“Content With That Little Particular Knowledge”: Margaret Cavendish on Ignorance

“Perception Presupposes Ignorance”

How does perception presuppose ignorance? As we have seen, perception involves a process of relating to others – external parts or figures, i.e., those from whom we are divided. Cavendish clearly diagnoses division as the cause of ignorance: “A division or separation of parts makes ignorance.”24placeholder Ignorance, then, should not be understood as mere cognitive failure or lack of information, but as a brute physical fact. Matter encodes ignorance in very partitions, proliferating ignorance necessarily and universally. A divided metaphysics mandates a perspectival epistemology, and a perspectival epistemology reflects a parted metaphysics.

Cavendish identifies at least three levels at which ignorance-cum-division operates:

1. Ignorance between effective parts

As discussed above, no creature can perceive another’s interior motions. Perceptive other-knowledge arises only from the ways our own interior motions reconfigure when occasioned by another’s exterior motions. As Cavendish writes, “Perception has but only a respect to the exterior figures and actions of other parts,” and thus “cannot have an infallible and thorough perception of all their interior parts and motions, which is a knowledge impossible for any particular creature to attain.”25placeholder Returning to the looking-glass example, a mirror (perhaps) patterns the face of a man, and the man’s eye patterns the mirror’s copy, but the mirror and the eye “cannot be said to have the same perception; by reason a glass and an animal are different sorts of creatures.”26placeholder When we perceive others, we gain perceptive knowledge of them, but we never share their perception. A mirror can no more be said to have a human’s perception “than the eye patterning out a tree or stone can be said to have vegetable or mineral perception.”27placeholder To borrow a phrase from Thomas Nagel, we cannot know what it is “like” to be a bat – or a tree or a mirror, for that matter.28placeholder For Cavendish, as for Nagel, we can never truly inhabit another creature’s experience.

2. Ignorance within a single creature

Just as we cannot know the other figures from whom we are divided, we cannot fully know the divided parts that comprise us. The eye is blind to the ear’s perceptions; the left hand cannot know the right. As Cavendish writes, “even one part of his body doth not know the sense and perception of another part of his body: as for example, one of his hands knows not the sense and perception of his other hand: for, as the corporeal figurative motions differ, so do particular knowledges and perceptions.”29placeholder When I join my hands together, they may perceive each other’s touch “and yet be ignorant of each other’s perception.”30placeholder My left hand feels pressure, as does my right. But neither directly perceives what the other does. Thus, internal obscurity pervades parts. Ignorant man cannot “possibly know by his exterior senses all the several and various interior motions in his own body, nor all the exterior motions of his exterior parts.”31placeholder Cavendish frequently invokes examples of divided parts and minds: not just a left hand that cannot feel the right, but a man who both hates and loves the same thing. This disunity, in her view, reveals our very material nature, and for Cavendish, also speaks against situating knowledge singularly within the brain, and precludes the possibility of unified immaterial souls.32placeholder

3. Ignorance among constitutive parts

Ignorance accompanies not only the divisions between creatures and within creatures, but also the divisions within the constitutive matter that composes every creature, despite their perfect mixture: “for, as the rational part is not, nor can be the sensitive part, so it can neither have a sensitive knowledge; no more can a sensitive part have a rational knowledge, or either of these the knowledge of the inanimate part; but each part retains its own life and knowledge.”33placeholder The rational designs, the sensitive labors, the inanimate resists, yet none grasps what the others perceive. They can enjoy a seamless cooperation despite a lack of mutual comprehension.34placeholder At times Cavendish concedes that rational matter, being subtler and more active, “may sooner have a general knowledge and information of the whole, than the sensitive.”35placeholder But rational matter never functions as a centralized, supervisory mind; it remains distributed, particulate, and only partially informed. The sensitive part likewise knows only its own motions and the exterior occasions that prompt them. The unity of constitutive parts appears functional, not epistemic. Colin Chamberlain’s interpretation of constitutive matter supports this reading. In his account, constitutive degrees are literally distinct subjects of knowledge, each bearing different perceptual and cognitive capacities. Their cooperation forms a coherent creature, but their ignorance of one another’s interior motions is structural, not incidental. Order arises because, rather than despite, an internally multiple subject.36placeholder

The Impossibility of Self-Ignorance

Cavendish sharply distinguishes perception, i.e., knowledge of others, from self-knowledge. While the former “presupposes ignorance,” the latter precludes it: “When I say that ‘ignorance is caused by division, and knowledge by composition of parts’ I do not mean an interior, innate self-knowledge… which remains in every part of particle of nature, composition and division;… nor can any part lose self-knowledge.”37placeholder Elsewhere, she lays out a more systematic claim: “An interior self-perception [cannot] be in nature, because perception presupposes ignorance; and if there cannot be a self-ignorance, there can neither be a self-perception, although there may be an interior self-knowledge.”38placeholder Drawing out this argument, we see that perception presupposes ignorance, therefore self-perception would entail self-ignorance. And since Cavendish takes as a given that self-ignorance is impossible, therefore we must also conclude that self-perception is impossible.

Why does Cavendish assume the impossibility of self-ignorance? But positively, what about the nature of self-knowledge protects it from otherwise pervasive ignorance? Sadly, she provides few clues. While Cavendish deems self-knowledge as “the ground of all particular knowledges and perception,” she never furnishes a detailed account of this ground.39placeholder Scholars disagree about the epistemic “content” and function of self-knowledge. Some argue that self-knowledge characterizes a body’s knowledge of nature’s norms or furnishes parts with “know-how.”40placeholder In both cases, self-knowledge functions as a sort of instruction manual. A heart’s self-knowledge would direct its motions to pump blood, a stone’s self-knowledge encodes how to fall. This epistemically weighty self-knowledge furnishes internal laws or norms that guides each part’s proper motions, helping to explain why hearts typically pump rather than freeze and why most stones fall rather than float – that is, helping to explain Nature’s apparent order.

Alison Peterman challenges this interpretation on both textual and philosophical grounds.41placeholder She argues the know-how reading “gets a dependency relation upside-down”: if self-knowledge is the ground of all particular knowledges, then particular knowledges depend on self-knowledge, not the reverse.42placeholder But the “know-how” interpretation renders self-knowledge a kind of particular knowledge, that of cardiac norms or rock regularities. Instead, Peterman interprets self-knowledge as something like identity. On this reading, a part’s self-knowledge simply is its being that part, a view seemingly echoed when Cavendish states “as matter cannot be divided from being matter, or self-motion from being self-motion; so, neither can self-knowledge be divided from being self-knowledge.”43placeholder In our world of parts and wholes, self-knowledge, serves as the principle of composition: it is what identifies certain parts with one composite thing.44placeholder

Cavendish’s insistence on the impossibility of self-ignorance bolsters, I think, Peterman’s case.45placeholder One could conceivably be ignorant of know-how or laws (a heart might fail to pump, a stone might not know the “rules” of falling). But one cannot be ignorant of one’s identity. Self-ignorance would be non-identity, non-being itself, a contradiction in terms. Self-knowledge is thus innate, inalienable, and definitive, while other-knowledge is external, acquired through motion, and necessarily partial. Every part perfectly knows itself while never fully knowing another. This asymmetry will prove crucial when we consider Nature as a whole.

How ignorant parts make one wise whole

As we have seen, the category of ignorance marks a potent site in the Cavendishian system where metaphysics, epistemology and mereology inextricably comingle. Yet the central question generated at this convergence remains unresolved: How can finite, ignorant parts comprise an “entirely wise” whole? I see two different paths towards an answer.

1. The paradox of ignorance: division as order

Cavendish’s philosophy is unabashedly teleological. As scholars note, Cavendish’s orients her entire natural philosophy around a desire to explain the apparent order of Nature.46placeholder The seamless choreography of starling murmurations, the dependable rhythm of heartbeats, and regularly orbiting celestial bodies philosophically motivate Cavendish to extend life, knowledge, and perception across Nature because, as she insists, “If Nature were not Self-knowing, Self-living, and also Perceptive she would run into Confusion: for their would be neither Order, nor Method.”47placeholder Matter, its attendant movements, and resulting perception protect against confusion.

But we must not mistake confusion for homogeneity – Cavendish regards undifferentiated matter as chaos. “Nature is necessitated to divide her Creatures into Kind and Sorts, to keep Order and Method.” Nature’s unified Self-knowledge alone cannot guarantee Order; regularity results from many particular knowledges: “That several sorts, kinds, and differences of Particulars, cause Order, by reason it causes Distinctions: for if all Creatures were alike, it would cause Confusion.”48placeholder

Nature seeks order, and paradoxically, ignorance proves a central means to achieve it. The argument unfolds in three steps: first, division creates difference. Second, difference prevents chaos, since a world of uniform creatures would collapse into chaos. And as we have seen, ignorance follows necessarily from division. Therefore, counterintuitively, ignorance serves as a principle of order. A wise Nature is a highly articulated Nature, and paradoxically, an ignorant one.

2. The whole of Nature supersedes her parts

Yet there might be a deeper resolution. In several passages, Cavendish seems to suggest that while infinitely dividable, Nature is never really divided:

“And thus Nature may be called both ‘individual’ as not having single parts subsisting without her, but all united in one body; as ‘dividable’ by reason she is partible in her own several corporeal figurative motions, and not otherwise: for… neither can her parts start or remove from the infinite body of Nature, so as to separate themselves from it: for there’s no place to flee to, but body and place are all one thing; so that the parts of Nature can only join and disjoin to and from parts, but not to and from the body of nature… nature is but one body, entirely wise and knowing.”49placeholder

In other words, Nature lacks an “outside.” Her parts can join and disjoin from one another, but never from her infinite body. As Cavendish observes elsewhere, Nature moves “all within herself,” not exteriously but interiorly, “so that all the motions that are in nature, are within herself.”50placeholder This claim yields a syllogism:

1. Only divided beings have other-knowledge (perception).
2. Only those with other-knowledge can experience ignorance.
3. Nature, having no external other, possesses only self-knowledge.
4. Therefore, Nature experiences no ignorance.

Nature does not overcome the ignorance of her parts but sublates them. What appears as disorder and opacity at the local scale becomes, from Nature’s infinite perspective, entirely coherent and wise. Nature, encompassing all parts within herself, knows each part perfectly because each part’s finite self-knowledge constitutes her infinite self-knowledge. On this reading, the whole enjoys primacy over parts.

Ignorance Against Anthropomorphism and Human Exceptionalism

As we have seen, a thin line divides metaphysics, epistemology, and mereology in Cavendish precisely because a thin line divides life, knowledge, matter, motion, perception, division, and ignorance. These features functionally interrelate.

Given this close interrelation, scholars have characterized Cavendish as an “animist,” “materialist,” “vital materialist,” “vitalist,” “panpsychist,” and “anthropomorphic naturalist” in turn.51placeholder All are defensible, I think, except for anthropomorphic naturalist. Below, I show how ignorance functions an important prophylactic against anthropomorphism in Cavendishian thought.

As we have seen, Cavendish’s epistemology begins from the admission of a profound limitation. She never ceases to remind us that each creature – her readers included! – knows only “that little particular knowledge” its figure affords it. Our figures prescribe and limit our perceptual worlds. By continually foregrounding the perspectival quality of creaturely knowledge, Cavendish warns against projecting our perceptual realities onto others. In this way, ignorance functions as prophylactic: recalling what we can’t know prevents us from universalizing what we do.

In fact, the charge of “anthropomorphic naturalism” reveals more about the accuser than the accused. In deploying the term, scholars implicitly index Cavendish’s categories to Anthropos, insinuating that Cavendish extends them erroneously, perhaps naively, to all matter. But Cavendish never performs this indexing. In fact, her metaphysics rehearses the reverse: knowing and perceiving matter is knowing and perceiving first, and human second: “Animate matter is the life and soul of nature, and consequently of man.”52placeholder Human form one unique effective part in Nature, but we are not uniquely unique. Our perceptual realities and knowledge form but one piece in an infinitely configuring and reconfiguring kaleidoscope whose whole no one single situated part can grasp.

Ignorance thus demands a posture of humility. It issues an injunction not only against anthropomorphism but also its attendant risk, anthropocentrism, which Cavendish takes a radical stance against for her time. She refuses to hierarchize intelligences, saying that among creatures “none can be said to be least knowing or most knowing… for there is no such thing… for, several kinds and sorts of knowledge make not Knowledge to be more or less.”53placeholder In a moving passage, Cavendish elaborates on this point and challenges those who claim that other creatures – rocks, fish, worms – have no knowledge. How can we know she asks,

“whether Fish do not Know more of the nature of Water, and ebbing and flowing, and the saltness of the Sea? or whether Birds do not know more of the nature and degrees of Air, or the cause of Tempests? or whether Worms do not know more of the nature of Earth, and how Plants are produced? or Bees of the several sorts of juices of Flowers, then Men? And whether they do not make there Aphorismes and Theoremes by their manner of Intelligence? … the Ignorance of Men concerning other Creatures is the cause of despising other Creatures, imagining themselves as petty Gods in Nature, when as Nature is not capable to make one God, much less so many as Mankind.”54placeholder

Cavendish’s radical anti-human exceptionalism stands in stark contrast to her contemporaries. Much of early modern thought remained influenced by Aristotle’s hierarchy of souls and the scala naturae of the scholastic period. Philosophers conceived of nature along a vertical axis ascending to perfection and descending to degeneracy. But Cavendish’s ethic extends along a horizontal axis, as if she detached the scala naturae from heaven and laid it on the ground.

This horizontality stands in stark contrast to Descartes, whose “beast-machine hypothesis” elevated humans and our immaterial souls above supposedly soulless animals. In fact, Cavendish picks a specific fight with Descartes who declared that animals’ seeming lack of speech “proves not merely animals have less reason than men but that they have none at all, for we see that very little is needed to talk.”55placeholder Deploying a doubled argument, Cavendish retorts that for all we know, other creatures do have speech. Perhaps, as some contemporary botanists argue, plants dialogue through a rich phytochemical lexicon of volatile organic compounds. But more fundamentally, she disagrees with Descartes that knowledge depends on language, for “it is not speech that makes sense and reason, but sense and reason makes them.”56placeholder Look, she says, at all the ways Nature manifests much wisdom wordlessly, from outer space to inside our skin: “all the motions of the Celestial Orbs” which are “not made by speech, neither is the knowledge or understanding which a man hath, when sick, as to know or understand he is sick, made by speech.”57placeholder Wise stars move wordlessly. A body acutely senses sickness without speech. Human speech is but one mode of intelligence in a cosmos teeming with alternate forms of knowledge. By attributing knowledge to spoken words, we mistake a parochial human capacity for the principle of intelligence itself.

“That Little Particular Knowledge”: Cavendish the Perspectivist

Cavendish concludes Philosophical Letter 3.43 by emphasizing the impossibility of perfect knowledge of Nature: “Whereof I shall never aspire to any such knowledge,” she writes, “but be content with that little particular knowledge Nature has been pleased to give me, the chief of which is, that I know my self, and especially that I am.”

I struggle not to read the final three words, “that I am” as an allusion, intentional or not, to Descartes’s cogito. Unlike Descartes, Cavendish’s knowledge of self arises not from eliminating doubt, but from appreciating to ignorance. Though Descartes does not develop or deploy “ignorance” as a central constructive category, one could argue that the Cartesian project is premised on the possibility of replacing ignorance with clear and distinct knowledge, whereas Cavendish foregrounds the necessity of ignorance. The Cartesian world revolves around the unified human mind while Cavendish’s constellates around the infinite, pluriform, and unknowable weirdness of many minds.

Many scholars read Cavendish as a skeptic, fairly invoking her insistence that creatures cannot fully know their interior natures or that of others, our inability to make definitive claims about others’ perception, as well as her critique of experimental philosophy, notably her attack on Boyle.58placeholder On this reading, Cavendish adopts a moderately skeptical position: given our ignorance, we can make reasonable conjectures, but never truly access the nature of reality.

But this reading deflates the function and value of ignorance in her system. Ignorance reveals as much as it conceals. It demarcates not simply where knowledge fails, but where it varies – where multiplicity itself becomes fully conceivable, though not fully perceptible. Our ignorance performs the obverse of nature’s diversity as if by photo negative. In this sense, ignorance is epistemically productive: to know that we are ignorant is to ascertain that nature is divided, that division generates heterogeneous forms of understanding, and that heterogeneity shores up Nature’s order. Cavendish rehearses a subtly apophatic epistemology, an “unsaying” that discloses the world by acknowledging what cannot be said. Her thought echoes the words of the much later American philosopher, Stanley Cavell: “We think skepticism must mean that we cannot know the world exists…Whereas what skepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.”59placeholder For Cavendish, as for Cavell, where knowledge ends, acknowledgement begins. Where one perspective fails, many others flourish.

As such, I suggest that “perspectivism” may offer a more faithful and characterization of Cavendish’s core epistemological (and metaphysical) commitments. Across disciplines, perspectivism names a theory of situated, plural, and irreducibly partial knowledge. Perspectivists consider knowledge always as a function of the knower. Some genealogies trace proto-perspectival strands to Plato or Leibniz, Nietzsche first explicitly deploys Perspektivismus to reject epistemologies claiming a “view-from-nowhere.”60placeholder For Nietzsche, physical drives and conditions always shape knowledge acts. In the twentieth century, philosophers of science adopt perspectivism as a methodological tool to critique scientific claims to objectivity, with feminist philosophers emphasizing the embodied, material nature of all “situated knowledges.”61placeholder Across these contexts, perspectivists share a commitment to knowledge as proceeding from partial, embodied, materially conditioned vantage points. Cavendish’s insistence that perceptive knowledge and self-knowledge arise from unique figurative motions echo this commitment. For perspectivists, as for Cavendish, the partial nature of knowledge doesn’t render it false, merely situated. Her declaration that she remains “content with that little particular knowledge Nature has been pleased to give me” admits no epistemological despair. It is a recognition that universality is neither possible nor desirable. Particularity is the ground of order; ignorance is its condition.

Conclusion

In the end, ignorance functions as a structural feature, not a deficiency, in Cavendish’s natural philosophy. Ignorance is the epistemic signature of material division, marking the perspectival limits that enable rather than undermine Nature’s order. I offered two solutions to the puzzle of ignorant parts and wise wholes. First, that division, and its attendant ignorance, paradoxically produces order by preventing chaotic homogeneity. Second, that Nature as a unified whole supersedes the partiality of her constituents, subverting local ignorance into infinite self-knowledge.

For Cavendish, ignorance issues a firm injunction against both anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. Because every creature possesses only the particular knowledge its figure affords, humans cannot claim universality or supremacy. This, I suggested, makes Cavendish less a skeptic than a perspectivist: she understands knowledge as partial, embodied, and fully real. She treats the limits of perception as disclosures of nature’s multiplicity rather than simply signs of its inaccessibility. In this sense, Cavendish’s material cosmos anticipates Cavell’s thought: where knowledge ends, acknowledgment can begin.