弗朗索瓦·普兰·德拉巴尔 Poulain de la Barre, François (Martina Reuter)

首次发表于 2019 年 10 月 3 日

弗朗索瓦·普兰·德拉巴尔（1648-1723）以他的著作《两性平等》（1673）、《女士教育》（1674）和《男性卓越》（1675）而闻名。尽管第三部著作的名字是关于男性卓越的，但它继续为两性平等辩护，推翻了修辞上为男性卓越辩护的论点。这三本书共同构成了 17 世纪关于妇女被压迫的最详细分析之一。

普兰的思想深受勒内·笛卡尔的哲学影响。他运用笛卡尔的怀疑和正确推理方法，以拒绝关于女性劣势的偏见，并在为两性平等辩护的论证中，运用了从笛卡尔对人类本质的解释中得出的许多见解。在介绍性传记概述之后，本文首先将考察普兰思想的笛卡尔基础，然后讨论他对妇女被压迫的分析。接下来，将介绍和评估他提出的四个主要的两性平等论证。最后，本文简要讨论普兰与后来女权主义思想发展的直接和间接关系。整个过程旨在呈现普兰的核心思想，并检验其哲学的有效性。

1. 生平与作品

我们对弗朗索瓦·普兰·德拉巴尔（或普兰）的生活了解甚少。没有他同时代人的通信或记载幸存下来。我们所知道的只能从偶尔幸存的官方文件和他的著作中据说有自传性质的言辞中进行重建。关于普兰生活的记载主要依赖于玛丽-路易丝·斯托克（1961）、马德琳·阿尔科弗（1981）和西普·斯图尔曼（2004）等人进行的档案研究。

普兰于 1648 年出生在巴黎，是富有的天主教父母的第三个孩子。像许多次子一样，他注定要从事教会事业，并在 1666 年在索邦大学获得神学学士学位。这个较低的学位通常被认为足以成为神职人员，但普兰在这个阶段并没有寻求晋升，这个决定虽然是暂时的，但常常与他对笛卡尔哲学的兴趣日益浓厚有关（Stuurman 2004: 30）。在他的第二部主要作品《论女士教育》（1674 年）中，普兰描述了笛卡尔教师、一个年轻人和两个年轻女性之间的五次对话。斯塔西马库斯告诉他的年轻对话者，有一天，当他发现学校的所有科学特别讨厌时，我有幸被一个朋友带走，去听一个关于人体的笛卡尔讲座。（TTen 245; TTfr 281）

受到对笛卡尔哲学的斯科拉哲学偏见的影响，斯塔西马库斯起初对此持怀疑态度，然后

Fed on Scholastic prejudices against Cartesian philosophy, Stasimachus was initially suspicious and then

听到的只是清晰明了的内容，我感到惊讶，意识到 [演讲者] 是基于如此简单和真实的原则进行推理，以至于我不得不同意他们。(TTen 245; TTfr 281–282)

正如 Stuurman 指出的那样，这个描述是一个“简化的皈依故事”，在 17 世纪下半叶，笛卡尔哲学的追随者经常重复这种类型的故事(Stuurman 2004: 35)。Stasimachus 的皈依不能被视为普兰的自传，但我们有充分的理由认为，普兰在还是学生时就对笛卡尔哲学产生了兴趣，而他的兴趣与参加公开讲座有关，比如巴黎的笛卡尔派雅克·罗霍(Jacques Rohault)的讲座(Stuurman 2004: 43)。

学者们也一致认为，离开大学后，普兰开始教授文学，并且有一本将拉丁语翻译成法语的教科书，出版于 1672 年，匿名作者被认为是他(Stock 1961: 19–20; Welch 2002a: 9)。在接下来的一年里，他出版了《论两性平等》(1673)，这是他的三部女权主义著作中最早也最广为人知的一部。一年后，他又出版了《论女士教育》(De l’éducation des dames)，在下一年，他又出版了《论男性的卓越性，反对两性平等》(De l’excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes) (1675)。尽管这部著作的名字是反对两性平等的，但它继续捍卫了普兰对两性平等的辩护，通过推翻他在修辞上提出的男性卓越性的论点。这部著作比前两部更少涉及笛卡尔哲学，更多地涉及神学论证。在这方面，它类似于早期的著作，参与了文艺复兴时期的女性争论，即关于女性与男性的优越性的辩论，比如科内利乌斯·阿格里帕的《论女性的高贵和卓越》(De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus) (1509/1529)。

在发表了他的三部女权主义著作之后的某个时候，普兰回到了神学，并在 1679 年被任命为天主教神父。他在写了批评斯科拉哲学的著作后决定从事教会事业可能看起来很奇怪。毫无疑问，普兰以笛卡尔的论证为女权主张的基础，并且对斯科拉哲学持批评态度，但我们也必须注意到，他的第三部著作在很多方面是他的女权主义和神学之间的和解。在重建普兰的观点时，我们必须小心不要将他与斯塔西马库斯这个角色过于紧密地联系在一起。正如卡罗尔·帕尔在伊丽莎白公主和安娜·玛丽亚·范·舒曼之间的友谊案例中所指出的，伊丽莎白公主具有强烈的笛卡尔主义倾向，而安娜·玛丽亚·范·舒曼在很多方面是一位斯科拉哲学思想家，十七世纪的知识分子将新旧哲学的元素结合起来并不罕见（帕尔 2012 年：250-254）。普兰可能并不像他的角色斯塔西马库斯那样是一个激进的笛卡尔主义者。

普兰晋升为牧师后，在皮卡第地区的两个教区担任助理牧师，首先是在中等规模的村庄拉弗拉芒格里，然后在 1685 年被调到小村庄韦尔西尼。这可能是某种纪律措施的结果（Stuurman 2004: 239–240）。在皮卡第地区，普兰目睹了对新教徒的迫害，这经常被解释为为他自己从天主教改宗为加尔文主义铺平了道路。他在 1688 年离开了他的教区，短暂停留在巴黎后，他的改宗被认为是在那里发生的，然后他搬到了日内瓦，在那里他于 1689 年 12 月获得了居民身份（Stuurman 2004: 242–243）。作为日内瓦的居民，普兰继续他早期的教师生涯，并于 1690 年与玛丽·拉维尔（逝世于 1742 年）结婚，他们育有两个孩子，让-夏洛特（1690–1716）和让-雅克（1696–1751），后者成为未来的加尔文主义牧师，并追随父亲的许多神学观点（Welch 2002a: 17–20; Stuurman 2004: 245–246）。普兰出版了另外两本书，一本是《关于日内瓦市法语的详细评论》（1691），与他的教师生涯有关，另一本是《关于自由和阅读圣经的权利的新教教义等》（1720），展示了他成熟的神学观点。他在他选择的故乡确实过上了安定的生活，尽管他似乎没有找到他所期望的宗教自由。在 1693 年和 1696 年，普兰被指控是一个索西尼派，这个指控与他对神学的理性主义方法有关，他没有严格区分神学和哲学（Stuurman 2004: 248–249）。这件事被视为普兰在 1708 年之前必须等待才能被任命为日内瓦学院的永久教职的主要原因，他一直担任该职位直到 1723 年去世。

2. 笛卡尔的基础

普兰的著作《两性平等》和《女士教育》都深受笛卡尔哲学的影响，但影响方式不同。在第一篇著作中，没有提到笛卡尔的名字，但普兰对性别平等的讨论在很大程度上借鉴了他的哲学方法和形而上学。第二篇著作详细讨论了笛卡尔哲学，主要人物斯塔西马库斯是笛卡尔的忠实追随者，但这本书本身并没有明显依赖笛卡尔的哲学方法。我将从这两篇著作中探讨普兰受到的笛卡尔影响，并首先讨论笛卡尔方法的作用，然后讨论普兰在多大程度上采用了笛卡尔的形而上学。

2.1 笛卡尔的方法

在《论两性平等》的前言中，普兰写道，对于那些试图获得真正知识的人来说，最好的想法是怀疑自己是否受到了良好的教育，并希望自己发现真理。随着他们在寻求真理的过程中取得进展，他们不可避免地会注意到我们充满了偏见，必须完全摆脱它们才能获得清晰而明确的知识。（T1en 119; TTfr 53）[ 1]

best idea that may occur to those who try to acquire genuine knowledge, if they were educated according to traditional methods, is to doubt if they were taught well and to wish to discover the truth themselves. As they make progress in this search for truth, they cannot avoid noticing that we are full of prejudices, and that it is necessary to get rid of them completely in order to acquire clear and distinct knowledge. (T1en 119; TTfr 53)[1]

这段文字是对笛卡尔在他所有重要作品中所提出的寻求真理方法的精彩总结。例如，在《方法论演讲》中，笛卡尔写道，由于我现在希望将自己完全致力于寻求真理，我认为有必要 [...] 将我能够想象到最小怀疑的一切都当作绝对错误予以拒绝，以便看看是否还相信任何完全无疑的东西。（CSM I，126-127；AT VI，31-32）

值得注意的是，普兰提到完全摆脱偏见的必要性，遵循了笛卡尔怀疑的激进性质及其强调拒绝一切除非完全无疑的东西为假的观点。普兰在引用段落的结尾处也忠实于笛卡尔的术语，他将某种知识称为“清晰而明确”。在《哲学原理》（第一部分，§45）中，笛卡尔强调为了“作为一种确定和无疑的判断的基础”，感知需要“不仅仅是清晰，而且还要明确”（CSM I，207；AT VIIIA，22）。他所说的“清晰”是指“它对专注的心灵来说是存在的和可接近的”，而为了“明确”，除了清晰之外，它还必须“与所有其他感知物分离得如此之清楚，以至于它自身只包含清晰的东西”（CSM I，208；AT VIIIA，22）。

It is notable that Poulain’s reference to the necessity of getting completely rid of prejudices follows the radical nature of Descartes’ doubt and its emphasis on rejecting everything as false, unless it is entirely indubitable. Poulain is true to Descartes’ terminology also at the end of the cited paragraph, where he refers to certain knowledge as “clear and distinct”. In Principia philosophiae (part I, § 45), Descartes emphasizes that in order to “serve as the basis for a certain and indubitable judgment” a perception needs to “be not merely clear but also distinct” (CSM I, 207; AT VIIIA, 22). By “clear” he means that “it is present and accessible to the attentive mind” and in order to be “distinct” it must, in addition to being clear, be “so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” (CSM I, 208; AT VIIIA, 22).

在《女性教育》一书中，普兰对方法论的怀疑进行了延伸，并将这种方法归功于笛卡尔。角色斯塔西马库斯解释道，没有其他作者“更好地讨论偏见，也没有更有说服力地反驳它”（TTen 242; TTfr 277）。普兰还强调了笛卡尔方法的平等主义方面，并指出“我们几乎都有足够的理性和良好的判断力来寻求真理”，这是在“我们形成清晰明确的观念”时找到的（同上）。普兰的文本与笛卡尔《方法论演讲》的第一段非常相似，其中他声称

判断得当、辨别真伪的能力——这正是我们恰当称之为“良好判断力”或“理性”的东西——在所有人中天然地是平等的。（CSM I, 111; AT VI, 2）

普兰对笛卡尔哲学的看法明确是方法论的，他补充说，笛卡尔值得信任，因为他提供了最好的“方法和原则”（TTen 242; TTfr 277）。采用笛卡尔的方法意味着人们必须批判性地审视其作者以及其他作者，斯塔西马库斯在演讲结束时强调了这一点。

我并不是在声称笛卡尔是绝对正确的，或者他提出的一切都是真实且没有问题的，或者我们必须盲目地追随他，或者其他人找不到比他更好甚至更好的东西。我只是说我认为他是我们拥有的最合理的哲学家之一，他的方法是最普遍和最自然的，最符合常识和人类思维的本质，最有可能在作品中区分真假的方法，即使是作品的作者本人。（TTen 243; TTfr 278）

除了笛卡尔的怀疑方法，普兰还采用了他的科学方法和他对科学顺序的讨论，正如在《哲学原理》法文译本的前言中所述（另见 Pellegrin 2013; Reuter 2017: 34–37）。笛卡尔著名地将哲学的整体（在这里理解为包括所有不同形式的知识）比作一棵树，其中根是形而上学，树干是物理学，从树干上生长出的树枝是所有其他科学，可以归纳为三个主要科学，即医学、力学和道德学。（CSM I, 186; AT IXB, 14）

roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. (CSM I, 186; AT IXB, 14)

笛卡尔的隐喻强调了科学的统一性，这个想法被普兰接受，他用人体的隐喻取代了树的隐喻。在《论教育》中，他写道，“所有科学之间存在着一种必然的关系和依赖，非常类似于人体不同部分之间的关系”（TTen 208; TTfr 239）。

普兰对于科学的层级结构并没有像笛卡尔那样强调，但他确实采纳了笛卡尔对物理学的重视，并在《论平等》中利用科学的统一性的观念来主张女性与男性一样能够掌握各种知识形式。在这里，普兰反驳了那些声称女性无法担任公职和统治他人的人，并指出这些人没有注意到心智在所有行动中只需要辨别和准确性，任何在一个情境中展示这些品质的人都能够轻松地将它们应用到其他一切事物上。道德和社会科学并不改变我们行动的本质；后者始终保持物理性质，[...] 一旦有人理解了自然哲学中的运动规律，他们就能够将其应用于自然界发生的所有变化和变异。同样地，如果有人一旦理解了社会科学的真正原理，他们在应用这些原理于新出现的情况时并不会面临新的挑战。（T1en 174; TTfr 116–117）

fail to notice that the mind needs only discernment and accuracy in all its actions, and that anyone who displays these qualities in one context is capable of applying them as easily and in the same way to everything else. Morality and social science do not change the nature of our actions; the latter always remain physical, […] Once someone understands the laws of motion in natural philosophy, they can apply them to all changes and all variations that occur in nature. Similarly, if someone has once understood the true principles of the social sciences, they do not experience a new challenge when applying them to novel situations that occur. (T1en 174; TTfr 116–117)

普兰似乎并不将道德知识简化为物理知识，但他强调存在一种方法论的统一，使得我们可以比较真理原则在自然科学和社会科学中的应用方式。他的论证对斯科拉传统进行了两方面的批评。首先，他反对了一种普遍观点（最初由亚里士多德提出），即由于女性的思辨能力缺乏足够的权威性，所以女性在治理自己方面存在困难，因此也无法治理他人（亚里士多德，《政治学》1260a12-14）。其次，普兰批评了斯科拉学派中占主导地位的观念，即不同形式的知识需要不同的方法，并且理论推理本身并不能为实践判断提供基础（参见亚里士多德，《尼各马可伦理学》1140b1-7，关于实践理性（fronesis）和理论知识的区别）。像克里斯汀·德·皮桑这样的女性权利辩护者，在亚里士多德传统中写作时，发现有必要单独论证女性在实践判断方面和理论推理方面与男性一样有能力（特别是参见《女士之城》（1405 年）第一部分第 43 章）。普兰的论证在于强调科学的统一，由此可得出结论，如果女性有理论推理的能力（这是一个较少有争议的主张），那么她们也有实践判断的能力。这一论证直接基于笛卡尔在《哲学原理》法文译本前言中对斯科拉科学的批评，并在所有科学统一的观念中达到高潮（CSM I，185-186；AT IXB，12-14）。

在笛卡尔的比喻中，形而上学构成了哲学树的根部，因此我们必须假设一个人不能成为笛卡尔哲学家而不采用笛卡尔的形而上学。普兰确实这样做了，尽管我们将在下一节中看到，他受到的影响没有受到笛卡尔哲学方法论的深刻影响。

2.2 形而上学

在《平等论》的第二部分中，普兰声称“心灵没有性别”，并将他的主张与笛卡尔的二元论松散地联系在一起（T1en 157–158; TTfr 99–100）。这个主张本身并不新鲜——我们在奥古斯丁的神学教义中就已经找到了它，奥古斯丁认为女性和男性的理性灵魂同样是按照上帝的形象创造的（《三位一体论》第 12 卷第 7.12 节），在普兰的时代，这个主张最近被玛丽·勒·贾尔·德·古尔内以强烈的女权主义强调的方式陈述（G-EMW 65; G-OC 978）。然而，许多普兰的同时代人以及现代学者都同意，笛卡尔的二元论加强了心灵没有性别的观念（Hoffmann 1969; Perry 1985; Harth 1992: 81–86; Atherton 1993; O’Neill 1999 and 2011; Broad 2002: 4–12 and 2017; Pellegrin 2011: 28–37 and 2019: 568–569; Reuter 2013 and 2019: 38–41; Detlefsen 2017 提出了不同的观点）。普兰没有充分利用笛卡尔的二元论似乎令人惊讶。

在所讨论的文章中，普兰指出，如果“将心灵本身考虑在内，它在所有人类中都具有相同的本质”（T1en 158; TTfr 100）。为了考虑心灵本身，人们必须假设它在某种程度上可以与身体区分开来，但普兰并没有讨论心灵与身体之间的形而上学关系的本质。相反，他将心灵本身的讨论抛在脑后，专注于心灵与身体的结合，他用以下的话来描述这种结合：

是上帝将心灵与女性的身体以及男性的身体结合在一起，并通过相同的法则将它们结合在一起。这种结合是通过感觉、激情和意志行为来建立和维持的；由于心灵在两性中以相同的方式行动，它在两性中同样能够做同样的事情。（T1en 158; TTfr 101）

这种描述与笛卡尔在第六冥想中给出的描述非常接近，当他考察“上帝赐予我的心灵和身体的结合”时（CSM II, 57; AT VII, 82），但是与此同时，笛卡尔在这最后一冥想中强调了心灵与身体之间的真正区别，根据这一区别，“我与我的身体确实是不同的，我可以在没有身体的情况下存在”（CSM II, 54; AT VII, 78），而普兰在专注于心灵与身体的结合之前并没有讨论心灵与身体之间的真正区别。

普兰对心灵与身体的结合的关注在《论教育》中得到延续，在第四次对话中详细讨论了自我认识的问题。在这里，通常代表斯科拉学派观点的年轻的蒂曼德提出了一个明显的笛卡尔反对意见。他指出，对于人来说，开始研究心灵会更容易。因为如果人更容易了解自己和身边的事物，而不是远离自己的事物 [正如之前所建立的那样]，同样地，似乎心灵会比身体更了解自己。(TTen 214; TTfr 246; 另见 Welch 2002b: 139)

蒂曼德的观点类似于笛卡尔在第二冥想中的强调，他从作为一个思考的事物来审视自己(CSM II, 19; AT VII, 28)，但斯塔西马库斯指出，尽管这是真实的，但并不遵循这种形而上学探究的顺序。

Timander’s point resembles Descartes’ emphasis in the Second Meditation, where he begins by examining himself as a thinking thing (CSM II, 19; AT VII, 28), but rather than following this order of metaphysical inquiry, Stasimachus points out that though this is true

假设我们能够将心灵与身体分开 […] 如果我们将它们视为一个单一的、相互依赖的实体 […] 我相信对身体的了解应该先于对心灵的了解。(TTen 214: TTfr 246)

同样，普兰直接进行了一项关于心灵与身体的研究，在这里，他对心灵和身体之间的区别的提及甚至比在《平等论》中更为短暂。

对于灵魂作为一个独立实体的任何明确讨论的缺乏，导致德斯蒙德·克拉克认为普兰拒绝了笛卡尔关于灵魂作为实体的概念，并将这个概念视为仅仅是一种学院派的残留。根据克拉克的观点，普兰辩护了这样一种观点，即

身体和灵魂的联合及其相互依赖比灵魂作为学院派物质的推测性区分更是人类经验的更基本的数据。(Clarke 2013: 43)

沿着同样的研究线路，玛丽-弗雷德里克·佩莱格林认为对于普兰来说，“人类学比形而上学更具决定性”(Pellegrin 2019: 576)。

普兰对人性的具体体现的强调在他同时代的笛卡尔学派中并不是独一无二的，相反，他与雅克·罗霍和路易·德·拉·福尔热等人分享了这一观点，例如，在他在《教育论》中提出的建议阅读列表中提到了这两位学者(TTen 237; TTfr 272)。很可能有一些影响，克拉克将普兰在《平等论》中关于心灵与身体联合的上述解释与福尔热在他的《人类心灵论》(1666)中给出的解释进行了比较(T1en 158n45)。然而，我们必须注意到，虽然强调了联合，但福尔热的解释仍然牢固地根植于物质二元论，他的目标是在严格的笛卡尔框架内解决与心灵运作和心灵与身体相互作用有关的未解决问题(Drieux 2019)。

普兰的非正统笛卡尔主义在描述个体思想与身体之间的关系时最为明显。在《论教育》中，普兰写道，“心灵的一切行动 […] 都依赖于身体的参与”，几页之后，他稍微不那么严谨地写道，“几乎从来没有一个行动是没有另一个行动的”（TTen 213，223；TTfr 244，256）。这些说法忽视了笛卡尔对心灵行动和激情之间区别的界定，根据这个界定，激情依赖于身体，而行动（如意志）则不依赖（CSM I，335；AT XI，342-343；更多细节请参见 Reuter 2013：79-82）。普兰确实在《论平等》中的一个段落中承认了意志和激情之间的区别，他写道：

至于加速激情的原因，只要我们学习了足够的物理学知识，了解周围的事物如何影响我们和影响我们，以及通过经验和使用如何将我们的意志与它们联系在一起或与它们分离，我们就能理解它们的运作方式。（TTen 84；TTfr 102；另请参阅 Broad 2017：76）

这一段依赖于笛卡尔的二元论，通过区分依赖于身体的激情和自由选择将其与之分离的意志。但是再次没有进一步的讨论，普兰似乎对他所做的区分的形而上学维度毫不知情。

普兰似乎并不认为心灵对身体有必要的依赖。他并没有明确地为笛卡尔的二元论提出唯物主义的替代方案，而是强调了心灵和身体之间的相互依存，没有明确表态这种互动需要什么样的形而上学基础。普兰在写他的女权主义论文时还很年轻，虽然他显然熟悉广泛的笛卡尔主题，但他可能并没有深入研究过笛卡尔的著作。与罗霍、德拉福热、尼古拉斯·马勒布朗什和安托万·阿尔诺等其他笛卡尔主义者相比，普兰没有通过研究笛卡尔的物理学和形而上学中的未解决问题做出贡献。相反，他在性别之间的道德、政治、物理和形而上学关系的笛卡尔分析中有着无与伦比的贡献。

3. 妇女的征服

普兰对妇女的征服的分析结合了对偏见的笛卡尔批评和对这些偏见观点起源的历史分析。

3.1 偏见的作用

在《平等论》第一部分的开头，普兰将关于性别的偏见与其他同样持久但不合理的信念进行了比较。首先，他指出除了一些学者外，每个人都认为太阳围绕地球运动是不容置疑的事实，尽管我们观察到的日月运行实际上是使人们相信地球围绕太阳运动。（T1en 122; TTfr 59）

from a few scholars, everyone thinks that it is indubitable that the Sun moves around the Earth, despite the fact that what we observe in the revolutions of the days and the years leads those who examine it to believe that it is the Earth that moves around the Sun. (T1en 122; TTfr 59)

其次，他提到那些想象动物是由理性引导的智能生物的人，就像原始人认为钟表和机器内部有小灵魂一样，尽管他们对其构造和内部弹簧一无所知。（T1en 122–123; TTfr 59）

最后，也许最有趣的是，普兰提到社会偏见，这使人们相信自己的国家是最好的，因为它最为熟悉，而其他国家则被认为是“异国”。

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Poulain refers to social prejudices, which cause people to believe that their own country is the best, because it is most familiar, and

他们所受的宗教是真正的宗教，必须遵循，即使他们从未考虑过检查它或将其与其他宗教传统进行比较。（T1en 123; TTfr 60）

这些社会偏见还包括对财富和地位的信念，普兰指出“物质和职位的不平等导致许多人得出结论，人类彼此不平等”（同上）。

普兰的比较将他对性别关系的分析置于新科学的框架中，包括天文学和动物身体的机械解释，以及关于宗教自由和人类平等的当前思想框架。他声称，当适当地进行检查时，性别平等应该像新确立的地球绕太阳运动的事实一样明显。

普兰继续强调，当人们审视偏见的基础时，会发现这些信念仅仅基于自身利益和习俗。有趣的是，他也非常清楚，基于偏见的信念比基于理性的信念更难改变。他指出，当某人的观点仅仅基于偏见时，要改变他们的想法比起他们被强有力和有说服力的理由所说服要困难得多。（T1en 123; TTfr 60）

人们在认为自己有充分证据支持他们的信念时可能会犯错误，但是那些犯这种错误的人在遇到新证据时更容易改变他们的想法，而不是那些基于偏见持有错误信念的人（关于普兰对偏见的笛卡尔分析的优秀讨论，请参见 Schmitter 2018；还有 Fraisse 1985）。偏见的持久性是一个重要的洞察力，对于关于我们“后真相”社会和不同形式的民粹主义修辞的讨论仍然非常相关。

People can make mistakes when they think that they have strong evidence to believe what they believe, but people who make this kind of mistakes are more prone to change their minds when they encounter new evidence than people who hold untrue beliefs based on prejudice (for an excellent discussion of Poulain’s Cartesian analysis of prejudice, see Schmitter 2018; also Fraisse 1985). The persistance of prejudice is an important insight, which is still very relevant for discussions about our “post-truth” society and different forms of populist rhetoric.

当讨论有关女性劣势的偏见时，普兰强调这些偏见特别难以克服，因为男性和女性都共享这些偏见。他写道，尽管这些信念是不合理的，但当考虑到女性自己容忍自己的处境时，这些信念似乎更加令人信服。她们接受这种处境，仿佛这对她们来说是自然的，要么是因为她们根本不考虑自己是谁，要么是因为她们在依赖中出生和成长，以与男性相同的方式思考这个问题。（T1en 126; TTfr 63）

在这里，普兰触及到了内化偏见的重要问题（也参见 Schmitter 2018, 6–9）。对女性的压制不仅仅体现在男性对她们的政治和经济权力上，还体现在女性内化她们被压迫的地位并将其视为自然的事实上。在 21 世纪的女性主义哲学中，这一观点也为关于女性物化（Haslanger 1993; Langton 2000）以及隐性偏见和所谓的刻板印象威胁的讨论提供了基础。这些因素可能会影响处于劣势群体的人在认为自己表现不佳的情况下的表现（Saul 2013）。

Here Poulain touches upon the important—and also still relevant—topic of internalized prejudice (also Schmitter 2018, 6–9). The subjugation of women does not consist only in the political and economic power men exercise over them, but also in the fact that women internalize their subjected position and perceive it as natural. In twenty-first century feminist philosophy this same insight provides the ground for discussions about the objectification of women (Haslanger 1993; Langton 2000) as well as about implicit biases and so called stereotype threat, which can affect the performance of disadvantaged groups in situations where they identify themselves as inadequate performers (Saul 2013).

由于服从部分基于错误的自我理解，普兰非常清楚我们需要真正的自我认识才能解放自己。在《平等论》中，他指出“[自我认识] 绝对是正确对待 [性别平等] 所必需的”，并且在强调人类状况的身体方面后，他补充说这尤其涉及“对身体的认识”（T1en 155; TTfr 97）。在《教育论》中，普兰将整个第四次对话专门讨论了自我认识的主题，尽管在这个背景下他并没有明确讨论性别平等的问题，但他对我们的自我认识如何受到他人偏见的影响发表了几个重要的观点。斯塔西马库斯解释道：

我们对几乎所有存在的事物都有偏见，尤其是对自己。我们不仅是偏见的创造者，也是它的舞台和受害者。就我们最亲近的事物而言，我们可以说我们将自己献祭给了我们的幽灵。[…] 尽管我们是以某种方式被塑造的，而且自然界不断地让我们意识到这一点并不断抗议我们自己的想象力，我们仍然试图成为别人告诉我们的那种人。（TTen 212; TTfr 243）

普兰的解释非常清楚地意识到了我们所谓的心智无意识方面以及在我们有意识地知道自己是偏见的受害者的情况下，改变我们的自我概念的困难。他显然意识到了法国关于自我认识的持续讨论，其中新奥古斯丁主义者如皮埃尔·尼科尔和布莱兹·帕斯卡尔质疑其可能性，并且他捍卫了自我认识的可实现性，反对那些声称认识自己是不可能的人。

像移动山脉一样，我们永远无法到达尽头，人类对自己隐藏，心中有无数无法揭示的隐藏角落（TTen 211; TTfr 242）

对于所涉及的困难有细致入微的意识（有关详细讨论，请参见 Reuter 2017: 44–49）。

3.2 历史起源

普兰对压迫心理方面的精细分析与对认为女性劣于男性的偏见的历史起源的强有力分析相结合。他解释说，我们需要追溯关于女性的偏见“到其起源”，这将涉及通过参照当前的实践来评估早期所做的事情，并通过与我们自己时代正在发展的事情进行比较来判断古代风俗。如果我们遵循这个规则，我们就不会在无数的判断中犯下那么多错误。而且，在女性当前的状况方面，我们会认识到她们只是被最强者的法律所统治，并且这并不是因为她们在能力或价值上的缺乏而未能分享给男性在社会中占据优势地位的好处。（T1en 126; TTfr 63–64）

根据普兰的观点，最强者的法则（la Loi du plus fort）在几个方面是任意的。他强调，除了儿童对父母的依赖之外，依赖“是一种纯粹的物理或民事关系”，应该“仅被视为变化、暴力或习俗的结果”（T1en 153; TTfr 95）。正如 Stuurman 所争论的，普兰可能受到了托马斯·霍布斯关于政治权力人为性质的观点的影响（Stuurman 2004: 177–178）。不平等不是自然的，男性性别也不是天生压迫性的。普兰明确否定了男性在夺取对女性的权力时“受到某种隐藏的本能驱使——也就是说，受到自然之神的总体命令——以这种方式行事”（T1en 126; TTfr 63）。上帝并没有使男性压迫性。从性别之间权力关系的任意性质也可以得出结论，“如果女性处于类似的境地，她们可能会 [支持自己的性别]”（T1en 152; TTfr 95）。任何一种性别都不是天生压迫性或顺从性的。

According to Poulain, the law of the stronger (la Loi du plus fort) is in several respects arbitrary. He emphasizes that with the exception for the dependence of children upon their parents, dependence “is a purely physical or civil relation” and it should be “considered only as an effect of change, violence, or custom” (T1en 153; TTfr 95). As argued by Stuurman, Poulain can have been influenced by Thomas Hobbes’ views about the artificial nature of political power (Stuurman 2004: 177–178). Inequality is not natural and neither is the male sex oppressive by nature. Poulain explicitly rejects the idea that men, when they usurped power over women, were “driven by some hidden instinct—that is, by a general command of the author of nature—to act in this way” (T1en 126; TTfr 63). God has not made men oppressive. From the arbitrary nature of the power relation between the sexes follows also that “women might have [favored their sex] had they been in a similar situation” (T1en 152; TTfr 95). Neither sex is by its nature oppressive or submissive.

普兰并不否认男性在平均上比女性身体更强壮，或者“怀孕和产后的影响会在一段时间内削弱女性的力量”，并使她们依赖于“丈夫的帮助”（T1en 127; TTfr 65）。然而，只要“家庭只由一个母亲、一个父亲和几个小孩组成”，这并不是一个问题，但当家庭扩大成为更大的单位，家务事变得更加多样化，并且所有家庭成员都服从父亲的统治时，问题就出现了（T1en 127–128; TTfr 65）。

普兰致力于一个原始的黄金时代的概念，这个时代在现今多样化的社会之前存在，并且他特别强调原始自由的概念，尤其是在他的第三篇论文《关于人类的卓越性》中，他还描述了自然自由丧失的过程。他解释说，当一些人利用他们的力量和闲暇时间试图征服其他人时，自由的黄金时代就让位给了奴役的铁器时代。自利和财富通过统治紧密地联系在一起，以至于不得不依赖他人变得不可避免。这种组合与无辜和和平的状态之间的距离成比例增加，导致贪婪、野心、虚荣、奢侈、懒散、傲慢、残忍、暴政、欺骗、分裂、战争、机会、忧虑——简而言之，所有困扰我们的心灵和身体的弱点。（TTen 313; TTfr 392）

some men took advantage of their strength and their leisure to try to subjugate others, the golden age of liberty gave way to an iron age of servitude. Self-interest and wealth were so bound together through domination that it became impossible not to have to depend on others. This combination increased in proportion to the distance from the state of innocence and peace, giving rise to greed, ambition, vanity, extravagance, idleness, pride, cruelty, tyranny, deceit, schisms, wars, chance, worries—in short, all the infirmities of mind and body that afflict us. (TTen 313; TTfr 392)

像让-雅克·卢梭之后，普兰将不平等的起源与财富和随之而来的对他人的依赖联系起来。这个历史过程不仅导致了不平等的物质条件，也是贪婪、傲慢和残忍等负面情绪的起源。男人对女人的暴政也有着相同的历史起源。在《平等论》中，普兰描述了最初的夫妻间自愿的依赖如何在战争迫使妇女“接受那些将她们视为战利品中最美丽的一部分的陌生人为丈夫”时变成了奴役（T1en 128; TTfr 66）。普兰认为，妇女的商品化是不平等的历史起源的一个组成部分。

普兰对母亲、父亲和几个孩子之间的最初和谐与发达社会中对妇女的压迫之间的区别的理解，通过他对婚姻和政治社会之间的区别的评论得到进一步阐明。在《卓越论》中，他将政治社会与“婚姻社会 [只由两个人组成，其中一个人因此不能对另一个人使用权威和强制]”进行了比较（TTen 280; TTfr 313）。普兰认为，婚姻不需要权力的等级划分，因为它“不是建立在恐惧上，而是建立在爱情上”（同上）。因此，婚姻可以直接建立在妻子和丈夫的自然平等基础上，而不是其中任何一方对另一方进行权力篡夺，而三个或更多人的社会，其中一个人“能够与另一个人联合起来迫使第三个人遵守”，则需要服从法律和君主，否则人们将“不断地处于战争状态”（同上）。为了避免通过战争和暴政建立起来的战争，政治社会需要君主权力，但与霍布斯一样，普兰强调命令的权利只有在人们自愿接受统治的情况下才是合法的。

不属于任何一个人比另一个人更自然，因为它包括自愿向被授予它的人提交的那些人的自愿。（同上。）

婚姻和政治统治都必须承认人类天生平等，即使政治社会不能像婚姻那样直接地基于自然平等，正如普兰所说，在自由的黄金时代之前，妇女受到任意征服之前。

4. 性别平等

我们已经看到，普兰声称所有人类都是平等的，但他如何为性别平等辩护呢？我们不知道普兰是否熟悉玛丽·德·古尔内的著作《男女平等》（1622 年），但他与她一样强调基于性别相似性的平等。古尔内自觉地与早期参与女性争论的人区分开来，后者经常主张某一性别的优越性，并强调她“满足于使女性与男性平等，因为在这方面，自然界既反对优越性也反对劣势”（G-EMW 54; G-OC 965; 参见 Deslauriers 2018）。古尔内遵循亚里士多德的观点，认为人类动物的独特形式在于理性灵魂，而这种灵魂在两性中是相同的（G-EMW 65; G-OC 978; 参见 Deslauriers 2019）。普兰则拒绝了斯科拉哲学，并试图将他的大部分论证基于笛卡尔的哲学。当我们分析他对性别平等的讨论时，我们可以区分出四个主要论点。首先，普兰认为没有证据支持不平等，这只是一种错误的信念。其次，他认为在所有相关方面，女性和男性在心理和身体上都是相似的，因此平等。第三，他提到了自然平等的规范概念，最后，他提出了对平等机会的规范要求。我为每个论点都专门设立了一个小节。

4.1 不平等是一种错误的信念

这个论点基于笛卡尔寻求真理的方法（第 2.1 节），并与普兰对偏见的批评（第 3.1 节）密切相关。从很大程度上说，这是普兰最重要的论点，因为《平等论》的很大一部分内容是他对有关女性劣势的主张的驳斥。普兰认为，关于女性的信念并不是基于女性的本质或天性，而是历史上形成的偏见（第 3.2 节）。特别是戴斯蒙德·克拉克强调了普兰批评的这一方面，并将其与笛卡尔对斯科拉学解释模型的普遍批评联系起来，这些模型通过假设与需要解释的每个现实相对应的“形式”或“本质”来解释“任何现象”（克拉克 2013：41）。普兰对斯科拉学关于“本质”的批评在一段文字中表达得最明确，他在其中反驳了“律师的观点”，这些观点对许多人来说具有很大的分量，因为他们专门声称给每个人应得的权利（T1en 152; TTfr 94）。这些斯科拉学派的律师中，学者们声称普兰包括雨果·格罗蒂乌斯（Stuurman 2004：166-167），他们说“是本质决定了女性在社会中的最低职能，并将她们排除在公职之外”，但根据普兰的说法，如果要求他们在这个背景下清晰地解释“本质”的含义以及本质如何区分两性，他们将会陷入困境。（T1en 152; TTfr 94-95）

普兰认为，在这个背景下，“本质”是一个非解释性的概念。我们可以将他的批评与古尔内的批评进行比较：她认为，正确解释的情况下，斯科拉学对人类的概念不允许性别区分，而他认为这种概念本身就无法解释性别的真正本质。

Poulain argues that ‘nature’ is, in this context, a non-explanatory concept. We can compare his criticism with that of Gournay: whereas she argues that when correctly interpreted, the Scholastic concept of the human being does not allow for a distinction of sex, he argues that this kind of concept cannot explain the true nature of the sexes in the first place.

普兰还认为，不平等是一种错误的信念，他举了许多例子来证明女性具有相等甚至更优秀的能力。其中许多例子都是推测性的概括，不符合笛卡尔的确定性标准。例如，普兰写道，

听到一个女人辩护是一种乐趣。无论案件有多复杂，她都能解开并清晰地解释。[…] 在女性处理法律案件的过程中，我们发现她们具有男性所缺乏的某种能力。（T1en 139; TTfr 79）

这里所做的概括是无效的，实际上与普兰所反对的关于女性劣势的概括相似。但我们还必须注意到，他只需要一个女人能够辩护得当的例子，就足以证明女性并非天生无法做到。从这个意义上说，他的概括是多余的。当普兰写道时，他似乎意识到了从例子中进行哲学上更有效的论证的方面：

正如认为所有女性都不慎重是不公平的，仅仅因为认识了五六个这样的女性，同样公平的是，我们应该得出结论，女性有能力进行科学研究，因为我们看到有一些女性已经达到了如此高度。（T1en 142; TTfr 82）

即使在这里，普兰对于从例子中得出无效的概括和使用例子来证明某个概括是不真实的之间的关键区别也没有完全明确。但是，他允许一种宽容的解释，即他的主要目的是要证明关于女性劣势的概括是错误的。

4.2 性别的相似性

除了显示关于不平等的主张是错误的之外，普兰的目标是要表明性别是平等的，因为在所有相关方面，它们是相似的。在《平等论》的第二部分中，这个论点被放在了“女性”这个副标题下，从哲学原理的角度来看，女性在各种知识方面和男性一样有能力，并以上述（在第 2.2 节中）引用的“心灵没有性别”的主张开始（T1en 157; TTfr 99）。普兰争辩道：

很容易看出，性别差异仅适用于身体。严格来说，仅涉及身体的人类繁殖，而心灵仅仅是表示同意，并且在每个人身上以相同的方式表示同意，因此可以得出结论，心灵没有性别。（T1en 157; TTfr 99–100）

在这里，普兰主要关注的是心灵的本质，但他将繁殖和同意联系起来的方式也值得注意，并且与他在《卓越论》中的强调相一致，即当一个女人和一个男人“同意生活在一起时，这完全是自愿的”（TTen 280; TTfr 313; 另见《平等论》，T1en 153; TTfr 95）。根据他关于平等同意的主张，普兰得出结论，如果“将心灵本身考虑在内，就会发现它在所有人类中是平等的，具有相同的本质，并且能够进行各种思考”（T1en 158; TTfr 100; 另见第 2.2 节）。

独立思想的平等是不够的，因为人类是由思想和身体组成的复合体。思想不断受到身体的影响。因此，普兰继续通过论证认为，性别的身体在所有认知相关方面也是相似的。他声称这在大脑方面尤其如此：

[思想在男性和女性身上的功能没有任何不同]，如果只考虑头部，这一点更加明显，头部是科学知识的唯一器官，思想在其中发挥所有功能。即使进行最详细的解剖调查，我们也无法观察到男性和女性之间在这个器官上的任何差异。后者的大脑与我们的完全相似；它们以与我们相同的方式接收和组合感觉印象，并以完全相同的方式将其存储于想象力和记忆中。（T1en 158; TTfr 101）

基于认知器官（如大脑）相似性的论证存在问题，即它使平等依赖于经验发现。普兰所提到的“最详细的解剖调查”在今天的标准下并不算先进，当时的笛卡尔主义者马勒布朗奇对女性的大脑，包括她们的想象力，得出了不同的结论（参见克拉克 2013 年：44、50）。马勒布朗奇并不声称所有女性的能力都比所有男性弱，恰恰相反：“有些女性的思维比一些男性更强”，但他认为大多数女性“无法运用她们的想象力来解决复杂而纠缠的问题”，并将这种无能力与“脑纤维的细腻性是所有这些效果的主要原因”联系起来（马勒布朗奇 1674-75 年 [1997 年：130]）。现代的脑研究更加先进，但仍未解决是否存在女性和男性之间认知上的显著差异的问题。从哲学论证的角度来看，对脑研究的引用仍然是薄弱的。为了避免将心智能力的问题简化为由脑科学家回答的问题，我们需要一个不能简化为生理身体的心智概念。

即使普兰强调了女性和男性认知重要的生理器官的相似性，他似乎并不想提供一个彻底唯物主义的解释（见第 2.2 节）。雅各布·布罗德对普兰的立场进行了细致入微的解释，她强调了自由意志的作用，特别是其同意或不同意的能力（布罗德 2017 年：74-76 页）。笛卡尔曾经著名地认为判断由两个要素组成：智力的感知和意志的行动。为了避免错误，意志必须只同意那些清晰明确的感知（例如，Principia §§ 32-35; CSM I, 204; AT VIIIA, 17-18）。根据这个解释，当我们犯错时，最终是意志负责。布罗德的解释建立在《平等论》中普兰声称“我们可以将我们的意志与 [激情的原因] 结合或与之分离”（TTen 84; TTfr 102; 见第 2.2 节）的段落上。她认为

与笛卡尔一样，普兰暗示着行动者能够通过行使自由意志来克服身体的影响：他们可以将他们的意志“与激情的原因结合”或“与之分离”（布罗德 2017 年：76 页；关于笛卡尔和普兰对判断的解释，还可参见罗伊特 2013 年：79-80 页）

布罗德的解释捕捉到了普兰的平等意图，而基于意志独立性的解释具有明显的优势，即使女性和男性在受到身体影响方面可能存在经验上可检测的差异，他们仍然可以分享同等的意志自由，同意或不同意他们的激情以及想象（见罗伊特 2019 年：49-51 页）。这个解释的哲学问题在于它使普兰的立场容易受到伊丽莎白·波西米亚在与笛卡尔的通信中提出的最突出的异议。她在 1645 年 6 月 22 日写道：

我很清楚，当我从一个事务的想法中排除一切令我不安的东西（我相信这些仅仅是由想象力所代表的），我会健康地判断它，并在其中找到我所带来的疗法和感情。但是，直到激情已经发挥了它的作用，我从来没有知道如何将这个付诸实践。（Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 93; AT IV, 233–234）

伊丽莎白描述了她无法将自己的意愿与影响她的事务分离开来。这种无能并不是因为她对外部影响如何作用于她缺乏了解，相反，她对激情和想象力所扮演的角色非常清楚，但她认为，无论她有多少知识，她都无法自愿地分离她的同意。在这封信中，伊丽莎白从她的个人经验中进行了论证，但她的批评是由她在早期信件中提出的形而上学问题所框定的。在她的第二封信（1643 年 6 月 10 日）中，她总结了这一观点：

很难理解，正如你所描述的那样，一个灵魂在拥有了良好推理的能力和习惯之后，如何会因为一些蒸汽而失去这一切，并且，灵魂能够在没有身体的情况下存在，并且与身体没有任何共同之处，但灵魂仍然受其支配。（Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 68; AT III, 685）

伊丽莎白提出了一个问题，即思想如何可能同时与身体有所不同并受其影响。这些正是普兰未解决的形而上学问题，结果他无法为他关于性别相似性的主张提供有效的形而上学基础。

4.3 自然平等

不管普兰能否成功地展示出女性和男性智力能力的相似性，这种描述性的相似性并不能为规范性的平等概念提供一个强有力的基础（Clarke 2013: 49; Hoekstra 2013）。为了找到普兰关于性别平等的规范基础，我首先将研究他对人类自然平等和自由的引用。在《平等论》中，普兰写道，“依赖和奴役违背了使所有人平等的自然法则”（TTen 78; TTfr 95），几页之后，他指出当人们被想象为与公民社会分离时，他们被发现“完全自由和平等，只有对自我保护的渴望和获得所需一切的平等权利”（T1en 164; TTfr 106）。普兰没有详细说明他所说的自然法则或先于公民社会的自然状态的含义。目前尚不清楚他在多大程度上依赖于他在索邦大学的学习中所了解的经院哲学传统的自然法，以及在多大程度上受到了更近期发展的影响，比如雨果·格罗蒂乌斯和托马斯·霍布斯的自然法理论。

上述引用的两个段落都处于具有霍布斯色彩的背景中：在第一种情况下，普兰将自然平等与公民状态中的任意依赖性区分开来（另请参见第 3.2 节），而在第二种情况下，他继续说道：

但是 [学习法律和政治的女性] 也会注意到，这种平等将使他们陷入战争或永久的相互不信任状态，这与他们的目标不一致，并且理性的自然光明会告诉他们，除非每个人放弃自己的权利并订立契约或公约，否则他们无法和平共处。她还会看到，为了验证这些决定并保护人们免受焦虑，有必要求助于第三方，这个第三方将有权力强制每个人遵守他们对他人的承诺。（T1en 164; TTfr 106; 另请参见霍布斯，《利维坦》，第一部分，第 13-15 章）

基于这些理由，并考虑到普兰所处的知识背景中有哪些作品可供参考，斯图尔曼得出结论：“霍布斯是他最有可能的来源”（2004 年：177）。霍布斯的可能影响非常有启发性，特别是当我们考虑普兰对权力任意性的看法时，但斯图尔曼似乎过分强调了普兰观点中的霍布斯色彩，他指出普兰拒绝了自然社交性（斯图尔曼 2004 年：178）。普兰确实强调了恐惧作为政治社会动机的作用，如《平等论》（T1en 164; TTfr 106）和《卓越论》（TTen 280; TTfr 313）中所述，但关键是要注意，他并不认为恐惧是人类自然状态的必要方面。普兰在《卓越论》中描述的“自由的黄金时代”是对自然社交性的描述：

在世界的黎明时期，这些痕迹仍然可以在牧羊人和牧羊女的纯真爱情以及乡村生活的愉悦中看到，这种生活无忧无虑，不受权力或敌人的恐惧所困扰，所有人都是平等、公正和真诚的，因为他们唯一的规则和法律就是良知。（TTen 313; TTfr 392）

正如我们所看到的，恐惧在这种原始状态中是不存在的，它是“一些人利用他们的力量和闲暇时间试图征服其他人”的结果（同上；参见第 3.2 节中引用的段落）。普兰确实声称人类“有自我保护的欲望和获得实现这一目标所必需的一切的平等权利”（T1en 164; TTfr 106），但当我们将他的著作作为一个整体来考虑时，他似乎并不声称这种欲望本身就是持续对抗和由这些对抗引起的恐惧的起源。

普兰在《卓越论》中对自然平等和自由的讨论是以神学参考为框架的，其中包括对“圣奥古斯丁的引用，他声称人除了上帝之外不应该将任何事物置于自己之上”（TTen 279; TTfr 312; 另见 Wilkin 2019: 234–236）。普兰可能想到的是《上帝之城》（第十九卷，第 15 章）中的一段文字，奥古斯丁在其中写道：

上帝希望有理性的人，按照他的形象创造的人，只能统治非理性的自然界。因此，他并不希望人统治人，而只希望人统治兽类。因此，在原始时代，那些圣洁的人成为了牧羊人，而不是统治者（奥古斯丁 413–427 [2008: 223]）。

金奇·胡克斯特拉（Kinch Hoekstra）等人强调，奥古斯丁在《上帝之城》中的这一章节，以及《基督教教义》（第一卷，第 23 章）中的一段话，其中奥古斯丁陈述人类天生平等，对自然平等和自由的讨论影响了 17 世纪（Hoekstra 2013: 95）。当我们寻找普兰主张所有人类平等（包括牧羊人在内）的规范基础时，从人类的创造中得出平等的神学起源，至少与霍布斯关于平等的解释一样有可能（关于后者规范性本质的有影响力的解释，请参见 Hoekstra 2013）。在这里，我们并没有找到与学院传统的明确断裂。普兰使用它的平等概念，以反对许多学院派作者，认为自然平等必须应用于女性和男性之间的关系。

4.4 平等的需求

弗朗索瓦·普兰·德拉巴尔和雅各琳·布罗德都强调普兰的平等概念是规范性的，因为它包括对平等机会的要求。根据克拉克的观点，我们在普兰（和其他 17 世纪女权主义作家）中发现了“所有人都应该享有平等获得某些人类福利的权利”的要求（2013 年：49）。这一要求本身依赖于人们在某种相关方面是平等的这一观念，而在普兰的案例中，我们可以看到他对平等机会的要求根源于他对能力（第 4.2 节）以及自然平等观念（第 4.3 节）的讨论。

布罗德指出，在《平等论》中，普兰对平等权利的要求明确表达：“我们所有人，无论男女，都有平等的真理权，因为两者的思维能力是相等的”（TTen 91；TTfr 111）。在这里，平等权利和平等能力之间的联系是明确的，我们可以看到为什么对普兰来说，展示女性和男性具有相等的思维能力是如此紧迫。声称女性和男性的思维之间没有相关差异本身并不具有规范性，但为要求平等权利行使思维提供了基础。正如布罗德所示，普兰对平等真理权的要求与追求美德以及最终的真正幸福密切相关，而真正幸福只能通过美德实现（Broad 2017：79；2019：32）。普兰写道：“由于两性都能获得相同的幸福，他们对于获得幸福所需的一切都有相同的权利”（T1en 169；TTfr 111）。

重要的是要注意，正如 Broad 所指出的那样，普兰几乎逐字逐句地遵循笛卡尔的定义，将美德定义为“在各种情况下坚定不移地做自己认为最好的事情的决心”（T1en 187; TTfr 131; 还有笛卡尔于 1645 年 8 月 4 日写给伊丽莎白的信，Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 98; AT IV, 265）。从这种对决心的强调中可以得出结论，我们不需要假设意志总是能够将自己与激情联系在一起或分离开来（参见第 4.2 节）：只需要做出坚决的尝试就足以成为美德。普兰声称，女性和男性具有相等的决心能力，他明确声称这种能力属于心灵，并且仅依赖于身体作为其工具（T1en 187; TTfr 131），因此无论性别是否实际上能够同样地控制自己的激情（即使他认为第二个说法也是正确的），相等的决心能力本身就足以作为要求女性和男性拥有平等的知识权利和实现完全美德的所有其他附加手段的基础，从而实现普兰所说的幸福。（关于笛卡尔如何将美德和幸福联系在一起有广泛的学术讨论；有关最近的一份报告，请参阅 Svensson 2019。）

普兰对知识平等权利的要求实际上是对适当教育平等权利的要求。当普兰提到教育时，最常常是为了抱怨“女性所受到的最低限度的教育”（T1en 196; TTfr 141）。在《平等论》中，他认为，如果我们认为女性在认知能力上存在缺陷，那么“应该将其归因于她们生活的条件和所受的教育，其中包括她们所处的无知”（T1en 188; TTfr 132–133; 另见 G-EMW 59–60; G-OC 971–972）。但是普兰对现状的批评包括对变革的要求，在《教育论》的第一次对话开始时，斯塔西马库斯指出：“我认为教育绝对必要，我会安排事情，使女性能够像男性一样轻松地接受教育”（TTen 144; TTfr 163）。根据普兰对斯科拉学院的笛卡尔批评，由斯塔西马库斯详细阐述，教育被描绘为一项私人事业，而《教育论》的大纲，五次对话设定在索菲亚的私人住所中，可以被视为普兰对理想教育形式的示例。在这种环境中，平等被强调，因为我们有一个学识渊博的男性和女性，斯塔西马库斯和索菲亚，以及一个男性和女性的热心学生，尤拉利亚和提曼德（关于这四个角色的角色，参见 Schmitter 2018, 7–9）。

教育问题也是普兰与许多前辈和后继者最明显共同关注的问题。这个问题在克里斯汀·德·皮赞在《女士之城》（第一部，第 27 章）中有力地提出，她在那里辩称，

如果像对待男孩一样，将小女孩送到学校并在那里教授她们各种不同的科目，她们将像男孩一样轻松地理解和学习所有艺术和科学的困难（克里斯汀 1405 [1999: 57]）。

并且仍然是玛丽·沃尔斯通克拉夫特在《女权辩护》（1792 年）中的一个重要主题。

5. 普兰和他的继任者

普兰的女权论著在法国并没有很多追随者，但也不是没有影响力。有一些经过授权和未经授权的再版（完整列表请参见 Alcover 1981；也可参考 Welch 2002a：25-31），但对他的作品的引用很少。一个例外是加布里埃尔·苏雄，在她的《道德与政治论》（1693 年）中提到了“平等的作者”，她在其中捍卫了妇女的自由以及学习能力（Welch 2002a：29；Shapiro 2017；Wilkin 2019）。在下一个世纪，路易丝·杜邦在她未完成的手稿《关于妇女的作品》（约 1745 年）中引用了普兰，我们有直接证据表明孟德斯鸠对《平等论》评价很高（Thielemann 1983：321-326；Stuurman 2004：283-289；Wilkin 2019）。同时，卢梭很可能在杜邦撰写手稿期间担任她的秘书，至少熟悉普兰的第一篇论著。

早在 1677 年，德拉巴尔的著作《平等论》以匿名方式英译为《女人与男人一样好》，普兰的思想似乎影响了英国对性别平等的讨论，一直延续到 18 世纪（Leduc 2010；Clarke 2013：12-13）。一个重要的中介是《女人不亚于男人：或者，关于公平性别的自然权利的简短而谦虚的辩护》（1739 年），以假名“索菲亚，一位贵族”出版。这篇论文最近才引起学者们的关注，它借用了普兰论文中的几个段落，并将他的主张激进化，更明确地要求女性的权利（Clarke 2013：43-44；Broad 2019）。我们对索菲亚的论文的接受历史还知之甚少，或者对沃尔斯通克拉夫特使用的来源也不清楚，因此无法猜测这两篇关于妇女权利的辩护之间是否存在直接影响，但 Broad 最近表明，我们可以从普兰到沃尔斯通克拉夫特的尊严作为妇女权利基础的主题中发现一种连续性（Broad 2019）。

当我们考虑普兰在 18 世纪法国的影响力时，我们必须考虑到，在法国，基于性别相似性的平等观念比在英国更具争议性。卢梭在《爱弥尔》（1762 年）中声称：

争论两性中哪一方更优越，或者它们是否平等是多么的徒劳，就好像每个性别根据自己特定的目的履行自然的目标，如果它更像另一个性别，就会比较不完美！（1762 [1979: 358]；2012: 825）

卢梭认为性别既不平等也不相等，它们是不同的，应该致力于完善它们的差异，以形成和谐的夫妻关系。普兰基于相似性的平等要求是需要反驳而不是采纳的。尽管卢梭关于性别关系的观点受到了英国女权主义者如沃尔斯通克拉夫特的严厉批评（Reuter 2014），但它们影响了许多法国女权主义者（Bergès 2016）。当奥林匹娜·德古热在法国革命期间宣布妇女权利时，她并没有呼吁性别的相似性，而是呼吁它们的和谐团结，这是除人类以外的所有其他动物都实现了的。在她著名的《女性权利。致女王》（1791）中，她写道，对暴虐的男人说，

如果你能够区分自然运作中的性别，请区分一下。无论你走到哪里，你都会发现它们交织在一起；无论你走到哪里，它们都以和谐的团结合作在这个不朽的杰作中。（1791 [2011: 30]; 1993: 206）

我们确实听到了自由黄金时代的回声，但这是卢梭强调性别和谐团结所形成的回声。

在二十世纪早期的几十年间，人们对女权主义思想的历史产生了新的兴趣，这是由于对妇女选举权的激烈争论所引起的，这导致了一些早期学术论文对普兰进行了研究（格拉平 1913 年，1914 年；勒费夫 1914 年）。1949 年，西蒙娜·德·波伏娃在她的《第二性》一书中引用了普兰的一句话：“对于男人对女人所说的一切，我们都应该持怀疑态度，因为他们既是法官又是诉讼当事人”（T1en 151; TTfr 93），从而使普兰的名字为人所知。普兰对于波伏娃来说不仅仅是一个座右铭，当她讨论有关妇女的事实和神话时，她用以下的话描述了他的分析：

【普兰】认为，由于男性更强壮，他们偏袒自己的性别，而女性出于习俗接受了这种依赖。她们从未有过机会：无论是自由还是教育。因此，不能根据她们过去的所作所为来评判她们。没有任何迹象表明她们比男性低劣。解剖学揭示了差异，但其中没有一项对男性构成特权。（波伏娃 1949/1989: 184–185 [2011: 123–124]）

除了是普兰论点的一个很好总结外，这段文字还是波伏娃自己分析妇女如何成为第二性的一个有趣线索（另请参阅韦尔奇 2002a: 32；关于波伏娃思想中笛卡尔的方面，请参阅海纳马 2005）。

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1675, De l’excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes, Paris: Jean du Puis.
1681, Essai des remarques particulières sur la langue françoise pour la ville de Genève, Geneva.
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1677, The Woman as Good as the Man: Or, The Equality of Both Sexes, trans. A. L., London: N. Brooks.
[TTen], Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, introduction by Marcelle Maistre Welch, translated by Vivien Bosley, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Translations of On the equality of the two sexes (1673), On the education of ladies (1674), and On the excellence of men (1675).
[TTfr], De l’égalité des deux sexes, De l’éducation des dames, De l’excellence des hommes, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (ed.), Paris: Vrin, 2011.
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–––, 2014, “‘Like a Fanciful Kind of Half Being’: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Criticism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”, Hypatia, 29(4): 925–941. doi:10.1111/hypa.12105
–––, 2017, “François Poulain de la Barre on the Subjugation of Women”, in Broad and Detlefsen 2017: 33–49.
–––, 2019, “The Gender of the Cartesian Mind, Body, and Mind-Body Union”, in Reuter and Svensson 2019: 37–58.
Reuter, Martina and Frans Svensson (eds.), 2019, Mind, Body, and Morality: New Perspectives on Descartes and Spinoza, (Routledge studies in seventeenth-century philosophy), New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781351202831.
Saul, Jennifer, 2013, “Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy”, in Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 39–60. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199325603.003.0003
Schmitter, Amy M., 2018, “Cartesian prejudice: Gender, education and authority in Poulain de la Barre”, Philosophy Compass 13(12): 1–12.
Shapiro, Lisa, 2017, “Gabrielle Suchon’s ‘Neutralist’: The Status of Women and the Invention of Autonomy”, in Broad and Detlefsen 2017: 50–65.
Stock, Marie-Louise, 1961, “Poullain de la Barre: A Seventeenth-Century Feminist”, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University.
Stuurman, Siep, 2004, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press.
Svensson, Frans, 2019, “A Cartesian Distinction in Virtue: Moral and Perfect”, in Reuter and Svensson 2019: 208–225.
Thielemann, Leland, 1983, “The Thousand Lights and Intertextual Rhapsody: Diderot or Mme Dupin?”, Romantic Review, 74(3): 316–329.
Welch, Marcelle Maistre, 2002a, “Introduction: Poullain de la Barre’s Cartesian Feminism”, in TTen 3–33.
–––, 2002b, “Introduction: On the Education of Ladies”, in TTen 125–137.
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Academic Tools

Other Internet Resources

Clarke, Desmond, “François Poulain de la Barre,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/francois-barre/. [This was the previous entry on François Barre in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history.]
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New Narratives in the History of Philosophy

Acknowledgments

It is my honor to offer this replacement for the previous SEP entry on Poulain written by Desmond M. Clarke (1942–2016). In particular, my bibliography of Poulain’s works is based on his. In addition to the secondary literature cited and personal communication with many of the authors, my interpretations of Poulain’s thought are indebted to numerous discussions with Tuomas Parsio, the translator of Poulain’s De l’égalité into Finnish.

François Poulain de la Barre (1648–1723) is known for his treatises De l’égalité des deux sexes [On the Equality of the Two Sexes] (1673), De l’éducation des dames [On the Education of Ladies] (1674) and De l’excellence des hommes [On the Excellence of Men] (1675). Despite its name the third treatise continues his defense of equality between the sexes by overturning rhetorically presented arguments on the behalf of the excellence of men. Together the three books constitute one of the most detailed analyses of the subjugation of women written in the seventeenth century.

Poulain’s thought was deeply influenced by René Descartes’ philosophy. He used Descartes’ methods of doubt and right reasoning in order to reject prejudices about the inferiority of women and his arguments in defense of the equality of the sexes use many insights drawn from Descartes’ account of the nature of the human being. After an introductory biographical sketch, this entry will first examine the Cartesian foundations of Poulain’s thought and then proceed to a discussion of his analysis of the subjugation of women. Next, his four main arguments for the equality of the sexes are presented and evaluated. The entry closes with a brief discussion of Poulain’s direct and indirect relations to later developments in the history of feminist thought. Throughout, the aim is to present Poulain’s core ideas as well as examine their philosophical validity.

1. Life and Works

We know relatively little about the life of François Poulain (or Poullain) de la Barre. No correspondence or accounts by his contemporaries have survived. What we know has to be reconstructed from occasional surviving official documents and from supposedly autobiographical remarks in his writings. Accounts of Poulain’s life rely on archival research done in particular by Marie-Louise Stock (1961), Madeleine Alcover (1981), and Siep Stuurman (2004).

Poulain was born in Paris in 1648, as the third child to wealthy Catholic parents. As many younger sons he was destined for a church career and he earned his bachelor’s degree in theology at Sorbonne in 1666. This lower degree was generally considered sufficient for priesthood, but Poulain did not at this point of his life seek to be ordained and this decision, though temporary, is often connected with his growing interest in Cartesian philosophy (Stuurman 2004: 30). In his second main work De l’éducation des dames [On the Education of Ladies] (1674), a set of five conversations between a Cartesian teacher, a young man and two young women, Poulain describes how the teacher Stasimachus became a follower of René Descartes’ philosophy. Stasimachus tells his young interlocutors how, one day, when he found

all the sciences of the Schools particularly distasteful, by a great stroke of luck I allowed myself to be taken off by a friend to hear a Cartesian lecturing on a subject concerning the human body. (TTen 245; TTfr 281)

Fed on Scholastic prejudices against Cartesian philosophy, Stasimachus was initially suspicious and then

astonished to hear nothing but what was clear and intelligible, to realize that [the speaker] was reasoning on the basis of principles that were so simple and so true that I could not fail to agree with them. (TTen 245; TTfr 281–282)

As Stuurman points out, this description is a “streamlined conversion story”, of a type often repeated by followers of Descartes’ philosophy during the second half of the seventeenth century (Stuurman 2004: 35). Stasimachus’ conversion must not be read as Poulain’s autobiography, but we have strong grounds to assume that Poulain became interested in Cartesian philosophy while still a student and that his interest was connected to attending public lectures, such as those held in Paris by the Cartesian Jacques Rohault (Stuurman 2004: 43).

Scholars also agree that after leaving university, Poulain was teaching literature and a textbook on translating Latin into French, published anonymously in 1672, has been attributed to him (Stock 1961: 19–20; Welch 2002a: 9). In the following year he published De l’égalité des deux sexes [On the Equality of the Two Sexes] (1673), the first and most widely known of his three feminist treatises. One year later it was followed by De l’éducation des dames and in the next year by De l’excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes [On the Excellence of Men, against the Equality of the Sexes] (1675). Despite its name the third treatise continues Poulain’s defense of equality between the sexes by overturning his rhetorically presented arguments on the behalf of the excellence of men. This treatise is less Cartesian than the two earlier ones and more engaged with theological arguments. In this respect it resembles earlier treatises participating in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, the debate about the superiority of women versus men, such as Cornelius Agrippa’s De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus [On the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex] (1509/1529).

At some point after publishing his three feminist treatises, Poulain returned to theology and he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1679. His decision to take up a church career after having written treatises heavily critical of Scholastic philosophy might seem odd. There is no doubt that Poulain used Cartesian arguments as a basis for his feminist claims and that he was critical of Scholasticism, but we must also note that his third treatise is in many respect a reconciliation between his feminism and theology. When reconstructing Poulain’s opinions we must be careful not to identify him too closely with the character Stasimachus. As Carol Pal has argued in the case of the friendship between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, with strong Cartesian sympathies, and Anna Maria van Schurman, who was in many respects a Scholastic thinker, it was not unusual that seventeenth-century intellectuals combined elements from the old and the new philosophy (Pal 2012: 250–254). It is quite possible that Poulain was less militant a convert to Cartesianism than his character Stasimachus.

After being ordained Poulain served as a curate in two parishes in Picardy, first in the medium-sized village La Flamengrie, from where he was transferred to the small village Versigny in 1685, possibly as the result of some disciplinary measure (Stuurman 2004: 239–240). In Picardy Poulain witnessed the persecution of Protestants and this is often interpreted as paving the way for his own conversion from Catholicism to Calvinism. He left his parish in 1688 and after a short stay in Paris, where his conversion is assumed to have taken place, he moved to Geneva, where he received the status of habitant in December 1689 (Stuurman 2004: 242–243). As a resident of Geneva, Poulain continued his earlier career teaching French and in 1690 he married Marie Ravier (d. 1742), with whom he had two children, Jean-Charlotte (1690–1716) and Jean-Jacques (1696–1751), a future Calvinist minister and follower of many of his father’s theological ideas (Welch 2002a: 17–20; Stuurman 2004: 245–246). Poulain published two more books, Essai des remarques particulières sur la langue françoise pour la ville de Genève [An Essay of detailed comments about the French language, for the city of Geneva] (1691), related to his career as a teacher, and La Doctrine des Protestans sur la liberté et le droit de lire l’Ecriture Sainte, etc. [Protestant Teaching about the Freedom and the Right to Read the Holy Scriptures, etc.] (1720), developing his mature theological opinions. He did earn a secure living in his chosen homeland, though he did not find the religious freedom he appears to have been hoping for. In 1693, and again in 1696, Poulain was accused for being a Socinian, an accusation that was related to his rationalistic approach to theology, which did not draw a strict distinction between theology and philosophy (Stuurman 2004: 248–249). This affair has been seen as the main reason why Poulain had to wait until 1708 before he was appointed to a permanent teaching position at the Collège de Genève, a position that he held until his death in 1723.

2. Cartesian Foundations

Poulain’s treatises De l’égalité des deux sexes and De l’éducation des dames are both profoundly influenced by Descartes’ philosophy, but in different ways. In the first treatise Descartes is not mentioned by name, but Poulain’s discussion of the equality between the sexes draws heavily on his philosophical method as well as his metaphysics. The second treatise discusses Cartesian philosophy in detail and the leading character Stasimachus is a proclaimed follower of Descartes, but the book itself is not as evidently relying on Descartes’ philosophical method. My discussion of Poulain’s Cartesian influences will draw on both treatises and I will first discuss the role of Cartesian method and then discuss to what extent Poulain adopted a Cartesian metaphysics.

2.1 Descartes’ method

At the very beginning of the preface to De l’égalité des deux sexes, Poulain writes that the

best idea that may occur to those who try to acquire genuine knowledge, if they were educated according to traditional methods, is to doubt if they were taught well and to wish to discover the truth themselves. As they make progress in this search for truth, they cannot avoid noticing that we are full of prejudices, and that it is necessary to get rid of them completely in order to acquire clear and distinct knowledge. (T1en 119; TTfr 53)[1]

This paragraph is an excellent summary of Descartes’ method for the search for truth as it is presented in all his major works. In the Discours de la méthode, for example, Descartes writes that

since I now wished to devote myself solely to the search for truth, I thought it necessary to […] reject as if absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see if I was left believing anything that was entirely indubitable. (CSM I, 126–127; AT VI, 31–32)

In De l’éducation des dames Poulain extends his discussion of methodological doubt and attributes this method to Descartes. The character Stasimachus explains how no other author “has better discussed prejudice nor countered it more convincingly” (TTen 242; TTfr 277). The egalitarian aspect of Descartes’ method is also emphasized and Stasimachus points out that “almost all of us have enough reason and good sense to seek the truth”, which is found when “we have formed clear and distinct ideas” (ibid.). Poulain’s text is a very close echo of the first paragraph of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode, where he famously claims that

the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men. (CSM I, 111; AT VI, 2)

Poulain’s take on Descartes’ philosophy is explicitly methodological and he adds that Descartes is to be trusted because he provides the best “methods and principles” (TTen 242; TTfr 277). Adopting Descartes’ method means that one has to critically examine its author as well as other authors, and Stasimachus concludes his presentation by emphasizing that

I am not claiming that Descartes is infallible or that everything he proposed is true and unproblematic, or that one has to follow him blindly, or that others couldn’t find something as good or even better than he has left us. All I am saying is that I believe him to be one of the most reasonable philosophers we have, whose method is the most universal and the most natural, the one that most closely conforms to good sense and the nature of the human mind, and the most likely to distinguish the true from the false even in the works of the one who is their author. (TTen 243; TTfr 278)

In addition to Descartes’ method of doubt, Poulain also adopts his scientific method and his discussion of the order of the sciences, as it is presented in the preface to the French translation of Principia philosophiae (see also Pellegrin 2013; Reuter 2017: 34–37). Descartes famously compares the whole of philosophy, which is here understood as including all different forms of knowledge, to a tree, where the

roots are metaphysics, the trunk is physics, and the branches emerging from the trunk are all the other sciences, which may be reduced to three principal ones, namely medicine, mechanics and morals. (CSM I, 186; AT IXB, 14)

Descartes’ metaphor emphasizes the unity of the sciences and this idea is taken up by Poulain, who replaces the metaphor of a tree with that of the human body. In De l’éducation he writes that “there is a necessary relationship and dependence between all the sciences, quite similar to those between the different parts of the human body” (TTen 208; TTfr 239).

Poulain puts less emphasis than Descartes on the hierarchical structure of sciences implied by the original metaphor of a tree, but he does adopt Descartes’ emphasis on physics and in De l’égalité he uses the idea of the unity of the sciences in order to argue that women are as able as men to master all forms of knowledge. Here Poulain is arguing against those who claim that women are unable to hold civil offices and to rule over others and he points out that these people

fail to notice that the mind needs only discernment and accuracy in all its actions, and that anyone who displays these qualities in one context is capable of applying them as easily and in the same way to everything else. Morality and social science do not change the nature of our actions; the latter always remain physical, […] Once someone understands the laws of motion in natural philosophy, they can apply them to all changes and all variations that occur in nature. Similarly, if someone has once understood the true principles of the social sciences, they do not experience a new challenge when applying them to novel situations that occur. (T1en 174; TTfr 116–117)

Poulain does not seem to reduce knowledge of morality to knowledge of physics, but he emphasizes that there is a methodological unity, which makes it possible to compare the way in which true principles are applied in the natural and the social sciences. His argument criticizes the Scholastic tradition in two ways. First, he argues against the common view (originally presented by Aristotle) that since women’s deliberative faculty lacks sufficient authority, women have difficulties governing themselves and therefore cannot govern others (Aristotle, Politics 1260a12–14). Second, Poulain criticizes the idea, dominant among the Scholastics, that different forms of knowledge require different methods and that theoretical reasoning does not as such ground practical judgment (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1140b1–7, for the distinction between practical reason (fronesis) and theoretical knowledge). Defenders of women, who, like Christine de Pizan, wrote within the Aristotelian tradition, found it necessary to argue separately that women are as capable as men in their practical judgment as in their theoretical reasoning (see in particular Livre de la Cité des Dames [The Book of the City of Ladies], 1405, part I, chap. 43). Poulain’s argument is novel in its emphasis on the unity of science, from which it follows that if women are capable of theoretical reasoning, which was a less controversial claim, they are also capable of practical judgment. This argument is directly based on the criticism of Scholastic science that Descartes develops in the preface to the French translation of Principia philosophiae and which culminates in the idea of the unity of all the sciences (CSM I, 185–186; AT IXB, 12–14).

In Descartes’ metaphor, metaphysics constitutes the roots of the tree of philosophy and we must therefore assume that one cannot be a Cartesian philosopher without adopting Descartes’ metaphysics. Poulain did do so, though he was, as we will see in the next section, less profoundly influenced by it than by Descartes’ philosophical methodology.

2.2 Metaphysics

In the second part of De l’égalité, Poulain claims that “the mind has no sex” and loosely connects his claim to Descartes’ dualism (T1en 157–158; TTfr 99–100). The claim in itself was not new—we find it already in the theological doctrine of Augustine, who holds that the rational souls of women and men are equally created in the image of God (De trinitate XII 7.12), and in Poulain’s time it had recently been stated, with strong feminist emphasis, by Marie le Jars de Gournay (G-EMW 65; G-OC 978). Still, many of Poulain’s contemporaries as well as modern scholars agree that Descartes’ dualism strengthened the idea that the mind has no sex (different positions have been argued by Hoffmann 1969; Perry 1985; Harth 1992: 81–86; Atherton 1993; O’Neill 1999 and 2011; Broad 2002: 4–12 and 2017; Pellegrin 2011: 28–37 and 2019: 568–569; Reuter 2013 and 2019: 38–41; Detlefsen 2017). It might seem surprising that Poulain does not make more out of Descartes’ dualism than he actually does.

In the passage in question, Poulain points out that if “the mind is considered in itself, it […] have the same nature in all human beings” (T1en 158; TTfr 100). In order to consider the mind in itself one has to presuppose that it can in some respect be distinguished from the body, but Poulain does not discuss the metaphysical nature of the relation between mind and body. Instead he leaves the discussion of the mind considered in itself behind and focuses on the mind-body union, which he describes in the following words:

It is God who unites the mind with the body of a woman as with that of a man, and who unites them by means of the same laws. This union is established and maintained by sensations, passions, and acts of the will; and since the mind acts in the same way in both sexes, it is equally capable of the same things in both of them. (T1en 158; TTfr 101)

This description is indeed very close to the description Descartes gives in the Sixth Meditation, when he examines “what God has bestowed on me as a combination of mind and body” (CSM II, 57; AT VII, 82), but whereas Descartes begins this last Meditation by emphasizing the real distinction between mind and body, according to which it “is certain that I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it” (CSM II, 54; AT VII, 78), Poulain does not discuss the real distinction between mind and body before he focuses on their union.

Poulain’s focus on the mind-body union is continued in De l’éducation, where the fourth conversation stages a detailed discussion of self-knowledge. Here the young Timander, who is usually a spokesperson of Scholastic views, raises a significantly Cartesian objection. He points out that

it would be easier to begin with the study of the mind. For if it is easier for man to know himself and what immediately surrounds him than what is remote from him [as has been previously established], by the same token it seems that the mind would know itself better than it would know the body. (TTen 214; TTfr 246; see also Welch 2002b: 139)

provided one can separate the mind from the body […] if we consider them a single, interdependent entity […] I am convinced that knowledge of the body should precede that of the mind. (TTen 214: TTfr 246)

Again, Poulain proceeds directly to a study of the mind-body union and here his reference to the distinction between mind and body is even more fleeting than in De l’égalité.

The lack of any explicit discussion of the soul as a distinct substance has led Desmond Clarke to argue that Poulain rejected Descartes’ notion of the soul as a substance and held this notion to be a mere Scholastic residue. According to Clarke, Poulain defended the view that the

union of the body and the soul and their reciprocal interdependence was a more fundamental datum of human experience than the speculative distinction of the soul as a scholastic substance. (Clarke 2013: 43)

Following the same line of inquiry Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin argues that for Poulain “anthropology is more decisive than metaphysics” (Pellegrin 2019: 576).

Poulain’s emphasis on the embodied aspect of human nature was not unique among his contemporary Cartesians, on the contrary, he shares it with Jacques Rohault and Louis de la Forge, for example, who are both mentioned in his list of suggested readings presented in De l’éducation (TTen 237; TTfr 272). Some influence is very likely and Clarke compares Poulain’s above cited account of the mind-body union in De l’égalité with the account de la Forge gives in his Traitté de l’Esprit de l’Homme [Treatise on the Human Mind] (1666) (T1en 158n45). Still, we must note that while stressing the union, de la Forge’s account was firmly anchored in substance dualism and his aim was to address—within a strictly Cartesian framework—unsolved problems related to the operations of the mind and the interaction between mind and body (Drieux 2019).

Poulain’s unorthodox Cartesianism is most evident when he describes the relation between individual thoughts and the body. In De l’éducation, Poulain writes that “all the actions of the mind […] depend on the participation of the body” and a few pages later, less rigorously, that “one almost never acts without the other” (TTen 213, 223; TTfr 244, 256). These claims overlook the distinction Descartes makes between the actions and the passions of the mind, according to which passions depend on the body whereas actions, such as volitions, do not (CSM I, 335; AT XI, 342–343; for more detail see Reuter 2013: 79–82). Poulain does acknowledge the distinction between volitions and passions in one passage in De l’égalité, where he writes:

As for the causes that quicken the passions, we can understand their workings as soon as we have studied physics sufficiently to understand how the things that surround us affect us and influence us, and through experience and use how we can yoke our will to them or dissociate it from them. (TTen 84; TTfr 102; see also Broad 2017: 76)

This passage relies on Descartes’ dualism by distinguishing between the passions, that are dependent on the body, and the will, that is free to either yoke or dissociate itself. But again there is no further discussion and Poulain seems to be unaware of the metaphysical dimension of the distinction he makes.

Poulain does not seem to hold that there is a necessary dependence of mind upon body. He is not explicitly arguing for a materialist alternative to Descartes’ dualism, but rather emphasizing the interdependence between mind and body, without taking an explicit stand on what kind of metaphysical foundation this interaction requires. Poulain was young when he wrote his feminist treatises and though he was evidently familiar with a wide range of Cartesian topics, it is possible that he was not very deeply read in the Cartesian corpus. Compared to other Cartesians such as Rohault, de la Forge, Nicolas Malebranche, and Antoine Arnauld, Poulain did not contribute by examining unsolved problems in Descartes’ physics and metaphysics. Instead, his unrivalled contribution lies in his Cartesian analyses of the moral, political, physical, and metaphysical relations between the sexes.

3. The Subjugation of Women

Poulain’s analysis of the subjugation of women combines a Cartesian criticism of prejudice with a historical analysis of the origin of these prejudiced opinions.

3.1 The role of prejudice

Right at the beginning of the first part of De l’égalité, Poulain compares prejudice concerning the sexes to other equally persistent, but unjustified beliefs. First, he points out that apart

from a few scholars, everyone thinks that it is indubitable that the Sun moves around the Earth, despite the fact that what we observe in the revolutions of the days and the years leads those who examine it to believe that it is the Earth that moves around the Sun. (T1en 122; TTfr 59)

Second, he refers to people, who imagine that animals are intelligent beings guided by reason, just

like primitive people who suppose that there are little souls inside the clocks and machines that they are shown though they know nothing about their construction or their inner springs. (T1en 122–123; TTfr 59)

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Poulain refers to social prejudices, which cause people to believe that their own country is the best, because it is most familiar, and

that the religion in which they were reared is the true religion that must be followed, even if they may never have thought of examining it or comparing it with other religious traditions. (T1en 123; TTfr 60)

These social prejudices also include beliefs concerning wealth and rank, and Poulain points out that “the unequal distribution of goods and offices causes many people to conclude that human beings are not equal to each other” (ibid.).

Poulain’s comparisons place his analysis of the relations between the sexes in the framework of new science, including both astronomy and mechanistic explanations of the animal body, as well as in the framework of current ideas about religious freedom and human equality. He claims that when properly examined, the equality of the sexes should be as evident as the newly established fact that the earth moves around the sun.

Poulain continues by emphasizing that when one examines the foundations of prejudice one finds that these beliefs are based on mere self-interest and custom. Interestingly, he is also quite aware that beliefs based on prejudice are more difficult to change than beliefs based on reason. He points out that when

someone’s opinion is based only on prejudice, it is incomparably more difficult to change their minds than if they had been convinced by reasons that seem strong and persuasive to them. (T1en 123; TTfr 60)

When discussing prejudices about the inferiority of women, Poulain emphasizes that these are particularly difficult to overcome because they are shared by both men and women. He writes that these beliefs, though unjustified, seem

all the more convincing when one considers how women themselves tolerate their condition. They accept it as if it were natural to them, either because they do not think at all about what they are or because, having been born and reared in dependency, they think about it in the same way as men. (T1en 126; TTfr 63)

Since subjection is in part based on false self-understanding, Poulain is very aware that we need true self-knowledge in order to liberate ourselves. In De l’égalité he points out that “[s]elf-knowledge is absolutely necessary in order to address [the equality of the sexes] properly” and following his emphasis on the bodily aspect of the human condition, he adds that this concerns “especially knowledge of the body” (T1en 155; TTfr 97). In De l’éducation, Poulain devotes the whole fourth conversation to the topic of self-knowledge and though he does not in this context explicitly address the question of the equality of the sexes, he makes several important remarks on how our self-knowledge is affected by the prejudiced opinions of others. Stasimachus explains:

We are prejudiced about nearly everything that exists, and most of all about ourselves. We are not only the authors of the prejudice but also its theater and its victims. As far as the things that touch us most closely are concerned, we immolate ourselves to our ghosts, so to speak. […] Although we are made in a certain way, and nature makes us realize that and protests constantly against our own imagination, we still try to be the way people tell us we are. (TTen 212; TTfr 243)

Poulain’s account is remarkably aware of what we would call the unconscious aspects of our minds and of the difficulties to change our self-conception even in cases when we consciously know that we are the victim of prejudice. He was clearly aware of the ongoing French discussion of self-knowledge, where Neo-Augustinian thinkers such as Pierre Nicole and Blaise Pascal questioned its possibility, and he combined a defense of the achievability of self-knowledge against those who claim that knowing oneself is

like moving mountains and that we will never get to the end of it, that man is hidden from himself, that there are countless hidden recesses of the heart he can never uncover (TTen 211; TTfr 242)

with a nuanced awareness of the difficulties involved (for a detailed discussion see Reuter 2017: 44–49).

3.2 Historical origins

Poulain’s finely tuned analysis of the psychological aspects of oppression is combined with a robust analysis of the historical origin of the prejudiced opinion that women are inferior to men. He explains that we need to trace the prejudiced opinion about women “back to its origin” and that would

involve evaluating what was done in earlier times by reference to current practices, and judging ancient customs by comparison with those that we see developing in our own day. If we had followed that rule, we would not have fallen into so many mistakes in innumerable judgments. And, in respect of the current condition of women, we would have recognized that they were dominated only by the law of the strongest, and that it was not because of a lack of natural capacity or merit on their part that they failed to share the advantages that give men a superior position in society. (T1en 126; TTfr 63–64)

Poulain does not deny that men are, on an average, physically stronger than women or that “the interruptions of pregnancy and its after-effects reduced the strength of women for periods of time” and made them dependent on “their husbands’ assistance” (T1en 127; TTfr 65). This was not a problem, though, as long as “families consisted of just a mother, a father, and a few small children” but it became problematic when families expanded into larger units, when household chores became more diversified and all family members submitted to the rule of the father (T1en 127–128; TTfr 65).

Poulain is committed to the idea of an original golden age, preceding the present diversified society, and he emphasizes the idea of original liberty in particular in his third treatise De l’excellence des hommes, where he also describes the process through which natural liberty was lost. He explains that when

some men took advantage of their strength and their leisure to try to subjugate others, the golden age of liberty gave way to an iron age of servitude. Self-interest and wealth were so bound together through domination that it became impossible not to have to depend on others. This combination increased in proportion to the distance from the state of innocence and peace, giving rise to greed, ambition, vanity, extravagance, idleness, pride, cruelty, tyranny, deceit, schisms, wars, chance, worries—in short, all the infirmities of mind and body that afflict us. (TTen 313; TTfr 392)

Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau after him, Poulain connects the origins of inequality to wealth and the dependence on others that follows from an increasing division of labor. This historical process does not only give raise to unequal material conditions, it is also the origin of negative emotions such as greed, pride and cruelty. The tyranny of men over women has the same historical origin. In De l’égalité Poulain describes how the original voluntary dependence between husband and wife becomes subjugation when wars forced women “to accept as husbands unknown strangers who considered them merely as the most beautiful part of their booty” (T1en 128; TTfr 66). The commodification of women is thus, according to Poulain, an integral part of the historical origin of inequality.

Poulain’s understanding of the difference between the original harmony of mother, father and a few children and the oppression of women in developed societies is further illuminated by his remarks on the difference between marriage and political society. In De l’excellence he compares political society and the “society of marriage [which] is composed only of two persons, of whom one, therefore, cannot use authority and coercion towards the other” (TTen 280; TTfr 313). Poulain argues that marriage does not require a hierarchical division of power because it is “not founded on fear, but on love” (ibid.). Marriage can thus be based directly on the natural equality of wife and husband, without either of them usurping power over the other, whereas a society of three or more people, where one is “able to join forces with another to force the third to abide”, requires submission to laws and sovereigns, otherwise people will “be constantly at war” (ibid). In order to avoid war and tyranny established through war, political society requires sovereign power, but like Hobbes, Poulain emphasizes that the right to command

does not belong naturally to any one person more than to another, since it consists in the voluntary submission of those who give it to the one who is vested with it. (ibid.)

Both marriage and political rule must thus acknowledge that human beings are naturally equal, even if political society cannot be based on natural equality in the same direct manner as marriage can—and was, according to Poulain, during the golden age of liberty, before the arbitrary subjugation of women.

4. The Equality of the Sexes

We have seen that Poulain claims that all human beings are equal, but how does he argue for the equality of the sexes? We do not know if Poulain was familiar with Marie de Gournay’s treatise Égalité des hommes et des femmes [The Equality of Men and Women] (1622), but he shares her emphasis on equality based on the similarity of the sexes. Gournay self-consciously distinguished herself from earlier participants in the querelle des femmes, who often argued for the superiority of either sex, and emphasizes that she is “content to make women equal to men, for nature is also as opposed to superiority as to inferiority in this respect” (G-EMW 54; G-OC 965; see also Deslauriers 2018). Whereas Gournay followed Aristotle and argued that the unique form of the human animal consists in the rational soul, which is the same in both sexes (G-EMW 65; G-OC 978; also Deslauriers 2019), Poulain rejected Scholastic philosophy and attempted to ground most of his arguments on Descartes’ philosophy. When we analyze his discussions of the equality of the sexes, we can distinguish four main arguments. First, Poulain argues that there is no evidence in favor of inequality, which is a mere false belief. Second, he argues that women and men are in all relevant respects mentally and physically similar and therefor equal. Third, he refers to a normative concept of natural equality, and finally, he develops a normative demand for equal opportunity. I have devoted one subsection to each argument.

4.1 Inequality is a false belief

This argument is based on Descartes’ method for the search of truth (section 2.1) and closely connected to Poulain’s criticism of prejudice (section 3.1). It is Poulain’s most substantial argument in the sense that a large part of De l’égalité consists of his refutations of claims about the inferiority of women. Poulain argues that beliefs about women are not based on women’s essence or nature, but historically constructed prejudices (section 3.2). Desmond Clarke, in particular, has emphasized this aspect of Poulain’s criticism and connected it to a general Cartesian criticism of Scholastic explanatory models, which explain “any phenomenon simply by postulating a ‘form’ or ‘nature’ that corresponds to each reality that needs to be explained” (Clarke 2013: 41). Poulain’s criticism of a scholastic notion of ‘nature’ is most explicit in a passage where he argues against “Lawyers’ opinions”, which carry “a lot of weight for many people because they profess specifically to give everyone their due” (T1en 152; TTfr 94). These Scholastic lawyers, among whom scholars claim that Poulain includes Hugo Grotius (Stuurman 2004: 166–167), say “that it is nature that assigns women to the lowest functions in society and removes them from public offices”, but they would, according to Poulain,

be hard pressed if they were required to explain intelligibly what they mean by ‘nature’ in this context, and to explain how nature distinguished the two sexes, as they claim. (T1en 152; TTfr 94–95)

Poulain also argues that inequality is a false belief by giving numerous examples of the equal and even superior abilities of women. Many of these examples are speculative generalizations, which would not satisfy Cartesian criteria for certainty. Poulain writes, for example, that it

is a pleasure to hear a woman pleading a legal case. No matter how complicated a case may be, she unravels it and explains it clearly. […] One finds throughout women’s conduct of legal cases a certain competence that men lack. (T1en 139; TTfr 79)

The generalization made here is not valid and does in fact resemble the generalizations about women’s inferiority that Poulain is attacking. But we must also note that he does not need more than one example of a woman who pleads her case well in order to show that women are not by their nature unable to do so. In this sense his generalizations are superfluous. Poulain seems to be aware of this philosophically more valid aspect of arguing from examples when he writes:

Just as it is rather unfair to believe that all women are indiscreet simply because one knows five or six who are such, one should be equally fair and conclude that women are capable of scientific study because one sees that a number of them have been able to raise themselves to such heights. (T1en 142; TTfr 82)

Even here Poulain is not completely clear about the crucial difference between invalid generalizations from examples and the valid use of examples in order to show that a given generalization is untrue. But he allows for a generous interpretation according to which his primary aim is to show that generalizations about the inferiority of women are false.

4.2 Similarity of the sexes

In addition to showing that claims about inequality are false, Poulain aims to show that the sexes are equal, because they are in all relevant respects similar. In the second part of De l’égalité, this argument is placed under the subtitle Women, when considered from the perspective of the principles of sound philosophy, are as capable as men of every kind of knowledge and begins with the above (in section 2.2) cited claim that “the mind has no sex” (T1en 157; TTfr 99). Poulain argues:

It is easy to see that sexual differences apply only to the body. Since, strictly speaking, the body alone is involved in the reproduction of human beings and the mind merely gives its assent and does so in the same manner in everyone, it follows that the mind has no sex. (T1en 157; TTfr 99–100)

Here, Poulain is primarily concerned with the nature of the mind, but the way he connects reproduction and assent is also noteworthy and corresponds to his emphasis, in De l’exellence, that when a woman and a man “agree to live together it is purely voluntary” (TTen 280; TTfr 313; see also De l’égalité, T1en 153; TTfr 95). From his claim about equal consent, Poulain draws the conclusion that if “the mind is considered in itself, it is found to be equal and to have the same nature in all human beings, and to be capable of every kind of thought” (T1en 158; TTfr 100; see also section 2.2).

The equality of independent minds is not enough, though, since human beings are compounds of minds and bodies. Minds are constantly affected by bodies. Therefore Poulain continues by arguing that the bodies of the sexes are also similar in all cognitively relevant respects. He claims that this is particularly true of the brain:

[The fact that the mind functions no differently in one sex than in the other] is even clearer if one considers only the head, which is the unique organ of scientific knowledge and in which the mind exercises all its functions. Even with the most detailed anatomical investigations, we cannot observe any difference in this organ between men and women. The brains of the latter are completely similar to ours; they receive and combine sensory impressions there in the same way as we do, and they store them for the imagination and memory in exactly the same way. (T1en 158; TTfr 101)

The problem with an argument based on the similarity of cognitive organs such as the brain, is that it makes equality dependent on empirical findings. The “most detailed anatomical investigations” to which Poulain refers was not very advanced according to today’s standards and the contemporary Cartesian Malebranche drew different conclusions about women’s brains, including their imaginations (see also Clarke 2013: 44, 50). Malebranche does not claim that all women have weaker capacities than all men, quite the contrary: “some women are found to have stronger minds than some men”, but he argues that most women “cannot use their imagination for working out complex and tangled questions” and connects this inability to the “delicacy of the brain fibers [that] is the principal cause of all these effects” (Malebranche 1674–75 [1997: 130]). Present day brain research is more advanced, but has still not settled the question of whether there are cognitively significant differences between women and men. Considered as a philosophical argument, an appeal to brain research remains weak. In order to avoid reducing the question of mental capacity to a question to be answered by brain scientists, we need a concept of the mind that cannot be reduced to the physiological body.

Even if Poulain emphasizes the similarity of the cognitively significant physical organs of women and men, he does not seem to want to provide a thoroughly materialist account (see also section 2.2). Jacqueline Broad has developed a nuanced interpretation of Poulain’s position, where she emphasizes the role of the free will and in particular its capacity to assent or dissent (Broad 2017: 74–76). Descartes famously argued that a judgment consists of two elements: a perception of the intellect and an action of the will. In order to avoid error, the will must assent only to those perceptions that are clear and distinct (e.g., Principia §§ 32–35; CSM I, 204; AT VIIIA, 17–18). According to this account it is ultimately the will which is responsible when we err. Broad’s interpretation builds on the passage in De l’égalité where Poulain claims that “we can yoke our will to [the causes of the passions] or dissociate it from them” (TTen 84; TTfr 102; see also section 2.2). She argues that

like Descartes, Poullain suggests that agents are capable of overcoming the influence of their bodies through the exercise of free will: they might either “yoke” their will to the causes of their passions or “dissociate” it from them. (Broad 2017: 76; on Descartes’ and Poulain’s accounts of judgment, see also Reuter 2013: 79–80)

Broad’s interpretation captures Poulain’s egalitarian intentions and an account built on the independence of the will has the obvious advantage that even if there would be empirically detectable differences in how women and men are influenced by their bodies, they may share an equal freedom of will to assent or dissent to their passions as well as imaginings (see also Reuter 2019: 49–51). The philosophical problem with this account is that it leaves Poulain’s position open to the objections raised most prominently by Elisabeth of Bohemia in her correspondence with Descartes. On 22 June 1645 she writes:

I know well that in removing everything upsetting to me (which I believe to be represented only by the imagination) from the idea of an affair, I would judge it healthily and would find in it the remedies as well as the affection which I bring to it. But I have never known how to put this into practice until the passion has already played its role. (Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 93; AT IV, 233–234)

Elisabeth is describing her inability to dissociate her will from the affairs that affect her. This lack of ability is not due to a lack of knowledge about how external influences act on her, quite the contrary, she is well aware of the roles played by the passions and the imagination, but argues that regardless of her knowledge, she is unable to voluntarily dissociate her assent. In this letter Elisabeth is arguing from her personal experience, but her criticism is framed by the metaphysical questions she raised in her early letters. In her second letter (10 June 1643) she summarizes the point:

it is altogether very difficult to understand that a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and the custom of reasoning well, can lose all of this by some vapors, and that, being able to subsist without the body, and having nothing in common with it, the soul is still so governed by it. (Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 68; AT III, 685)

Elisabeth raises the question of how it is possible that the mind can be simultaneously distinct from and affected by the body. These are exactly the kind of metaphysical worries that Poulain leaves unaddressed, with the consequence that he is unable to provide a valid metaphysical basis for his claims about the similarity of the sexes.

4.3 Natural equality

Regardless of how successfully Poulain is able to show the similarity between the intellectual capacities of women and men, such descriptive similarity provides a weak—if any—foundation for a normative concept of equality (also Clarke 2013: 49; Hoekstra 2013). In order to find a normative basis for Poulain’s claim about the equality of the sexes I will first look at his references to the natural equality and liberty of humankind. In De l’égalité, Poulain writes that “dependence and servitude are contrary to the law of nature which makes all men equal” (TTen 78; TTfr 95) and a few pages later he points out that when humans are imagined separate from civil society, they are found “completely free and equal, with only a desire for self-preservation and an equal right to everything that would be necessary to achieve it” (T1en 164; TTfr 106). Poulain does not elaborate on what he means by the law of nature or by the state of nature preceding civil society. It is not clear to what extent he is relying on the Scholastic tradition of natural law, which he would have known from his studies at Sorbonne, and to what extent he is inspired by more recent developments, such as the natural law theory of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes.

Both passages cited above are situated in contexts that do have Hobbesian connotations: in the first case Poulain is distinguishing natural equality from the arbitrary nature of dependence in the civil state (see also section 3.2) and in the second case he continues:

But [the woman studying law and politics] would also notice that this equality would involve them in war or a permanent state of mutual distrust, which would be inconsistent with their objective, and that the natural light of reason would dictate that they could not live in peace unless everyone surrendered their rights and made contracts or conventions. She would also see that, in order to validate these decisions and to protect people from anxiety, it would be necessary to have recourse to a third party who would have authority to force everyone to observe what they had promised to others. (T1en 164; TTfr 106; see also Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, chap. 13–15)

On these grounds, and considering which works were available in Poulain’s intellectual context, Stuurman concludes that “Hobbes is his most likely source” (2004: 177). The probable influence of Hobbes is very illuminating, in particular when we consider Poulain’s view of the arbitrary nature of power, but Stuurman seems to overemphasize the Hobbesian nature of Poulain’s views when he indicates that Poulain rejects natural sociability (Stuurman 2004: 178). Poulain does indeed emphasize the role of fear as a motive for political society in De l’égalité (T1en 164; TTfr 106) as well as De l’excellence (TTen 280; TTfr 313), but it is crucial to note that he does not consider fear to be a necessary aspect of the natural condition of humankind. The description of “the golden age of liberty”, which Poulain gives in De l’excellence, is a description of natural sociability:

At the dawn of the world, traces of which are still to be seen in the innocent loves of shepherds and shepherdesses and in the pleasures of the rustic life, which is untroubled by the fear of powers or enemies, all men were equal, just, and sincere, since their only rule and law was that of good sense. (TTen 313; TTfr 392)

As we can see, fear does not exist in this original state, it is introduced as a consequence of “some men [taking] advantage of their strength and their leisure to try to subjugate others” (ibid.; see also the passage cited in section 3.2). Poulain does claim that humans have “a desire for self-preservation and an equal right to everything that would be necessary to achieve it” (T1en 164; TTfr 106), but when we consider his writings as a whole, he does not seem to claim that this desire is in itself the origin of constant confrontations and the fear raised by these confrontations.

Poulain’s discussions of natural equality and liberty in De l’excellence are framed by theological references, including a reference to “St. Augustine, who claims that man should place nothing above himself save God alone” (TTen 279; TTfr 312; also Wilkin 2019: 234–236). Poulain may have in mind a passage in De civitate Dei (book XIX, chap. 15), where Augustine writes:

God wanted rational man, made to his image, to have no dominion except over irrational nature. He meant no man, therefore, to have dominion over man, but only man over beast. So it fell out that those who were holy in primitive times became shepherds over sheep rather than monarchs over men, […]. (Augustine 413–427 [2008: 223])

Kinch Hoekstra, among others, has emphasized that this chapter from De civitate Dei, as well as a passage in De doctrina Christiana (book I, chap. 23), where Augustine states that human beings are naturally equal, influenced discussions about natural equality and liberty well into the seventeenth century (Hoekstra 2013: 95). When we look for the normative basis of Poulain’s claim that all humans are equal (shepherds and all), this theological origin, deriving equality from the creation of humankind, is at least as probable as Hobbes’ account of equality (for an influential interpretation of the normative nature of the latter, see Hoekstra 2013). Here we do not find a definite break with the scholastic tradition. Poulain is using its concept of equality in order to argue—against many Scholastic authors—that natural equality must be applied to the relation between women and men.

4.4 The demand for equality

Desmond Clarke and Jacqueline Broad both emphasize that Poulain’s concept of equality is normative in the sense that it includes a demand for equal opportunity. According to Clarke we find in Poulain (and other seventeenth-century feminist authors) a “claim to the effect that all persons should enjoy equal access to certain human goods” (2013: 49). This demand is in itself dependent on the idea that people are in some relevant respect equal and in the case of Poulain we can see that his demand for equal opportunity is rooted in his discussions of ability (section 4.2) as well as his notion of natural equality (section 4.3).

Broad points at a passage in De l’égalité where Poulain’s demand for equal right is clearly put: “all of us, men or women, have an equal right to truth since the minds of both are equally able to apprehend it” (TTen 91; TTfr 111). Here the connection between equal right and equal ability is explicit and we can see why it is so urgent for Poulain to show that women and men have equal minds. The claim that there are no relevant differences between the minds of women and men is not in itself normative, but provides a basis for demanding the equal right to exercise ones mind. As Broad shows, Poulain’s demand for an equal right to truth is closely connected to the pursuit of virtue and ultimately of true happiness, that can be achieved only through virtue (Broad 2017: 79; 2019: 32). Poulain writes that “[s]ince the two sexes are capable of the same happiness, they have the same right to everything that may be used to acquire it” (T1en 169; TTfr 111).

It is important to note, as Broad does, that Poulain, following Descartes almost word by word, defines virtue as “a firm and stable resolve to do what one thinks is best in various circumstances” (T1en 187; TTfr 131; also Descartes’ letter to Elisabeth of 4 August 1645, Shapiro [ed.] 2007: 98; AT IV, 265). From this emphasis on resolve follows that we do not need to assume that the will is always actually able to yoke itself to or dissociate itself from the passions (see section 4.2): it is sufficient to make a resolute attempt in order to be virtuous. Poulain’s claim that women and men have an equal ability of resolution, an ability he explicitly claims belongs to the mind and depends on the body only as its instrument (T1en 187; TTfr 131), is thus valid regardless of whether the sexes are actually able to similarly govern their passions (even if he holds that the second claim is also true). An equal ability of resolution is in itself enough as a basis for the demand that women and men have an equal right to knowledge and all other additional means of achieving full virtue and thereby, according to Poulain, happiness. (There is an extensive scholarly discussion of exactly how Descartes connects virtue and happiness; for a recent account see Svensson 2019.)

Poulain’s demand for an equal right to knowledge is in effect a demand for an equal right to proper education. When Poulain refers to education, it is most often in order to lament “the minimal education that women are given” (T1en 196; TTfr 141). In De l’égalité he argues that if we conceive a lack of cognitive ability in women, that “should be attributed uniquely to the conditions in which they live and the education they are given, which include the ignorance in which they are left” (T1en 188; TTfr 132–133; see also G-EMW 59–60; G-OC 971–972). But Poulain’s criticism of the current state of affairs includes a demand for change and right at the beginning of the first conversation in De l’éducation, Stasimachus points out: “as I think it absolutely essential to have an education, I would organize things in such a way that women could get one as easily as men” (TTen 144; TTfr 163). Following from Poulain’s Cartesian criticism of the Scholastic institutions of learning, articulated in detail by Stasimachus, education is pictured as a private enterprise and the outline of De l’éducation, five conversations set in Sophia’s private home, can be read as Poulain’s example of the ideal form of education. In this setting equality is emphasized by the fact that we have one learned person of each sex, Stasimachus and Sophia, and one eager pupil of each sex, Eulalia and Timander (on the roles of the four characters, see Schmitter 2018, 7–9).

The topic of education is also the topic that Poulain most evidently shares with many of his predecessors as well as successors. The question was forcefully raised by Christine de Pizan in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (part I, chap. 27), where she argues that

if it were the custom to send little girls to school and to teach them all sorts of different subjects there, as one does with little boys, they would grasp and learn the difficulties of all the arts and sciences just as easily as the boys do, (Christine 1405 [1999: 57])

and is still an essential theme in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

5. Poulain and His Successors

Poulain’s feminist treatises did not have a large following in France, but neither were they without impact. There were some authorized as well as unauthorized re-editions (for a complete list see Alcover 1981; also Welch 2002a: 25–31), but the references to his works are scarce. One exception is Gabrièle Suchon, who mentions “the author of the Equality” in her Traité de la morale et de la politique [Treatise on ethics and politics] (1693), where she defends women’s liberty as well as capacity of learning (Welch 2002a: 29; Shapiro 2017; Wilkin 2019). In the next century Louise Dupin cites Poulain in her unfinished manuscript Ouvrage sur les femmes [Work on Women] (ca. 1745), and we have direct evidence that Montesquieu spoke highly of De l’égalité (Thielemann 1983: 321–326; Stuurman 2004: 283–289; Wilkin 2019). It is also very likely that Rousseau, who was working as Dupin’s secretary while she worked on her manuscript, was familiar with at least Poulain’s first treatise.

Already in 1677, De l’égalité was anonymously published in English translation under the name The Woman as Good as the Man and Poulain’s thoughts, if not his name, seems to have influenced English discussions of the equality of the sexes well into the eighteenth century (Leduc 2010; Clarke 2013: 12–13). One important mediator was the treatise Woman Not Inferior to Man: or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the FAIR-SEX to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men (1739), published under the pseudonym “Sophia, A Person of Quality”. This treatise, which has only recently received attention from scholars, appropriated several passages from Poulain’s treatise and radicalized his claims into an even more explicit demand for the rights of women (Clarke 2013: 43–44; Broad 2019). We do not yet know enough about the reception history of Sophia’s treatise, or about Wollstonecraft’s use of sources, in order to be able to even guess if there was a direct influence between the two vindications of the rights of women, but Broad has recently shown that we can detect a continuity in the topic of dignity as the foundation for women’s rights that stretches from Poulain to Wollstonecraft (Broad 2019).

When we consider Poulain’s influence in France during the eighteenth century, we must take into account that the idea of equality based on the similarity of the sexes was much more contested than in England. In Émile (1762), Rousseau famously claims:

how vain are disputes as to whether one of the two sexes is superior or whether they are equal—as though each, in fulfilling nature’s ends according to its own particular purpose were thereby less perfect than if it resembled the other more!. (1762 [1979: 358]; 2012: 825)

Rousseau argued that the sexes are neither equal nor unequal, they are different, and should aim at perfecting their differences in order to form a harmonious couple. Poulain’s demand for equality based on similarity was something to be argued against rather than adopted. Though Rousseau’s views on the relations between the sexes were heavily criticized by English feminists such as Wollstonecraft (Reuter 2014), they influenced many French feminists (Bergès 2016). When Olympe de Gouges declares the rights of women during the French Revolution, she does not appeal to the similarity of the sexes, but to their harmonious union, which is fulfilled by all other animals except humans. In her famous Les droits de la femme. A La Reine [The rights of women. To the Queen] (1791), she writes, addressing tyrannical men,

distinguish, if you can, between the sexes in the workings of nature. Everywhere you will find them intermixed; everywhere they cooperate in this immortal masterpiece with a harmonious togetherness. (1791 [2011: 30]; 1993: 206)

We do hear an echo from the golden age of liberty, but it is an echo formed by Rousseau’s emphasis on the harmonious union of the sexes.

During the early decades of the twentieth century there was a new interest in what was seen as the history of feminist thought, actualized by the hotly debated question of women suffrage, and this resulted in some early scholarly essays on Poulain (Grappin 1913, 1914; Lefevre 1914). In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir made Poulain’s name known when she (rather freely) cites his phrase “one should be suspicious of everything that men have said about women because they are both judges and litigants” (T1en 151; TTfr 93) as a motto for her Le deuxième sexe [The second sex]. Poulain is more than a motto for Beauvoir and when discussing facts and myths about women, she describes his analysis in the following words:

[Poulain] thinks that since men are stronger, they favor their sex and women accept this dependence out of custom. They never had their chances: in either freedom or education. Thus they cannot be judged by what they did in the past. Nothing indicates their inferiority to men. Anatomy reveals differences, but none of them constitutes a privilege for the male. (Beauvoir 1949/1989: 184–185 [2011: 123–124])

In addition to being an excellent summary of Poulain’s argument, this passage is an interesting key to Beauvoir’s own analysis of how women become the second sex (see also Welch 2002a: 32; on Cartesian aspects of Beauvoir’s thought, see Heinämaa 2005).

Bibliography

Works by Poulain

1672, Les rapports de la langue Latin avec la Françoise pour traduire élégamment et sans peine, Paris: C. Thibout.
1673, De l’égalité des deux sexes: Discours physique et moral où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugés, Paris: Jean du Puis.
1674, De l’éducation des dames pour la conduite de l’esprit, dans les sciences et dans les moeurs: Entretiens, Paris: Jean du Puis, [date on title page 1671].
1675, De l’excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes, Paris: Jean du Puis.
1681, Essai des remarques particulières sur la langue françoise pour la ville de Genève, Geneva.
1720, La Doctrine des protestans sur la liberté et le droit de lire l’Ecriture Sainte, sur le service Divin en Langue entendue, sur l’invocation des Saints, sur le Sacrament de l’Eucharistie. Justifiés par le Missel Romain & par les Réflexions sur chaque Point, avec Un commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, Ceci est mon Corps; Ceci est mon Sang, Matth. Chap. XXVI, v. 26, Geneva: Fabri & Barrillot.
1677, The Woman as Good as the Man: Or, The Equality of Both Sexes, trans. A. L., London: N. Brooks.
[TTen], Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, introduction by Marcelle Maistre Welch, translated by Vivien Bosley, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Translations of On the equality of the two sexes (1673), On the education of ladies (1674), and On the excellence of men (1675).
[TTfr], De l’égalité des deux sexes, De l’éducation des dames, De l’excellence des hommes, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin (ed.), Paris: Vrin, 2011.
[T1en], A Physical and Moral Discourse Concerning the Equality of Both Sexes, translation of Poulain 1673 in C-trans: 119–200, 2013.

Other Sources

Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius, 1509/1529, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, R. Antonioli (ed.), Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1990. Translated as Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, Albert Rabil, Jr. (trans. and ed.), Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Aristotle, The Complete works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 Volumes, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press, 1984.
Augustine, Saint, De doctrina Christiana. Translated as On Christian teaching, R. P. H. Green (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
–––, De Trinitate. Translated in On the Trinity, books 8–15, Stephen McKenna (trans.), Gareth B. Matthews (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
–––, De civitate Dei. Translated in The City of God, books 17–22, Gerald G. Walsh and Daniel J. Honan (trans.), H. Dressler et.al. (ed.), (The Fathers of the Church, 24), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1954; paperback reprint 2008.
Beauvoir, Simone de, 1949/1989 [2011], Le deuxième sexe, vol. I, Paris: Gallimard, page numbers are from the 1989 edition. Translated as The Second Sex, Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (trans.), New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Christine de Pizan, 1405 [1999], The Book of the City of Ladies, Rosalind Brown-Grant (trans.), London: Penguin Books.
Clarke, Desmond M. (trans.), [C-trans], The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Descartes, René, [CSM], The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols., trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Cited as CSM followed by volume number.
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Shapiro, Lisa (trans./ed.), 2007, The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Sophia, 1739, Woman Not Inferior to Man: or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the FAIR-SEX to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men, London: John Hawkins, at the Falcon in St. Paul’s Church-Yard. Available at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sophia/woman/woman.html
Suchon, Gabrielle [G. S. Aristophile], 1693, Traité de la Morale et de la Politique, divisée en trois parties, sçavoir la liberté, la science, et l’autorité où l’on voit que les personnes du sexe pour en être privées, ne laissent pas d’avoir une capacité naturelle, qui les en peut rendre participantes, Lyon: B. Vignieu.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London: Joseph Johnson. Reprinted in Wollstonecraft [VR].
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Academic Tools

Other Internet Resources

Clarke, Desmond, “François Poulain de la Barre,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/francois-barre/. [This was the previous entry on François Barre in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history.]
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Acknowledgments

上一页后现代主义 postmodernism (Gary Aylesworth)下一页*刺激贫乏论——见先天：先天与语言 poverty of the stimulus argument — see innateness: and language

最后更新于7小时前

1. 生平与作品

2. 笛卡尔的基础

2.1 笛卡尔的方法

2.2 形而上学

3. 妇女的征服

3.1 偏见的作用

3.2 历史起源

4. 性别平等

4.1 不平等是一种错误的信念

4.2 性别的相似性

4.3 自然平等

4.4 平等的需求

5. 普兰和他的继任者

Bibliography

Works by Poulain

Other Sources

Secondary literature

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Other Internet Resources

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Acknowledgments

1. Life and Works

2. Cartesian Foundations

2.1 Descartes’ method

2.2 Metaphysics

3. The Subjugation of Women

3.1 The role of prejudice

3.2 Historical origins

4. The Equality of the Sexes

4.1 Inequality is a false belief

4.2 Similarity of the sexes

4.3 Natural equality

4.4 The demand for equality

5. Poulain and His Successors

Bibliography

Works by Poulain

Other Sources

Secondary literature

Academic Tools

Other Internet Resources

Related Entries

Acknowledgments