XV—‘I Wish My Speech Were Like a Loadstone’: Cavendish on Love and Self-Love

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines the surprisingly central role of sympathetic love within Margaret Cavendish’s philosophy. I show that such love fulfils a range of metaphysical functions, and highlight an important shift in Cavendish’s account vis-à-vis earlier conceptions: sympathetic love is no longer given an emanative or mechanistic explanation, but is naturalized as an active emotion. I further investigate to what extent Cavendish’s account reveals a rift between the realm of nature and the realm of human sociability, and whether this rift really prompts an inward turn as some interpreters have suggested.