1.1. ‘a history or, if you prefer, a fable’
For Jacques Rancière, politics is, in part, a conflict over social rationalities or logics. Far from reverting to a kind of idealist revanchism, aiming to interpret the world rather than change it, Rancière argues that politics is a moment of conflict between two ways of thinking and organizing – theorizing and practising – social relations. Politics begins when the supposition of equality interrupts the logic of policing and introduces new forms of speaking, being, and doing. The conflict of these two logics or rationalities and practices is the basis of any set of social relations. Every account of politics as speech or rationality (logos) is also a count of what speech or rationality is: political conflict ‘forms an opposition between logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways’ (Rancière, 1998e, 35).
Let us examine a paradigmatic form of treating the double count and account of logos, where Aristotle defines the human animal as political:
Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed [hexei] with the gift of speech [logos]. And whereas mere voice [phôné] is but an indication of pleasure and pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception [aisthesin] of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the useful and the harmful, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense [aisthesin] of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a household and a city. (Aristotle, 1253a9–18tm; see Rancière 1995, 1/19)
With a touch of irony, Rancière states in his ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ that ‘nothing could be clearer’ than Aristotle’s deduction: a human and thus political animal is an animal endowed with logos and an aisthesis of justice and injustice, good and evil, as well as the useful and harmful (1998e, 37). These political animals share not only the capacity to indicate pleasure and pain, like all other animals, but they also share in common a sense of justice, the useful, and the good. And yet, Rancière notes, it is not obvious how ‘language expresses a shared aisthesis’ (1995, 2/20). While logos and an aisthesis of justice, the useful, or the good may be shared, this logos is not possessed by all. A slave, Aristotle argues, is he who ‘by nature’ apprehends (aisthesis) speech but does not possess (hexis) it (1254b24–25). Women are similarly dispossessed of logos. At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle claims that women are made only for the purpose of the reproduction of the species and are thus inferior to men.1 Later, he argues that women are free (1259a40) but are incapable of ruling, for just as the rational part of the soul rules over the irrational, so does a man rule over a woman – who possesses reason without authority (1260a14). Although Aristotle argues that the possession (hexis) of speech is unique to human animals and indicates that they are part of the political community, there are nevertheless those, such as women and slaves, who have or possess no part in the community. Though Aristotle might not consider it as a wrong, his account or count of how human beings are political animals implies that there is a part of the human community without a part, what Rancière refers to as ‘the part of those who have no part’ (‘la part des sans-part’).
Politics, for Rancière, turns on a count of what there is in common in social life, what he calls a distribution of the sensible, the distribution of social relations and the ways in which bodies, places, practices, and visibilities are made intelligible. What separates the logic of the police and egalitarian logic is the count of the parts of the distribution of the sensible. The police counts the parts of society as parties with specific interests that can be represented according to customary forms of intelligibility, with no possibility that there is a void or supplement in society, a part which has no part, a part which is neither represented nor counted (Rancière, 1998e, 36). For Rancière, politics takes place when a part of those who have no part, through political subjectivation, contests the policing of social relations in order to introduce new ways of speaking, being, or doing.
In contrast to the political philosophy of the ancient Greeks, which serves to justify inegalitarian regimes of policing, Rancière explicitly links his account of political subjectivation to René Descartes, to whom little political philosophy, let alone egalitarianism, is often attributed. In Disagreement, Rancière argues that:
Politics is a matter of subjects, or, rather, modes of subjectivation. By subjectivation I mean the production through a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience, whose identification is thus part of the reconfiguration of the field of experience. Descartes’s ego sum, ego existo is the prototype of such indissoluble subjects of a series of operations implying the production of a new field of experience. Any political subjectivation holds to this formula. It is a nos sumus, nos existimus. (1995, 35–36/59)
A political subject introduces within a given distribution of the sensible new ways of being, doing, and speaking premised on the supposition of equality. But how does this account relate to Descartes, with his ‘provisional moral code’ (Discourse on the Method, VI, 22–8), his general reluctance to engage socio-political questions, and his attempts to restrict the method of doubt to epistemological and metaphysical considerations (Meditations, VII, 15)? What do Descartes’s cogito and Rancière’s account of political subjectivation have in common?
I will argue in this chapter that Rancière’s thought is indebted to a specific tradition of Cartesian egalitarianism that runs from the often-neglected work of François Poullain de la Barre to Simone de Beauvoir. It is possible to identify three overarching features of this tradition. First, Cartesian egalitarianism thinks political agency as a practice of subjectivity, even if its proponents differ on how political practice is subjectively engaged (whether, for instance, this engagement begins with individuals or collectives). Second, Cartesian egalitarians share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. This supposition follows from the beginning of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method:
Good sense (bon sens) is the best distributed (partagée) thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false – which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’ – is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things. (VI: 1–2)
Looking past the ironic posturing of the first sentence, Cartesian egalitarians such as Poullain de la Barre or Joseph Jacotot take this ‘bon sens’ as Descartes’s fundamental idea: ‘there are not several manners of being intelligent, no distribution between two forms of intelligence, hence between two forms of humanity. The equality of intelligences is first the equality of intelligence with itself in all of its operations’ (Rancière, 2005a, 412). The equality of intelligences has one other crucial consequence: if there is no hierarchy of intelligences, then there is no natural or inevitable hierarchy between those who rule and those who are ruled.
Third, Cartesian egalitarians conceptualize politics as the processing of a wrong through the practice of dissensus. As Rancière writes, ‘politics becomes the argument of a basic wrong that ties in with some established dispute in the distribution of jobs, roles, and places’, initiating ‘conflict over the very existence of something in common between those who have a part and those who have none’ (1995, 35/59). Politics is not concerned with those who already possess speech or visibility, nor is politics about power, consensus, or better or worse regimes. These are, in fact, problems of policing. When Rancière argues that politics turns on a wrong, he claims political practice for those who have been marginalized or excluded; political subjectivation is always a moment of dissensus that challenges the structural inequalities of a given regime of policing, when those without speech begin to speak, when the uncounted offer an account of themselves, when the previously invisible occupy a visible place.2
In this chapter, I will examine how these three features of Cartesian egalitarianism emerge from the work of Descartes. Although subjectivity (as cogito) and intellectual equality are central components of his philosophy, Descartes nevertheless limits his critique of the prejudices of intellect, authority, and habit to the epistemo-metaphysical problem of separation. After reconstructing how egalitarianism functions in Descartes’s system, I will show how Poullain reconceptualizes the problem of separation in a socio-political context, transforming it into the problematic of a wrong. He uses Descartes’s dualism to show that there are neither natural qualities of the mind nor of the body that justify the inequality of the sexes. Women have been wronged, Poullain argues, because there are no clear and distinct reasons for their subjugation. Instead, women have been denied the capacity of fully exercising their reason due to the political self-interest of men and the force of social convention.
After examining Descartes and Poullain, I will shift the discussion to the philosophy of Beauvoir. Though this has the unfortunate effect of setting aside many other developments in the historical relationship between Cartesianism, egalitarianism, and feminism, Beauvoir’s conception of the relationship between political subjectivity and the processing of a wrong foreshadows several of Rancière’s concerns.3 I will argue that Beauvoir’s account of a wrong – which occurs, for instance, when a woman is forced to assume, and thus limit, her freedom as an ‘other’ rather than a ‘subject’ – marks a significant advance over Sartre’s individualist ethics of the 1940s. Because Beauvoir focuses on those whose agency has been historically marginalized, her account of political subjectivity avoids the pitfalls that have so often plagued many strains of Marxism, which amplify the teleological character of the proletariat’s historic mission. For Beauvoir, it is not possible to subordinate one struggle to another; a historic mission, as it were, can only be built out of practices of solidarity, and not out of the hierarchization of demands, abilities, and intelligences.
Thus I focus on Beauvoir because her Cartesian egalitarianism is an important precedent to Rancière’s. Since Rancière does not, to my knowledge, extensively discuss the work of either Poullain or Beauvoir, I do not intend this as an explication of Rancière’s work, but rather as ‘a history or, if you prefer, a fable’ (Descartes, VI: 4) that provides an overview of a longer tradition of egalitarianism than is typically acknowledged. I will conclude by showing, through a focused reading of his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, how Rancière’s understanding of Cartesianism emphasizes the egalitarianism of Poullain and Beauvoir rather than Descartes’s metaphysical or epistemological commitments. In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes writes that the ‘last and greatest fruit of these principles is that they will enable those who develop them to discover many truths which I have not explained at all’ (IXb: 18). Though we will be telling a history or fable, revisiting the work of Descartes and his successors will outline a much richer history of Cartesian egalitarianism.
1.2. Descartes’s egalitarianism and the problem of separation
We do not typically consider Descartes an egalitarian. He is more often interpreted, in the post-Heideggerian tradition of philosophy, as an epochal figure of the modern destiny of metaphysics. On this account, Descartes introduces the metaphysical ground of technicity by dividing all beings between thinking subjects and objects of a calculable objective world.4 Or, following Antonio Negri, he is considered an architect of a ‘reasonable ideology’ that expresses the class compromise constitutive of the formation of bourgeois class power after the 1620s: whereas Descartes formulates his philosophy as the production of human significance (and practical utility) in its separation from the world, the bourgeoisie affirms its position in civil society at the same time that it accepts a temporary class compromise with absolutism (Negri, 1970, 295–6).
Recently, however, several prominent radical thinkers have laid claim to the legacy of the Cartesian subject. For example, Alain Badiou, Rancière and Slavoj Žižek all hold that the emergence of subjectivity in political praxis is irreducible to the reconfiguration of Cartesian thought as instrumental rationality, whether it is considered as a moment of technological enframing or as a moment of bourgeois compromise.5 Yet the Cartesianism of Badiou and Žižek does not imply the supposition of equality. Instead, their commitment is largely programmatic. Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject, proposes that the Cartesian subject is a revolutionary alternative to what he considers to be the hegemony of ‘liberal-democratic multiculturalism’, a category into which he throws things as unlike as new age obscurantism and postmodern deconstruction (Žižek, 1999, 1–4). For Badiou, Descartes is a paradigmatic materialist dialectician, insofar as he maintains that truths are eternal against the general presumptions of both ‘democratic materialism,’ which counts only bodies and languages, and Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s ‘aristocratic idealism,’ which, despite its overwhelming sense of resignation, aims to preserve the poetic event against modern nihilism (2006b, 1–6).
In contrast to these interpretations, I will argue that Descartes’s work wavers between egalitarianism and the constraints of method. On the one hand, the Cartesian project, even for Descartes, requires the supposition of equality in order for its method to be verified. That is, rather than appealing to tradition, convention, or authority to establish the validity of his system, Descartes calls for the well-considered and reasonable judgements of his readers. And yet, on the other hand, Descartes makes persistent appeal to the necessity of method to prevent the egalitarianism of his appeal from encouraging a thoroughgoing critique of all social conventions. Instead, his system is directed toward epistemological and metaphysical questions, which are structured by the problem of separation.
Let us begin with Descartes’s supposition of equality. Despite his programme of searching out the self-foundational moment of a system, his philosophy is nevertheless conditioned (but not necessarily determined) by its historical situation, or the distribution of the sensible within which it was elaborated. When Rancière speaks of a distribution of the sensible, it includes the relations between subjects, objects, and places, and the ways of speaking, doing and being that make these relations intelligible. While policing, in Rancière’s terms, is a process of hierarchically arranging these relations and enforcing them, we should not consider a distribution of the sensible as static until politics intervenes; instead, the intelligibility of these relations is also dynamic, which can change, enter into periods of stability, and undergo crises from which a politics of dissensus can emerge (or not).
Though it is not a moment of politics in Rancière’s sense, Descartes’s thought inaugurates a new way of thinking the relations between subjectivity, habit, and intelligibility within an intellectual milieu in transition, in which Scholasticism and Renaissance philosophy have been challenged by a renewed sense of scepticism. This conjuncture is not unique to philosophy, but is itself enmeshed within a series of socio-political upheavals. Negri, for instance, points to the recomposition of class power after the European economic crisis of 1619–22 and the condemnation of Galileo (1970, 112–26; 140–55). Moreover, as Susan Bordo argues, the renewal of scepticism is not only of philosophical interest, but also an expression of the ‘epistemological implications of cultural difference’ brought on by advances in European techniques of travel (to, for instance, China) and the conquest of the Americas (Bordo, 1987, 40–1). She cites, for example, Montaigne’s remark that ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country’ (Montaigne, I, XXXI, 231).
In the Discourse, Descartes makes a similar remark: ‘It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly and not think that everything contrary to our own ways is ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing of the world ordinarily do’ (VI: 6tm).6 He draws two conclusions from this diversity of customs: first, ‘not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom’ (VI: 10), and second, that the knowledge of cultural difference helps justify the supposition that opens the Discourse, that good sense or reason is ‘naturally equal in all men’ (VI: 2).7 From these two conclusions Descartes proposes a new relationship between subjectivity, habituation, and intelligibility. This new relationship is founded on the cogito or thinking being, which emerges from a method of doubt directed toward habits or practices derived from custom and a discourse of intelligibility established on the authority of the schools. The significance of this critique of convention turns on whether it is conceived as a project of intellectual emancipation, or as the metaphysical and epistemological problem of separation.
It is possible, beginning with the Discourse, to read Descartes’s project as an exercise in intellectual emancipation. Starting from the premise of the equality of intelligences and abilities, Descartes delineates his method of directing his reason as an example of ‘self-instruction’ for the reader to judge as to whether it is a worthy example for imitation or improvement (VI: 4). It is not a necessary order of reasons, as it is in the Meditations, or an attempt at ‘teaching’, but an account of how Descartes had ‘tried to direct [his] own’ reason (VI: 4). By stressing the egalitarian aspect of this work, we can see that the validity of the subject as thinking being is verified by the capacity for the direction of reason to be repeated through each reader’s self-instruction. The emergence of the cogito transfers authority from the customs of the schools to all those to whom reason or good sense is distributed – a lesson in the practice of thinking learned from Descartes’s travels rather than the schools (VI: 5–6). The intelligibility of the new philosophy – and its foundation, the cogito – is verified through the free use of the reader’s own reason, rather than doctrinal authority.
Nevertheless, the socio-political consequences and the gestures toward a broader vernacular culture found in the Discourse are absent from the Meditations. The contingent emergence of the cogito as a response to a crisis in intellectual authority within the sciences is instead given a metaphysically necessary status, and philosophical inquiry becomes a problem of ascertaining the proper epistemological and metaphysical foundations for physics. The egalitarian moment of the Discourse is now restricted to the problem of the separation of self and world.8 Once we enter into the order of reasons of the Meditations, the situation becomes, as Sartre argues, that of ‘autonomous thought which, by its own power, discovers intelligible relationships between already existing essences’ (1947, 499tm).
Let us look at the way that the Meditations recasts the relationship of subjectivity, habit and intelligibility. The ‘First Meditation’ begins with Descartes’s acknowledgement that he has been accustomed since childhood to a method of making judgements that has led to numerous falsehoods, which leads him to suspect that the basis of those judgements – information ‘acquired either from the senses or through the senses’ – is doubtful (VII: 18). This passage carries a double significance. In fact, Descartes wavers between two different accounts of the basis of the judgements he has discovered to be doubtful. Both share the same starting point – the prejudice of relying on the senses has a basis in the habits acquired in childhood – but they differ on how these habits are acquired. One, which I will call the ‘prison of the body’ account, identifies the body as the cause of the prejudices that prevent the proper use of reason.9 In the subsequent history of Cartesian egalitarianism, this metaphysical account of the origin of prejudices is rejected in favour of the second account, which focuses on the socio-political critique of convention, such as the criticism of Scholasticism.
In the Discourse, we find a socio-political critique of the prejudices of childhood. One accepts teaching based on authority and explication, rather than according to reason. Descartes recounts that from ‘my childhood I have been nourished upon letters, and … I was persuaded that by their means one could acquire a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful in life’ (VI: 4). Books – ‘letters’ – would have taught him the basic premise of Scholastic philosophy, that ‘nihil est in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu’, that ‘nothing is in the intellect unless it was first in the senses’ (Carriero, 2009, 12ff.). Rather than understanding the immediacy and intelligibility of the sensible as a naïve standpoint, we could understand it as a product of a determinate (and by Descartes’s time, reified) historical production of knowledge, that is, of Scholasticism. In this case, the method of doubt and the emergence of the subject of the cogito become a challenge to one particular historical system of knowledge, though a persistent vigilance is required to prevent Descartes’s thought from being reified into a teaching based on authority, a vigilance evidenced by his repeated references to needing to inculcate new habits of thought against the lures of custom. This is how, broadly speaking, the Cartesian egalitarians will take up his thought.
On the other hand, Descartes also faults the body itself for propagating the habits and prejudices of childhood; the body is, on this account, the prison of the soul.10 In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes writes:
In our childhood the mind was so immersed in the body that although there was much that it perceived clearly, it never perceived anything distinctly. But in spite of this the mind made judgments about many things, and this is the origin of the many preconceived opinions which most of us never subsequently abandon. (VIIIa: 22)
On this account, Scholasticism’s reliance on the senses as the foundation of knowledge serves to reinforce the prejudices of the body. The task for thinking, for Descartes, is to obtain through the method of doubt a reflexive distance from what we take to be the immediacy of the senses to allow the intellect to mediate our judgements. The task is to separate thinking substance, the cogito, from the mechanisms of the body through a method that makes it possible to discover clear and distinct ideas of ‘already existing essences,’ as Sartre puts it – of, for instance, thought, extension, substance, and God (1947, 499tm). Of course, as many commentators have pointed out, it is difficult to see how Descartes can establish a measure to test the truth of a judgement after the introduction of hyperbolic doubt. Even if he can demonstrate the truth of the cogito as a thinking being, it is still possible that he is being deceived about other kinds of knowledge. To overcome the evil genius hypothesis, Descartes proceeds in the ‘Third Meditation’ to attempt a proof of his dependence on a supremely perfect being. This supremely perfect being functions, in the system, as the guarantor of the knowledge that Descartes establishes throughout the rest of the Meditations, gradually returning into his grasp the fields of mathematics, physics, and everyday sense experience – as long as these things are conceived ‘clearly and distinctly’. With thought and extension clearly and distinctly separated, and with their correspondence guaranteed by God, the reconstruction of philosophy from the cogito allows Descartes to introduce a physics that explains bodies and movements according to the general rules of mechanics and mathematics, rather than the Scholastic – or childlike (VII: 437–9) – cognition of universals from particular qualities derived from the senses (see Carriero, 2009, 16–17; Garber, 1986, 84–8). By establishing the ‘already existing’ essential validity of the separation of thought and extension, Descartes limits the possibility that doubt toward the sensible could open into a socio-historical critique – that is, that knowledge could be historically situated.
Instead, Descartes suggests that Scholasticism lends the errors of the body an artificial veneer of rationality. In the unfinished dialogue ‘The Search for Truth’, Descartes juxtaposes the ‘natural’ use of reason to the ‘artifice’ of Scholasticism. In this text, the greatest threat to knowledge is not the separation of thought and extension and of self and world, because in his system God guarantees that they have an intelligible relationship; the greatest threat is that the good sense of the meditator is captured by the artifice of authority and the schools, that, as in the case of Epistemon the Scholastic, one is lulled into the ‘habit of yielding to authority rather than lending [one’s] ear to the dictates of reason’ (X: 523).11 By contrast, Descartes claims that his method begins, through the use of doubt, by inculcating ‘a judgment which is not corrupted by any false beliefs and a reason which retains all the purity of its nature’ (X: 498). The whole rhetorical staging of ‘The Search for Truth’ relies on Eudoxus being able to direct Polyander (a character who has never studied but possesses ‘a moderate amount of good sense’) in this ‘natural’ use of his reason with the aim of discovering the true principles of (Cartesian) philosophy (X: 514). Yet if Cartesianism lays claim to being the ‘natural’ use of reason, then it risks, despite Descartes’s protests that he is not attempting to ‘teach’ anyone, repeating the problems that he had identified with Scholasticism: the naturalization of doctrine through the reification of a historically situated knowledge. In Rancière’s terms, the intellectual emancipation promised by the Cartesian ego sum, ego existo is subordinated to the intellectual policing of method.
1.3. The rationality of a wrong
The social and political consequences of Descartes’s thought were not lost on his contemporaries, especially in the conflicts over the equality of the sexes.12 His account of the egalitarian distribution of reason stands in stark contrast with the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics.13 As we have seen, while Aristotle defines humans as rational animals, he nevertheless proceeds to dispossess slaves and women of logos. Women are doubly dispossessed, with bodies created for the ‘single use’ of reproduction (1252b1–5) and a capacity for the use of reason for which they possess no authority.
Poullain de la Barre appropriates Cartesian philosophy to show, in contrast to Aristotle, that patriarchal social forms possess authority without reason. In On the Equality of the Two Sexes, Poullain notes that:
if something is well established, then we think it must be right. Since we think that reason plays a role in everything men do, most people cannot imagine that reason was not consulted in the setting up of practices that are so universally accepted, and we imagine that reason and prudence dictated them. (Poullain, 1673, 54)
Using the results of Cartesian philosophy, Poullain argues that the inequality of the sexes – that is, the subjugation of women – is founded on the prejudices of habit, custom, and political self-interest rather than well-founded reasons. Though we have seen that Descartes restricts his system to the epistemological and metaphysical problem of separation, Poullain uses Cartesian philosophy to conceptualize the wrong at the basis of the inequality of the sexes: both popular opinion and scholarly learning dispossess women of subjectivity and the capacity to reason. Poullain’s task, then, is to demonstrate how the part of those who have no part – women as they are socially excluded and subjugated – can lay claim to a political subjectivity that they have been denied. This claim begins with undermining the foundations of long-standing prejudices that justify inequality. This process of critique can open the possibility of a more egalitarian distribution of the sensible, in which women are recognized as thinking and speaking subjects, not merely passive objects of men’s possession, and as agents who are just as able as men to make public use of their reason.
In On the Equality of the Two Sexes, Poullain argues – in a passage that later appears in paraphrase as an epigraph to The Second Sex – that the historical and intellectual record shows that:
Women were judged in former times as they are today and with as little reason, so whatever men say about them should be suspect as they are both judges and defendants. Even if the charges brought against them are backed by the opinions of a thousand authors, the entire brief should be taken as a chronicle of prejudice and error. (1673, 76)
To overturn these judgements, Poullain criticizes both ‘popular’ and ‘learned’ prejudices against women. There are, he argues, no natural reasons for the ‘chronicle of prejudice and error’, but only the ‘reason’ of political self-interest. The oppression of women has been enforced by the physical strength of men, and policed by naturalizing a gendered division of labour within the distinction of public and private domains (see his ‘historical conjectures’ at 1673, 56–60). This situation is reproduced, he argues, when in both ancient and modern times intellectuals have generally taken ‘their prejudices with them into the Schools’ and worked to give reasons for the subjugation of women (1673, 79).
Poullain appropriates Descartes’s distinction between thought and the body to show that there are neither intellectual nor physical inequalities between men and women. Customary prejudice, he notes, holds that women cannot exercise reason as well as men, often pointing out how women are more passionate or intemperate, how their use of reason is less independent of the body. Poullain turns this argument around to claim that those who maintain this customary prejudice have themselves provided reasons that do not consider the faculties of the mind independently from the body. For, he claims, given that thought is a substance other than body, the mind has no sex, and if the mind has no sex, good sense or reason is equally distributed to both men and women. Moreover, if equality is indeed the case, there is no natural basis for an intellectual division of labour. From the standpoint of well-considered reasons, his misogynist opponents have confused nature and custom: the perceived intellectual flaws of women are the product of their exclusion from education. In addition, the intellectual stultification of women, Poullain notes, also has a political basis: those who deny that the ‘scope of reason is boundless and has the same influence over all people’ do so out of self-interest, fearing that ending a gender- (and class-) based intellectual division of labour will devalue the prestige and authority that comes with learning (1673, 95). Given the numerous prejudices of intellectuals, Poullain even suggests that the exclusion of women from education could work to their eventual advantage because they would be able to direct their natural reason without the artifice of the schools (1673, 62–5).14
That the mind has no sex, and that good sense or reason is equally distributed among all humans, are the positions of Poullain that are closest to Descartes. It is more difficult to use the Cartesian system to establish that inequality is not based on embodied differences, given that Descartes sometimes maintains that the body is the prison of the soul, that the confusions of the body produce many of our prejudices. The stakes are also elevated when one considers that the authoritative figures of Scholastic philosophy viewed the capacities of the body with some disgust – especially when it comes to women’s bodies. Women were considered ‘monstrous’ by Aristotle and considered ‘imperfect’ or ‘incomplete’ men by others (Poullain, 1673, 118).15 Poullain, then, cannot rely on Descartes’s claim that the body is the origin of human prejudices about the world to show that there are no natural inequalities that can be discovered in the embodied differences between men and women.
Instead, Poullain, like several other Cartesians and cartésiennes, attempts to rehabilitate the body within the Cartesian system.16 He argues that the reproductive functions are the only embodied differences between men and women; in all other ways the mechanisms of the body follow the same laws (1673, 82). Poullain emphasizes Descartes’s Passions of the Soul over his ‘prison of the body’ conjectures.17 In addition, embodied differences are not considered imperfections.18 Instead, Poullain claims that ‘God desired’ to create the difference of the sexes so that human beings would be dependent upon each other, and that each body is ‘perfect in its own way: both are presently constituted as they were intended’ (1673, 104). This position, however, valorizes motherhood in a way that later feminists such as Beauvoir would openly challenge. Despite his precautions in other arguments, Poullain seems to rely on the assumption (especially given that he attributes it to ‘God’s desire’) that maternity is a natural good that provides women with ‘the highest purpose in the world, namely to bear us and nourish us in their womb’ (1673, 104). Nevertheless, these arguments for the equality of two kinds of ‘perfect’ bodies contrast starkly with the depreciations of the body current during the seventeenth century. Despite the contingencies of his historical situation, Poullain’s philosophy is a prototype for an emancipatory political thought that seeks to show both how all humans are capable of exercising their freedom, and how, as Beauvoir will write three centuries later, biology is not destiny.
1.4. Woman as other, woman as subject
As is well known, both Sartre and Beauvoir take the cogito as a starting point for interrogating the freedom of human being. In Beauvoir’s words, the ‘Cartesian cogito expresses both the most individual experience and the most objective truth’ insofar as it affirms that human freedom is the basis of all values (Beauvoir, 1947, 17). As Sartre underlines, the basis of this ‘most individual experience’ is the democratic character of good sense.19 He emphasizes that ‘the famous assertion that good sense is the most widely shared thing in the world doesn’t simply mean that every man has in his mind the same germs of thought, the same innate ideas’, but that there is a free capacity of judgement shared equally by all humans (Sartre 1947, 505). To be more specific, Sartre reads this moment of freedom as the capacity to doubt, to negate all qualities other than freedom; the basis of the thinking subject is ‘that nothingness, that little quivering of air that alone escapes the enterprise of doubting and is nothing other than doubt itself; and when it moves out of nothingness, it does so to become a pure assumption of being’ (Sartre, 1947, 520). Cartesian freedom, emerging out of a moment of doubt, must be transformative, a projection into an open future. This much, I think, Sartre and Beauvoir have in common, but they diverge concerning how the freedom which is the basis of all value can be realized within the social life of the individual. Through the mid-1940s, Sartre largely remains focused on the problem of how an individual can act freely within a historical situation that is not of his or her own making, and many of his more hyperbolic comments imply that, as long as one is not in bad faith, all choices are equivalent as long as they are free (see Section 2.4).
Genevieve Lloyd worries that Beauvoir’s commitment to the ‘ideal of radical freedom’ could add ‘an extra burden of self-recrimination on those – male or female – who find themselves caught in oppressive situations’ (Lloyd, 1993, 98). However, already in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), Beauvoir is attentive to the situation of the oppressed and marginalized in ways that Sartre would only recognize later: throughout her analyses of the existential attitudes that lead to bad faith or individualist ethics, she repeatedly claims that a subject’s freedom must work toward the freedom of others.20 For Beauvoir it is necessary that practices of freedom and the situations that they transform be understood as historically differentiated, so neither situations nor choices are equivalent. This requires Beauvoir to move from an individualist ethics to conceptualizing these concerns from their bases in social perceptions and relations designated as l’expérience vécue: the socially lived experience of giving an account of oneself within a historically concrete situation (see Simons, 1999, 41–54).
In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir frames the question of subjectivity more explicitly as a political problem, not just in the sense that she examines how a subject assumes her freedom within a historical situation, but also insofar as this question turns on what we have called a wrong: she pursues the consequences of the fact that, despite being an ‘autonomous freedom’, a woman ‘discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other’ (Beauvoir, 1949, 17/1: 31). Like Poullain, Beauvoir rejects the thesis that there are biological data that necessarily determine, and form the ‘fixed destiny’ of, the subjugation of women within the social hierarchy of the sexes (1949, 44/1: 70). Instead, she argues that all situations are politically and historically conditioned, meaning that all possible biological data take on social values rather than intrinsically natural values that transcend a given situation.21
Beauvoir therefore turns to the investigation of the historical and political bases of the inequality of those who are able to assume their subjective freedom, and those who – depending on the situation, could be women, African Americans, the colonized, or other groups – confront a historical situation in which they are considered pejoratively as ‘others’. It is a fundamental supposition of existentialism that all human beings have the capacity to exercise their freedom, because freedom is the basis of all social values, and yet in each situation they cannot exercise the full extent of their freedom.
Beauvoir politicizes the existentialist account of subjectivity and freedom by conceptualizing how a wrong is introduced into social distinctions between subjectivity and alterity. This wrong occurs because women are constrained by a situation in which men are subjects and women are others. The distinction between self (or subject) and other, she notes, is not necessarily the basis of a wrong. The category of the other ‘is as original as consciousness itself’ (1949, 6/1: 16). Beauvoir states that the distinction between self and other can designate a relationship of reciprocity (such as that between nature and culture) or opposition and antagonism (between, for instance, two different cultures). But it is quite possible that the well-travelled person can recognize the reciprocity of these two different cultures, which relativizes her concept of alterity – just as Descartes noted that visiting others can reveal how one’s own customs are just as arbitrary and locally determined as another’s. In such a situation, alterity is not a negative category, but one through which one’s own values are questioned and reconsidered.
What is different about the situation of women is that the distinction between men and women carries with it a series of value-laden social judgements: a woman is defined against the standard of man and the man’s attributes are given positive values, while women’s attributes are considered negatively as flaws or insufficiencies. These values are reinforced because men arrogate to themselves the sole capacity to make such judgements. As Michel Kail writes, women are interpellated in ‘a specific regime of alterity [that] shows that rulers control the meaning of the situation by setting the very conditions that make relationships possible’ (Kail, 2009, 157). Beauvoir produces numerous examples to show how, in such situations, ‘Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being’ (Beauvoir, 1949, 5/1: 15). This situation is prevalent in both social and intellectual life. Take, for instance, Emmanuel Lévinas’s account of one’s responsibility toward a transcendent Other: Beauvoir sardonically notes that his claim that ‘alterity is accomplished in the feminine’ forgets that a ‘woman also is consciousness for herself’ (1949, 6, n.3/1: 15 n.1).
Although much of The Second Sex is dedicated to diagnosing and cataloguing how a woman is defined against a masculine standard, Beauvoir also points toward the possibilities of women’s emancipation. First, she argues that subjective practice must be socially transformative: the reified social structures that commit a wrong against a marginalized or oppressed group must be challenged and interrupted by the free creation of new social values. A wrong occurs, she argues, when one’s freedom is denied within a given social situation, such as when the values of ‘patriarchal femininity’ – such as the myth of the ‘Eternal Feminine’ – are created or upheld by men and utilized to police the ‘proper’ places or practices for a woman.22 While the values that underlie patriarchal femininity are often inconsistent, they function to treat femininity as an absolute alterity, which dispossesses women of their subjective freedom. As Beauvoir writes:
to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of women, mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is an entity but that women are not feminine. (1949, 266/1: 383)
Although Beauvoir’s use of the term wrong is not exactly equivalent to Rancière’s, they are nevertheless analysing the same type of oppression: the values of patriarchal femininity function to dispossess women of their freedom, their speech, and their capacity to give an account of themselves. In addition, Beauvoir argues that it is not enough to reverse the polarities of the values and distinctions of patriarchal femininity, in the way that the mystic identifies with the absolute alterity of the feminine – or celebrates, rather than denigrates, women’s proximity to nature in contrast to the artifice of masculine culture; as Mary Wollstonecraft points out, there is no reason to lend credence to ‘prejudices that give a sex to virtue’ (1792, 75). Again, to affirm the social character of women’s struggle, Beauvoir holds that attempts at ‘individual salvation’ such as mysticism, love, or narcissism ‘can only result in failures’ (1949, 717/2: 517); a wrong must be challenged by a socially transformative engagement that undermines the judgements and distinctions of patriarchal femininity through the free creation of social values.
Second, Beauvoir’s politics are universal and egalitarian. She argues that the recognition of some people as subjects and the social exclusion of some people as others is the fundamental basis of inequality. Be it the distinction between men and women, Americans of European descent and African Americans, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, ‘whether it is race, caste, class, or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same’ (1949, 12/1: 24). In each case those who rule attempt to demonstrate that there is some natural reason for inequality: ‘one of the ruses of oppression,’ she writes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, ‘is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one can not revolt against nature’ (1947, 83). Thus a crucial task for politics is to demonstrate that these so-called natural differences are based on social relations. But the dual lesson of Beauvoir’s critique of Marxian economism must not be forgotten. First, all struggles emerge from, and are conditioned by, their local and historical situation, which means that they use varied approaches to emancipatory practices. Hence second, the emancipatory aspirations of a people cannot be subordinated to another group’s aspirations. One cannot argue that the historical mission of the proletariat requires that, for instance, women subordinate their demands and practices to those of the proletariat. However, despite the rejection of a teleological concept of historical struggle, one should nevertheless maintain, like Beauvoir, that women’s liberation requires the end of their economic exploitation. These various struggles can only be strengthened and reinforced by what Beauvoir calls reciprocity – by practices of freedom and solidarity that do not reproduce the social hierarchies that these groups are combating.
While Sartre’s existential appropriation of the cogito marks him as a Cartesian, Beauvoir is a Cartesian egalitarian. Her conceptualization of political subjectivity follows Descartes and Poullain insofar as it affirms that reason or good sense is equally distributed to all people – far from a world of sovereign subjects and their inferiors, she proposes a politics that instils the reciprocity of practices of freedom. Her existentialism begins with the individual, but it demands that the individual aims toward accomplishing practices of reciprocity and freedom that expand ‘toward an indefinitely open future’ (1949, 16/1: 31).
1.5. Toward collective egalitarianism
This history or fable of the egalitarianism that leads from Descartes to Beauvoir shows that Cartesianism cannot be reduced to several of its more prominent conceptual commitments, such as mind–body dualism, the technicity of its mechanistic physics, or even, as we will see with Rancière’s critique, the so-called rigours of the method. Cartesianism is also defined by its egalitarianism: the formation of a political subject from the supposition of the equality of intelligences. This subject is political insofar as its praxis turns on the processing of a wrong, an egalitarian challenge to the inequalities of any social order. As we have seen, Cartesianism from Poullain to Beauvoir constitutes a direct challenge to the claim that there is a hierarchy of intelligences.
If egalitarianism is a key component of this kind of Cartesianism, then it becomes possible to see why Rancière argues, in Disagreement, that ‘Descartes’s ego sum, ego existo is the prototype of such indissoluble subjects of a series of operations implying the production of a new field of experience’ (1995, 35/59). This new field of experience – what we could call, following Beauvoir, a collective reciprocity of equality – is opened when the part of those who have no part engage in political practice, challenging a social distribution that counts them as inferiors or subordinates, such as the count, challenged by Poullain and Beauvoir, that women are others and not subjects of freedom. Without this aspect, it is difficult to see why Rancière lays claim to the Cartesian legacy, for he directly challenges, through a discussion of Joseph Jacotot, many of Descartes’s epistemological and metaphysical assumptions.
In fact, Rancière’s work does not contain an extensive interrogation of Descartes’s thought. As we have seen in the Introduction, Rancière reproduces as an epigraph to The Philosopher and His Poor a passage from Baillet’s La Vie de Monsieur Descartes that gives an account of the friendship between Dirk Rembrantsz, a Dutch peasant shoemaker and autodidact astronomer, and Descartes, in which Descartes embraces a man of lower social standing because of their common interest in astronomy (1983, xxii–xxiii). Baillet’s story provides a counterpoint to the ways – criticized by Rancière – in which Plato, Marx, Sartre, and Bourdieu treat the poor in their respective philosophies. But there are other moments when Cartesian egalitarianism surfaces in The Philosopher and His Poor. At one point, Rancière contrasts Descartes’s supposition of the universality of ‘good sense’ to Plato’s distribution of the virtues within the parts of the city. Though each part of the city is organized around its full realization, coordinating functions and virtues:
only a government of philosopher-guardians can give the first order its own virtue, wisdom (sophia) … There is no virtue or education that belongs to the laboring people. Their ‘own’ virtue – moderation, common ‘wisdom’ (sōphrosunē) – must come to them from outside. There is no ‘self-mastery’ that the inferior can claim as its own virtue since, by definition, mastery presupposes a superior. The ‘wisdom’ of the people cannot be either a ‘good sense’ or a ‘common sense’ shared equally by the most educated and the least educated; nor can it be a quality specific to inferiors. It is simply the submission of the lowest part of the state to its noblest part. (Rancière, 1983, 24–5; on Kant’s aesthetic common sense, see Section 3.5)
According to Plato, of the three classes in the city, only the philosopher has the capacity to contemplate and assign virtues. With the artisan, the superior part of the soul is ruled by a weaker part, and thus ‘to insure that someone like that is ruled by something similar to what rules the best person, we say that he ought to be the slave of that best person who has a divine ruler within himself’ (590c), as to be ruled by a superior does not wrong the inferior. To Plato’s division of labour, Rancière opposes the supposition of the Cartesian ‘good sense’ shared equally by all human beings in order to isolate a wrong: artisans, relegated to one function, and dispossessed of the capacity to deliberate about the city, must submit to a virtue chosen by those (self-)entitled to the mastery of thinking. This virtue of sōphrosunē, often translated as ‘moderation’, means that each member of the community is to stay in his or her place (Rancière, 1983, 25–7; 1995, 67/101–2). The Platonic division of labour is not a natural structure of the city, but a relation of domination. As Rancière argues elsewhere, the equality of intelligences undermines all claims to ‘natural’ or ‘just’ orders of submission. First, for one to command and one to obey, there must be something in common between the two: ‘you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. And to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. It is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order’ (1995, 16/37). Moreover, the supposition of the equality of intelligences means that an individual cannot be identified with any one function; since all individuals reflect on their position in the social order, ‘it is impossible for shoemakers to just make shoes, that they not also be, in their manner, grammarians, moralists, or physicists’ (1987, 34).
Rancière develops a more extensive engagement with Cartesian egalitarianism in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where the figure of Descartes intermittently emerges in the discourse of Joseph Jacotot, who argues that the cogito is ‘one of the principles’ of intellectual emancipation (quoted in Rancière, 1987, 35; Van de Weyer, 1822, 23). As James Swenson notes, Rancière’s ‘free indirect style’ poses several interpretative challenges with The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where Rancière adopts Jacotot’s vocabulary, ‘rigorously avoids any anachronism in his references’, and refrains from differentiating his position from that of Jacotot (Swenson, 2009, 266). This produces some uncertainty concerning ‘where the voice of Jacotot stops and Rancière’s begins’ (K. Ross, 1991, xxii). With these precautions in mind, I will focus on Rancière’s discussion of Jacotot’s reading of Descartes. More specifically, I will argue that Rancière’s reference in Disagreement to Descartes’s ego sum, ego existo as the prototype of political subjectivation is an appropriation of Jacotot’s reading of Descartes.
In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière contrasts the emancipatory teachings of Jacotot to the stultification of the teachings of the ‘Old Master’, whose primary function is to explicate knowledge to those who do not possess it.23 Jacotot presents – or, perhaps, discovers – a method of teaching that emphasizes the equality and reciprocity of intelligences, and thus realizes that the pedagogue must teach that he or she has no expertise to teach (Rancière, 1987, 15). Rather than transmission and expertise, the ignorant schoolmaster interrogates and verifies that the student is attentive (1987, 29). Rancière argues that the division of labour between the ‘Old Master’ and the family, between instruction and moral teaching, reinforces social order: the student draws from science what is not his own, and he draws from moral education what his place is (1987, 35). Using a free indirect style that quotes Jacotot, Rancière writes:
Emancipation is precisely the opposite of this; it is each man becoming conscious of his nature as an intellectual subject; it is the Cartesian formula of equality read backwards. ‘Descartes said “I think, therefore I am”; and this noble thought of the great philosopher is one of the principles of universal teaching. We turn this thought around and say: “I am a man, therefore I think.”’ The reversal equates ‘man’ with cogito. Thought is not an attribute of the thinking substance; it is an attribute of humanity. (Rancière, 1987, 35–6; cf. Van de Weyer, 1822, 23)
Jacotot, for Rancière, turns Cartesian thought around twice. Jacotot’s Cartesian egalitarianism privileges the supposition of equality that begins the Discourse on the Method: given that reason is equally distributed to all, each meditator thinks. Hence there is no hierarchy of intelligences, and each human activity ‘is the practice of the same intellectual potential’ (1987, 36). In addition, the equation of ‘man’ and ‘cogito’ is telling. As we know, after the cogito is demonstrated in the ‘Second Meditation’, Descartes rejects the inference that the cogito is a ‘man’ or ‘rational animal’ (VII: 25–6). As much as this equation might upset Descartes, Rancière or Jacotot are not interested in metaphysical disputations. Instead, they aim through philosophical misunderstanding to underline the importance of the Cartesian supposition of equality: to say ‘ego sum, ego existo’ is the initiation of a new field of experience for speaking beings, rather than one step in an orderly method. Method, Rancière argues, is one way to restrain the equality of intelligences, by ranking the capacity for inquiry by setting out a series of steps that must be duplicated, lest the student go astray. Recall that in the ‘Fourth Meditation’, Descartes argues that the will is the cause of error because its powers extend beyond those of the understanding, but by restraining the will to clear and distinct knowledge – built upon the order of method – it is possible to avoid error. By contrast, Jacotot argues that intellect without will is the cause of error, because willing is the activity that engages us with the world and with others (Rancière, 1987, 54–5). Jacotot’s second formulation of Descartes’s principle underlines the practical interpretation of the cogito over an epistemological interpretation:
Descartes said: to think is to live; I exist, I am man, therefore I think. Yes, all men think, all men feel [sent]; but not all men know how to express their thoughts, nor communicate their sentiments [sentiments] … But to feel is nothing, to think is nothing, if we do not know how to express our thinking. (in Van de Weyer, 1822, 25)
Descartes, who relies on an orderly method, can bracket this engagement with the world and build an epistemological system of truth, while for Jacotot, the subject is thrown immediately into a social situation where intellectual equality and good sense must engage a variety of activities by which ‘we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things’ (Descartes, VI: 2), which requires the will to direct the attention of the intellect. Thus Jacotot and Rancière introduce a second turn of Cartesian thought by rejecting the structured order of reasons of method.
Following Jacotot, Rancière argues that once the supposition of equality is accepted, emancipation can begin from anything that individuals have in common. For Rancière, this supposition is not just a concern of pedagogy, but of politics itself. To underline the Cartesian import of this supposition, let us look at another intellectual source for his concept of a wrong. It is without doubt that this concept of a wrong is in part derived from the young Marx’s account of the proletariat: the proletariat has a universal character because its revolution marks the dissolution of all classes when it overthrows the bourgeoisie which has perpetrated an ‘unqualified wrong’ in its oppression of all other classes (Marx, 1844, 38; cf. Rancière, 1995, 18). Yet there is a tendency within Marxism that subordinates all other ‘particular wrongs’ experienced by others (such as those experienced by women or by the colonized) to the historico-teleological mission of the proletariat, and this tendency is explicitly rejected by Cartesian egalitarians such as Beauvoir or Rancière, who argue that emancipatory struggles cannot be subordinated to one another, but must be reinforced through solidarity, by whatever they have in common.
A Marxist analysis would certainly note that Cartesianism in general stakes its validity on an individual’s perception of the social world and an individual’s practice. Rancière – like Beauvoir before him – sees the limitations of individualism, and that is why he transforms the subjective ego sum, ego existo into the reciprocity of the nos sumus, nos existimus, with the latter designating a new field of collective political practice. How Rancière conceptualizes collective political practices is the focus of the next chapter. Thus let us conclude by underlining that the Cartesian ‘prototype’ has two positive aspects. First, like Marx, Poullain and Beauvoir conceptualize politics as the processing of a wrong. But second, and in contrast to the teleological tendencies of Marxism, there is no privileged subject, no finality that drives history, but only the persistently renewed struggle against all forms of social inequality. Emancipation is not an end point of a historical continuum. Instead, emancipation is only possible through the efforts of those who combat inequality and oppression through practices of reciprocity and solidarity. In this sense, Rancière is a Cartesian egalitarian.
Notes
1Giuseppina Mecchia argues that ‘one could easily say that according to the classics’ that politics is not ‘rooted in the equality of speech but … in the hierarchical ordering of the oikia or household’ (2009: 75). I do not think it so easy; even if the household is discussed before the definition of what the city shares in common, Aristotle nevertheless argues that the city ‘is by nature clearly prior to the household [oikia] and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part’ (1253a19–20tm).
2The phrasing of this point was developed in dialogue with Jason M. Wirth, who gave a commentary on an earlier draft of what has become Chapter 2.
3For accounts of the relationship between Cartesianism, egalitarianism and feminism, see Atherton 1993, Harth 1992, Rodis-Lewis 1990, 169–80, and with discussions of Poullain’s predecessors, Delon 1978 and Stuurman 2004, 52–86. Atherton argues that seventeenth-century feminism was motivated in part by ‘the concept of reason that could be found in Descartes’ rather than, as later feminism would be, by ‘any general beliefs about equal human rights’ (Atherton, 1993, 20).
4Heidegger claims that ‘Descartes does not doubt because he is a skeptic; rather, he must become a doubter because he posits the mathematical as the absolute ground and seeks for all knowledge a foundation’, that is, the cogito, ‘that will be in accord with it’ (1962, 103).
5Badiou argues that a Marxism ‘sutured’ to the scientific condition of philosophy (read: Althusser) dovetails theoretically with Heidegger when it reduces the subject to ‘a simple operator of bourgeois ideology’. The scientific Marxist, then, would say: ‘for Heidegger, “subject” is a secondary elaboration of the reign of technology, but we can see eye to eye if this reign is in fact also the bourgeoisie’s’ (1989, 92). It should be noted that Negri is more ambivalent than Badiou’s typical ‘scientific Marxist’; he seems to admire the revolutionary character of Descartes’s thought even if he reproaches what he sees as its fundamental compromise.
6Later in the Discourse, Descartes writes: ‘I have recognized through my travels that those with views quite contrary to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many of them make use of reason as much or more than we do’ (VI: 16).
7Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, invokes the principles of Cartesianism against the false universality of the colonial legacy (its science, politics, and sociology), which denigrates the non-European to the benefit and ‘glory’ of Western bourgeois society. He argues that ‘the psychologists, sociologists et al., their views on “primitivism”, their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their tendentious speculations, their insistence on the marginal, “separate” character of non-whites’, rest on ‘their barbaric repudiation, for the sake of the cause, of Descartes’s statement, the charter of universalism, that “reason … is found whole and entire in each man”, and that “where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures”’ (1955, 56).
8This egalitarianism would also be troubled by the exclusion of the figure of madness from the valid and considered reasons for doubt. Even Descartes’s correction of Arnauld – the reason of madmen is not ‘extinguished’ but ‘disturbed’ (VII: 228) – will not ameliorate this exclusion (see Foucault, 1972).
9This name is derived from a passage in Descartes’s letter to Hyperaspistes, dated August 1641, where he states that if an infant’s mind were ‘released from the prison of the body’, it would discover innate ideas within it (III: 424).
10Descartes’s conjectures on the ‘prison of the body’ are especially problematic given that they are not sustained by his Passions of the Soul.
11See also Descartes’s letter to Voetius, dated May 1643, where he contrasts the use of reason for ‘education’ with scholastic ‘learning’, through which students ‘lose the use of their natural reason and put in its place an artificial and sophistical reason’ (VIIIb: 43).
12Harth discusses responses to Descartes from several now neglected seventeenth-century cartésiennes: Anne de la Vigne, Marie Dupré and Catherine Descartes (niece of René), as well as Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1992, 64–106).
13Not to mention the Platonic gestures of Philo and Augustine. On this point see Lloyd, 1993, 18–37.
14Note that this claim echoes Descartes’s critique of scholastic artifice and, intentionally or not, suggests the ‘gallantry’ that Poullain derides elsewhere (1673, 49; see also 69–72 for other passages that suggest a gallant discourse).
15The editors source Aristotle’s claim to Generation of Animals, 737a27–8. The claim that women are imperfect men is attributed by Poullain to Philo, and by Beauvoir to Aquinas (1949, 5/1: 15).
16Again, see Harth 1992, 64–106.
17See Poullain, 1674, 227. Stuurman argues that the Passions of the Soul ‘gives us only a physiological explanation and a general taxonomy of the passions. The theory cannot explain why particular people are more strongly affected by some passions than by others’ (2004, 87–8).
18It is also interesting to note that during his reconstruction of the Cartesian system in his On the Education of Ladies, Poullain follows the proof for the existence of the cogito with a proof for the existence of the body: ‘I concluded just now that I exist, I who think, because I act. There being a thing from which I cannot be separated which brings me pleasure and pain without any contribution on my part, and sometimes even despite myself, then this thing that I call my body must really exist’ (1674, 178).
19This democracy of judgement, according to Sartre, also underlies the democracy of ‘universal suffrage’ (1947, 505).
20It is the subject’s relation toward others that gives content to freedom: the subject ‘can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. Therefore, in any case, the freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it content’ (Beauvoir, 1947, 60). Note that ‘helping’ others, as it were, must take place through reciprocal engagement rather than through an intervention from the outside of their respective projects (see 1947, 88–9, and Beauvoir’s comments on charity at 1947, 86).
21For Beauvoir, childhood plays a crucial role in the habituation of social roles, values and prejudices. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she writes that ‘Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child’ (1947, 35), but her reading of Descartes in this respect bears more similarities to Poullain, who challenged the reification and ‘inevitability’ of social convention, than to Descartes, who wavered between faulting as the origin of prejudice and habit either social reification or the natural composition of the body itself. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir criticizes both the Freudian determination of penis envy from an anatomical lack (1949, 287/2: 18) and (implicitly) Sartre’s bizarre claim that a woman’s existence ‘in the form of a hole’ is first grasped in the infant’s ‘ontological presentiment’ of sexuality (Sartre, 1943, 782/660), because childhood must also be historically situated.
22Toril Moi coins the term ‘patriarchal femininity’ to refer to feminine qualities as defined by patriarchal societies (1994, 192).
23In another gesture that opposes ancient Greek political philosophy to Cartesian egalitarianism, Rancière argues that the ‘Socratic method is … a perfected form of stultification’ (1987, 29).