The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
are flat and, ironically for a Cartesian, didactic. And yet they are not without revealing tensions. Education was meant to show how the intellectual emancipation of women might find a beginning, a point of departure, in his own society. In creating his interlocutors, he gave that beginning a recognizable social location and sought to dispel the skepticism he could expect to confront there. Though the conversations advance to a forgone conclusion, there are moments along the way when, with a close reading, the tensions in his efforts to fuse Cartesianism and the discourse of honnêteté become audible.
This is not to deny that Education, like Equality, attests to strong affinities between the two discourses. They both offered alternatives to the institutionalized forms of expertise in seventeenth-century France.16 Both assumed that the mind achieves a certain clarity and precision when it is freed from the pedagogical tyranny of “the schools” and follows its natural inclinations. They shared an undisguised contempt for the obscurantist jargon of Latinist scholarship and a preference for simple, clear use of the vernacular in print as well as in speech. They found ridiculous the conventional scholar’s knee-jerk appeals to canonical texts and especially to the ancients. In rejecting such appeals as mere “pedantry,” and in questioning what they saw as manipulative and intimidating forms of public and private communication, they opposed blind submission to “authority”; and at least to that extent, they both endowed individuals with a measure of intellectual autonomy.
But there are tensions, and these are reflected in the very dramatic structure of the conversations. Poullain introduces his dramatis personae with quick sketches, as in a play bill. There is Sophia, a “lady” (Dame) who is “so accomplished and so wise that she can be called wisdom itself”; Eulalie, a young lady “who speaks well, with ease and grace”; Timander, “an honnête homme who is persuaded by reason and good sense”; and Stasimachus, “the peacemaker, or the enemy of division, quarrels, and pedantry.”17 From the opening scene, when Stasimachus joins the other three at Sophia’s home, we learn that he is the author of Equality. He has already guided his friend Sophia to the new philosophical wisdom, which she states with a simple and sometimes blunt certainty that may have unsettled some readers. Timander, like Stasimachus, has freed himself from the “pedantic” schooling to which he was subjected; but, as his objections to his friend’s arguments make clear, he is noticeably less free of conventional social wisdom. With Sophia as his exemplar of an intellectually emancipated woman, and with Timander alternately aiding him and raising objections, Stasimachus undertakes the reeducation of the young Eulalie. The process begins with her initiation into Cartesian doubt, and culminates with his outlining an order of study for her, from geometry textbooks to several of Descartes’s philosophical texts. Because she is naïve in the positive sense—because her natural gifts of comprehension and speech have not been corrupted by conventional formal education—Eulalie is an able and willing pupil. By the end she has joined Sophia on the path to wisdom. Having surpassed Timander in intellectual emancipation, she declines his invitation to be as open with her as Stasimachus is with Sophia—though at points along the way she has shared his misgivings about adopting the new philosophy.18
One might expect the educational program of Education to be designed to realize the larger emancipatory agenda of Equality—the transformation of the world of educated employments into a meritocracy that would be as open to talented women as it was to talented men. That is not the case. In Equality Poullain had explained why, despite his egalitarian convictions, he looked to “distinguished ladies” to prove that women could be as rationally educated as men. He was careful to note that his “observations about the qualities of mind” could “easily be made about women of any class,” and that “the whole sex” was “capable of scientific study”; but because the “ladies” had “opportunity” and “external advantages,” they were able to overcome the “indolence” induced by “pleasure and idleness” and demonstrate their intellectual equality with men. There is an implicit paradox here; if leisure was a habit that “women of quality” had to overcome if they were to undertake “study,” it was also the sine qua non for study. Her advantages made Eulalie a promising subject of Stasimachus’s guidance because they exempted her from the work burdens that left most women with neither the time nor the energy to educate themselves. Poullain would have denied that he was abandoning the larger goal; he saw himself taking the first step—the only step that was practically possible under the circumstances. And yet there is a yawning silence in the text, a disconnection between it and its predecessor. The author of Equality, one might assume, would feel compelled to note in Education, if only in passing, that the Eulalies of French society would some day enter the world of offices and professions, or at least that their education would eventually be organized with that prospect in mind. The text offers no hint of such a prospect. The silence marks Poullain’s need to adapt his argument. The most radical change he had called for—his virtually utopian vision of a rational restructuring of social access to educated labor—could not be reconciled with the norms and taboos of an elite whose self-validation lay precisely in imagining itself hovering above the social organization of labor. Left unspoken is the irony that made this adaptation necessary: in the only social and cultural milieu that made Poullain’s first step possible, the next step was unthinkable.
Less obvious is the fault line in the text between two different concepts of selfhood. In the relational selfhood attributed to the honnête homme (or femme), self-formation and self-validation require a kind of hypersociability, leaving hardly any room for the introspection that distances an inner self from the particular society and culture in which it is immersed. Descartes’s philosophical calling was a reformulation of the reflective idea of self-formation as an “inner” ascent to wisdom through the meditative labor of “spiritual exercises.” It was indebted especially to Stoicism, and perhaps influenced by Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as well. Only with that context in mind can we understand what Descartes meant to convey when he wrote of “meditations” and offered “rules for the direction of the mind.” He was calling his readers to engage in reflective intellectual labor, to be distinguished sharply from the mere social “pleasures” that Saint-Évremond extolled.19
Poullain did not, it should be stressed, evade the possibility that the reflective self of Cartesian philosophy was incompatible with the relational self of the culture of honnêteté. In fact he might be said to have confronted it quite directly. He did so, however, by focusing not on the labor that reflectivity required, but on the commitment to radical critique that it might entail. Could one be an uncompromising Cartesian doubter and an honnête femme—or, for that matter, an honnête homme—at the same time? Descartes himself had been notoriously cautious on this issue. The first maxim in his own “provisory code of morals,” outlined in A Discourse on Method, offered a kind of compromise between critique and acceptance of the status quo. So long as he was on the path to truth, he would continue to “obey the laws and customs of [his] country,” adhering to the faith in which he had been raised, and conforming his “practice” to the “general consent” of “the most judicious.” In his own attempt at a Socratic dialogue—the unfinished Search for Truth—Descartes characterized the ideal seeker after Cartesian truth as an honnête homme.20 He seems to have been using the phrase in its literal sense, to evoke a sensible and upright man. To judge by his own life, the honnête homme he had in mind need not be the totally socialized participant in conversational play that the term honnête had come to imply by the 1670s. Descartes had preferred Holland to Paris. In that commercial country, “in the midst of a great crowd actively engaged in business,” he could enjoy the “conveniences” of “the most populous cities” and yet live “as solitary and as retired as in the midst of the most remote deserts.”21 Living in (relative) solitude, far removed from the salon culture as well as the learned societies of Paris, Descartes had simply avoided the demands of the new social aesthetic.
Poullain’s Cartesianism was necessarily much more tension-ridden. Unlike Descartes, the author of Equality extended the principle of radical doubt from epistemology and natural philosophy to a critique of the social order. By the very nature of the imagined setting of Education, its interlocutors could hardly avoid asking whether a consequential application