The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ in the text, a disconnection between it and its predecessor. The author of Equality, one might assume, would feel compelled to note in Education, if only in passing, that the Eulalies of French society would some day enter the world of offices and professions, or at least that their education would eventually be organized with that prospect in mind. The text offers no hint of such a prospect. The silence marks Poullain’s need to adapt his argument. The most radical change he had called for—his virtually utopian vision of a rational restructuring of social access to educated labor—could not be reconciled with the norms and taboos of an elite whose self-validation lay precisely in imagining itself hovering above the social organization of labor. Left unspoken is the irony that made this adaptation necessary: in the only social and cultural milieu that made Poullain’s first step possible, the next step was unthinkable.

      Less obvious is the fault line in the text between two different concepts of selfhood. In the relational selfhood attributed to the honnête homme (or femme), self-formation and self-validation require a kind of hypersociability, leaving hardly any room for the introspection that distances an inner self from the particular society and culture in which it is immersed. Descartes’s philosophical calling was a reformulation of the reflective idea of self-formation as an “inner” ascent to wisdom through the meditative labor of “spiritual exercises.” It was indebted especially to Stoicism, and perhaps influenced by Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as well. Only with that context in mind can we understand what Descartes meant to convey when he wrote of “meditations” and offered “rules for the direction of the mind.” He was calling his readers to engage in reflective intellectual labor, to be distinguished sharply from the mere social “pleasures” that Saint-Évremond extolled.¹⁹

      Poullain did not, it should be stressed, evade the possibility that the reflective self of Cartesian philosophy was incompatible with the relational self of the culture of honnêteté. In fact he might be said to have confronted it quite directly. He did so, however, by focusing not on the labor that reflectivity required, but on the commitment to radical critique that it might entail. Could one be an uncompromising Cartesian doubter and an honnête femme—or, for that matter, an honnête homme—at the same time? Descartes himself had been notoriously cautious on this issue. The first maxim in his own “provisory code of morals,” outlined in A Discourse on Method, offered a kind of compromise between critique and acceptance of the status quo. So long as he was on the path to truth, he would continue to “obey the laws and customs of [his] country,” adhering to the faith in which he had been raised, and conforming his “practice” to the “general consent” of “the most judicious.” In his own attempt at a Socratic dialogue—the unfinished Search for Truth—Descartes characterized the ideal seeker after Cartesian truth as an honnête homme.²⁰ He seems to have been using the phrase in its literal sense, to evoke a sensible and upright man. To judge by his own life, the honnête homme he had in mind need not be the totally socialized participant in conversational play that the term honnête had come to imply by the 1670s. Descartes had preferred Holland to Paris. In that commercial country, “in the midst of a great crowd actively engaged in business,” he could enjoy the “conveniences” of “the most populous cities” and yet live “as solitary and as retired as in the midst of the most remote deserts.”²¹ Living in (relative) solitude, far removed from the salon culture as well as the learned societies of Paris, Descartes had simply avoided the demands of the new social aesthetic.

      Poullain’s Cartesianism was necessarily much more tension-ridden. Unlike Descartes, the author of Equality extended the principle of radical doubt from epistemology and natural philosophy to a critique of the social order. By the very nature of the imagined setting of Education, its interlocutors could hardly avoid asking whether a consequential application of social critique was compatible with the social identities they brought to its exercise. To judge by his initiation of Eulalie into Cartesian doubt, Stasimachus’s answer is uncompromising. One of his conditions for undertaking her reeducation is that she be prepared to shed completely the habit of blind deference to authority that she originally learned as a child in relation to her parents and has continued to practice in submitting to “prejudice” in all its forms, including the authority attributed to superior social status, public rhetoric, and esoteric expertise. The “discernment” she will acquire will make her aware that conventional authority is nothing more than unexamined “custom,” a social construction by which mere “opinion” perpetuates its dominance.²² Eulalie, in other words, is being asked to undo an entire process of socialization. At issue was not simply the behavior, or “practice,” that Descartes seemed to have in mind; it was speech as the externalization of thought, the act of asserting or withholding the inner self of the Cartesian rationalist in the social presentation of self. Should one’s speech be devoted to helping others along the path to Truth, or should it simply be fashioned to “please” them, even if this complaisance required keeping silent about truths that might “shock” people and thereby explode the aesthetic illusion of the group?

      This is the question that occasions the most obvious moment of tension in the text, at the beginning of the second conversation. Faced with the prospect of ridding herself of all untested opinions, Eulalie (“smiling”) asks whether that means that we “have to give up the whole world,” and whether there is not a “disadvantage” to “such a general renunciation.” Timander joins in: will not the result be “a terrifying solitude (une solitude épouvante)”—a life spent seeking the truth “as if we were the only people in the world, with no possibility of ever talking about it to anyone?” At first Stasimachus remains uncompromising. It is not “I” but “reason,” he tells Eulalie, that demands the renunciation. There is no middle ground; one either “submit[s] completely” or “withdraw[s] completely.” Timander’s concern about solitude can be dismissed as “excessive panic.” It is Eulalie who begins to find a way around this stark choice. She imagines a kind of “conversation” that “opens the mind” with a mutual exercise in instruction, not possible in “the privacy of our own studies.”²³

      Eulalie’s remark prompts Stasimachus to resolve the issue by advocating a dual social existence, at once withdrawn from social custom and acquiescent to its demands. Stasimachus reminds his friends that, though we cannot suppress thought, we can “avoid argument” by remaining masters of “our speech and action.” The proper strategy is to “consider [the truth] as if you were alone whether you are in fact alone or with other people.” There are two kinds of knowledge: the “feelings and thoughts” we seek through “philosophy,” which we “keep to ourselves” in the face of custom; and the “external” knowledge manifested in “outward actions,” which is “of society” and “concerns the public and intercourse between people.” One can live in both knowledge-worlds without being false to either. But isn’t it “counterfeit and dissimulation,” Eulalie asks, to be “able to speak other than the way one thinks”? Though at first Stasimachus remains uncompromising, he goes on to reassure her that there is a middle ground. Speech in society at large need not be an act of total conformity to opinions one no longer accepts. You can “insinuate” the truths to others, though you must proceed ever so carefully, keeping in mind the need to “moderate the dose” and “add honey to the medicine.”²⁴ Stasimachus elaborates on this need for caution in the fifth conversation. When dealing with opinionated people, “we shouldn’t show off our intelligence or reason constantly in their presence, because they will find us trying.” We must take stock of others very carefully, “become accustomed to turning [our] thoughts so well that they always have several faces”; and “take more pain to excuse [the opinionated] than to condemn them.”²⁵

      In a sense these exchanges deflect our attention from the actual social site of the problem. Poullain uses the phrase “the whole world” to refer to society at large, not to the elite society of salon conversation. For the most part, when he insists on the need to choose between intellectual independence and conformity he pits the individual against the mass. There are the “vast numbers of people” who are immersed in custom and opinion and manipulated by authority; and there are СКАЧАТЬ