On Rationality and Condorcet's Feminism

This observation is not correct. Women are not governed, it is true, by the reason (and experience) of men; they are governed by their own reason (and experience).

Their interests not being the same (as those of men) by the fault of the law, the same things not having the same importance for them as for men, they may, without failing in rational conduct, govern themselves by different principles, and [8] tend towards a different result. It is as reasonable for a woman to concern herself respecting her personal attractions as it was for Demosthenes to cultivate his voice and his gestures.'--Condorcet (1791) On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship.

With his work on juries and voting, Condorcet is, of course, a true hero of formal philosophers--about which some other time more. (I have a tendency to focus on his better half, herself a very fine political economist.) But he was also a major feminist thinker. And the quote is from his major statement on the topic.* 

It's easy to misunderstand what he is saying here in two ways. First, he may be thought to be promoting gender-stereotypical behavior. I don't think that's right. He is rather explaining what we would call adaptive behavior (even Stockholm syndrome). He is not claiming the should develop their interest being attractive to men. (In fact, in immediate context he is claiming that when given the chance, in rare instances or emergencies, women express citizen virtues as nobly as any republican hero.)

Second, he is not claiming that women naturally or essentially have a different kind of reason than men have.  A view like this centered on male and female virtues, primarily, was familiar enough. Rather, he is saying that given certain institutional constraints  -- especially the unequal treatment of men and women by the law, which entails a legal servitude of women -- , men and women have different kinds experiences. And, anticipating the stand-point epistemologists, those experiences give rise to different standards ("principles") and conceptions of rationality.

Now, there is a way to domesticate the thought of the previous paragraph that's not wrong. One can read Condorcet as saying that what counts as rational depends on circumstances. In particular, if one thinks of rationality in terms of the means to achieve some (given) ends in the context of certain constraints, then when either the means and/or the constraints change, or even the ends change, then what counts as the rational thing to do also changes. 

Admittedly the two reasons may be thought to be in tension because one may think that to engage in adaptive behavior should not be called rational. But Condorcet's argument is precisely that in very bad social, legal, and political circumstances rationality expresses itself as a species of Stockholm syndrome. To put this in game-theoretical terms sometimes the optimal (or rational) move is objectively awful. 

This is not to deny that there is a tension here. Condorcet clearly (i) wants to give the lived experience of subjugated women epistemic and normative standing such that her actions and claims need not be evaluated by those of men, who do not face the same experiences. But (ii) he also has -- not unlike Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy -- an objective conception of human flourishing. And one can easily imagine the two [(i) & (ii)] coming into conflict in particular instances.

One final thought. One may think that Condorcet is committed to the idea that once the legal-institutional barriers to women's participation in commercial, social, and political life have disappeared women's rationality will disappear and become like male rationality. But I think there is a more radical thought lurking in Condorcet's though: men's experiences will be transformed by such  female emancipation. (This is a point that both Wollstonecraft and Mill/Taylor also emphasize.) For, on Condorcet's view, prior to female emancipation men are de facto tyrants. And this means that what counts as rational for them is adaptive to bad social and political circumstances.

That is, male experience and rationality will be transformed by the admission of women to the rights of citizenship. And what will count as rational in that future state will be grounded in wholly new experiences (and ad infinitum). Thus, the age of reason comes to a close in this most optimistic Enlightenment thinker, who invents, in part, not just the fracturing of reason into different standpoints, but the discovery of rationality as an open-ended historical process*

 

*I don't want to turn him into a saint. He has a curious obsession with genius, which is not just gendered male, but he also seems to think is -- despite even mentioning De Gournay and Chatalet -- only instantiated by males.

**Whatever is true in this post is very indebted to some insights by Meirav Jones. 

Comments

[Aaron Garrett]

You might want to include Olympe De Gouges. This was her view and she, Condorcet, and De Grouchy were all very close intellectually.

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Aaron, yes, I teach De Gouges alongside Condorcet (and Wollstonecraft). But where do you see her as claiming that reason is an open-ended, transformative historical process (driven by emancipation)? (She has some nice stuff on adaptive preferences that I use.)

[Aaron Garrett]

I meant what Condorcet says in the actual quote.