The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

disabused us of the long-held illusion that we see the same “star” in the morning as in the evening? When Théanor reminds him that Descartes also taught the doctrine of metempsychosis, Clitandre lays the blame for that folly on the great man’s disciples. Théanor concedes the point; Descartes’s “doctrine” could not be so “foolish,” because “his morality (morale) is so beautiful.”²⁶ The philosopher can be named in this circle, and at least some of his ideas can be discussed there, because he is, after all, an honnête homme.

      The reference to the stars is revealing. There were salon women who engaged Descartes’s concept of rational agency, but it was primarily his discoveries in natural science that became popular in the salons from the 1750s onward.²⁷ Fontenelle’s Conversations suggests how the social aesthetic accommodated Cartesian science. In Education Poullain sought a middle ground between Fontenelle’s exercise in the instructive diversion of conversational play and an ascetic insistence on strenuous spiritual labor. Stasimachus seems to provide this via media when he promises, early in the first conversation, that the “quest for truth” will bring a “pure and complete joy” that is spiritual, in that it “has almost nothing to do with the body,” and yet also aesthetic. “Nature,” he assures his friends, endows Truth with “beauties and graces that ought to render it adorable to all men.” Hence there is no danger that women educated in the new philosophy will be corrupted by “meditation and study” and will succumb to the attendant boorishness of the “pedant.” For “women who have leisure and means,” Stasimachus claims, his method of studying science will provide “a gentle and pleasant intellectual exercise”—intellectually challenging, to be sure, but entirely compatible with “their usual diversions.”²⁸ The rest of the text is sprinkled with similar assurances. With his method, “science” will provide his friends with “a gentle and pleasant intellectual exercise.” Eulalie will find it “easy” to “withdraw” into herself and “admit nothing that is not clear and of which one does not have some idea.” In the fourth conversation, Eulalie agrees; the new science would indeed be “a gentle, easy exercise for ladies.”²⁹

      Does all this mean that the honnête femme can avoid the rigors of meditative labor? When Stasimachus extolls the ease with which the search for truth can be pursued, he means that the knowledge in question is relatively accessible. He is assuring women of quality that, thanks to the natural simplicity and clarity of Cartesian truth, they will not have to undergo the tedious initiation into obscurantist learning—the dogged training in classical languages, logic, formal rhetoric, and so on—that produces the pedant.³⁰ Their learning will be entirely compatible with both their femininity and their status as honnêtes femmes. At the same time, however, as a Cartesian, Poullain has to insist that, unlike the pseudoknowledge dispensed by learned authorities, truth is not something one can passively receive from someone else; it has to be acquired in a process of self-discovery, an exercise in reflective autonomy, and that requires no little effort. Hence if the Cartesian search for truth is “agreeable,” and indeed a “pleasure,” it is also “serious study,” requiring “acute and clear thought.” The difference is perhaps clearest in its figurative expressions. While the apt metaphor for honnête conversation was a stream flowing by chance, Poullain, following Descartes and the tradition of askesis, figured the search for truth as a purposeful, resolute ascent up a path.³¹ Conversation offered a shorter and more “agreeable” path than the reading of massive scholarly tomes, but only if it was conducted in “a methodical and orderly way,” as the “labor” of “solid reflection” following “principles and rules.” There was no avoiding the fact that we must “labor to become learned.”³²

      In Poullain’s construal of Cartesian reflexivity, labor in this fundamental sense is the sine qua non for intellectual and spiritual autonomy. The required commitment to it is implicit to his analogy between the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of property. In a particularly interesting exchange at the end of Education, Eulalie and Stasimachus confront the possibility that, by giving preference to Cartesian philosophy, they are simply accepting a new authority. If they are disciples of Descartes, can their search for truth really be said to be an exercise in autonomy? Stasimachus assures his pupil that his loyalty is not to a particular thinker, but to the truth. In her usual laconic manner, Sophie, echoing Descartes, summarizes the point: “If by the force of meditation we gain entry to certain principles, even though we got them from a learned man, they are no longer his but ours. The effort (peine) we have given ourselves in understanding them is the price for acquiring them as property (la propriété), and they belong to us no less than the goods of the body of which we have become masters through legitimate means.”³³ So it is in the “gift” (donation) of “sciences,” Eulalie agrees; “However eager a person is to make us a part of their knowledge, we must collaborate (concourir) with her and accept through our own labor (travail) what she wishes to give to us.”³⁴

      In the exchange of verbal gifts in the play of polite conversation, both the giving and receiving must be—or must seem to be—effortless. In the exchange of ideas in Cartesian philosophical conversation, the reception, even more than the giving, is a kind of labor of appropriation. Such labor is the condition for the “natural” freedom of the spirit that Cartesian meditation offers. Having made the point, Poullain does not ask whether natural freedom in that sense can be reconciled with the natural freedom from labor to which the discourse of honnêteté attaches singular honor. Instead he returns to an earlier theme: that the little circle of philosophical friends must be very cautious in their conversation with others. In these broader circles of conversation, Timander adds, perhaps naïvely, women are better at gift-giving (and receiving) than men. It is not simply that men defer to women out of politeness, without taking their ideas seriously. When joined with “intelligence,” “beauty” gives women “such a powerful and absolute ascendancy” over the heart of a scholar that “he keeps nothing secret from them, and far from being as reserved with them as he is with men, he feels an indescribable (je ne sçai quoi) force to tell them all he knows.” Eulalie agrees, “smiling”; “it is in such encounters that it must be said that there is in men and women not a demon but a corresponding genie.”³⁵ Her remark heightens Timander’s disappointment. In her eyes, now open for the first time, he is not, or at least is not yet, worthy of such an encounter. We are left wondering whether the little circle of three philosophical friends—Stasimachus, Sophie, and Eulalie—will eventually become a circle of four.

      In 1691, in an effort to improve Genevan French (and perhaps to win sponsorship for a school he hoped to establish), Poullain published a little book on proper French usage. He dedicated it to Mme Perdriau, the wife of a Genevan councillor of state. It was in her home that he had been introduced into the city’s patrician circles and had met his future wife. He fondly recalled that, in a typical conversation there following a dinner, Mme Perdriau distinguished herself “as much by the importance of the subjects (she) brought up as by (her) reasonings and by the turn and beauty of her expressions.” There was nothing more important or beautiful or worthy of our “study” and “conversation,” he recalled her saying, than “the truths of salvation”; and so we should “neglect nothing to acquire the purity of the language,” since “it can serve to render the truth at the same time more agreeable and more useful.”³⁶

      We glimpse in the dedication a world of bourgeois wealth and domesticity quite different from the Parisian salons. If there is any room in it for the free play of esprit, it is subordinate to a sober concern with the purity of religious truth. All the more striking, then, that Poullain made Mme Perdriau a kind of bourgeois—and Calvinist—salonnière. We do not know whether his radically unconventional commitment to gender equality survived the transition from Parisian polite sociability to the Genevan variety. But we can be sure that Poullain carried with him to Geneva, along with his Protestant convictions, the social aesthetic with which he had identified when he turned his back on the clerical scholasticism of the Sorbonne. In this bourgeois world of Calvinist religiosity, he retained his Parisian attachment to polite conversation and, with it, his appreciation of the indispensable