On Oscillation and the Monad: The Unacknowledged Dynamic Principle in Damaris Cudworth Masham’s Critique of Cartesian Passivity
The scrutiny of unheralded metaphysical complexities yields, upon perseverant excavation, a strange yet luminous clarity within often-dismissed corpuses. Damaris Cudworth Masham — daughter of Platonist Ralph Cudworth and correspondent of both Locke and Leibniz — emerges as one such overlooked figure, whose epistolary arguments and philosophical essays betray a subtle rejection of Descartes’ inert paradigms of mind-matter dualism. While her critique of Locke’s epistemology on moral obligation and her correspondence with Leibniz are generally accorded footnote status in academic discourse, a more fastidious reading of her most sustained work, “A Discourse Concerning the Love of God” (1696), reveals the presence of a striking and granular metaphysical thesis: namely, the notion of “oscillation as monadic volition.” While this notion is veiled in theological parlance and girded by semantic subtleties, it proposes a reconciliation between the seemingly inert Cartesian body and the passive receptivity implied by Lockean empiricism, through an inner dynamic she imputes to the soul itself.
What Masham suggests — without formalizing into a system, as she was both philosophically traditional and politically constrained — is that love, or what she calls the divine impulse of affection, is neither reaction nor spontaneous agency in the Cartesian sense, but rather an inherent oscillation of the soul’s substance toward perfection. For Masham, this movement is not a mere secondary effect, nor is it outside the identity of the monad; it is the very essence of monadic operation. The soul exists as a dynamic center of volition, not unlike Leibniz’s later monads, though hers are not windowless, but rather porous and radiative, influenced not mechanistically but via divine participation. Her conception, then, is neither Cartesian nor wholly Leibnizian, but emerges as an intermediate theo-philosophical metaphysic grounded in moral dynamism.
It is this oscillation — the soul’s continual reaffixing of itself toward an object of divine perfection — that serves as an unacknowledged animation of the otherwise static Lockean subject. Let us note her language: “the Soul is made to move towards the Love of God not by coercion, but by a necessity inward and voluntary as breathing is to Life.”¹ This phrase, replete with teleological organicism, introduces what I claim is a proto-dynamic ethology not fully developed until Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, yet nestled within Masham’s 17th-century divinity.
Masham’s depth manifests further when she subtly refuses to countenance the Cartesian doctrine that the body is purely extended substance without appetite or direction. In several letters to Locke, particularly the long letter dated June 1703, she writes, “There is, methinks, something less mechanical and more akin to Desiring in what appears to us brute. Their motions are governed, if not by Reason, then by a Principle antecedent to it.”² Here, the “Principle antecedent to Reason” hints at a vitalist monadology in which movement is not inertially bestowed upon bodies from without (as in Cartesian res extensa) but arises from within as a pre-rational “desiring.” It is not unreasonable to conjecture that Masham here anticipates Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza and Leibniz, wherein desire is not mere lack but productive force. However, where Deleuze secularizes this vitality, Masham attributes it to a sort of proto-theurgical immediacy: the soul’s energies are co-emanative with divine will.
One must also reflect on the theological implications of this oscillation. Masham was neither wholly rationalist nor fideist. Her notion that the soul’s oscillation toward divine Love constitutes a kind of embodied epistemology — a “knowing as tending” — reconfigures both knowledge and love not as fixed essences but as modulations of attention. In this we observe an analogue with Peter Sterry, another English Platonist, who wrote of “the Soul’s Recoiling into God as a Sinew back into Source.”³ Masham refines this metaphor with more epistemological rigor, though bound evermore to her gendered constraints and Anglican decorum, which forbade open ontologizing. Nevertheless, her distinction between “knowing through impression” and “knowing through oscillation” illuminates an early apprehension of phenomenology avant la lettre.
Indeed, it is due to her religious moorings that Masham avoids systematizing her metaphysic. Yet, in her undersung dialogues with Leibniz, we catch glimmers of her resistance to his pantheistic determinism. In one letter, dated October 1704, she chides: “Your Monads, though they Pre-know all, can only do as they must. But if vigilance of the Heart be wanton with necessity, then surely not all Virtue is but Performance.”⁴ This more liberal account of monadic freedom — which she locates not in rational will, but in the soul’s capacity for affective realignment — serves as the cornerstone of her oscillation-theory. The oscillating soul does not simply react, nor does it act in isolation; rather, it trembles between proximity and lapse from the divine, and in this trembling — this recurring process of return — virtue emerges.
This theological vitalism, if I may coin such a phrase, is of more than passing historical interest. By reinstating movement at the heart of moral being, and doing so through language of oscillation rather than categorical action, Masham submits a serious counterpoint to the passivity of Locke’s tabula rasa and the determinism of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. Moreover, she opens a third horizon between Cartesian mechanization and Spinozistic immanence: namely, a metaphysics of moral participation grounded in volitional fluctuation. Her conception of love is neither romantic nor affective in the modern sense, but ontological; in oscillating toward the divine, the soul actualizes its being.
What remains most remarkable is that this entire metaphysical schema is buried not in a published treatise, but in half-sentences, marginalia, and letters — the feminine form of philosophical transmission consigned to parenthesis for centuries. Her marginal status in canonical historiography, no doubt due to constraints of gender, genre, and geography, has deprived us of what might have formed a genuinely alternative tradition in the metaphysical genealogy of the self.
In summation, Masham’s underexplored notion of inner oscillation — veiled within theological discourse yet pregnant with unfulfilled metaphysical potency — provides an embryonic model for what later thinkers would call affective intentionality, deconstructivist becoming, and even phenomenological orientation. She marks an early instance of what might be termed micro-volitional metaphysics: wherein the soul, far from being a passive recipient of sensation or a cog in deterministic machinery, is a vibrating filament between the human and the divine, neither act nor thought, but alignment. Such a model could well inform new systems of ethico-ontological theory, were we ready, even in our tumult of contemporary metaphysics, to listen more intently to these obscure harmonics from the philosophic margins.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, moral dynamism, forgotten women philosophers, monadology, oscillation