Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists

Abstract

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible.

Veil of Light: The Role of Light in Cavendish’s Visual Perception

“…Indeed, she argues that this must be the case because we cannot even conceive of a body that isn't colored. 28 Allen (2019), Chamberlain (2019), and West (2022) all note that Cavendish's argument for the inconceivability of colorless bodies has one rather important inconsistency: Cavendish herself discusses the existence of transparent or clear bodies. 29 She even gives a cause of transparency in the PL: "As for Transparency, it is caused through a purity of substance, and an evenness of parts: the like is glossiness, onely glossiness requires not so much regularity, as transparency" (1664: 464).…”

“…This seems to suggest that Cavendish holds competing claims: (1) all bodies are colored, and (2) colorless or transparent bodies exist. Chamberlain (2019) hesitantly offers a solution to this problem. He posits that transparency does not entail colorlessness (Chamberlain 2019: 309).…”

“…28. See Allen (2019), Chamberlain (2019), and West (2022) for reconstructions of Cavendish's conceivability argument.…”

Cavendish, Margaret

“…Cavendish's zeal to reduce qualities to motions or to "corporeal figurative motions"whatever "motion" turns out to besuggests something like a primary-secondary quality distinction. However, she never makes or develops such a distinction, she often treats canonical primary and secondary qualities equivalently (see entry ▶ "Primary and Secondary Qualities"), and she makes some explicit claims that canonical secondary qualities are really out there in nature, especially regarding color (Chamberlain 2019).…”

Natural Philosophy, Abstraction, and Mathematics among Materialists: Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish on Light

“…For discussion of this issue, see Lascano [41] (p. 417). 16 Chamberlain [42] (p. 327, fn. 67) discusses this claim about "one thing" and notes some of the difficulties in understanding what Cavendish could mean if her proposal is to be understood metaphysically.…”