Cudworth and the Unconscious

Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate student, I took a class on the Enlightenment in which, as is to be expected, John Locke was included. My teacher was a Guenonian and a Platonist. He had no love for John Locke, and his general approach to the Enlightenment was one of a “Great Disenchantment”. One of the things that stuck with me from this class was my teacher’s observation that Locke never engaged directly with the ideas of Plato to refute them, but only with his own Neo-Platonist contemporaries, whom he found very easy to knock down indeed. No names were mentioned by my teacher. These thinkers weren’t even granted such an honour, when, if put to it my teacher could name and discourse with great enthusiasm on just about every obscure Platonic thinker from the past several millennia if he wanted to. Later I was to learn that they were called the Cambridge Platonists. K. Joanna S. Forstom in a recent book on Locke titled John Locke and Personal Identity (Bloomington Press, London, 2011, p. 78) puts the situation perfectly:

“In contemporary terms the Cambridge Platonists are failures: no philosophical theory philosophers consider true or even promising is attributed to them. Even worse, they are not famously notorious failures, where they err is usually not of concern or interest to contemporary theorists. In short the Cambridge Platonist movement failed to make the major canon of Western philosophy and so is rarely taught or discussed outside of specialist circles.”

Forstom is a Lockean. But for Locke’s Platonist contemporaries to be fobbed off like this by my teacher, a Platonist with no love for modernity, seemed to indicate that if only they had put in a little better effort, perhaps we would not be in the situation we are today: the dominance of British empiricism and subjective value. Thus, for many years I didn’t think about the Cambridge Platonists. I vaguely knew that perhaps the most interesting of them was Ralph Cudworth, who developed a strange theory of “Plastic Nature” – the idea that there was some vitalist power at work in matter operating in accordance with divine instruction to produce and reproduce entities. Thus, I left Cudworth and his friends Henry More and others to rot. They probably deserved it for being so utterly dull. Instead I became interested in Giordano Bruno and F. W. J. Schelling who seemed to have far more interesting “takes” on the Platonic heritage. And then recently I serendipitously came across two books which caused me to go back and look at Cudworth again with fresh eyes.

The first was Lancelot Law White’s The Unconscious Before Freud (Social Science Paperbacks, London, 1960, pp. 95-7), in which Cudworth is given a strange pride of place as the first “modern” thinker to outline a theory of the unconscious – totally at odds with the erasure and denial of such things by Descartes, Locke and others at the time. It would not be until Schelling that the unconscious would become a modern concept, and then of course, it would be most closely associated with Freud and his Id, the touted “third wound of modernity” after Copernicus and Darwin, which transformed human beings from conscious and rational animals to, at their base, unconscious erotic animals. The second book was D. S. Schindler’s very recent Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Nature of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame IN, 2017). Schindler outlines a Platonic attack on the Lockean concept of freedom and liberty as nothing but subjectivism and appetitive slavery.

 The text doesn’t mention Cudworth or the Cambridge Platonists, as far as I can recall, but it is certainly an eccentricity that has managed to stir up more than a few conservatives in America who of course like Locke and the liberal tradition an awful lot. Schindler’s book comes hot on the heels of a selection of more popular texts such as Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, London, 2018) that also grants Locke a key place in the history of our current disenchantment with the consumer myopia, atheism, futurelessness, and resentment our political systems have turned into. Schindler argues that Lockean freedom is nothing more than appetitive freedom, which from a Christian-Platonist perspective means slavery and a “diabolical” turning away from the Good qua God. Most importantly he sees the Lockean emphasis on potentiality over actuality as breeding nothing but an attempt to escape from the world into fantasy when the world is unable to be forcibly changed into what one desires it to be. A British Radical Orthodoxy thinker like John Milbank (see recently here on this blog) might see this as part of the nominalist-voluntarist legacy of a “certain middle ages” we are still living through. One in which infinite possibility, the plenitudinousness of God, is mistaken for infinite power and that power is then stolen from God for Man to do as he pleases.

 Schindler might begin to seem like the Cambridge Platonist we should have had. Thus, like A. N. Whitehead, I am drawn to Schindler for being an eccentric “Baroque” thinker out of place today – the sort of person who would deploy Platonism against Locke as though the former was still a valid position and the latter’s assumptions about the tabula rasa and subjectivity as freedom, not yet beyond questioning in mainstream discourse. Usually if you want an attack on the subject or the sovereign liberal “person” you have to go down into the depths of Continental Philosophy’s post-humanist atheists – the children of Heidegger such as Foucault with his The Order of Things (Routledge, London, 1986, esp. p. 387) that claims that Enlightenment Man is but some passing historical construct, and Roberto Esposito’s Two: The Machine of Political Theology (Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2015) in which the person is taking to be nothing but a device of political control. Against this Esposito weaponizes a line of thinkers from Averroes to Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze who have troubled or deconstructed the idea of the individual subject with its own personal ideas, will, property and guilt before the law. We recently wrote a review of it here.

Thus, Schindler inspired me to go back to Cudworth and his associates to see what might have been. I was instantly struck by how, although he was a proddie, Cudworth is already a Radical Orthodox thinker. This is not simply because of his and his contemporaries’ turn back to the early Christian Platonists. In a sermon preached before the House of Commons in 1647 Cudworth declared that “there is nothing contrary to God in the whole world, nothing that fights against him but Self Will” and contrasts the twin “deformities” of considering either a “Baby God” that is too sweetly like ourselves to the point of mere projected kitsch, and an equal “shaping him out according to the Model of our selves, when we make him blind, dark, impetuous Self Will” (The Cambridge Platonists, ed. E. A. Patrides, Edward Arnold Publishers, London, 1969, pp. 101-2). If only Cudworth had turned such observations against Locke’s conception of the individual human Self Will!

However, what I was truly drawn to in Cudworth, through the Lancelot White book, was his theory of the unconscious. Here I am going to lay it out and develop it. White was so impressed by it that he wondered, should history have been different, whether “a Christian post-Cudworth school of scientific thought might have enjoyed the world fame of Marx and Freud together, and more. But they preferred the status quo” (The Unconscious Before Freud, p. 97). There’s a little too much of the once popular but now generally refuted Draper and White “warfare hypothesis” between science and religion here, but what a different world it might have been if the Cambridge Platonists had come to dominate instead of their contemporary, Lockean empiricism.

As George Makari illuminates in his wonderful Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (W. W. Norton and Co, London, 2015), the history of modern understandings of consciousness, mind and the unconscious are very tangled. French thinkers like Voltaire had a great deal of trouble trying to translate Locke’s disinfected “mind” into French, as they only had âme (soul) and esprit as options, and conscience meant pretty much the same as it does in English – one’s moral conscience. Mentalité for a way of thinking was possible, but there was no term for what was thinking and perceiving without immaterial connotations (pp. 214-8).

As Makari (p. 218) observes, this may have been both a good and a bad thing: “watched by authorities, some radicals may have taken comfort in such double-talk” – it enabled the French Enlightenment thinkers to hide behind terms that conveyed elements of the Scholastic anima and spiritus, while attempting to divest them of such meanings. Moreover, as White (Unconscious Before Freud, pp.66-7) long ago pointed out French did not have a term for the unconscious, inconscient, until the 1950s and even in the late 19^th century it was very uncommon. The Germans on the other hand had it much easier. Bewusstlos and Unbewusstsein are first attested by one E. Platner in 1776 and were very common in German by 1850.

 Nonetheless, if we look to Cudworth and his 1678 “Digression Concerning the Plastick Life of Nature” (True Intellectual System of the Universe, Thomas Tegg, London, 1845, Vol. I) he deploys conscious (pp. 215-16, 244-84 passim), and inconscious (pp. 215, 260, 272-3, 283) as though they were common concepts without a second thought. He seems to have almost no comprehension that what he is doing is revolutionary, only that the essay, which occurs as an excursus in the middle of his massive but very repetitive TIS might be seen as an important part of it rather than some mere “wen” or “excrescence” that had grown on the text (see section 1 of the text).

In order to understand this, it is necessary to look at the way in which Cudworth structures his exploration. It is an exercise in bringing together the ideas of Plato, Plotinus and Aristotle. No one else is quoted, there are no Christian elements to the essay, no consciousness of history. When he speaks of “atheism” he means it only in the sense that Aristotle would in the Physics and its defence of arguments from design against the atomists and Ionian thinkers (sections 6-7). The only time he breaks with this a single reference to microscopes (section 2), and in section 17, wherein his theory of the unconscious is properly laid out, in order to mention William Harvey and Descartes in an attempt to refute the idea that mechanicism can explain all the workings of animals and human bodies.

Cudworth is thus writing as though he is an ancient Neo-Platonic commentator on these ideas, bracketing the investigation to very certain limits so that he can partake in the arguments as were. The result of this is that a great deal of the text is large block quotes of these thinkers and then paraphrastic translations of their Greek to bring them into line with his own argument. Thus, what he is doing more than anything is translating Neo-Platonism into English. As he assumes that Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus are already correct, but might have certain minor contradictions with one another, he simply renders their ideas in English. One might joke that he is unconscious of his actions. Thus, in section 16, the Greek term synaesthesis (to feel together) becomes con-sense, and thereafter consciousness (and with synonyms: animadversion and self-perception) and that is that. Yet, as Cudworth proceeds, in section 16 of the essay he includes this quotation from Plotinus (Enneads III, 8,3):

“If any will needs attribute some kind of apprehension or sense to nature, then it must not be such a sense or apprehension as is in animals, but something that differs as much from it as the sense or cogitation of one in a profound sleep differs from that of one who is awake.”

He then adds (section 16) Plotinus’ observations that Nature is engaged in an act of silent self-contemplation (theoria apsophos), producing a spectacle (theama) unto itself. Nature is philotheamon, which he glosses as “a lover of spectacles or contemplation” [sic]. Nature has a “certain dull and obscure idea” of what it is doing. This is very interesting. Through much of the essay prior to this Cudworth presents the model, which in the tradition of Aristotle and Plato, utilises the language of craftsmanship and design to understand Nature. Nature becomes a craftsman at work upon matter, utilising techne (artistry) to reveal the will of the divine Mind (sections 8-10). Nature is depicted as a “drudge” – a lowly tradesman who only knows what to make because the architect instructs him to. Nature is barely conscious; it does what it is told.

Cudworth favours this model because he does not want to endorse the idea that God is responsible for the emergence of every particular entity in Nature – this would be too much – “operose, solicitous and distractious…bringing him down to mean offices” (sections 4-5). Instead the vitalist “plastic power” that is Nature per se is contracted to do this work. Unlike the human craftsman it never consults or deliberates – it never goes back on what it has carved or made, it never second-guesses (section 10). This is because it follows the instructions of the great Mind to the letter, and the great mind is never wrong, even if matter is far from perfect: “sometimes frustrated and disappointed”, a “bungle” or “fumble” (section 4).

 This is Cudworth’s reply to the “dead and wooden world” of the rising mechanicism of the 17^th c. It is highly reliant on the gap in knowledge where vitalisms often hide. So too is it extremely territorial regarding atheism. The possibility that the oikonomia of providence could operate of its own immanent accord, rendering the need for Mind or God irrelevant, seems to frighten him a little. This is not surprising as the subtitle to the True Intellectual System is Wherein All the Reason of the Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted and Its Impossibility Demonstrated. Thus, we seem Platonism already on the backfoot by this stage, displaying its weaknesses that the Enlightenment would take advantage of in order to banish the argument from design and the need for a God to run the world. Thus, Cudworth strangely grants agency to Nature, but only so that it obeys God/Mind without question. One might be reminded of the old Akkadian myth of man being created to do all the dirty work for the gods on Earth because the gods could not be bothered. There is certainly an ergo-cosmic aspect to this, which our Marxist friends would likely have much to say about. How easy it would be to construct a Gnostic myth in which nature slowly becomes more conscious and rebels against Mind/God to do as it pleases.

However, something very odd happens. Instead of simply calling nature “vegetative” and moving on, as he has done previously in the essay, Cudworth takes the Plotinus given above quote about “profound sleep” and utilises it to look at how human consciousness often seems to work without being conscious. In section 17 we read:

“that there may be some vital energy without clear and express synaesthesis -“con-sense” and “consciousness, animadversion, attention,” or ” self-perception,” seems reasonable upon several accounts. For those philosophers themselves, who made the essence of the soul to consist in cogitation, and again, the essence of cogitation in clear and express consciousness, cannot render it in any way probable, that the souls of men in all profound sleeps, lethargies and apoplexies, as of also embryos in the womb, from their very first arrival thither, are never so much as one moment without expressly conscious cogitations, which if they were, according to the principles of their philosophy, they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being. Now, if the souls of men and animals be at any time without consciousness and self-perception, then it must needs be granted that clear and express consciousness is not essential to life.”

Here we have the first “modern” discourse on the unconscious. Why would a Platonist have gotten here when others had not? Quite simply because the Platonists had always known that there is a “darkness above” and a “darkness below” the usual range of human consciousness. Plotinus (Enneads I. 4.10. 13-16) utilised the analogy of a mirror image to illustrate the point that thinking can go on without our awareness of it. The mirror is “broken” by us being busied on other things, and yet thought continues. Another major factor for both Cudworth and Plotinus is the tripartite Aristotelian soul: vegetative, animalic and rational are all present in human beings. As the mystic Rumi was to say God sleeps in plants, wakes up in animals, becomes conscious in Man.

The Neo-Platonic representation of the cosmos as an “emanation” rather than as hypostatised parts also encourages the idea that the cosmos goes from the divine mind at the top down through decreasing consciousness to mere unconscious matter at the bottom. Plotinus (Enneads III. 8.2. 30-34) even speaks of a “dead” logos – the “forming principle” in Nature that gives shapes and qualities to entities but does not move itself or give rise to further forming principles. This is the end of the line for emanation. In this “life” or Nature is but a lower unconcious aspect of Nous (Mind), part of the All’s diffusion into logoi spermatikoi (seminal formative principles) – which “squander” unity by bringing about individual entities through externalisation and extension away from Mind. Thus, there is no “cut” between Mind and Nature and entities, simply a spectral fading of one into another and decreasing consciousness. Within the microcosm of the human being Cudworth speaks of this as a “knot”:

“That vital sympathy by which our soul is united and tied fast, as it were in a knot, to the body, is a thing that we have no direct consciousness of, but only in its effects. Nor can we tell how we come to be so differently affected in our souls, from the many different motions made upon our bodies. As likewise we are not conscious to ourselves of that energy whereby we impress variety of motions and figurations upon the animal spirits of our brain in our fantastic thoughts. For though the geometrician perceive himself to make lines, triangles, and circles in the dust with his finger, yet he is not aware how he makes all those same figures first upon the corporeal spirits of his “brain, from whence notwithstanding, as from a glass, they are reflected to him, fancy being rightly concluded by Aristotle to be a weak and obscure sense….We have all experience of our doing many animal actions non-attendingly, which we reflect upon afterwards; as also that we often continue a long series of bodily motions, by a mere virtual intention of our minds, and as it were by half a cogitation.”

Thus, instead of the perpetual intentionality of constant conscious perception Aristotle (which would later be picked up by phenomenology), we have a “virtual intention”. The virtual is a scholastic term for what something is capable of, but might not be actualised. To apply it to intentionality seems simply to mean that we might either become conscious of these actions or not. Cudworth explains this, declaring that this lower “plastic” part of the soul is the one acting rather than our conscious mind:

“There is also another more interior kind of plastic power in the soul, (if we may so call it) 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, in which oftentimes it seems to be surprised with unexpected answers and repartees, though itself were all the while the poet and inventor of the whole fable.”

However, Cudworth does not develop this amazing and original observation. What would happen if we were to trouble Cudworth’s “knot” but shifting the “inconscious” and habit a little higher than he did? What if, in fact, human beings are not conscious the majority of the time, but simply going through the motions, repeating learned phrases, actions and patterns of thought? This can of worms could result in something like a Platonic Dennetianism, where, instead of the language of mechanicism – that people are just unconscious “robots” running an “app” telling them that they are conscious – we would have Nature and habit all the way up. The fact is that I am not entirely offended by this idea. Like Voegelin (and Heidegger and Deleuze too), I think that “thought is rare”. Some days I am almost convinced that Gurdijeff was right- that most people, most of their lives (including yours truly!) are simply walking around asleep.

In the same way we might ask what would happen if we shifted the “knot” a little lower – rendering Nature with slightly more consciousness than Cudworth is willing to grant the animals when he refuses to believe in “animal fancy”? In section 14 he declares that although spiders with their webs and bees with their combs might seem to be very clever, he agrees with Aristotle that they are not conscious and that:

 “to affirm that brute animals do all these things by a knowledge of their own, and which themselves are masters of, and that without deliberation and consultation, were to make them to be endued with a most perfect intellect, far transcending that of human reason ; whereas it is plain enough that brutes are not above consultation, but below it, and that these instincts of nature in them are nothing but a kind of fate upon them.”

One might contrast this with the very Platonic Church Father Origen (First Principles, III. 1.3), who believed that many animals, especially bees, spiders and dogs possessed an “incipient reason” of their own, or Giordano Bruno’s Neo-Platonic affirmation of metempsychosis (reincarnation) which renders humans, flies, fleas, oysters, plants and anything else that has movement (and therefore a soul) to possess the same “specific and generic essence”. In the end Bruno’s only real difference between them, as is set out in the Cabala of Pegasus (Yale Uni Press, New Haven, 2002, p. 54) is that some humans keep their past life memories (including of being animals), whereas the animals do not. But how is he to know this? As Roberto Esposito (Living Thought, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2012, pp. 69-70) says of Bruno, the idea that the animal is part of the human and the human part of the animal is the “deep core” of his whole philosophy. Eventually we are going to realise (and perhaps in Two: The Machine of Political Theology Esposito almost got there as we said in this review), that the Platonic thinkers are always the most disturbing thinkers. They blur the gap between conscious and unconscious, between man and animal, between personal mind and transcendent mind beyond persons and ego.

We may speculate all we like (and the more the better!), but by the end of “The Plastick Life of Nature” Cudworth has seemingly even forgotten that the conscious soul we have has a lower “plastic” unconscious part when he begins speaking about the world-soul’s relation to the cosmic Mind. He is not sure whether this “plastic power” is simply the lowest part of the cosmic Mind, or if it is in fact a “Life” of its own that is separate, but requires a separate cosmic mind to give it instructions (section 21). He never answers this problem. To avoid hypostition of the Two, which would result in simply immanent Nature ruling itself, however conscious, it seems obvious that he should have chosen the first option. By section 25 we find him reduced to wondering about the mereology of the “plastick power” – whether each planet might have one of its own power that functions for all the animals, plants and so on upon it in “greater parts of the universe”. I must say that this speculation on a cosmos of world-souls reminded me more than a little of the seething planet in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. Perhaps the Earth itself is a kind of Solaris. Cudworth is a post-Copernican Platonist, but so too was Bruno of course. The Neo-Platonic tradition never really had a problem with the idea of a infinite cosmos, because it already believed in the infinite plenitudinousness of creation anyway. And yet, when it comes to the “inconscious”, Cudworth fails to realise the importance of his insight and history has entirely glossed over it and forgotten in (with the exception of a few people like Lancelot White).

 It also bears mentioning that the 1969 Patrides edition of The Cambridge Platonists for The Stratford Upon Haven Library that I have (one of the few publications of CP material at all in the past century), cuts out sections 17 and 18 in order to fit more material into the book. On the bottom of page 309 of the volume we simply get a footnote that reads: “The next two sections – not reprinted here – attempt to demonstrate the reasonableness that “there may be some Vital Energy without clear and express synaesthesis, con-sense and consciousness”. When I saw this I was utterly astounded. We might submit that the end of section 17 and all of section 18 are about William Harvey, Descartes and mechanicism and now look quite woeful for assuming that no one would ever find material causes to explain the workings of hearts in human and animal bodies, and that only an immaterial vitalism might explain them. Yet the editor does not seem to have realised at all that what Cudworth is talking about is the unconscious and that this was a revolutionary concept.

Perhaps if Cudworth had developed his ideas, he might have ended up with a panentheism like Giordano Bruno’s in which there are no substances and no individual minds or persons. Maybe like Schelling he might have historicised this “unconscious” part of the great Mind as God, the Will that Does Not Will. Schelling’s attempt to overcome Kant’s division of the world into subjects and objects cut off from one another relied upon the evolution of this unconscious towards an eventual reunification through the evolution and emergence of human consciousness in a final millenarian transformation of the cosmos into “alchemical gold”.

However, Cudworth’s system is anhistorical. The cosmos goes on as is without progress or decline. It may not be a “machine”, but it is a sort of homeostatic organic entity that never changes. A century of proto-Darwinian ideas from Hume, Diderot, Goethe and others and secular millenarianisms from Bacon, Fichte and Hegel about the “adulthood of man” would put Schelling in a very different situation when he came to outline his ideas. In the mid-17^th c. the world, however, vitalistic it might be imagined to be, was not yet “dynamic”. By the 19^th century vital force had an evolutionary history, so that by the end of that century the pop thinkers of the time were Nietzsche and Bergson, one emphasising the violent, wasteful and overabundant nature of the “eternal return” of the will to power, and the other reading life and feeling as an epiphenomenon of time’s execrable arrow forwards. These days the legacy of these thinkers is to be found in the recent obsession with “vibrant matter” and so on in the students of Gilles Deleuze, wherein chaos theory “complexity” and negentropy is seen to provide a scientific opportunity to reinsert vitalism.

What shall we do with poor old Cudworth then? I think that the key is in section 13 of the essay, a first salvo into the question of the unconscious, which is illustrated in relation to the idea of “habits” in human beings. In short what becomes unconscious habit in man is the level of (un)consciousness in “Plastick Nature”. Cudworth says:

“So that the same thing may be said of these habits, which was said before of nature, that they do not know, but only do. And thus we see there is no reason why this plastic nature (which is supposed to move body regularly and artificially) should be thought to be an absolute impossibility, since habits do, in like manner, gradually evolve themselves in a long train or series of regular and artificial motions, readily prompting the doing of them, without comprehending that art and reason by which they are directed.”

However, Cudworth is quick to affirm that this “habit” is acquired through “teaching, industry and exercise” whereas natural instinct is “unlearned and untaught.” What a division this is? Could we not imagine a post-Darwinian Cudworth in which Nature through repeated action develops new habits – ie. new species and so on as though they were new strains in the great cosmic tune? At very least it is worth considering. But the more important question, for now at least, is: what value does Cudworth place on human “habits” that have been integrated into the unconscious? He never bothers to judge what they might really mean. At once they might seem rather bad because they mean that man is becoming unconscious, almost vegetative. However, Cudworth, as a good Platonist who believes that Nature is inherently good is not the sort of person who would ever say such a thing. Indeed, at section 20 we read:

“It is true that our human actions are not governed by such exact reason, art, and wisdom, nor carried on with such constancy, evenness and uniformity, as the actions of nature are; notwithstanding which, since 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, the rational life that is in us ought to be accounted a much higher and more noble perfection than that plastic life of nature.”

And yet at section 21: “there is more of final or intending causality and of the reason of good in the works of nature than in those of humane art”. It would seem that our poor humans are represented, as they have been generally in the Western tradition as always-already divorced from Nature, a confused and alienated creature having to learn how to resynchronise with the “nature of things”. Athens says that man is totally out of whack with nature because he is not acting rationally but is above mere animalic and vegetative nature and thus, to quote Schelling, man is always either above or below the other animals, but he cannot be the same as them. Jerusalem says that man was given free will, which was being given enough rope to hang himself again and again, which necessitated Christ showing up. The human is a melancholy and confused creature.

Should it not seem a little obvious that “self-perception”, that fruit of the tree in Eden, is a kind of terrible curse that we need to alleviate in order to resynchronise with the way of things? Is it not responsible for the “night of the world” of ontological anxiety, our out of control technologies and ridiculous Gnostic power fantasies? We might end up sounding like Ludwig Klages believing that man is an animal cursed with too much Geist (self-awareness, instrumental reason) at the expense of his Seele (vital energy, animal qualities) and all the other creatures on the planet.

And perhaps that is not entirely wrong. I very much wonder what Cudworth would make of today and whether he would see any “noble perfection” in the tired atheistic, depoliticised, consumer society of today. It is, after all, so very keen to compress man down into animal in the name of the remnants of Enlightenment scientism and cynical “end of history” anti-humanism and elevate the animal up to the position of man in the name of Disneyfied moral kitsch. He’d be bloody horrified, I think one would have to say, but he would also perceive its tiredness bound by an intense and pig-headed refusal to give up its ruins in order to try anything else. We need a Cudworth who is able to realise that today that “self-perception”, like reason, have become entirely instrumentalised in the pursuit of unconscious and futureless appetition. Instead of the unconscious serving the conscious, the opposite (though it has always existed) is the very point of the current way of things.

I think that the key to using Cudworth’s discourse on “habit” is contained in section 13, where he uses the example of dancers and musicians as perhaps the most perfectly cultivated “habits” of the unconscious:

“But because this may seem strange at the first sight, that nature should be said to act for the sake of ends and regularly or artificially, and yet be itself devoid of knowledge and understanding, we shall therefore endeavour to persuade the possibility, and facilitate the belief of it, by some other instances; and first by that of habits, particularly those musical ones of singing, playing upon instruments, and dancing. Which habits direct every motion of the hand, voice, and body, and prompt them readily, without any deliberation, or studied consideration, what the next following note or motion should be. If you jog a sleeping musician, and sing but the first words of a song to him, which he had either himself composed, or learnt before, he will presently take it from you, and that perhaps before he is thoroughly awake, going on with it, and singing out the remainder of the whole song to the end. Thus the singers of an exercised lutonist, and the legs and whole body of a skilful dancer, are directed to move regularly and orderly, in a long train and series of motions, by those artificial habits in them, which do not themselves at all comprehend those laws and rules of music or harmony, by which they are governed.”

Here Cudworth is once again building on Plotinus (Enneads III. 2, 16): “the energy of nature if artificial… a dancer resembles this artificial life of nature.” Cudworth later goes on to connect this insight with the “ancient mythologists” who represented the god Pan playing his pipes because of his love for the nymph Echo: “as if Nature did, by a kind of silent melody make all the parts of the universe everywhere daunce [sic] in measure and proportion” (section 13). One might also note that this same imagery of “the pipes of pan” would famously be used in a posthumously published work of Cudworth’s contemporary Isaac Newton in relation to his own Pythagorean interest in the seeming musical proportionality of the cosmos. What is most interesting is that way in which Cudworth claims that nature “artificially” “doth but Ape and mimick the Divine art and wisdom” (section 12).

 As Plato would have Timaeus (Timaeus 38a-c) say, “time in its measurable cycles imitates (mimoumenou) eternity”; the cosmos was made “as like it as possible” (homoiotatos autooi kata dynamin). The cosmos is “mimetic desire” all the way down one might say – Nature is but the “echo” of the tune of the divine Mind, as the two interact not as master giving directions to unthinking servant builders, but as lovers. One responds to the other and is caught in a mirroring. The greatest of all bonds is Eros, as Giordano Bruno would say in his De Vinculis in Genere (On Bonds in General, see here on this blog). The tripartite human erotic quest for God, for political recognition and for material desires are but aspects of the Great Eros that binds the cosmos together in attraction, from top to bottom. To Bruno even hate and jealousy are Eros– for to truly loathe someone or something is to become bound to it and fixated upon it.

Thus, we might then ponder if there could be a Platonic reading of René Girard’s theory of “mimesis” (see back here on this blog). Perhaps human “mimetic desire” is merely a “topography” of a desire to approximate and be drawn to each other that goes all the way down through all things, a cosmic agon. Oh my this would not be an “ontology of peace” at all without a Girardian addition of Christ’s ending of the sacrificial economy. It would be perverse. A “best of all possible worlds” in which even the most awful of deeds would be the result of Love. As Plotinus (Enneads III. 2.2.24-32) said:

“This All has arisen and separated into parts, and of necessity some have become friendly and gentle, others hostile and at war, and some did harm to others willingly, some, too, unwillingly, and some by their destruction brought about the coming into being of others, and over them all as they acted and were acted upon in these kinds of ways they began a single melody, each of them uttering their own sounds, and the forming principle (logos) over them producing the melody and the single ordering of all together to the whole.”

Now, not many people might want to hear such things, and it might make any action seem no worse than any other. Indeed, the Platonic cosmology is mirrored, with its “darknesses” above and below, its trades which all have a pseudos shadow double (for the philosopher the sophist, for the dietician the chef). And it is course off the basis of this mirroring that Gnostics drew out that obscure comment in Plato’s Laws (897) which seemed to suggest the existence of two “world souls”: “one soul or more than one? I’ll answer for you both: more than one. At any rate we must not assume fewer than two: that which does good, and that which has the opposite capacity”. We find ourselves in a war-cosmology, in Manichaeism, if we are not careful. The hypostatisation of the Two is a dangerous business, rather than attempting to see mirroring as parts of a larger whole, as Neo-Platonism would affirm (if at the risk of the acceptance of all things as good and necessary).

What then can be done? Perhaps the emphasis remains on the relation of mortal men to eternity, how they imitate it. The old saying of my teacher when I was a kid was that the appetitive want to perpetuate their descendants unto eternity, the thymotic want their names to last for eternity, the philosophers want to know the nature of eternity. Today the first group might seem to have slightly different interests instead of simply having lots of children – perhaps to joyously consume without end, Norman O. Brown’s happy acceptance of neo-liberalism through Georges Bataille as a great big orgy: “Here Comes Everyone” (“Dionysos in 1990” in Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991). The appetitive compete over access to sex and consumables in the drive to perpetuate eternal delight. The thymotic compete over who will live the biggest sema. The philosophers are then simply left as either of the loud or silent type: those endlessly arguing down through the centuries with each other in a “great conversation” over the nature of eternity, and those who retract from the city into quietude and mysticism, perhaps to set up this or that anagogic ladder, perhaps to say that of the It-Reality nothing can really be said at all. This is the human lot perhaps, man under the speculative lens, two and a half thousand years ago, and in many ways still an oft insightful myth today.

The question is then how “habit” might be integrated into the Platonic model of desire and Nature. The overwhelming thing missing from Cudworth’s essay is any discourse on Eros and desire apart from the reference to Pan and Echo. This is very odd when this is clearly saying that “habit” IS the product of erotic mimesis, of repetition as being caught in a mirroring. Yet the sort of desire involved is the difference between “good habits” that turn towards God and serving others and “bad habits” that turn downwards towards narcissistic excess of self-consciousness, disintegration and the darkness below. We are especially in need of such a clarification today. As Byung-Chul Han (The Agony of Eros, Continuum Press, New York, 2017, pp. 43-4) has recently said of the Platonic understanding of Eros:

“Eros guides the soul, according to Plato. It holds sway over all its parts: pleasure-based desire (epithumia), spiritedness or courage (thumos), and reason (logos). Each spiritual component has its own mode of enjoyment and interprets the beautiful in its own way. Today, it seems that desire (epithumia) dominates the soul’s experience of pleasure. For this reason, actions are rarely thumos driven. Rage is thumotic: it radically breaks with convention and inaugurates a new state of affairs. But now it is increasingly yielding to annoyance, or dissatisfaction, which lacks the negativity of rupture and instead allows circumstances to persist. Moreover, without eros, logos is deteriorating into data-driven calculation, which is incapable of reckoning the event, the incalculable. Eros must not be confused with fleshly desire (epithumia). It stands above both desire and thumos. Eros makes thumos bring forth beautiful deeds. Thumos, then, would be where eros and politics touch. However, contemporary politics—which lacks not only thumos, but eros as well—has degraded into mere work. Neoliberalism is depoliticizing society in general—and not least of all, by replacing eros with sexuality and pornography. It is based on epithumia. In a burnout society of isolated, self-alienated achievement-subjects, thumos is also withering away. Communal action—a we—now proves impossible.”

The sad fact of the matter is that we have fallen into a situation wherein “capitalism is a computer that processes desire” is not an outlandish thing to say at all. Instrumental reason seems not to be a cold creature, but a “cold emotion” for binding human beings in a forced repetition of epithymic nothingness, a great “desiring machine” of isolated burnouts. The great problem in the majority of Western thought is that it has understood epithymic “low desire” as nothing but a release of morals, of tensions, of strictures and disciplines, whereas in fact it is a discipline, as is evinced by the phenomenon of addiction.

We still have much to learn from Giordano Bruno’s above-mentioned “On Bonds in General” (discussed on this blog back here), and its precocious theory of mass psychology that “eros is the strongest of all bonds” and that all leaders and in effect “sorcerers of desire”. They can place in men’s minds images of what they would like them to believe, they bind them to them. Bruno, we might say, understood what Freud’s nephew, the father of consumerism, Edward Bernays did about desire and fantasies, five hundred years before the 20^th century. As long as we are bound to the unconscious epithymic “habits” that we have developed, neither the Religious nor the Political will return. We might then sit and wait for some great Event, or for the system to accelerate itself off into a ditch or something, but it is likely to be a few generations yet before such things happen.

This is even if we are steadily realising that there seems to be a three-fold “replication crisis” building that threatens the childlike naivety of the “end of history” – biological (people are too burned out or too narcissistic to want to have children and the population is crashing), economic (the luck of the Boomers to arrive at an unprecedented patch of the “democratisation of luxury” in history is not going to be repeated) and cultural (no one with half a brain or with any sense of “cool” [that most precious of all post-industrial resources] can believe in the tiny left and right liberal contents of the “Overton Window” of accepted political theories anymore). As to whether this should come to a head (or several heads) over the next several decades and bring about any change is at present uncertain. Perhaps instead there will simply be more “forced repetition” of the sad 20^th c. nostalgia we have been feeding ourselves on as part of the “slow cancellation of the future” for the past couple of decades now.

On this blog we often speak of the Eremocene – a coming age of silent misery in which biodiversity, cultural diversity and society might steadily disappear, a strange and sad hikikomori age, in which the only hope might be that the eremeia (the desert[ed]) might become hermetic, a return to mysticism, an Age of the Monk. If this is to be the fate of the burn-out society, then so be it. When we say “fate”, we should emphasise that “fated” is commonly used by Cudworth to describe “plastic nature” and the unconscious. The irony, of course, is that it is Lockean liberalism and its epithymic understanding of freedom as unimpeded sensation and will, that had led us to this spiritlessness and LACK of will and a masochistic cult of powerlessness.

I think the only way to deal with this is to take the question of “habit” seriously. When we say this, we must eschew the gauche depoliticised “self-help” sophism that these days fills this gap and obsesses over “Seven Habits of the Highly Successful” and so on. This has been the eternal foe of philosophy these last fifty years, endlessly cashing in upon its moral vacuum with its hideous kitsch and lessons for “entrepreneurs”. The fact is that when we speak of hexis (habit) in the Cudworthian sense, we mean something cosmic of which human “habits” are but a microcosmic topology. We are speaking about a necessary conversion of action to the level of the unconscious as a “form of life” governed by Eros. We mean overcoming self-consciousness to “become Nature” for a certain purpose. It all depends if this is the “forced repetition” of epithymotic discipline, thymotic “habits” learned to become a political warrior (fighting, speaking, charisma, reading – the neo-reactionaries often speak of this as “become worthy”), or noetic “habit” as has been laid down by religious communities and esoteric teachers throughout history as a way of engaging with the erotic “metaxy” – the luminous turning towards God.

The fact is that there may never be any relent from the “mimetic desire” of epithymotic and thymotic jealousy and destruction– appetition and politics will go on forever (or until the millennium of peace comes, that which is forever “not yet”). And yet some will choose the noetic quest. Cudworth should be thanked for having given us an insight that has been missed – that the “inconscious” is integral, but that in the end “self will” and “self consciousness” are something to be overcome because they fail to be as the dancer and the lutenist and sleeping geometrist are.

My old teacher Roger Sworder (see here) had some ideas like this. He thought that there was a profound connection between the Hindu karma yoga (work as an act of devotion and karma-alleviation) and what he called the “Platonic work ethic”. What is this? The idea is described two ways, in the Republic (X. 597b) in relation to a carpenter who copies his table from the mind of God, and in Ion (536-42) in relation to the Homeric rhapsode poet who is “possessed” by the gods when he recites and radiates a magnetic divine force upon his audience. If one becomes devoted to one’s proper task it is as though the god, the phytourgos, is doing the work and that the worker is merely engaged in mimesis, an extension of the divine mind. In the end this is exactly what Cudworth’s “Plastick Nature” is all about, or should be read at least, if we would like to get something out of it. We become “Nature” rather than become “mechanised”, as is the nightmare of the last century in relation to the mass-worker as the “robot”. However, in an era in which increasingly the only “real” work is consumption and extracting value from the data horde/hoard, a different work ethic with different priorities is the sort of thing we need (as was argued in the link given just above on Roger Sworder).

If in order to consolidate such an ethic and build communities around it we are still “waiting on a new Saint Benedict” to give us a “form of life” of virtue ethics and rules to live by, as Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, Duckworth, London, 1993 2nd ed, p. 263) famously said, nearly forty years ago now, then we will have to go forth and find such things. On this blog we occasionally speak of such projects as “schools” (see here). MacIntyre was very much correct about the “narrative” aspect of human moral life, how it is built out of a history and tradition of exempla of good and bad images of human beings. By learning these, by attempting to imitate good models we come upon, to internalise them and render them “inconscious” becomes a life’s work.

This is not the “work” of the so called “neo-liberal” subject, that little burned out anhedonic atom. It can only be undertaken in a community of friendship and spirited learning from one another. Aristotle and Plato believed in a truism so basic that they do not question it – you need philia (friendship) or you have no polis. Without the virtue of friendship, where habits are learned and exchanged, there is no community and no Political and certainly no Religious. It is thus our business to learn how to be friends again. Alain Badiou, that Maoist Platonist raging against the post-modernists, also seems to believe this. Why? It is so mindlessly obvious that perhaps it seems meaningless, even kitschy. Yet one wonders if not too soon the greatest project will have to be the resocialisation of the atomised human being, the need to teach it even the most basic of “habits”  as though one is toilet training a child – how to develop good friendships that keep on giving.