The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa
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but “there seems to be nothing about physical organisms,” McGinn writes, “from which [consciousness] could conceivably arise”; indeed, “the operations of matter look like a singularly inadequate foundation for a mental life.” McGinn aptly calls his position Transcendental Naturalism.10 The passage from matter to the immaterial—from activity in the brain to activity in the conscious mind (emotions, images, ideas, etc.)—remains incomprehensible to us and may be an insoluble mystery. We speak of the electrochemistry of the brain giving rise to, or generating, or producing the feelings and ideas of the mind. The very profusion of possible verbs to describe the brain/mind relationship betrays our ignorance.
McGinn may be overly pessimistic. At this point agnosticism would seem to be the prudent position; neuroscience opens a vast new universe of scientific exploration, and there is no telling what it will and will not yield in knowledge of the mind. Nonetheless I find it essential to take McGinn’s skepticism as our heuristic premise, if we are to be duly critical of leaps to conclusions that reduce the workings of the mind to brain functioning. It was precisely such materialist reductionism that informed much early modern medical thinking about intelligence, which distinguished between brain and mind but in effect reduced the latter to the former. The question early modern physicians asked was not whether men and women differed in mental capacities, or what the differences were, but what paradigm of the brain/body relationship best accounted for them.
In the very concept of intelligence (not to mention the measuring of it) we see the naturalization of something that could only be witnessed then, and can only be witnessed now, positionally. We see and hear performances of intelligence, without knowing what the thing (if it exists in the singular) is. More precisely, we see what a society and culture endorse some people and not others to perform, and what kinds of performance they forbid them, or at least disapprove. The rules are more or less internalized; there is room in individuals’ subjectivity to acquire a critical distance on them. People can, of course, adjust their performances to different contexts, and can move from one to another.
Though my use of “performance” has obvious affinities with Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, I am not advocating a way of conceiving a feminist political strategy. Nor am I following Stephen Greenblatt and other practitioners of the New Historicism, whose modus operandi I find incompatible with the kind of explanatory and interpretive historical analysis I attempt here.11 I am tempted to suffice with the OED definition of performance as “the doing of any action or work” and “the quality of this, esp. as observable under particular conditions.” But in the spirit of nineteenth-century positivism, the OED seems to have had in mind laboratory testing. For our purposes “observable” needs to be redirected to the ways in which we observe each other in the social relations of everyday life. In that capacity it implies—and I want to imply—that making one’s cognitive capacities audible (as in speech) or visible (as in writing or gestures) is a performance, not always in the sense that it is calculated to please or impress, but always in the sense that it occurs with awareness of the socially and culturally specific expectations of others. It is not quite right to say that my historical subjects misunderstood the workings of intelligence, as though we now thoroughly understand what they didn’t. They wrongly assumed that the nature of intelligence could be inferred from the performance of it. Neuroscience notwithstanding, we share this illusion with them. The critical point for our present purposes is that our historical subjects’ conceptual leap from performance to the thing itself is historically specific, contingent on the social arrangements and cultural resources of a particular time and place.
Of particular interest here are what I am calling aesthetic and relational intelligence, which were often conceded to women. That women excelled in aesthetic sensibility—in the gifts of “taste”—was a truism from the beginning to the end of our period. This sensibility usually had to bow to the principled rigor of manly moral judgment; but as the aesthetic and the moral were so tightly interwoven in early modern thought, there was no dispelling the lurking implication that women should have a central normative role in defining public as well as private morality. I use the term “relational” purposely to link my work to Jerrold Seigel’s history of the idea of the self and, as important, to suggest its relevance to arguments reverberating through feminism for at least the last four decades.12 In a study published in 1982 the developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan argued that women have a distinctly “female voice” in moral reasoning. Whereas men think morally by conceiving individuated rational agents and removing contextual detail to clear the way for the application of abstract principles, women’s moral thinking works through complex connections with others (hence “relational”) and takes into account the particularity of contextual detail. The implication is that the two voices should be integrated in a fully human moral reasoning.13 Though I admire Gilligan’s book, I wish she had brought more critical distance to bear on her claim about the difference in voices by considering historical precedents for it that had labile gender implications. We are only beginning to understand how complex were the implications of making relational intelligence a distinctly female capacity. This way of differentiating feminine from manly minds can be traced back at least to seventeenth-century France, well over a century before modern feminism emerged. It operated within the broad semantic range of the word esprit, which could mean the immaterial soul, or the mind as a structure of cognitive faculties, or the reasonableness of the cultivated social being, or the alacrity and acuteness of wit, or aesthetic and psychological discernment, or sentiment.
Gilligan’s contribution to theory has come to seem naïve as “difference” feminism has undergone several mutations, some far more radical than she had in mind, advocating a feminine alternative to reason rather than a feminine kind of reasoning. The opposition has been no less firm. To some any positing of female difference in reason merely has the effect of validating men’s power to define what women are; but at the same time any purported universalism—even a concept of the human being that tries to transcend gender and sexual difference entirely—relies on a male model and justifies male control. Other feminists want to extend, not negate, the logic of a broadly liberal tradition of universal human rights based on a universal human nature. Still others have recently made their peace with abstract universals, with what might be called reluctant pragmatism. They accept the need for the regulative ideas that universalism provides, however exclusionary they may inevitably be in application.14
I should make clear that my ethical loyalties lie with making the practice of reason as gender-neutral and sex-neutral as it can be, despite the fact that historical contingencies still impinge on it and may always do so. In 1984 Genevieve Lloyd, in a classic work of modern feminist scholarship, demonstrated that in western philosophy women have symbolically represented what is outside the deep symbolic structures of the concept of reason. Women were relegated to the “nether world” that manly reason transcended. Some feminist literary scholars, taking their cue from various strands of postmodernism and postcolonialism, have abused this insight in applying it to the period of the supposed formation of the modern world, the eighteenth century in western Europe, and have described the ascent of a “logocentric” Enlightenment (with the privileging of Logos, or reason, camouflaging male hegemony). As an Enlightenment historian, I find this view woefully ignorant. When it takes cognizance of the wide variety of texts that constitute the Enlightenment, it simply lumps them together, despite the many objections in them to a rigid privileging of the authority of Reason that turned it into a desiccated, coercive, and dehumanizing power. I agree with Lloyd, who herself took pains to avoid the conclusion that the concept of reason inherently relegates women to a nether world.
The distance between the discipline I entered and the one I now practice can seem unbridgeable. When I was a graduate student, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, social history began its heady ascendancy. The middle years of my career witnessed the passages from social to cultural history and to the linguistic turn. More recently I have taken part in the renewal of intellectual history, and have become increasingly interested in literary hermeneutics. I say this not to advertise my versatility, but to explain why the book cannot be easily categorized within a disciplinary subfield. Looking back, I do not see myself migrating from approach to approach, method to method. The evolution of my work is better