HoP 477 The Mind Has No Sex: Cartesianism and Gender

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spk_0 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 Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

spk_0 Online at historyofilosody.net

spk_0 Today's episode, the mind has no sex, Cartesianism and Gender.

spk_0 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 Cartesianism's.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Unlike the universities, Salon culture welcomed women.

spk_0 In fact, women were often the hosts.

spk_0 Last time I already mentioned Madame de Bonne Role, an outstanding Salonnier who was an exponent of Descartes' philosophy.

spk_0 There was also Madame de Suvret, who corresponded with Descartes' colleague Arnod and hosted leading scholars including Cartesianism.

spk_0 The celebrated letter writer and wit Madame de Sevigné claimed allegiance to what she called the Cartesian sect.

spk_0 Sevigné referred to her daughter as my little Cartesian, which is not the most obvious endearmant, but then French people sometimes express fondness by calling each other my little cabbage, so at least it fits a pattern.

spk_0 Another pattern of more importance to us just now is this fondness of women intellectuals for Cartesianism. What lay behind it?

spk_0 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 performance from Queen Christina of Sweden.

spk_0 Now, these were both royal figures, so one might cynically wonder whether their high social status simply trumped their gender in his eyes.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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 scholars, and thus had not had a chance to master its refined distinctions of forbidding technical terminology.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Indeed, that might well be one reason that Descartes appreciated engaging with Elizabeth. According to his biographer, Bayet, he found ladies to be more gentle, more patient, more docile, in a word more void of prejudices and false doctrines than many men.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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 this subject.

spk_0 It's 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.

spk_0 Naturally, quite a few contemporaries were not so ready to set aside their sexist assumptions. The well-educated, witty, literary denizens of the savagnes were mocked as presseuse or precious women.

spk_0 Moya made fun of them in his comedies, including one called Le Pharm Savant, meaning the Learned Ladies.

spk_0 That was first performed in 1672, but already in the 1650s we have works like the Abé Michel de Prues novel La Prête de Use, a parody of salon culture.

spk_0 A trio of friends who were considered to be presseuse were Arm de Levine, Marie de Pré, and Catherine Descartes.

spk_0 Yes, you heard that name right? Catherine was Vénaise Descartes' niece. For her, the spread of Cartesianism was a family affair.

spk_0 In 1673, she addressed a poem to La Vine, asking her to use her own considerable talents to champion Descartes' teachings.

spk_0 She enthused that great truths which seemed new will henceforth appear clear, solid, beautiful. And imagined her famous uncle, saying to her friend,

spk_0 I see our two names joined together, bringing to posterity my glory with yours, and I can already hear it said in many climbs, Descartes and La Vine have instructed the world.

spk_0 La Vine was presumably flattered, but wrote back also in poetic form to decline the mission.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Undeterred, Catherine later wrote a literary account of Descartes' death up in Sweden, blaming his demise not on the coldness but on his boldness.

spk_0 It was nature herself who decided to punish him for prying into her secrets with his scientific investigations.

spk_0 Catherine imagines nature as a fearsome goddess saying to Descartes, rash mortal, audacious soul, learn that one doesn't view the gods with impunity.

spk_0 The three friends belonged to the circle gathered around one of the most important figures of 17th century salon culture, Madalan des Ruderis.

spk_0 She published numerous novels as well as model speeches, though in another reflection of the social pressures invoked by Lavigne, Suderis' books appeared either anonymously or under her brother's name.

spk_0 Still, she was widely known to be the true author. In one of her novels, she names her spokeswoman character Safo, and she also takes up the guise of the Greek poet Safo to write a speech on the education of women.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Instead, women should become learned, something of which they are well capable since they are not inferior to men in imagination, memory or reason.

spk_0 Indeed, Suderis remarks, our sex is capable of anything we would attempt.

spk_0 She also engaged, by the way, in a passionate, epistolary verse exchange with Catherine Descartes.

spk_0 Alongside her identification with Safo and other features of her literary output, this has won her a prominent place in the history of same-sex attraction and literature.

spk_0 But her romantic connection to the Descartes family notwithstanding, Suderis was not really a Cartesian.

spk_0 She seems more like an heir to such humanist feminist like Moderata Fonte and Lucrezio Marinella, or earlier literary stylists like Marriott of Navarre, whose own intellectual circle helped to inspire early modern French salon culture.

spk_0 In fact, the best example of an explicitly Cartesian defensive feminism from this period is not by a woman.

spk_0 It was the achievement of Francois Poularm de la Barre, who wrote no fewer than three works on the subject.

spk_0 In 1673, he published a treatise called On the Equality of the Two Sexes, followed by a dialogue called On the Education of Ladies.

spk_0 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 fortaciously discussing the subject of equality, as here in Poularm's work.

spk_0 Finally, and surprisingly, Poularm 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.

spk_0 This has led some to assume that the whole project was a mere rhetorical exercise, or even a kind of sophisticated display, arguing on both sides of a contentious issue.

spk_0 This was the later judgment of Pierre Bale, who suggested that Poularm was just looking for controversy.

spk_0 He expected to have been written against, but finding that no reply was likely to appear, he wrote against his own book himself.

spk_0 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, Poularm wanted to gather together arguments against female equality for the sake of refuting these arguments and displaying their weakness.

spk_0 As for the points made in favour of female equality and his other two works, they are numerous and developed with a humanistic zeal for copious style.

spk_0 Though I don't think you can accuse Poularm of insincereity, 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Again, he argues that length that women and men share the same virtues, but then dedicates his dialogue to the Duchess of Ollion, praising her as uniting in her person, all that is noblest and most perfect in both sexes.

spk_0 But, as he shows in the dialogue, such inconsistencies are only to be expected when you have grown up in a sexist society.

spk_0 He has a kind of spokesman character there named Stasimicus, who with the help of a learned lady named Sophia, is trying to encourage the education of a young woman named Ullalia.

spk_0 A fourth character, Tamander, represents the common sense and scholastic view that women are inferior.

spk_0 Thus, Tamander says that every learned woman he has met is just a press use.

spk_0 Stasimicus is far more enlightened, but even he slips up at one point and says that Sophia has the mind of a man in the body of a woman.

spk_0 Sophia points out to him that this conflicts with his own feminist theory, and he apologizes, saying in effect that old habits die hard.

spk_0 And that's only one of several strikingly modern moments in the dialogue, with another nice instance being an exchange between Tamander and Ullalia.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 As I say, all this, including the choice of dialogue form and the way Poulan writes it, could be imagined as a further development from the Renaissance debate over women's equality.

spk_0 What makes Poulan novel is his explicit use of Cartesian ideas in the feminist cause.

spk_0 When Stasimicus eventually gets around to recommending a reading list for Ullalia's education, the authors he names include Descartes himself, Côte-moi, Rojol, La Forge, and The Port Royal Logic.

spk_0 See, I told you it's famous.

spk_0 More importantly, Poulan repeatedly emphasizes the need to abandon one's prior conceptions.

spk_0 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 Poulan describes as putting us in a state of impartiality or of objectivity, in which we lean neither to one side nor the other.

spk_0 One might say that Poulan goes even further than Descartes or better, that he applies the method in a domain that Descartes did not.

spk_0 The meditations used doubt to set aside prejudices about metaphysics, the relation between soul and body, the sciences, and so on.

spk_0 Poulan 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Poulan, by contrast, vigorously rejects customary attitudes about the inequality of women and also about the inferiority of the lower classes.

spk_0 Who knows, he asked, how many peasants might have become renowned scholars if they had been given the chance to study.

spk_0 The other properly Cartesian aspect of Poulan's view is the one already suggested by Queen Christina, that the mind or soul has no sex.

spk_0 It is equal and of the same nature in all humans and capable of all kinds of thoughts.

spk_0 Doctors find no anatomical differences between male and female brains, not that this would be decisive to a Cartesian dualist anyway.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 With his usual rhetorical flair, Poulan 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.

spk_0 He also seeks to pull the rug out from under sexist beliefs by offering a historical narrative to explain how they emerged.

spk_0 This is a version of the stories about the state of nature we find in other early modern thinkers, like Hobbes and Housseau.

spk_0 Originally, says Poulan, both sexes were equal. Sadly, men then started to exploit their physical strength and the fact that women are weakened and made vulnerable by pregnancy and child rearing.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Reading Poulan, one gets the impression that he was not led to his feminism by Cartesianism but rather the other way around.

spk_0 He has his spokesman, Stesemicus, express a preference for the teachings of Descartes precisely because it is the philosophical approach that is most effective in banishing false prejudice.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 Yet we should acknowledge that you didn't have to be a Cartesian to speak out in favor of that cause.

spk_0 You will hopefully remember the name of Anamaria von Schumann, the one who was taught by Descartes' enemy Voityus and allowed to attend lectures from behind a screen in Utrecht.

spk_0 She achieved great renown for her learning, including her mastery of numerous languages.

spk_0 One contemporary said that going to Utrecht without seeing von Schumann was like going to Paris without seeing the king.

spk_0 We have several surviving works by von Schumann, including a dissertation which deals with more or less the same question raised by Poulan, whether the study of the liberal arts is appropriate for a Christian woman.

spk_0 Her answer is, of course, the same as his, that it is not just appropriate but imperative for women to be educated.

spk_0 But her way of arguing for that conclusion couldn't be more different.

spk_0 von Schumann's procedure is entirely, even ostentatiously, faithful to scholastic methods.

spk_0 She lays out a series of syllogisms in favor of her position, and methodically, one might say pedantically, proves both premises for each syllogism.

spk_0 The premises from which von Schumann argues are often Aristotelian, though hers is an Aristotelianism updated for the feminist cause.

spk_0 For example, she cites Aristotle's from market, the start of the metaphysics, that all humans have a natural desire for knowledge and adds that this applies to women too.

spk_0 Similarly, learning confers virtue, and surely we want women not only men to be virtuous.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 What better activity for filling the hours than philosophical reflection.

spk_0 That's a point that was made by Madeline des scuderis, too.

spk_0 Women have lots of free time on their hands, which education could profitably fill.

spk_0 It's a reminder, if one were needed, that 17th century feminism was being championed by, and for, a rather elite class of women.

spk_0 Plenty of servants were needed to facilitate the philosophical activities of this elite, but then that goes for the men of the time, too.

spk_0 Now, von Schumann wrote a good 20 years before Prunang, so one might think that this explains the difference between them.

spk_0 Perhaps it just took a generation for Cartesianism to despise scholasticism as the best way to argue for gender equality.

spk_0 But, whatever his other achievements, we cannot credit Poulan for making feminism synonymous with Cartesianism.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 So, in 1693, there appeared a treatise on morals and philosophy by Gavrya Sushon, which again tries to make the case for educating women.

spk_0 Sushon knows and sites Poulan, but as the introduction to an English translation of her works' comments, she does not share his enthusiasm for decount.

spk_0 Instead, her approach is broadly scholastic, if not as markedly so as Van Schumann's.

spk_0 Which gives us another reminder not just of the longevity of Aristotelianism, but also its adaptability.

spk_0 Inotoriously, Aristotle had discouraging things to say about women in his politics, and he suggested in his zoological works that female animals are effectively male animals that failed to develop to full perfection.

spk_0 Yet some early modern proponents of teaching philosophy to women thought the philosophy in question should be Aristotelianism.

spk_0 Louis Leclash was one of them. He argued in 1667 that women should do philosophy, but should steer well clear of Cartesianism.

spk_0 He saw it as dangerous for precisely the reason Poulan praised it, it tends to make people abandon all accepted beliefs.

spk_0 This, said Leclash, could lead to abandoning religion, and for that, good old Aristotle would be the best-handed out.

spk_0 Now, Leclash was no Poulan. What he wanted was for women to become good wives and mothers, and a bit of philosophy should help them achieve that goal.

spk_0 But in a way, this far from revolutionary thinker brings home to us that a revolution was truly underway.

spk_0 With even the socially conservative Aristotelians arguing that women should be well educated, is no wonder that the 17th century was a turning point for the involvement of women in philosophy.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 And we can be absolutely sure that he would have been delighted by the impact his works made in another sphere, medicine.

spk_0 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.

spk_0 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 gaps.

HoP 477 The Mind Has No Sex: Cartesianism and Gender

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