The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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body.” Having already come to regard the Scholastic “sciences” as “particularly distasteful,” he found the lecturer’s “principles” so “simple” and so “true” that he “could not fail to agree with them.” For six months he followed Descartes’s “method,” learning more than he had learned in the previous six years. One of his discoveries was that the “scholastic” view of women “as monsters, and as very much inferior to men,” was completely wrongheaded.8
There is something stylized about this recollection, echoing as it does Descartes’s autobiographical account of his “search for truth” in A Discourse on Method. We have reason to suspect that in his ardent identification with Descartes the young Poullain had cast his recent conversion to fit a received mold. And yet the details are revealing of Poullain’s own experience. We learn that he came of age at a time when Scholastic learning, still deeply entrenched in the Parisian university faculties, faced a mounting challenge from the new natural philosophy and its offshoots. As in the case of many other educated young men in the 1660s, Poullain’s disillusionment with Scholasticism and his attraction to the Cartesian alternative fed off each other. The study of Descartes was not simply another intellectual experiment; it proved to be a definitive way out of a personal crisis, an escape from the anguish of disillusionment. Having lost the sense of purpose he had had since childhood, he found a new one. This intense awareness of shedding an outworn tradition and embracing a new mission drives the feminist argument in Equality and the subsequent texts. Poullain’s reasoning was that if Cartesian clarity can prevail on the subject of the equality of the sexes, which is “more prone to prejudice than any other subject,” it can prevail against “custom” in any area of social life. He would show that women in their current state were not what “nature” intended them to be; they were what arbitrary male domination—the abuse of superior force, sanctioned by mere custom—had made them. Once emancipated they would prove to be men’s equals, and perhaps in some ways their superiors, in every kind of work requiring rational intelligence.9
The recollection also suggests that, if Poullain’s intellectual commitment to Descartes entailed a measure of solitary reading and meditation, it nonetheless took place in, and required, a juxtaposition of social milieus to be found only in seventeenth-century Paris. It was conversations, friends, and at least one public meeting that led him to Descartes. The young Poullain was from a well-established family, if not an especially prominent one.10 At least from talk with friends and from his own reading, he was familiar with the conversational culture of the salons.11 He was acutely aware that the turn to Cartesianism from Scholasticism was social as well as intellectual, from the emphatically male clerical society of the Sorbonne to the very different world of men and women gathered in the salons. Academic study, he writes in Equality, stamps men with “rudeness” and “crudity (grossièreté) in their manners”: if scholars “want to go back into polite society (le monde) and cut a good figure there, they have to go to the school of ladies to learn politeness, the art of pleasing (complaisance), and everything else that is essential today to polished and cultivated people (honnestes gens).”12 In the first conversation in Education, Poullain counters the stereotype of the haughty and affected salonnière, used to such satirical effect in Molière’s The Learned Ladies, with the image of a “learned lady” who is “natural, polite, and easy to be with.” A few pages later he makes this appeal to the ladies:
What a singular service you and women like you could render our learned men (scavans)! By admitting them into your circles, you would give them a beautiful means of civilizing what they know; by making them part of your conversations, you would communicate that gentleness that they lack and that is distinctive of you. You would inspire in them insensibly that gallant and cultivated (honnêtes) air that makes you so lovable; and thus ridding them of what is hard and crude in them, you would put them in a position to be well received in le monde.13
His conviction of transformation notwithstanding, Poullain is perhaps best understood as a liminal figure. Thoroughly alienated from academic culture, he had probably not been assimilated enough into the empire of women to be aware of dissonances between its self-representation and its actual social practices. He was something of a naïf; enraptured by the ideal of the honnête femme, he made its radical revaluation of women integral to his reconstrual of his own social self.
The Mind Has No Sex
How did Poullain blend the discourse of honnêteté with his Cartesian argument in Equality, and with what results? The first time it is used in Equality, the phrase “the mind has no sex” stands alone, as the marginal header for several paragraphs. There is a sense, of course, in which the statement is eminently Cartesian. Descartes replaced the Aristotelian teleological distinction between a vegetative and a sensitive soul with his famous mind/body dualism. His dichotomy was ontological; there was matter, which he defined as having extension, and there was the single, unitary soul or “mind,” the thinking substance with no extension. The existence of the mind is not, in principle, contingent on anything with extension, including the human body. In this immaterial mind Descartes found our innate certainty—our clear and distinct ideas—of our own existence, of the existence of God, of the immaterial nature of our intellection, and of pure extension. Since the mind thus conceived is cleanly detached from corporeal substance, physical differences between human bodies, including sexual differences, are irrelevant to it.
In the passages Poullain’s phrase introduces, however, we soon learn that the mind has no sex only when it is “considered independently.” Having established the independence of “mind” as a concept, Poullain immediately proceeds to consider embodied minds, which differ despite the natural sameness and “equality” of all minds as such. He observes that “difference” between male and female minds is to be explained by variations not only in education and environment, but also in “the constitution of the body.” This, too, was an eminently Cartesian step. Descartes’s very insistence on the mind/body dualism had made it imperative to explain mind/body interaction. He did so by developing a psychophysiology based on a radically mechanistic conception of the body, including the brain. It was this new paradigm of the human body—a paradigm Descartes posed squarely against the received wisdom of scholastic medicine, despite its numerous borrowings from that tradition—that first attracted Poullain and others to the new philosophy. The human body, we should recall, was the subject of the “Cartesian lecture” Poullain attended with a friend.14
How did sexual differences affect the workings of the mind? On this subject Descartes’s texts offered very little guidance. Their presentation of the new paradigm was fragmentary and simply ignored sexual differences. Hence in the years following Descartes’s death in 1650, Cartesians had ample room to draw a wide spectrum of inferences. Most of them significantly qualified the principle of the sexless equality of minds by emphasizing that the physical weakness of women had its corollary in their mental weakness, usually explained by the softness of their brain fibers. Poullain derived from Descartes’s mechanistic paradigm a quite different view of the mind/body interaction; and, no less important, he made the normative implications of the discourse of honnêteté integral to his use of Cartesian doubt to mount a radical critique of the social status quo. Women, he argued, “have an advantageous disposition for the sciences”:
Their brain (cerveau) is constituted in such a way as to receive even faint and almost imperceptible impressions of objects that escape people of a different disposition.… The warmth that accompanies this disposition brings it about that objects make a more lively impression on a woman’s mind, which then takes them in and examines them more acutely and develops the images they leave as it pleases. From this it follows that those who have a great deal of imagination and can look at things more efficiently and from more vantage points are ingenious and inventive, and find out more after a single glance than others after long contemplation. They are able to give an account of things in a pleasant and persuasive way, finding instantly the right turn of phrase and expression. Their speech is fluent and expresses their thoughts to best advantage.… Discernment and accuracy (le discernement et la justesse) are natural qualities [of a woman’s disposition] It could be said that this kind of