The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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      Eulalie’s remark prompts Stasimachus to resolve the issue by advocating a dual social existence, at once withdrawn from social custom and acquiescent to its demands.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 the rare individuals who can rise above that miasma. On one level, this abstract dichotomy between an imagined philosophical elite and the uninitiated mass allows Poullain to sidestep the immediate social question: whether Cartesian autonomy can be reconciled with the imperatives of conformity within an elite. Can the individual inject Cartesian critique, with all the egalitarian implications Poullain has drawn from it, into the rarified world of polite conversation without questioning one’s interlocutors’ very logic of self-legitimation and thereby making herself an outcast?

      If the question is deflected, it is nonetheless there, posed not only by the characters and the setting Poullain has chosen, but also by the echoes of the social aesthetic of honnêteté in his framing of their choices. In the “world” in which his characters circulate there can be no open “argument”; it is forbidden to be “trying”; a certain serene equilibrium must be maintained within the constraints of custom. We can think of the unresolved tension at several levels. The self that withdraws into a Cartesian state of nature, where disembodied reason reigns, has to coexist, very uneasily, with the embodiment of self in the intensely and relentlessly socialized form of honnêteté. The Cartesian natural self connects immediately with objective (i.e., universal) truth. In that task the mastery of a social aesthetic—the mastery required to achieve self-validation within the community of honnêtes gens—becomes in principle an obstacle, though it may be unavoidable. A Cartesian philosophical conversation is about ascertaining and communicating truth; that aim may very well collide with the need to affirm the cohesion and harmony of a community, to practice an art whose claim to exclusiveness lies precisely in subordinating the “search for truth” to the shared appreciation of a codified and ritualized verbal exchange. Ultimately it is the difference between reasoning as a kind of internal dialogue and reason as the instrument of an emphatically other-directed sociability—between the spiritual self, as autonomous interiority, and the self externalized in relentlessly social speech.

      Poullain does, to be sure, try to bridge these dichotomies with his little circle of three or four philosophical friends. In this context speech can be social in another sense; friends use it to aid each other in the search for truth. They help each other strip away the mere appearances, the chimeras of authority, in which society at large remains wrapped. There is something quite radical about this way of giving Cartesian truth-seeking a social dimension. By bonding both Sophia and Eulalie in friendship with Stasimachus, Poullain contradicts the longstanding assumption that truly “philosophical” or “spiritual” friendship is possible only between males. That defiance of conventional wisdom is punctuated at the end; it is Timander’s intellectual inhibitions, and not Eulalie’s, that explain why he fails to draw her into such a friendship. The circle of philosophical friends, however, is more a retreat from the demands of polite sociability than a base from which to challenge them. In their larger social world, the friends can only exercise critique obliquely, with a kind of conspiratorial insinuation. And, while that constraint applies to men as well as to women, it is women who have the most to lose. If she keeps within Stasimachus’s recommended limits, the honnête femme runs the risk that her much-admired gifts for aestheticizing thought and speech will come to be seen, and resented, as a new form of manipulative dissimulation, still gendered female. Violating the limits—openly asserting the power of critique in intellectual argument—would not only condemn individual women to terrifying solitude. Honnêtes femmes could assert the power of critique—could speak that power—only at the cost of sacrificing their normative role in a discourse extending them a kind of intellectual equality and, in some respects, superiority. There is a sense in which their newly acquired capacity for critique lands them in a kind of social nowhere; there is no social space for it in the very world that puts a new value on female intelligence.

      Underlying this equivocal solution to the problem of critique, though more obliquely recorded in Education, is the tension between a Cartesian self and the self of honnêteté. Can Cartesian radical doubt be integrated somehow into the aestheticized play of conversation? The difficulty of doing so is acknowledged, very discreetly, in Madeleine de Scudéry’s imagined conversation on “politeness.” In the course of advocating a kind of Cartesian doubt,