Le Doeuff and Irigaray on Descartes

Abstract

Michele Le Doeuff, French feminist theorist, reads Descartes' morality par provision as a permanent site of value-charged elements, impossible to excise through systematic doubt. Such elements, including what Le Doeuff calls imaginary, are in fact prior to and constitutive of reason itself. Consequently, neutrality of reason, language, and subject in philosophy is illusory, expressive of masculine values that reject plurality or difference. Thus Descartes undermines his own project of securing certain grounds for science, grounds that are not already fertile with non-rational elements. Luce Irigaray, another French feminist theorist, is equally critical of Cartesian myth of philosophy as self-grounding rationality. But in Descartes' treatment of wonder she detects potential for a radically different myth, one congenial to feminine and to woman. Wonder celebrates sexual difference and in this way subverts logic underlying cogito. Sexual difference, then, and not cogito, becomes touchstone of philosophy in future: as irreducible difference, it banishes neutrality of language and subject at same time it justifies proliferation of discourse-types; and as embodiment, as lived experience, it rejects split between body (change, history, existence) and mind (permanence, eternity, essence) in favor of reuniting them. Descartes thus turns out to be essential not only for modernity but also for postmodernity. In same way that re-enacting moves of Cartesian doubt initiates philosophy into spirit of Enlightenment rationality and freedom, and thus into what Le Doeuff calls the game of theoretical domination,' taking pleasure in morality par provision and in Cartesian wonder opens up an entirely different world-which is our world today. Le Doeuff and Irigaray, in appropriating certain elements of Cartesian thought for feminism, reveal Descartes' importance to contemporary debates over difference. In Part Three of Discourse on Method, Descartes compares thoroughgoing renovation of a house to trilogy of ends constituting his epistemological project: clearing away his disordered and unreliable preconceptions, uncovering indubitable status of cogito, and then rebuilding knowledge in form of universal science upon foundation of cogito. But as renovation of a house is not merely an affair of bricks and plumbing, but upsets entire human household, so reconstruction of knowledge issues in non-theoretical consequences and upsets knower's morale. Systematic doubt is alienating, first of all; it is primarily meditative or solitary, a division of self from everything else. And it is traumatizing: smooth circuit of habit together with opinion is broken; one no longer manages simplest of exchanges with confidence but rather with a sense of dread, of not knowing what's around corner. Acknowledging this, Descartes advises: before starting to rebuild your house, it is not enough simply to pull it down, to make provision for materials and architects (or else train yourself in architecture), and to have carefully drawn up plans; you must also provide yourself with other where you can live while building is in progress. Likewise, lest I should re main indecisive in my actions while reason obliged me to be so in my judgments, and in order to live as happily as I could during this time, I formed for myself a provisional moral code con sisting of just or four maxims.2 Descartes suggests that if we plan to repeat philosophical moves he lays down for us in Meditations on First Philosophy, then we'll need, when going gets rough, access to some other place where we can live comfortably or happily. Defined by his three or four maxims, it is a in which one resolves to conserve political and religious traditions of one's upbringing; to practice one's convictions as if they were true; and, Stoic-like, to focus on improving oneself rather than world. …