ABSTRACT
Feminist (cultural) historians and philosophers generally concur that Cartesian rationalism proved a double-edged sword for women: while Descartes attacked existing obstacles preventing women from participating in the pursuit of knowledge, he also (unintentionally) laid the foundation for new exclusions all the more difficult to overcome. Feminist assessments of Cartesian rationalism focus on Descartes’s dualism, on his claim that mind and body are separate, radically distinct substances. On the one hand, François Poullain de la Barre extrapolated from Descartes’s assertion of the universality of good sense and separateness of the mind from the body to declare, “the mind has no sex,” thereby annulling the homology between mind and body assumed in Galenic humoral theory. On the other hand, as Erica Harth puts it, “if an identical disembodied mind in men and women alike is made to be the principle of sexual equality, what can be made of embodied difference?”1 Minds may be equal in the abstract, but experience shows that minds do not exist (equally) in the abstract. Some minds are more affected by their embodiment than others, as the Princess Palatine, Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618-80), pointed out in a 1645 letter to Descartes: “[M]y body is imbued with many of the weaknesses of my sex”; these weaknesses made it difficult for her to accept the mind-over-matter
1 Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca and London: Cornell U.P., 1992), 9. Alluding to Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses, Harth states that “the age of Descartes witnessed the displacement of an older discourse of ‘resemblance’ or ‘patterning’ by one of ordered analysis” (6). Tempering the drastic rupture between the late Renaissance and “the age of Descartes” posited by Foucault, Harth argues that the metaphor persisted in the language of the “Cartésiennes,” and that this figurative mode participated in the critique of masculinist objectivity that they detected in Descartes’s writings. It is doubtful, however, that Descartes’s female enthusiast-critics had any community of interest with the occult authors from whom Foucault takes most of his examples, because the metaphors favored by these marginal figures were manifestly antifeminist, as shown by William R. Newman, “Alchemy, Domination, and Gender,” in A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, ed. Noretta Koertge (New York and Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1998), 216-26. Eileen O’Neill also takes issue with the contention that metaphoric language acts in and of itself as a critique of the implicit masculinism of scientific discourse in “Women Cartesians, ‘Feminine Philosophy,’ and Historical Exclusion,” Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, ed. Susan Bordo (University Park: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1999), 232-57. O’Neill points out that Descartes’s personification of the earth as a woman in his only extant poem “The Birth of Peace” (1649) “has not been taken to be a rejection of mechanism by Descartes late in his life” (244). René Descartes, Œuvres, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 11 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1969), V, 265.
