Freddy Purcell discusses Keith Allen’s talk on whether we can and should posthumously diagnose Margaret Cavendish with ADHD.
Last week we were excited to welcome the head of York’s philosophy department, Keith Allen, who specialises in the philosophy of perception and history of philosophy. It was lovely to see a good turnout to this talk, with a proper blend of undergrads, postgrads, and lecturers.
Keith began by introducing the subject of his talk, Margaret Cavendish, someone I knew shamefully little about. Cavendish was born to a wealthy family in 1623 and died in 1673 . During this time, she not only managed to achieve celebrity status, such that people would flock to London’s parks to catch a glimpse of her when she rarely visited, but she also wrote and self-published on numerous topics within philosophy and science. Despite her achievements, she had a reputation as “Mad Marge”. Samuel Pepys called her “mad, conceited, and ridiculous” and Virginia Woolf described her as “crack-brained and bird-witted”. Keith pointed out that Cavendish’s particular style, that stretched the norms for women of the day, and writing under her own name would have naturally garnered negative attention. However, it was Cavendish’s mental health that Keith wanted to reexamine in light of these accusations.
Cavendish described herself as shy and melancholic, also suffering from poor physical health and hypochondria throughout her life. Keith believes that this aspect of her life can be better understood through a lens of ADHD, which he took a broad understanding of through attention, inner restlessness, creativity, and productivity.
Both modern and contemporaneous commentators noted that Cavendish expressed herself erratically in her work, with poor style, page-long sentences, and unexplained topic switches. Although it is worth noting that this idiosyncrasy birthed a Blazing World in 1666, a sci-fi romance and work of popular philosophy that was added onto one of Cavendish’s routine works on experimental philosophy because she found the variety pleasing. Woolf put this unique writing style down to a lack of formal education, while historians since have speculated that she may have been dyslexic. Keith argues that particularly because Cavendish also seems to describe periods of hyperfocus associated with ADHD, a diagnosis could explain her writing habits. He also points out that ADHD and dyslexia can regularly go hand in hand.
In her writing, Cavendish describes an intense inner world where she felt that her thoughts were always too quick for her pen or mouth to keep pace. Her thoughts also appear regularly in flux, with one work called An Argumental Discourse containing 30 different speakers interacting at once. Cavendish also testifies to organising her thoughts by speaking to herself out loud, a behaviour common in children with ADHD. At this point, Keith revealed some of the practical use in understanding Cavendish in terms of ADHD. Cavendish was a vitalist materialist, believing that everything is material, with animate and inanimate parts that allow it to be self-moving and self-knowing. In place of traditional mechanics of the time that understood events in terms of direct causation, Cavendish therefore believed that when a person throws a ball, the ball understands that it is being thrown, so naturally complies by launching in the correct manner. Here, Keith believes that Cavendish’s tumultuous inner world may help to explain why she came to this belief. Although many other factors were likely at play, including a response to Descartes, Cavendish’s experience of her own body, and her desire longing for harmony in England after the Civil War.
Keith unfortunately couldn’t go into detail on the other ways in which Cavendish appears to correlate with traits associated with ADHD, but it seems fair to say that her publishing of 23 volumes of interesting work on philosophy, science, and poetry fits the criteria for productivity and creativity.
With a compelling argument that Cavendish could have been diagnosed with ADHD, maybe with aid of necromancy or a time machine, Keith explained how Cavendish saw herself. Without modern diagnoses, Cavendish still had rich self-knowledge, particularly believing that she was melancholic. Different to the modern sense of the word, she understood melancholy as regularly turning to idle contemplation. Cavendish therefore associated melancholy with her intense intellectual life, likening herself to other tortured geniuses, as she also believed it came with difficulty regulating emotions. For these reasons, Cavendish was immensely shy and kept to herself in her manor houses.
Given Cavendish’s self-knowledge and being dead, the question remains; what is the point in posthumous diagnosis in this case or at all? Keith accepted that there are numerous conceptual difficulties in retrospectively applying a modern concept but maintained that we would do it for older people who had ADHD as children but didn’t have it available as a diagnosis. These late diagnoses can be immensely valuable in helping people understand themselves, so Keith argued that if we offer late diagnosis in life, why not very late diagnosis in death? He also argued for the positivity of diversifying the philosophical canon.
As you might expect at a university with specialism in neurodivergence, many objections were raised. One being that diagnosis is something you do for a specific outcome like medication or therapy, so it is an error to claim that post-humous diagnosis is possible. Discussion also brought out the issue that Cavendish desired above most things to be famous as a “uniquely singular” individual, so may not have embraced a diagnosis shared by others. Keith speculates that she would have found the diagnosis useful but pointed out that her self-conception aligns better with Mad pride in her celebration of her mental health and/or neurodivergence.
Thank you to Keith for the fun talk! It was a great platform for further discussions on neurodivergence and mental health, but also enjoyable to learn about such an interesting character and thinker. If you have any opinions on whether it is possible to posthumously diagnoses people, let us know in the comments below!