The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ task of having a gallant gentleman explain the new science, from Copernicus’s heliocentric cosmos to Descartes’s vortices, to a young and beautiful marquise who is quite at home in le monde but is spending some time at her country chateau. They have five evening conversations in the garden, where they can converse unobserved as they gaze at the heavens. The gentleman obviously accomplishes his purpose. Having been introduced at the end to Descartes’s vortices and the possibility of a vast plurality of solar systems, the marquise exclaims “I have the whole system of the universe in my head! I’m a scholar!”⁷⁶ “Scholar” is, of course, a surprising term for an honnête femme to apply to herself. The marquise uses it with more than a little irony, but not at all flippantly.

      J. B. Shank has done us the service of rescuing this text from conventional misreadings and placing it squarely in the new discursive freedom of mixed-gender conversational sociability. Extricating the text from a now defunct teleology in the history of science, a linear narrative in which Cartesian science figures as a wrong turn, is only the first step. What Shank sees Fontenelle enacting so deftly is one of “the lost alternatives to Newtonian physics,” another way of conceiving scientific inquiry that is by no means irrelevant today, and that can “open up perspectives on the lost social and political possibilities of the period as well.”⁷⁷ Nor is the text, Shank argues, another conventional exercise in gallantry, paternalistically using the idiom of light flirtation to “popularize” scientific reasoning to a typical woman who cannot rise above sentiment.⁷⁸ The gentleman does, to be sure, try to engage in gallantry out of incurable habit. “It will never be said of me,” he comments on the first evening, “that in an arbor, at ten o’clock in the evening, I talked of philosophy to the most beautiful woman I know.”⁷⁹ But talk he does, at sophisticated conceptual levels, and that is because the marquise insists that she is capable of “enjoying intellectual pleasures.” She repeatedly demonstrates her intelligence by grasping truths, by countering her interlocutor’s speculations with skepticism, and by raising questions that move the conversation in fascinating directions. In this alternative view science requires rational clarity, but the essential measure of its “truth” is whether it gives “pleasure” to the imagination. Its beauty lies in the elegant simplicity of its laws, and in the apparently infinite diversity of forms and colors that clothe them. Science becomes a process of “imaginative picture making.”⁸⁰ What we are witnessing, Shank emphasizes, is the aestheticizing not just of the presentation of science to neophytes, but of the basic process of scientific understanding.

      Much of this is convincing, but when Shank follows DeJean’s lead he pushes his argument too far. In the fusion of the aesthetic and scientific that we have lost, he argues, we find a mixed-sex partnership in “knowledge production”; and that in turn connects the text to “the feminist pedagogical project” of the era, whose key text was Poullain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes.⁸¹ “Production” carries the wrong connotations; it cannot be detached from labor, the disciplined making of a product. At issue, I should stress again, is not intelligence itself; it is a measure of Fontenelle’s mastery of dialogue in its polite form that he gives us no reason to conclude that the marquise is any less intelligent than the gentleman (and she often seems quite a bit more sensible). The issue is the socially and culturally acceptable performance of intelligence. From that standpoint, Shank undervalues the ways in which gender and status reinforced each other to ban the appearance of labor in the social aesthetic of play. From the outset the marquise is assured that, though she will have to “[apply] herself a bit,” it will not be necessary to “penetrate” obscure matters “by means of concentrated thought.” She needs only “the same amount of concentration that must be given to The Princess of Clèves in order to follow the plot closely and understand all its beauty.” She understands spontaneously, only “conceiv[ing] of those things of which she can’t help but conceive.”⁸² Her imagination not only aestheticizes the suns and planets; it makes them dramatic characters she can approve or disapprove of. We have to keep in mind that it is not only the gallant gentleman who worries that these ungallant conversations will be an embarrassment to him. The marquise is no less concerned about her performance, even though it is physically removed from le monde and there is no one but the gentleman to witness it. When he proposes to make an outline of the zodiac in her garden sand, she shrinks back on the grounds of impropriety; “it would give my garden a scholarly air which I don’t want it to have.”⁸³

      In his Preface Fontenelle explained that he had tried to find “a middle ground … where it’s neither too dry for men and women of the world nor too playful for scholars”; and that is precisely what he accomplished. He does not fuse the two worlds; he uses his middle ground to dance with such agility from one to the other that one hardly notices that he’s dancing. “I hold her a scholar,” the gentleman writes to his friend in the opening letter, “because of the extreme ease with which she could become one.”⁸⁴ Left unsaid—but obvious to his audience—is that she could not become one without shedding her entire social identity. Women had to embody the principle of aisance in its full purity by not betraying any sign of labor in their way of thinking and speaking in their own world, detached as it was from occupational life. That was why, despite their intellectual equality and, in some respects, superiority, their presentation of self had to remain distinctly feminine. Scudéry warned the salonnière that she must avoid “speaking with a certain affected simplicity, which smells of the child,” but also that, if she did not wish to appear “bizarre” by playing the man, she must not “[pass] judgment decisively on some difficult question.”⁸⁵ Scudéry’s point was not that difficult questions were beyond women’s mental capacity, but that women could not appear to have worked through them to a conclusion. The man whose speech betrayed intellectual labor invited ridicule. The woman who committed such a violation of the social aesthetic undermined the group claim to unique status more directly. Her resulting stigmatization as a “learned lady” (femme savante) threatened her with a kind of social death.

      The imagined world of honnêteté was a community of frictionless exchange, immune to destabilization because its speech could neither offend nor shock nor stray into argument. In principle, the kind of critique that would make a society and polity self-critical was banned. Women were the keepers of the ban.

      Chapter 2

      Poullain de la Barre: Feminism, Radical and Polite

      From 1673 to 1675 François Poullain de la Barre published three books arguing that women were by nature as intelligent as men.¹ From our perspective other early modern feminist thinkers reflect the inhibitions of their times in one way or another, but Poullain seems to crash through his times to offer us nothing less than the full-blown agenda of feminism in our own era.² And yet, though we now have a better historical understanding of the intellectual chemistry that produced Poullain’s feminism, the compound itself still seems to leap out of its historical context and address contemporary feminism in its own terms, without that quality of strangeness, requiring a strenuous leap of the imagination, with which we expect seventeenth-century thought to confront us.

      That Poullain’s historical significance remains less than fully contextualized is not due simply to the fact that he has acquired iconic status. The more serious problem is that, in part because he failed to command the public attention he sought, the historical traces of his life are so meager and scattered.³ What we have is the skeletal narrative of a life: his birth into a Parisian family of the judicial nobility in 1648; theological studies at the Sorbonne from 1663 to 1666, almost certainly in the expectation of pursuing a university career; his disillusionment with Scholasticism and discovery of an alternative source of certainty in Cartesian philosophy; his withdrawal from Paris to village curacies in Picardy from 1680 to 1688; his relocation in December 1688, as a Protestant, to Geneva, where he married, raised a family, taught at the collège, and died on May 4, 1723.⁴

      Despite СКАЧАТЬ