Spirit, Body, and Pain in Anne Conway

Abstract

Carol Wayne White explains in her book that Lady Anne Conway wasbetter known for her lifelong headaches than for her profound philosophical thinking(White in The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631–1979): Reservations from a MysticalNaturalism, State University of New York Press, 2008, p. 4). By reading not onlyWhite’s, but also Sarah Hutton’s book, it is possible to say that Anne’s strongheadaches gave her a path to texts and practices that found place in her own philosophy.There are phrases repeated by her friends and family like this one: “thoughher Pains encreas’d, yet her Understanding diminish’d not” (Van Helmont in HuttonAnne Conway: A Women Philosopher, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 203).But Anne does not think the relationship between mind and body in that way. Shewrites about the union between spirit and body in human beings and animals, howbody and spirit are essentially the same, the strong bond they have. In this paper Iintend to analyse this relationship between spirit and body, and the concept of painrelated to them, in Anne Conway’s The Principles of the Most Ancient and ModernPhilosophy, in order to accept or dismiss the kind of phrases that her friends andfamily said concerning her condition. I will relate her philosophy to John ScottusEriugena’s (ca. 810–ca. 870) thought through a comparison of their understandingof the concept of pain in their metaphysics.