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, Clitandre remarks that he “dare not name [the philosopher] before the ladies, although we are in a time when many beauties (belles) are amused to know the new philosophy”—and then proceeds to name him. Has not Descartes, he asks, 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
