Revealing Voices: Alison Stone

Posted on June 15, 2021

Alison Stone’s post is part of our Revealing Voices blog series.


Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) was a prominent ethicist, feminist, advocate for animal welfare, and critic of Darwinism and atheism, very well known in the Victorian era. Such was her reputation in her time that when the scientist Richard Owen criticised her for championing animals’ well-being, her defender Charles Adams asked whether Owen knew “anything at all of the position Miss Cobbe holds in Intellect and Thought”. And later when the novelist G. K. Chesterton wanted to establish that nineteenth-century women had contributed little to philosophy, there were two women he saw fit to mention, albeit dismissively – Wollstonecraft and Cobbe: “I never heard that many women, let alone men, shared the views of Mary Wollstonecraft; I never heard that millions of believers flocked to the religion tentatively founded by Miss Frances Power Cobbe.” But unlike Wollstonecraft, Cobbe has not gone on to enter the accepted canon of western philosophy. Indeed very few contemporary philosophers have even heard of her.

Until a few years ago, neither had I. I’ve long been interested in nineteenth-century European philosophy, but there has not yet been the huge body of work recovering nineteenth-century women’s voices that now exists for the “early modern” period. Nineteenth-century scholarship remains telescoped on a few big male names: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and – from Britain – John Stuart Mill. Happily, this is changing: examples are the pioneering work of Dorothy Rogers on America’s First Women Philosophers, work on Mary Shepherd, the rediscovery of the philosophical side of George Eliot’s work such as her translation of Spinoza, and studies of the women of German Idealism such as Karoline von Günderrode. This is the tip of the iceberg and points to the fact that plenty of women did philosophy in the nineteenth century. Women were there in history; it’s the historiography that has omitted them.

Once I realised this, the question arose: How to go about rediscovering nineteenth-century women? Fortunately, there’s already lots of work on women in nineteenth-century history, politics, society, culture, and literature – for instance on first-wave feminism. By no means exclusively focused on the vote, first-wave feminists campaigned for women’s access to formal and higher education and to the professions, and for women to retain rights and legal personhood on marriage, have legal protection against domestic violence, and much more. So I started here, looking into some first-wave feminists and whether their work had a philosophical side. Barbara Caine’s Victorian Feminists alerted me to Cobbe. For as Caine remarks, Cobbe’s “interest in philosophical and religious questions, and her quite substantial reputation in these fields, made her see herself as the philosopher of the women’s movement”. My interest was piqued.

I quickly found out that Cobbe had by no means written exclusively on feminist issues. Although she liked to say “I am a woman. Nothing concerning the interests of women is alien to me”, actually very few issues were alien to her. She had an incredibly prolific and successful publishing career and wrote on a vast array of topics. In 1855 and 1857 she published her two-volume Essay on Intuitive Morals, in which she set out a duty-based moral theory and argued that morality and religion are indissolubly connected. Based on this theory, in the 1860s and 1870s Cobbe gave an account of human duties to animals; articulated a duty-based form of feminism; defended a unique form of dualism in the philosophy of mind; and criticized evolutionary ethics, claiming that it threatened to usher in “a code of Right in which every cruelty and every injustice may form a part”. Her philosophical views informed her feminist and anti-vivisection campaigning, and her political experiences in turn led her to revise her ethical theory. From the 1870s onwards she increasingly stressed the moral role of the emotions, especially sympathy, theorizing a gradual progression in sympathy across history. Moving into the 1880s, Cobbe combatted secularism, agnosticism, and atheism, arguing that religion is necessary not only for morality but also for meaningful, value-laden life and culture as a whole.

This does not exhaust her work. She also wrote about pessimism, life after death, what makes death bad, and moral knowledge. She put forward a moral argument for the existence of God and an aesthetic theory of the typical nineteenth-century style, categorising and ranking the various arts. She insisted that there have been female artistic geniuses. She explored the philosophical basis of welfare reform and criticised a growing obsession with health which she called “hygeiolatry”. Apart from the original anonymous edition of Intuitive Morals, her work was always published under her own name. Cobbe was thus a philosopher with a comprehensive perspective, just like many better-known male figures of her period. Given the range and ambition of her work, there could hardly be a clearer case of the disparity in how historical male and female philosophers have been treated.

For example, Nietzsche is associated with the idea that “God is dead”, announced through his mouthpiece the “madman” in The Gay Science (first edition, 1882). The madman tries unsuccessfully to convince the people around him that the death of God is much more consequential than they realise. Five years earlier, in 1877, Cobbe had written: “If it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris”. However, she went on to say – again like Nietzsche’s madman – that despite the indifference of these metropolitan sophisticates, really the “news” is of devastating import. My point is not that Cobbe is the true originator of the idea that “God is dead”. On the contrary, she herself attributes her own “startling remark” about God being dead to the Unitarian theologian James Martineau – although this is disingenuous, as what Martineau had said was: “If tomorrow Atheism were somehow to prove true, … London and Paris would not feel it as they would the death of a Statesman or a President”. Clearly the remark has found itself in Cobbe’s translation – and gained the crucial idea that “God is dead”. So my point is, first, that the idea that God is dead was not the product of a lone genius, Nietzsche, but was in broader circulation at the time; and, second, that women, including Cobbe, were amongst those doing the circulating.

The more I’ve learnt about Cobbe, the more impressed I’ve become at how much she achieved. This had led me to edit a collection of Cobbe’s Essential Writings which will be coming out in the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy series. I hope this may start to put Cobbe back on the philosophical map!


Alison Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Lancaster University (UK). Her most recent book was Being Born: Birth and Philosophy (2019). She recently co-edited a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy on Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America. She is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century, and her edition of Cobbe’s writings Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-Century Feminist Philosopher is forthcoming in the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy series.

 

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