Pain in Conway's Lovely World

NATALIA STROK

Conferencia; 18th International Society for Neoplatonic Studies Annual Conference; 2021

Anne Conway (1631-1679) is included in the Cambridge Platonists group of seventeenth century, although she has never attended any class at that university. But Lady Conway was a close friend to Henry More, who acted as her teacher for so many years, and has known Ralph Cudworth as well. Her thought has strong influence of the Platonic trend, especially of Neoplatonism and Christian Platonists such as Origen of Alexandria. She presents an emanationist metaphysics, that is considered monist when looking to the created substance. The only work of Anne Conway that we had is The Principles of the most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, published posthumously first in Latin in 1690 and then translated from that Latin into English in 1692. The original English text is lost. She is also known for her lifelong headaches, which kept the attention of the scientific world of that moment. This biographic note can be found in her philosophy in the concept of pain or suffering, which has an important role in the spiritualization of the world (Principles Chapter VII and VIII), and is understood as something good (Mercer 2012). In this paper I propose to analyze the concept of pain, that has a fixed place in the created world, which is govern by the concepts of sympathy and love. What I intend to prove is that pain belongs only to the intelligent creature, and not even to all human beings, but only to those really intelligent. I will show why this is so and how it is related to the concept of love. With this aim I will present Conway?s metaphysics, focusing on her understanding of the created substance and its relationship to the middle substance, Christ, and the first substance, God.