← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode the Mind has no Sex, Cartesianism and Gender if you were a well to do woman of the mid 17th century looking for intellectual stimulation, then before long you'd likely find yourself hanging around with Cartesians. Their anti scholastic approach was slowly making inroads at those bastions of scholasticism, the universities, especially in the Netherlands. But their real intellectual home was the Salon, a meeting held at someone's real home, especially in Paris, dedicated to witty and edifying conversation. Unlike the universities, Salon culture welcomed women. In fact, women were often the hosts. Last time I already mentioned Madame de Bonnevaux, an outstanding salonier who was an exponent of Descartes philosophy. There was also Madeleine des Souvre, who corresponded with Descartes colleague Arnauld and hosted leading scholars, including Cartesians. The celebrated letter writer and wit, Madame de Sevigne claimed allegiance to what she called the Cartesian sect. Sevign referred to her daughter as my little Cartesian, which is not the most obvious endearment. But then French people sometimes express fondness by calling each other my little cabbage. So at least it fits a pattern. Another pattern of more importance to us just now is this fondness of women intellectuals for Cartesianism. What lay behind it? Well, there was first of all, the attitude of Descartes himself. In addition to his extensive and philosophically deep exchange of letters with Elizabeth of Bohemia, he also sought and secured preferment from Queen Christina of Sweden. Now these were both royal figures, so one might cynically wonder whether their high social status simply trumped their gender in his eyes. But he also said that his Discourse on the Method was aimed at a broad audience, including women. His direct jargon free mode of writing means he is still used today to introduce people to philosophy, and it also helps to explain his wide appeal at the time. This was philosophy that could readily be understood by women who might be highly literate, but who were excluded from the gated community of the university's scholarship and thus had not had a chance to master its refined distinctions of forbidding technical terminology. A similar point can be made about the Method Descartes first described in the Discourse and then put on display in the Meditations. He encouraged his readers to set aside their preconceptions and prejudices for women who had received no specialized Training in philosophy, it was actually easier to follow this procedure. They had fewer preconceptions to set aside. Indeed, that might well be one reason that Descartes appreciated engaging with Elizabeth. According to his biographer Bailly, he found ladies to be more gentle, more patient, more docile, in a word, more void of prejudices and false doctrines than many men. Then too, exclusionary attitudes towards women were themselves a matter of unreflective prejudice, the sort of thing that one might well put into question when applying Descartes method. If you start from a blank piece of paper and try to come up with compelling arguments why women cannot do philosophy, you're going to struggle. In fact, Descartes philosophy might well seem to point in the other direction. According to his dualism, the mind is a pure thinking subject, which doesn't sound like the sort of thing that could even be male or female. Already, Queen Christina noticed this point, remarking that the soul is of no sex and conceding that there are weaknesses of the female sex, but denying that they have anything to do with their soul. Naturally, quite a few contemporaries were not so ready to set aside their sexist assumptions. The well educated, witty literary denizens of the savants were mocked as prcieuses or precious women. Moliere made fun of them in his comedies and including one called Les femmes savant, meaning the Learned Ladies, that was first performed in 1672. But already in the 1650s we have works like the Abbe Michel des Proul's novel La, a parody of salon culture. A trio of friends who were considered to be prassieus were Armes de la Vigne, Marie Duprez and Catherine Descartes. Yes, you heard that name right. Catherine was Rene Descartes niece. For her, the spread of Cartesianism was a family affair. In 1673 she addressed a poem to Lavigne asking her to use her own considerable talents to champion Descartes teachings. She enthused that great truths which seemed new will henceforth appear clear, solid, beautiful, and imagined her famous uncle saying to her friend, I see our two names joined together, bringing to posterity my glory with yours, and I can already hear it said in many. Descartes and Lavigne have instructed the world. Lavigne was presumably flattered, but wrote back also in poetic form, to decline the mission. With heavy irony she commented that for women it is almost a duty to speak rarely and to know nothing. And if a lady follows other maxims, she should hide them as one hides crimes. She allowed that there were occasional extraordinary exceptions, like Elizabeth of Bohemia. But it was really for men to promote the new philosophy, since they could do so without causing scandal. Were she to speak out in favor of Descartes, she said, she would be attacked for it. For me, not even the love of a dead man is permitted. Pure as it is, I could be blamed, as there is always some shame in loving undeterred. Catherine later wrote a literary account of Descartes death up in Sweden, blaming his demise not on the coldness, but on his boldness. It was nature herself who decided to punish him for prying into her secrets with his scientific investigations. Catherine imagines nature as a fearsome goddess, saying to Descartes, rash mortal, audacious soul. Learn that one doesn't view the gods with impunity. The three friends belong to the circle gathered around one of the most important figures of 17th century salon culture, Madeleine des Scuderie. She published numerous novels as well as model speeches, though in another reflection of the social pressures invoked by Lavigne, Soudary's books appeared either anonymously or under her brother's name. Still, she was widely known to be the true author. In one of her novels, she names her spokeswoman character Sappho, and she also takes up the guise of the Greek poet Sappho to write a speech on the education of women. Most people, she says here, believe that the great advantage of women is beauty. But one should not put one's trust in this, since beauty fades and some never have it to begin with. Instead, women should become learned something of which they are well capable, since they are not inferior to men in imagination, memory or reason. Indeed, Scudery remarks, our sex is capable of anything we would attempt. She also engaged, by the way, in a passionate epistolary verse exchange with Catherine Descartes. Alongside her identification with Sappho and other features of her literary output, this has won her a prominent place in the history of same sex attraction in literature. But her romantic connection to the Descartes family notwithstanding, Scudery was not really a Cartesian. She seems more like an heir to such humanist feminists like Moderata Fonte as Lucrezia Marinella, or earlier literary stylists like Marguerite of Navarre, whose own intellectual circle helped to inspire early modern French Salon culture. In fact, the best example of an explicitly Cartesian defense of feminism from this period is not by a woman. It was the achievement of Francois Poulain de la Barre, who wrote no fewer than three works on the subject. In 1673 he published a treatise called on the Equality of the Two Sexes, followed by a dialogue called on the Education of Ladies. Again, a humanist legacy is evident here, because on the Education of Ladies is highly reminiscent of any number of Renaissance dialogues, including several that have men and women flirtatiously discussing the subject of equality, as here in Poulain's work. Finally and surprisingly, Poulain wrote On the Excellence of Men against the equality of the sexes, this in 1675, so only two years after the first installment of the trilogy. This has led some to assume that the whole project was a mere rhetorical exercise, or even a kind of sophistical display, arguing on both sides of a contentious issue. This was the later judgment of Pierre Bayle, who suggested that Poulain was just looking for controversy he expected to have been written against, but finding that no reply was likely to appear, he wrote against his own book himself. But this is a misconception, actually. On the Excellence of Men is framed by an introduction and conclusion that make clear what was going on. Poulain wanted to gather together arguments against female equality for the sake of refuting these arguments and displaying their weakness. As for the points made in favor of female equality in his other two works, they are numerous and developed with a humanistic zeal for copious style. Though I don't think you can accuse Poulain of insincerity, you can definitely accuse him of throwing everything he can find at the wall in hopes that some of it will stick. His arguments are at times inconsistent or tendentious. He officially denies that women's bodies have any effect on their ability to think, but then concedes that their bodies are warmer than men's, only to insist that this could be an advantage, since it makes their imaginations more lively. Again, he argues at length that women and men share the same virtues, but then dedicates his dialogue to the Duchess of Orleans, praising her as uniting in her person all that is noblest and most perfect in both sexes. But as he shows in the dialogue, such inconsistencies are only to be expected when you have grown up in a sexist society. He has a kind of spokesman character there named Stesymachus, who, with the help of a learned lady named Sophia, is trying to encourage the education of a young woman named Eulalia. A fourth character, Timander, represents the common sense and scholastic view that women are inferior. Thus Timander says that every learned woman he has met is just a prcieuse. Stesimachus is far more enlightened, but even he slips up at one point and says that Sophia has the mind of a man and the body of a woman. Sophia points out to him that this conflicts with his own feminist theory, and he apologizes, saying in effect that old habits die hard. That's only one of several strikingly modern moments in the dialogue, with another nice instance being an exchange between Timander and Eulalia. When he claims that it is in fact a tactical advantage for women, that people have low expectations of them, she counters that it's not so advantageous if no one takes you seriously, anticipating modern day concerns about epistemic injustice. As I say, all this, including the choice of dialogue form and the way Poulain writes it, could be imagined as a further development from the Renaissance debate over women's equality. What makes Poulain novel is his explicit use of Cartesian ideas in the feminist cause. When Stefimachus eventually gets around to recommending a reading list for Eulalia's education, the authors he names include Descartes himself, Cour d' a Moi, Rohole La Forge and the Port Royal Logic. See, I told you, it's famous. More importantly, Poulain repeatedly emphasizes the need to abandon one's prior conceptions. One should not be like the Scholastics, whose learning is based on the opinions they formed in the cradle, but instead use Descartes method of doubt, which Poulain describes as putting us in a state of impartiality or of objectivity in which we lean neither to one side nor the other. One might say that Poulain goes even further than Descartes, or better, that he applies the method in a domain that Descartes did not. The Meditations use doubt to set aside prejudices about metaphysics, the relation between soul and body, the sciences, and so on. Poulain does give faithfully Cartesian examples of beliefs that are widely accepted but false, for instance that animals have souls, or that the sun goes around the earth. But he's most interested in questioning social norms and beliefs, the kind of thing that Descartes said he would accept under the first maxim of his provisional morality. Of course, the maxims of that morality are not intended to be the last word, but it indicates how cautious Descartes was when it came to challenging social custom. Pourlin, by contrast, vigorously rejects customary attitudes about the inequality of women and also about the inferiority of the lower classes. Who knows, he asked, how many peasants might have become renowned scholars if they had been given the chance to study the other properly? Cartesian aspect of Poulain's view is the one already suggested by Queen, that the mind or soul has no sex. It is equal and of the same nature in all humans, however, and capable of all kinds of thoughts. Doctors find no anatomical differences between male and female brains. Not that this would be decisive to a Cartesian dualist anyway. Thus everyone of either sex can do what Descartes did, abandoning preconceptions and isolating certain clear and distinct ideas that serve as a sound basis for philosophy. With his usual rhetorical flair, Poulain declares that it is no more difficult to become a philosopher than a carpet maker, apparently forgetting how hard it is to make a decent carpet. He also seeks to pull the rug out from under sexist beliefs by offering a historical narrative to explain how they emerged. This is a version of the stories about the state of nature we find in other early modern thinkers like Hobbes and Rousseau. Originally, says Poulain, both sexes were equal. Sadly, many men then started to exploit their physical strength and the fact that women are weakened and made vulnerable by pregnancy and child rearing. Over the generations, this led to the domination of men, and just as bad, the pervasive belief that their tyranny over women is natural and immutable. Reading Poulain, one gets the impression that he was not led to his feminism by Cartesianism, but rather the other way around. He has his spokesman Stesimachus, express a preference for the teachings of Descartes precisely because it is the philosophical approach that is most effective in banishing false prejudice, especially when coupled with the feminist potential of Cartesian dualism. Descartes skeptical method made his new philosophy a powerful resource for those who wanted to champion the cause of gender equality. Yet we should acknowledge that you didn't have to be a Cartesian to speak out in favor of that cause. You will hopefully remember the name of Anna Maria von Schuermann, the one who was taught by Descartes enemy Woetias and allowed to attend lectures from behind a screen in Utrecht. She achieved great renown for her learning, including her mastery of numerous languages. One contemporary said that going to Utrecht without seeing von Schoeman was like going to Paris without seeing the King. We have several surviving works by von Schuermann, including a dissertation which deals with more or less the same question raised by Poulain, whether the study of the liberal arts is appropriate for a Christian woman. Her answer is of course the same as his, that it is not just appropriate, but imperative for women to be educated. But her way of arguing for that conclusion couldn't be more different. Von Schuermann's procedure is entirely, even ostentatiously, faithful to Scholastic methods. She lays out a series of syllogisms in favor of her position, and methodically, one might say pedantically, proves both premises for each syllogism. The premises from which von Schoman argues are often Aristotelian, though hers is an Aristotelianism updated for the feminist cause. For example, she cites Aristotle's remark at the start of the metaphysics that all humans have a natural desire for knowledge, and adds that this applies to women too. Similarly, learning confers virtue, and surely we want women, not only men, to be virtuous. A more unexpected and in a sense conservative argument is that women have plenty of leisure time and a need for recreation that doesn't require them to leave their proper place, the home. What better activity for filling the hours than philosophical reflection? That's a point that was made by Madeleine de Scudery, too. Women have lots of free time on their hands, which education could profitably fill. It's a reminder, if one were needed, that 17th century feminism was being championed by and for a rather elite class of women. Plenty of servants were needed to facilitate the philosophical activities of this elite, but then that goes for the men of the time too. Now, von Schulmann wrote a good 20 years before Poulin, so one might think that this explains the difference between them. Perhaps it just took a generation for Cartesianism to display scholasticism as the best way to argue for gender equality. But whatever his other achievements, we cannot credit Poulain for making feminism synonymous with Cartesianism. The latter remained a contentious approach, and when you're arguing for something controversial, it can be good tactics to argue from generally accepted principles. So in 1693, there appeared a Treatise on Morals and Philosophy by Gavriel Souchon, which again tries to make the case for educating women. Suchon knows and cites Poulain, but as the introduction to an English translation of her works comments, she does not share his enthusiasm for Descartes. Instead, her approach is broadly scholastic, if not as markedly so as van Schurmann's, which gives us another reminder not just of the longevity of Aristotelianism, but also its adaptability. Notoriously, Aristotle had discouraging things to say about women in his politics, and he suggested in his zoological works that that female animals are effectively male animals that failed to develop to full perfection. Yet some early modern proponents of teaching philosophy to women thought the philosophy in question should be Aristotelianism. Louis Leclage was one of them. He argued in 1667 that women should do philosophy, but should steer well clear of Cartesianism. He saw it as dangerous for precisely the reason Poulain praised it. It tends to make people abandon all accepted beliefs. This, said la clash, could lead to abandoning religion, and for that, good old Aristotle would be the best antidote. Now, Laclash was no Poulain. What he wanted was for women to become good wives and mothers, and a bit of philosophy should help them achieve that goal. But in a way this far from revolutionary, Thinker brings home to us that a revolution was truly underway, with even the socially conservative Aristotelians arguing that women should be well educated. It's no wonder that the 17th century was a turning point for the involvement of women in philosophy. Given Descartes comments and discourse on the method about writing for women and his eagerness to work with Princess Elizabeth and Queen Christina, we can guess that he would have been very pleased by his role in inspiring that sea change. And we can be absolutely sure that he would have been delighted by the impact his works made in another sphere, medicine. This was, after all, one of the fruits to be harvested from his tree of knowledge. So he surely wouldn't want us to finish our look at Cartesianism without touching on this aspect of his legacy. And far be it from me to disappoint the ghost of Descartes. So join me, my little cabbages, for an episode on Cartesianism and the sciences, especially medicine. Next time here on the history of philosophy without any G Sam.