists in Philosophical Context, ed. G.A.J. Rogers, J.M. Vienne, and Y.C. Zarka (Dordrecht, 1997), 217-231. Many extracts from the manuscripts on free will are also quoted in an unpublished PhD thesis by A. Thévenet (Ralph Cudworth et les fondements de la morale, 2 vols, Université Blaise Pascal de Clermont-Ferrand, 2007).

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self- consciousness in Cudworth. For Thiel and Lähteenmäki, Cudworth’s conception of self- consciousness is limited to self-determination, that is to say for Thiel to man’s “practical self-relation”105 and for Lähteenmäki to the conscious subject’s “explicit awareness of being in control of her actions.”106 In my view, the texts on which their interpretation is based introduce another and higher degree of self-consciousness, not the unique self-consciousness admitted by Cudworth. Besides the degree of self-consciousness reached when conscious understanding grasps the essences of things,107 a new and higher level of the human soul’s self-mastery can be achieved, without which no one could be considered as a moral agent.108 Thanks to this new kind of self- consciousness, rational deliberation on actions will attain another dimension, participating in man’s ethical self-formation instead of being merely some piece or other of discursive reasoning.109

Cudworth’s aim, in his ethical manuscripts, is to deduce from the ontological division between matter and life “another Psychologicall Hypothesis” directed mainly against the scholastic division of the rational soul into two faculties, understanding and will, which fails to save “the Phaenomenon of Freewill.”110 At the core of Cudworth’s planned new psychology is a redefinition of “what is commonly called Will,” so that this word is “taken properly” instead of being misused as it is in faculty psychology.111 To define the will as a rational appetite

105 Thiel, ‘Cudworth and Seventeenth-Century Theories of Consciousness’, 94. See also U. Thiel, ‘Hume’s Notions of Consciousness and Reflection in Context’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 2 (1994), 75-115: Thiel highlights (94) that the duplication or self-relation included in consciousness according to Cudworth must not be equated with “individual reflection,” “which is possible only on a higher, rational level of life.”

106 Lähteenmäki, ‘Cudworth on Types of Consciousness’, 27. It should be noted that, even though they are the source from which Thiel and Lähteenmäki draw their restrictive interpretation on self-consciousness, neither of these two commentators gives a broad range of quotations from the texts dealing with self-determination in Cudworth. Also, Darwall’s very helpful development on this topic (The British Moralists, 109-148) is not mentioned in Lähteenmäki’s later article.

107 In TEIM, III, II, 1, 54, Cudworth qualifies knowledge/understanding/intellection as mas-tery and conquest. He refers this qualification to Plotinus: see Enneads, IV, VI (Perception and Memory), 2—“to be conquered” is Cudworth’s translation for κρατεῖσθαι.

108 On this topic of the soul’s self-mastery and self-conquest, see ‘Summary’, 222.109 For this change in the status of deliberative reasoning when it is placed under the control

of the soul’s self-power, see the qualifications added to it by self-determination, for instance in TFW, X, 178-179 (e.g., “more intensely considered, and more maturely deliberated”).

110 ‘Summary’, 221.111 Ibid., 222.


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makes it necessarily consequent to “the last dictate and resolution” of the intel-lect, while what is sought is its recognition as a “Self-Power” independent of understanding.112 A Treatise of Freewill denounces a series of absurdities and contradictions that follow out of the “vulgarly received psychology” of the two rational faculties, understanding and will.113 The mutual exclusion of the cognitive and motive natures of those faculties (“understanding hath noth-ing of will in it, and will nothing of understanding in it”) implies that acts or operations respectively attributed to understanding and to will can only be tautological. The understanding understands, the will wills: such attributions mean nothing, except a nonsense comparable to the faculty of walking walks and the faculty of speaking speaks.114 Moreover, scholastic psychology is unable to escape circular arguments about which mental act (either the act of the understanding or the act of the will) gets preference over the other for the role of “beginner and first mover of all actions.”115 Any hypothesis that allows pre-cedence in the rational soul either to understanding or to will is led to stumble over a reversal of roles, so that the Aristotelian problem of the practical prime mover in the soul,116 to which faculty psychology attempts to give a solution, remains unsolved. In the wake of this endless alternating, the alleged essential difference of the acts of the two faculties is denied: in the interchangeable role of first mover, the will must move the soul “understandingly,” and reciprocally the understanding must do that “willingly.”117

112 Ibid., 221. Cf. TFW, VI, 169.113 TFW, V-VII, 166-171.114 For this critique, see TFW, V, 167 and VII, 170. In the Objectiones Tertiae, Objectio II (AT VII,

174), Hobbes’s refutation of the Cartesian inference sum res cogitans, ergo sum cogitatio as comparable to sum ambulans, ergo sum ambulatio denounces in Meditatio Secunda a con-fusion between the substance (res intelligens) and its faculty (intellectus) or the operation of its faculty (intellectio). Instead, when Cudworth introduces the comparison faculty of understanding/faculty of walking, his target is not the reification of what cannot be sub-stantial, but such a distinction between two faculties of the human soul as that which is attributed to the one cannot be attributed to the other. From this viewpoint, his position is still different from that of Hobbes, who argues against Descartes’s identification of a substance (is qui intelligit) with its faculty (intellectus) that ambulatio ambulat or facultas ambulandi ambulat analogically unearths the absurdity of the scholastic sayings intellec-tus intelligit, voluntas vult (Objectio III, AT VII, 174 and 177).

115 TFW, V, 167. For Cudworth’s critique, see TFW, VI and VII (for the argument about “an infinite and endless circuit” of the first mover, see 171).

116 TFW, VIII, 171 (τί τὸ πρώτως κινοῦν). See De Anima III, c. 10, 433a, where τὸ κινοῦν is identi-fied, not with a faculty of the soul, but with the desired object, τὸ ὀρεκτόν.

117 TFW, VII, 171.

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Interestingly, Cudworth’s main concern, regarding the unescapable absur-dities of this vulgar psychology deals with the multiplication of persons—in other words, with the annihilation of the oneness of the person or moral agent—induced by the division of the rational soul into understanding and will. It is from the viewpoint of its practical absurdity, not from that of its onto-logical difficulties as Hobbes remarks in the Objectiones Tertiae, that A Treatise of Freewill denounces the reification of understanding and will as constituting two distinct subjects for the heterogeneous acts of intellection and volition. According to Cudworth, through an application of the axiom actiones sunt suppositorum, these two faculties become in scholastic psychology “two sub-sistent things,” as if there were “two agents, and two persons, in the soul.”118 One must thus dismiss the intricate hypotheses of faculty psychology because they radically compromise the unicity and unity of the practical agent or per-son. In opposition to this psychology, for Cudworth “it is one and the same sub-sistent thing, one and the same soul that both understandeth and willeth, and the same agent only that acteth diversely.”119 The mutual exclusion of under-standing and will in the rational soul must be abandoned and replaced by a conception of the soul as an individual substance, a unique and self-identical agent that is to itself its own moral end.

The first step toward doing so consists in understanding the true signifi-cance of Aristotle’s question about the soul’s first mover. It must be under-stood not as a question about the diverse faculties of the rational soul, but as a question fundamentally concerning the “vital power, and energy which the soul displays itself in, and which in order of nature precedes all its other pow-ers, it implying them, or setting them on work.”120 The question is not that of a self-determining power in the soul, but of that which gives an individual soul a vital disposition toward moral actions. For Cudworth, morality can be defined only once it has been understood that the human soul has a desire for hap-piness which is “both a primum and perpetuum mobile” in it, “an everlasting and incessant mover.”121 A constant quantity of desire in the soul is the “centre of life”122 from which the soul’s diverse practical commitments, as it were,

118 TFW, VII, 170-171.119 TFW, VII, 170.120 TFW, VIII, 171-172.121 TFW, VIII, 173; cf. TISU, V, Sect. IV, 845-846.122 TFW, VIII, 174. See in this passage the parallel with Descartes’s supposition in his physics

(cf. Principia philosophiae, II) that “the same quantity of motion [is] perpetually con-served in the universe, but not alike in all the same bodies, but being transferred, and passing from one to other, and so, more or less, here and there.” For Cudworth, in the same


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radiate. Thus, it is only in a second stage of his argumentation that Cudworth asks a question both different from, and subsequent to, that of the prime mover, a question that corresponds to the requirement that the moral agent be one person. This question is that of “what is τὸ ἡγεμονικόν, the ruling, gov-erning, commanding, determining principle in us.”123 One can consider the human soul as self-determined only through recognizing what is in it “by necessity of nature,” starting with an immutable “stock of love and desire of good always alive.”124

Since he intends to define the principle of psychic unity in man on the model of the vital foundation of human action, Cudworth accordingly reconsiders the duality of sense/intellect. The dichotomy sensitive soul/rational soul is no better than the distinction understanding/will for saving the phenomenon of free-will. The correct dichotomy for this purpose—the dichotomy which gives rise to a new psychology—must be quite different. Cudworth contends that all the cogitative powers of the human soul, whether related to sensible percep-tions or to conceptions of the mind, are to be ranked on a scale which could be designated as “necessary nature” in the soul.125 All of them are merely lower or higher powers “necessary and natural in us.”126 External sensations, inter-nal sensations of pleasure and pain, imagination, appetites, passions, inferior reason (the selfish precepts of utility), superior reason (the moral precepts of honesty), speculative understanding, and practical understanding all belong to this hierarchy.127 Now, it is not enough to place the multiplicity of natural and necessary psychic powers onto this scale. These powers must be as it were distinguished from the soul itself as from a separate power superior to all of them. The soul itself is (rather than has) the power to reflect on all its powers: in other words, the soul is the power of reflecting on itself as a whole. Distinct from the hierarchy of nature in the soul, the soul’s supra-power to compre-hend itself together with its multiple powers, and to recollect all of them in a unity, is described in A Treatise of Freewill as a “reduplication of life in a higher degree.”128 The reason why it deserves such a qualification is that, while “all

manner that particular bodies do not conserve an alike quantity of movement but are differentiated by diverse modalities in the transferring of motion, so every particular soul diversely dispatches a given quantity of desire.

123 TFW, IX, 175.124 TFW, VIII, 174.125 Ibid.126 Ibid.127 For the enumeration of these different powers or energies of the human soul, see for

instance TFW, XVI, 193-194. See also ‘Summary’, 221.128 TFW, XIX, 201.

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cogitative beings as such, are self-conscious,”129 it is self-conscious insofar as it is self-comprehensive and self-determining.130 The two assertions, that of a higher degree of life attained by reduplication and that of the attribution of self-consciousness to all cogitative beings, are not equivalent; the second is not on the same level as the first, but on the contrary Cudworth remarks that beyond the kind of self-consciousness pertaining to all cogitative beings, there is still another kind of self-consciousness, which is not merely duplication, as self-perception (either in animal perception or in intellectual perception) is, but reduplication. What is asserted is not that self-consciousness arises only with this reduplication, but that the highest kind of self-consciousness is then attained. For Cudworth, in contrast with the degree of self-consciousness achieved when the human soul’s self-reflexivity or reflection upon itself com-prehends the whole of its powers, even the duplication inseparable from con-scious perception in sense and intellection is still related to a simple kind of self-activity of the soul. It can be deemed to be “single” self-activity compared to the “redoubled” or “reduplicate” self-activity of the self-determining soul.131

According to Cudworth, the highest level of self-consciousness belongs to the hegemonic or self-ruling soul, which gives the will its true significance as free will or self-power.132 Symmetrical to the fundamental desire that is the source of life in the soul, the ἡγεμονικόν functions as “one common focus or Center” in which all the different and constantly conflicting psychic powers may meet and be reconciled.133 The “whole soul redoubled upon it Self” and “reflected upon it Self”134 arbitrates the contests, for instance those between self-interest, or private utility, and the dictates of virtue. It is therefore by that

129 My emphasis. The whole sentence, 201, says: “We are certain by inward sense that we can reflect upon ourselves and consider ourselves, which is a reduplication of life in a higher degree. For all cogitative beings as such, are self-conscious.” To my mind, the second sen-tence explains the locution “in a higher degree,” by showing that the self-consciousness that belongs to all cogitative beings “as such” is by contrast in a lower degree, since it does not consist in a “reduplication” as the self-consciousness relevant to self-determination does.

130 On the great variety of terms used by Cudworth on the topic of the autonomy of the human agent, and for an attempt to categorize them, see Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, 141-142.

131 ‘Summary’, 220 and 221 (“Single Self-Activity of the Soul,” “a Single Self-Activity”); 222, 223, 224, 225 (“redoubled Self-active life of the Soule,” “reduplicate Self-activity,” etc.).

132 TFW, IX, 175; ‘Summary’, 222.133 ‘Summary’, 221. See TFW, XI, 182.134 ‘Summary’, 221 and 222. Cf. TFW, XII, 184: “the soul [. . .] as it were reduplicated upon itself

and so hegemonical over itself”; XIII, 185: “the soul as reduplicated upon itself, and self-comprehensive.”


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which Cudworth calls its “reflexive duplicity”135 that every human soul is con-stituted into one personality. The ἡγεμονικόν, Cudworth claims, is “that which is properly called I my Self in every man,” that according to which “every one [is] morally denominated good or bad.”136 The separation between the soul’s diverse powers, on the one hand, gathered as its necessary nature, and the hegemonic, on the other, is a division between what is merely mine and the I myself which constitutes the principle of the moral accountability of my actions.137 Even the pure perception of the understanding (the perception of truth and falsity, or of good and evil) is merely “something in us,” “something of ours,” and not “properly we ourselves.” The principle that makes every agent be what she is must be found in the soul’s government over itself as a whole. The highest-level self-consciousness, that is to say the consciousness which contains a reduplication of the soul, forms every individual soul into a moral agent, or person.138 The agent could not be acknowledged as a moral agent if nature brought about everything in her without herself contributing anything. Nature only provides a prelude to the final work: it does only a part of the work. It is the human soul qua redoubled upon itself and reflecting upon itself that makes the addition of “something of its owne,”139 something essential to the agent’s moral completion. There would be no morality without the agent’s nat-ural incompletion. The I myself is the agent’s personal superaddition to nature in her. The whole soul, with all its powers, is comparable to a matter waiting for its being informed, while the same soul, as a power of self-determination,

135 ‘Summary’, 222.136 Ibid.137 See TFW, X, 178: “I say, therefore, that the τὸ ἡγεμονικόν in every man, and indeed that

which is properly we ourselves (we rather having those other things of necessary nature than being them), is the soul as comprehending itself, all its concerns and interests, its abilities and capacities, and holding itself, as it were in its own hand, as it were redoubled upon itself [. . .]. Wherefore this hegemonicon always determines the passive capability of men’s nature one way or other, either for better or for worse. And [it] has a self-forming and self-framing power, by which every man is self-made, into what he is. And accordingly deserves either praise or dispraise, reward or punishment.” Cudworth applies to the soul’s self-comprehension Zeno’s image (a hand closed into a fist) for illustrating comprehen-sion or κατάληψις (Cicero, Academica Priora II, 145). The same image for “the whole Soule redoubled upon it Self which [. . .] comprehends it Self” is given in ‘Summary’, 221.

138 London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 4980, f. 50: “This is that where our person-ality is seated, it is the αὐτοέκαστος in every one, that which is properly called we ourselves.”

139 ‘Summary’, 224. On man’s addition to the soul’s necessary nature, see, i.a., TFW, IV, 163-164; 179; 192.

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informs itself as matter. From what she has, every agent makes what she is. But according to Cudworth the soul’s self-formative power is “an amphibious thing”140 that can lead either to a higher or to a lower moral life. The power of the soul with respect to itself, named indifferently in A Treatise of Freewill as τὸ ἐϕ’ἡμῖν, sui potestas, τὸ αὐτεξούσιον, self-power, and liberum arbitrium,141 is a power liable to be inverted into a weakness.142 While reason is impeccable and cannot act against reason, the ἡγεμονικόν or self-power of the free will, in which all the energies of our soul are “as it were summed up,”143 is that quality of the soul (or the soul itself as quality) that is capable as well of remission as of intension, as well of self-abatement as of self-improvement.144 Personality, which is the summit of the human soul’s life, exists on the condition of the possibility of this inversion. Moral individuality obtains only at the price of such a bidirectional self-formation of the soul.

Just as this new psychology divides the soul into its multiple faculties and itself (or, as it were, the whole of itself dominating them), the reduplicated self-consciousness which is the foundation of personality ensures the to-oneself consciousness a new status. Cudworth’s analysis of self-determination allows him to introduce a specific name for the consciousness to oneself : it is “inward sense,”145 or “internal sense.”146 This inner sense makes us know with certainty “that there is in us some one hegemonical,” “comprehending all the other pow-ers, energies, and capacities of our soul,”147 and that the soul as comprehending itself is able to exert more or less “self-recollection” and “self-attention.”148 Not only is the hegemonic conscious of all the powers it sums up, but the soul is also conscious to itself of this highest-level consciousness and self-consciousness. Cudworth does not limit the soul’s to-oneself consciousness to the distinction between images of sensation and imaginary images, or to the internal origin of the intellectual ideas providing the knowledge of the natures of individual bodies. The to-oneself consciousness includes the very self- comprehension and self-determination of the soul.

The phenomenon of the dream is reconsidered from this viewpoint. Indeed, the point that, without the self-comprehensive power of the hegemonic,

140 ‘Summary’, 228.141 For these different names of the hegemonic, see TFW, IX, 175-176.142 See ‘Summary’, 228: “it is a determinable power or weaknesse.”143 TFW, XVI, 193.144 See TFW, XIV, 185-186.145 TFW, X, 179; XVI, 193; XIX, 200 and 201.146 TFW, XI and XII, 183. See TISU, I, XXXVII, 46.147 TFW, XVI, 193.148 TFW, XI, 183.


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we cannot be ourselves, is paradigmatically attested by this phenomenon. Dreaming constitutes the perfect test or criterion for discerning the power of the soul to which we must refer the imputation of personal accountability for actions. This requires that all the soul’s powers be connected together: a dissociated soul cannot constitute an ethical subject. The ascription of moral terms to the agent requires that there be a unifying power which informs all the psychic powers and which gives the whole soul its personality by direct-ing all its thoughts to one and the same end. Now, when dreaming, the soul’s unifying power is suspended, so that this phenomenon makes everyone aware of the very separation between necessary nature and self-determination in her soul. When we are asleep we lack not only external sense, but also the faculty on account of which everyone forms herself into that which she is. Dreaming for Cudworth does not lead us to skepticism, but on the contrary it confirms that our self-consciousness when we are awake is not illusory. An individual is immediately conscious to herself of being awake, merely from the determination of her multiple psychic powers by her soul’s self-ruling power. Similarly, an inward sense makes everyone aware when sleeping that her self or I myself is partly lacking, that she is not completely herself. “When awake by internal sense we plainly feel ourselves to be all ourselves whereas in sleep we feel ourselves to be but half ourselves, Simple Nature without redoubled Self-activity.”149 This internal sense, when sleeping, the sense of a mutilation of the I myself, persists when awakening: the soul reflects then on the non-sense or absurdity of its dreaming thoughts, the I myself looks back upon itself as an amputated I myself. When the human soul’s reduplicated power of self- comprehension does not remain active, the dominating consciousness is that of the loss of one’s personality or of the silence of what is properly I myself.

Conclusion

Thus, besides “single” self-activity and “redoubled” self-activity, besides con-sciousness involving duplication and consciousness involving reduplication, Cudworth’s psychology leaves room for the constant psychic experience of the different modes of self-consciousness, the to-oneself consciousness. This expe-rience has degrees too: consciousness to oneself is at the highest degree when it is the internal sense of the moral nature of the human person, that is to say, when the certitude it immediately conveys concerns the very hegemonic power of the soul. That is why, in the end, in A Treatise of Freewill, what must be recognized as the “great difference” between the incorporeal substance

149 London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 4980, f. 4.

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and the corporeal substance is not merely life, or self-activity, but that kind of self-activity that is self-determination.150 Through the reduplication allowed by the self-consciousness proper to the supra-power of the soul over itself, the self can be completed as a moral object for the internal sense. Cartesian dual-ism, by being founded on self-consciousness as a general and uniform property of the thinking substance, was ill-founded for Cudworth. Not only does the immaterial or thinking substance include more than the conscious substance, but it is the self-determination of the human soul that brings ontological dual-ism to its achievement. The Summary annexed as an Appendix to London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 4981, on the nature of liberum arbitrium puts strong emphasis upon the human soul’s “duplicity”: the self-reflecting human soul is “as it were twice repeated,” since first it is simply the energy of nature displayed into a range of powers, and secondly it is “rebounding upon it Self, acting upon it Self, and determining it Self.”151 This gives its full sense to the ontological definition of life as the contrary of matter: the incommen-surability of the human soul with matter is the effect of self-comprehension par excellence. With a series of excerpts from Plotinus’s The Immortality of the Soul (Enneads IV, VII), The True Intellectual System of the Universe had already proved that the soul is unextended and indivisible by the impossibility that it be “scattered” and “dispersed into infinite multiplicity” when perceiving an external object.152 As “One thing indivisibly the Same,” the “I My Self ” was alleged in this case to be the right name for the psychic principle of the com-prehension of sensible objects. Already this I myself was known “by our inter-nal sense” to be “One and the Self same thing in us,” perceiving “both the Parts and the Whole” of the external thing.153 In the same way as he first asserted that “we are intimately conscious to our selves, that we have but only One Sensation of One Object at the same time,”154 Cudworth relies in his ethical manuscripts on the human soul’s internal sense or consciousness to itself of its self-power155 for developing the thesis that the I myself is also the proper name of the kind of self-consciousness which makes us capable of moral agency.

150 TFW, IV, 164.151 ‘Summary’, 222.152 TISU, V, Sect. III, 831. The perceiving soul is “a Monade, or one Single Substance, and not a

Heap of Substances.”153 TISU, V, Sect. III, 826.154 TISU, V, Sect. III, 825.155 See for instance TFW, X, 179, concerning the “common experience and inward sense” we

have of our self-power.

cudworth on self-consciousness and the "i myself"

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