Cartesian Egalitarianism : From Poullain de la Barre to Rancière

This essay presents an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from Francois Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Ranciere. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’ supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition, I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects.

Devin Zane Shaw because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.(VI: 1-2) Looking past the ironic posturing of the first sentence, Cartesian egalitarians (such as Poullain de la Barre or Joseph Jacotot) take this "bon sens" as Descartes' fundamental idea: "there are not several manners of being intelligent, no distribution between two forms of intelligence, and then between two forms of humanity.The equality of intelligences is first the equality of intelligence itself in all of its operations" (Rancière, "L'actualité" 412-413, author's translation). 1The equality of intelligences has one other crucial consequence: if there is no hierarchy of intelligences, then there is no natural or inevitable hierarchy between those who "naturally" rule and those who are ruled.
Third, Cartesian egalitarians conceptualize politics as the processing of a wrong through the practice of dissensus.As Rancière writes, "politics becomes the argument of a basic wrong that ties in with some established dispute in the distribution of jobs, roles, and places," initiating "conflict over the very existence of something in common between those who have a part and those who have none" (Disagreement 35).Politics turns on who or what exists, or who or what counts, in common in society; it constitutes a new and more egalitarian distribution of the sensible.Dissensus produces conflict because the logic of policing counts the parts of society as parties with specific interests that can be represented according to customary forms of intelligibility, with no possibility that there would be a void or supplement to society, a part which has no part which is not represented ("Ten Theses" 36).For Rancière, politics takes place when a "part of those who have no part" (la part des sans-part) contests the policing of social relations and conventions in order to introduce new ways of speaking, being, or doing.PhaenEx In this essay, I will examine how these three features of Cartesian egalitarianism emerge from the work of Descartes.Although he makes subjectivity (as cogito) and intellectual equality central components of his philosophy, Descartes nevertheless limits his critique of the prejudices of intellect, authority, and habit to the epistemo-metaphysical problem of separation.After reconstructing how egalitarianism functions in Descartes' system, I will show how Poullain reconceptualizes the problematic of separation in a socio-political context, transforming it into the problem of a wrong.He uses Descartes' dualism to show that there are no natural qualities of the mind or the body that can justify the inequality of the sexes.Women have been wronged, Poullain argues, because there are no clear and distinct reasons for their subjugation.Instead, women have been denied the full capacity for the exercise of their reason due to the political self-interest of men and the force of social convention.
After examining Descartes and Poullain, I will shift the discussion to the philosophy of Beauvoir.Though this has the unfortunate effect of setting aside many other developments in the historical relationship between Cartesianism, egalitarianism, and feminism, Beauvoir's conception of the relationship between political subjectivity and the processing of a wrong foreshadows several of Rancière's concerns. 2I will argue that Beauvoir's account of a wrongwhich occurs, for instance, when a woman is forced to assume, and thus limit, her freedom as an "other" rather than a "subject"-marks a significant advance over Sartre's individualist ethics of the 1940s.Because Beauvoir focuses on those whose agency has been historically marginalized, her account of political subjectivity avoids the pitfalls that have so often plagued many strains of Marxism, which amplify the teleological character of the proletariat's historic mission.For Beauvoir, it is not possible to subordinate one struggle to another; a historic mission, as it were, Devin Zane Shaw can only be built out of practices of solidarity, and not out of the hierarchization of demands, abilities, and intelligences.
Thus I focus on Beauvoir because her Cartesian egalitarianism is an important precedent to Rancière's.Because Rancière does not, to my knowledge, extensively discuss the work of either Poullain or Beauvoir, I do not intend this as an explication of Rancière's work, but rather as "a history or, if you prefer, a fable" (Discourse VI: 4) that provides an overview of a longer tradition of egalitarianism than is typically acknowledged.I will conclude by showing, through a brief reading of his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, how Rancière's understanding of Cartesianism emphasizes the egalitarianism of Poullain and Beauvoir rather than Descartes' metaphysical or epistemological commitments.

II. Egalitarianism and Separation
We do not typically consider Descartes an egalitarian.He is more often interpreted, in the post-Heideggerian tradition of philosophy, as an epochal figure of the modern destiny of metaphysics.On this account, Descartes introduces the metaphysical ground of technicity by dividing all beings between thinking subjects and objects of a calculable objective world. 3Or, following Antonio Negri, he is considered an architect of a "reasonable ideology" that expresses the class compromise constitutive of the formation of bourgeois class power after the 1620s: whereas Descartes formulates his philosophy as the production of human significance (and practical utility) in its separation from the world, the bourgeoisie affirms its position in civil society at the same time that it accepts a temporary class compromise with absolutism (Negri   295-296).PhaenEx Recently, however, several prominent radical thinkers have laid claim to the legacy of the Cartesian subject.For example, Alain Badiou, Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek all hold that the emergence of subjectivity in political praxis is irreducible to the reconfiguration of Cartesian thought as instrumental rationality, whether it is considered as a moment of technological enframing or as a moment of bourgeois compromise. 4Yet the Cartesianism of Badiou and Žižek does not imply the supposition of equality.Instead, their commitment is largely programmatic.
Žižek, in The Ticklish Subject, proposes that the Cartesian subject is a revolutionary alternative to what he considers to be the hegemony of a "liberal-democratic multiculturalism" that ranges indiscriminately from new age obscurantism to postmodern deconstruction (1-4).For Badiou, Descartes is a paradigmatic materialist dialectician, insofar as he maintains that truths are eternal against the general presumptions of "democratic materialism," which counts only bodies and languages, and Nietzsche's and Heidegger's "aristocratic idealism," which, despite its overwhelming sense of resignation, aims to preserve the poetic event against modern nihilism (Logics of Worlds 1-6).
In contrast to these interpretations, I will argue that Descartes' work wavers between egalitarianism and the constraints of method.On the one hand, the Cartesian project, even for Descartes, requires the supposition of equality in order for its method to be persuasive.That is, rather than appealing to tradition, convention, or authority to establish the validity of his system, Descartes calls for the well-considered and reasonable judgments of his readers.And yet, on the other hand, Descartes makes persistent appeal to the necessity of method to prevent the egalitarianism of his address from encouraging a thoroughgoing critique of all social conventions.Instead, his system is redirected toward epistemological and metaphysical questions, which are structured by the problem of separation.
Let us begin with Descartes' supposition of equality.Despite his program of searching out the self-foundational moment of a system, his philosophy is nevertheless conditioned (but not necessarily determined) by its historical situation, or its distribution of the sensible.When Rancière speaks of a distribution of the sensible, it includes the relations between subjects, objects, and places, and the ways of speaking, doing, and being that make these relations intelligible.While policing, in Rancière's terms, is a process of hierarchically arranging these relations and enforcing them, we should not consider a distribution of the sensible as static until politics intervenes; instead, the intelligibility of these relations is also a dynamic, which can itself change, enter into periods of stability, and undergo crises from which a politics of dissensus can emerge (or not).
Though it is not a moment of politics in Rancière's sense, Descartes' thought inaugurates a new way of thinking the relations between subjectivity, habit, and intelligibility within an intellectual milieu in transition, in which Scholasticism and Renaissance philosophy have been challenged by a renewed sense of skepticism.This conjuncture is not unique to philosophy, but is itself enmeshed within a series of socio-political upheavals.Negri, for instance, points to the recomposition of class power after the European economic crisis of 1619-1622 and the condemnation of Galileo (112-126; 140-155).In addition, the renewal of skepticism is not only of philosophical interest, but also an expression of the "epistemological implications of cultural difference" brought on by advances in European techniques of travel (to, for instance, China), and the conquest of the Americas (Bordo 40-41).Take, for example, Montaigne's remark that "each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice … indeed it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in" (quoted in Bordo 41).PhaenEx In the Discourse, Descartes makes a similar remark: "It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so that we may judge our own more soundly and not think that everything contrary to our own ways is ridiculous and against reason (contre raison), as those who have seen nothing of the world ordinarily do" (VI: 6, translation modified). 5He draws two conclusions from this diversity of customs: first, "not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom" (VI: 10), and second, that the knowledge of cultural difference helps justify the supposition that opens the Discourse, that good sense or reason is "naturally equal in all men" (VI: 2). 6From these two conclusions Descartes proposes a new relationship between subjectivity, habituation, and intelligibility.This new relationship is founded on the cogito or thinking being, which emerges from a method of doubt directed toward habits or practices derived from custom and a discourse of intelligibility established on the authority of the schools.The significance of this critique of convention turns on whether it is conceived as a project of intellectual emancipation, or as the metaphysical and epistemological problem of separation.
It is possible, beginning with the Discourse, to read Descartes' project as an exercise in intellectual emancipation.Starting from the premise of the equality of intelligences and abilities, Descartes delineates his method of directing his reason as an example of "self-instruction" for the reader to judge as to whether it is a worthy example for imitation or improvement (VI: 4).It is not a necessary order of reasons, as it is in the Meditations, or an attempt at "teaching," but an account of how Descartes had "tried to direct [his] own" reason (VI: 4).By stressing the egalitarian aspect of this work, we can see that the validity of the subject as thinking being is verified by the capacity for the direction of reason to be repeated through each reader's selfinstruction.The emergence of the cogito transfers authority from the customs of the schools to Devin Zane Shaw all those to whom reason or good sense is distributed-a lesson in the practice of thinking learned from Descartes' travels rather than the schools (VI: 5-6).The intelligibility of the new philosophy-and its foundation, the cogito-is verified through the free use of the reader's own reason, rather than doctrinal authority.
Nevertheless, the socio-political consequences and the gestures toward a broader vernacular culture are absent from the Meditations.The contingent emergence of the cogito as a response to a crisis in intellectual authority within the sciences is instead given a metaphysically necessary status, and philosophical inquiry becomes a problem of ascertaining the proper epistemological and metaphysical foundations for physics.The egalitarian moment of the Discourse is now restricted to the problem of the separation of self and world. 7Once we enter into the order of reasons of the Meditations, the situation becomes, as Sartre argues, that of "the autonomous thought which discovers by its own forces intelligible relations between already existing essences" (La liberté cartésienne 289, author's translation). 8t us look at the way that the Meditations recasts the relationship of subjectivity, habit, and intelligibility.The "First Meditation" begins with Descartes's acknowledgement that he has been accustomed since childhood to a method of making judgments that has led to numerous falsehoods, which leads him to suspect that the basis of those judgments-information "acquired either from the senses or through the senses"-is doubtful (VII: 18).This passage carries a double significance.In fact, Descartes wavers between two different accounts of the basis of the judgments he has discovered to be doubtful.Both share the same starting point-the prejudice of relying on the senses has a basis in the habits acquired in childhood-but they differ on how these habits are acquired.One, which I will call the "prison of the body" account, identifies the body as the cause of the prejudices that prevent the proper use of reason. 9In the subsequent PhaenEx history of Cartesian egalitarianism, this metaphysical account of the origin of prejudices is rejected in favor of the second account, which focuses on the socio-political critique of conventions, such as criticisms of Scholasticism.
In the Discourse, we find a socio-political critique of the prejudices of childhood.One accepts teaching based on authority and explication, rather than according to reason.Descartes recounts that from "my childhood I have been nourished upon letters, and … I was persuaded that by their means one could acquire a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful in life" (VI: 4).Books-"letters"-had taught him the basic premise of Scholastic philosophy, that "nihil est in intellectu nisi prius fuerit in sensu," that "nothing is in the intellect unless it was first in the senses" (Carriero 12ff).Rather than understanding the immediacy and intelligibility of the sensible as a naïve standpoint, we could understand it as a product of a determinate (and by Descartes' time, reified) historical production of knowledge, that is, of Scholasticism.In this case, the method of doubt and the emergence of the cogito subject become a challenge to one particular historical system of knowledge, but a persistent vigilance is required to prevent Descartes' thought from being reified into a teaching based on authority, a vigilance evidenced by his repeated references to needing to inculcate new habits of thought against the lures of custom.This is how, broadly speaking, the Cartesian egalitarians will take up his thought.
On the other hand, Descartes also faults the body itself for propagating the habits and prejudices of childhood; the body is, on this account, the prison of the soul. 10In the Principles of Philosophy, Descartes writes: In our childhood the mind was so immersed in the body that although there was much that it perceived clearly, it never perceived anything distinctly.But in spite of this the mind made judgments about many things, and this is the origin of the many preconceived opinions which most of us never subsequently abandon.(VIIIa: 22) Devin Zane Shaw On this account, Scholasticism's reliance on the senses as the foundation of knowledge serves to reinforce the prejudices of the body.The task for thinking, for Descartes, is to obtain through the method of doubt a reflexive distance from what we take to be the immediacy of the senses to allow the intellect to mediate our judgments.The task is to separate thinking substance, the cogito, from the mechanisms of the body through a method that makes it possible to discover clear and distinct ideas of "already existing essences," as Sartre puts it-of, for instance, thought, extension, substance, and God (La liberté cartésienne 289, author's translation).Of course, as many commentators have pointed out, it is difficult to see how Descartes can establish a measure to test the truth of a judgment after the introduction of hyperbolic doubt.Even if he can demonstrate the truth of the cogito as a thinking being, it is still possible that he is being deceived about other kinds of knowledge.To overcome the evil genius hypothesis, Descartes proceeds in the "Third Meditation" to attempt a proof of his dependence on a supremely perfect being.This supremely perfect being functions, in the system, as the guarantor of the knowledge that Descartes establishes throughout the rest of the Meditations, gradually returning into his grasp the fields of mathematics, physics, and everyday sense experience (as long as these things are conceived "clearly and distinctly").With thought and extension clearly and distinctly separated, and with their correspondence guaranteed by God, the reconstruction of philosophy from the cogito allows Descartes to introduce a physics that explains bodies and movements according to the general rules of mechanics and mathematics, rather than the Scholastic-or childlike (Descartes, "Sixth Set of Replies" VII: 437-439)-cognition of universals from particular qualities derived from the senses (see Carriero 16-17; Garber 84-88).By establishing the "already existing" essential validity of the separation of thought and extension, Descartes PhaenEx limits the possibility that doubt toward the sensible could open into a socio-historical critiquethat is, that knowledge could be historically situated.
Instead, Descartes suggests that Scholasticism lends the errors of the body an artificial veneer of rationality.In the unfinished dialogue "The Search for Truth," Descartes juxtaposes the "natural" use of reason to the "artifice" of Scholasticism.In this text, the greatest threat to knowledge is not the separation of thought and extension and of self and world, because in his system God guarantees that they have an intelligible relationship; the greatest threat is that the good sense of the meditator is captured by the artifice of authority and the schools, that, as in the case of Epistemon the Scholastic, one is lulled into the "habit of yielding to authority rather than lending [one's] ear to the dictates of reason" (X: 523). 11By contrast, Descartes claims that his method begins, through the use of doubt, by inculcating "a judgment which is not corrupted by any false beliefs and a reason which retains all the purity of its nature" (X: 498).The whole rhetorical staging of "The Search for Truth" relies on Eudoxus being able to direct Polyander (a character who has never studied but possesses "a moderate amount of good sense") in this "natural" use of his reason with the aim of discovering the true principles of (Cartesian) philosophy (X: 514).Yet if Cartesianism lays claim to being the "natural" use of reason, then it risks, despite Descartes' protests that he is not attempting to "teach" anyone, repeating the problems that he had identified with Scholasticism: the naturalization of doctrine through the reification of a historically situated knowledge.In Rancière's terms, the intellectual emancipation promised by the Cartesian "ego sum, ego existo" is subordinated to the intellectual policing of method.

III. The Rationality of a Wrong
The social and political consequences of Descartes' thought were not lost on his contemporaries, especially in the conflicts over the equality of the sexes. 12His account of the egalitarian distribution of reason stands in stark contrast with the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics.Though Aristotle argues that the possession (hexis) of logos (speech and reason) is unique to human animals, implying a universal capacity, he nevertheless proceeds to exclude some humans from this capacity.So while the logos and an aisthesis of justice, the useful, or the good, may be shared (Politics 1253a9-18), this logos is not possessed by all.A slave, Aristotle argues, is he who "by nature" apprehends (aisthesis) speech but does not possess (hexis) it (1254b24-25).Women are similarly dispossessed of reason.At the beginning of the Politics, Aristotle claims that women are made only for the purpose of the reproduction of the species and so are inferior to men.Later, he argues that women are free (1259a40) but are incapable of ruling, for just as the rational part of the soul rules over the irrational, so does a man rule over a woman-who possesses reason without authority (1260a14).
Poullain de la Barre appropriates Cartesian philosophy to show, in contrast to Aristotle, that patriarchal social forms possess authority without reason.In his On the Equality of the Two Sexes, Poullain notes that: if something is well established, then we think it must be right.Since we think that reason plays a role in everything men do, most people cannot imagine that reason was not consulted in the setting up of practices that are so universally accepted, and we imagine that reason and prudence dictated them.(54) Using the results of Cartesian philosophy, Poullain argues that the inequality of the sexes-that is, the subjugation of women-is founded on prejudices of habit and custom, and political selfinterest rather than well-founded reasons.Though we have seen that Descartes restricts his PhaenEx system to the epistemological and metaphysical problem of separation, Poullain uses Cartesian philosophy to conceptualize the wrong at the basis of the inequality of the sexes: both popular opinion and scholarly learning dispossess women of subjectivity and the capacity to reason.
Poullain's task, then, is to demonstrate how the part of those who have no part-women as they are socially excluded and subjugated-can lay claim to a political subjectivity that they have been denied.This claim begins with undermining the foundations of long-standing prejudices that justify inequality.This process of critique can open the possibility of a more egalitarian distribution of the sensible, in which women are recognized as thinking and speaking subjects, not merely passive objects of men's possession, and as agents who are just as able as men to make public use of their reason.
In On the Equality of the Two Sexes, Poullain argues (in a passage that later appears in paraphrase as an epigram to The Second Sex) that the historical and intellectual record shows that: Women were judged in former times as they are today and with as little reason, so whatever men say about them should be suspect as they are both judges and defendants.Even if the charges brought against them are backed by the opinions of a thousand authors, the entire brief should be taken as a chronicle of prejudice and error.(76) To overturn these judgments, Poullain criticizes both "popular" and "learned" prejudices against women.There are, he argues, no natural reasons for the "chronicle of prejudice and error," but only the "reason" of political self-interest.The oppression of women has been enforced by the physical strength of men, and policed by naturalizing a gendered division of labor within the distinction of public and private domains (see his "historical conjectures" at 56-60).This situation is reproduced, he argues, when in both ancient and modern times intellectuals have generally taken "their prejudices with them into the Schools" and worked to give reasons for the subjugation of women (79).
Poullain reconceptualizes Descartes' distinction between thought and the body to show that there are neither intellectual nor physical inequalities between men and women.Customary prejudice, he notes, holds that women cannot exercise reason as well as men, often pointing out how women are more passionate or intemperate, how their use of reason is less detached from the body.Poullain turns this argument around to claim that those who maintain this customary prejudice have themselves provided reasons that do not consider the faculties of the mind independently from the body.For, he claims, given that thought is a substance other than body, the mind has no sex, and if the mind has no sex, good sense or reason is equally distributed to both men and women.Moreover, if equality is the case, there is no natural basis for an intellectual division of labor.From the standpoint of well-considered reasons, antifeminists have confused nature and custom: the perceived intellectual flaws of women are the product of a lack of education.In addition, the intellectual stultification of women, Poullain notes, also has a political basis: those who deny that the "scope of reason is boundless and has the same influence over all people" do so out of self-interest, fearing that ending a gender-(and class-) based intellectual division of labor will devalue the prestige and authority that comes with learning (95).Given the numerous prejudices of intellectuals, Poullain even suggests that the exclusion of women from education could work to their eventual advantage because they would be able to direct their natural reason without the artifice of the schools (62-65). 13at the mind has no sex, and that good sense or reason is equally distributed among all humans, are the positions of Poullain that are closest to Descartes.It is more difficult to use the Cartesian system to establish that inequality is not based on embodied differences, given that political thought that seeks to show both how all humans are capable of exercising their freedom, and how, as Beauvoir will write three centuries later, biology is not destiny.

IV. Woman as Other, Woman as Subject
As is well-known, both Sartre and Beauvoir take the cogito as a starting point for interrogating the freedom of human being.In Beauvoir's words, the "Cartesian cogito expresses both the most individual experience and the most objective truth" insofar as it affirms that human freedom is the basis of all values (Ethics of Ambiguity 17).This much Sartre and Beauvoir have in common, but they diverge concerning how these values can be realized within the social life of the individual.Through the mid-1940s, Sartre remains focused on the problem of how an individual can act freely within a historical situation that is not of his or her own making, and many of his more hyperbolic comments imply that, as long as one is not in bad faith, all choices are equivalent as long as they are free. 18r Beauvoir it is necessary that practices of freedom and the situations that they transform be understood as historically differentiated, so neither situations nor choices are equivalent.This requires Beauvoir to move from an individualist ethics to conceptualizing these concerns from their bases in social perceptions and relations (see Simon 41-54).In The Second Sex, Beauvoir reconceptualizes the question of subjectivity as a political problem, not just in the sense that she examines how a subject assumes her freedom within a historical situation, but also insofar as this question turns on what we have called a wrong: she pursues the consequences of the fact that, despite being an "autonomous freedom," a woman "discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other" (Second Sex 17).Like Poullain, Beauvoir rejects the thesis that there are biological data that necessarily determine, and form the PhaenEx "fixed destiny" of, the subjugation of women within the social hierarchy of the sexes (44).
Instead, she argues that all situations are politically and historically conditioned, meaning that all possible biological data take on social values rather than intrinsically natural values that transcend a given situation. 19auvoir therefore turns to the investigation of the historical and political bases of the inequality of those who are able to assume their subjective freedom, and those who-depending on the situation, could be women, African Americans, the colonized, and other groups-confront a historical situation in which they are considered pejoratively as "others."It is a fundamental supposition of existentialism that all human beings have the capacity to exercise their freedom, because freedom is the basis of all social values, and yet in each situation they cannot exercise the full extent of their freedom.
Beauvoir politicizes the existentialist account of subjectivity and freedom by conceptualizing how a wrong is introduced into social distinctions between subjectivity and alterity.This wrong occurs because women are constrained by a situation in which men are subjects, and women are others.The distinction between self (or subject) and other, she notes, is not necessarily the basis of a wrong.The category of the other "is as original as consciousness itself" (6).Following Lévi-Strauss, Beauvoir states that the distinction between self and other can designate a relationship of reciprocity (such as that between nature and culture) or opposition and antagonism (between, for instance, two different cultures).But it is quite possible that the well-traveled person can recognize the reciprocity of these two different cultures, which relativizes their concept of alterity-just as Descartes noted that visiting others can reveal how one's own customs are just as arbitrary and locally determined as another's.In such a situation, Devin Zane Shaw alterity is not a negative category, but one through which one's own values are questioned and reconsidered.
What is different about the situation of women is that the distinction between men and women carries with it a series of value-laden social judgments: a woman is defined against the standard of man and the man's attributes are given positive values, while women's attributes are considered negatively as flaws or insufficiencies.These values are reinforced because men arrogate to themselves the sole capacity to make such judgments.As Kail writes, women are interpellated in "a specific regime of alterity [that] shows that rulers control the meaning of the situation by setting the very conditions that make relationships possible" (157).Beauvoir produces numerous examples to show how, in such situations, "Humanity is male, and man defines woman, not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being" (Second Sex 5).This situation is prevalent in both social and intellectual life.Take, for instance, Lévinas' account of one's responsibility toward a transcendent Other: Beauvoir sardonically notes that his claim that "alterity is accomplished in the feminine" forgets that a "woman also is consciousness for herself" (6, footnote).
Although much of The Second Sex is dedicated to diagnosing and cataloguing how a woman is defined against a masculine standard, Beauvoir also points toward the possibilities of women's emancipation.These possibilities can help us understand how the relationship of subject and other can give rise to a politics that challenges a wrong.First, a wrong occurs if the other's freedom is denied, such as when so-called feminine values-like the myth of the "Eternal Feminine"-are created or upheld by men and utilized to police the "proper" places or practices for a woman.For Beauvoir, it is not enough to attempt to reverse the polarity of value-laden terms. 20Instead, reciprocity must be introduced into the free creation of social values.PhaenEx Second, Beauvoir's politics are universal and egalitarian.She argues that the social hierarchization of recognizing some people as subjects and some people as others is the fundamental basis of inequality.Be it the distinction between men and women, Americans of European descent and African Americans, or the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, "whether it is race, caste, class, or sex reduced to an inferior condition, the justification process is the same" (12).This serves as a reminder that in each case those who rule attempt to demonstrate that there is some natural reason for inequality.Thus a crucial task for politics is to demonstrate that these so-called natural differences are based on social relations.But the dual lesson of Beauvoir's critique of Marxian economism must not be forgotten.First, all struggles emerge from, and are conditioned by, their local and historical situation, which means that they use varied approaches to emancipatory practices.Hence second, the emancipatory aspirations of a people cannot be subordinated to another group's aspirations.One cannot then argue that the historical mission of the proletariat requires that, for instance, women subordinate their demands and practices to those of the proletariat.(Despite the rejection of a teleological concept of historical struggle, one should nevertheless maintain, like Beauvoir, that women's liberation requires the end of their economic exploitation).These various struggles can only be strengthened and reinforced by what Beauvoir calls "reciprocity"-by practices of solidarity that do not reproduce the social hierarchies that these groups are combating.While Sartre's existential appropriation of the cogito marks him as a Cartesian, Beauvoir is a Cartesian egalitarian.Her conceptualization of political subjectivity follows Descartes and Poullain insofar as it affirms that reason or good sense is equally distributed to all people-far from a world of sovereign subjects and their inferiors, she proposes a political program that instills the reciprocity of practices of freedom.Her existentialism begins with the individual, but it demands that the individual aims toward accomplishing practices of reciprocity and freedom that expand "toward an open future" (16).

V. Toward Collective Egalitarianism
This history or fable of the egalitarianism that leads from Descartes to Beauvoir shows that "Cartesianism" cannot be reduced to several of its more prominent conceptual commitments, such as mind-body dualism, the technicity of its mechanistic physics, or even, as we will see with Rancière's critique, the so-called rigors of the method.Cartesianism is also defined by its egalitarianism: the formation of a political subject from the supposition of the equality of intelligences.This subject is political insofar as its praxis turns on the processing of a wrong, an egalitarian challenge to the inequalities of any social order.As we have seen, Cartesianism from Poullain to Beauvoir constitutes a direct challenge to the claim that there is a hierarchy of intelligences.
If egalitarianism is a key component of this kind of Cartesianism, then it becomes possible to see why Rancière argues, in Disagreement, that "Descartes's ego sum, ego existo is the prototype of such indissoluble subjects of a series of operations implying the production of a new field of experience" (35).This new field of experience-what we could call, following Beauvoir, the collective reciprocity of equality-is opened when the part of those who have no part engage in political practice, challenging a social distribution that counts them as inferiors or subordinates, such as the count, challenged by Poullain and Beauvoir, that women are others and not subjects of freedom.Without this aspect, it is difficult to see why Rancière lays claim to the Cartesian legacy, for he directly challenges, through a discussion of Joseph Jacotot, many of Descartes' epistemological and metaphysical assumptions.PhaenEx struggles cannot be subordinated to one another, but must be reinforced through solidarity, by whatever they have in common.
A Marxist analysis would certainly note that Cartesianism in general stakes its validity on an individual's perception of the social world and an individual's practice.Rancière (like Beauvoir before him) sees the limitations of individualism, and that is why he transforms the subjective ego sum, ego existo into the reciprocity of the nos sumus, nos existimus, with the latter designating a new field of collective political practice.But the Cartesian "prototype" has two positive aspects.First, like Marx, as I have argued above, Poullain and Beauvoir conceptualize politics as the processing of a wrong.But second, and in contrast to the teleological tendencies of Marxism, there is no privileged subject, no finality that drives history, but only the persistently renewed struggle against all forms of social inequality.Emancipation is not an end point of a historical continuum.Instead, emancipation is only possible through the efforts of those who combat inequality and oppression through practices of reciprocity and solidarity.In this sense, Rancière is a Cartesian egalitarian.
Notes Devin Zane Shaw knowledge a foundation that will be in accord with it" (What is a Thing?103).This foundation, of course, is the cogito. 4Badiou argues that a Marxism "sutured" to the scientific condition of philosophy (read: Althusser) dovetails theoretically with Heidegger when it reduces the subject to "a simple operator of bourgeois ideology."The scientific Marxist, then, would say: "for Heidegger, 'subject' is a secondary elaboration of the reign of technology, but we can see eye to eye if this reign is in fact also the bourgeoisie's" (Manifesto for Philosophy 92).It should be noted that Negri is more ambivalent than Badiou's typical "scientific Marxist"; he seems to admire the revolutionary character of Descartes' thought even if he reproaches what he sees as its fundamental compromise.
5 Later in the Discourse, Descartes writes: "I have recognized through my travels that those with views quite contrary to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many of them make use of reason as much or more than we do" (VI: 16).
6 Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, invokes the principles of Cartesianism against the false universality of the colonial legacy (its science, politics, and sociology), which denigrates the non-European to the benefit and "glory" of Western bourgeois society.He argues that "the psychologists, sociologists et al., their views on 'primitivism,' their rigged investigations, their self-serving generalizations, their tendentious speculations, their insistence on the marginal, 'separate' character of non-whites," rest on "their barbaric repudiation, for the sake of the cause, of Descartes's statement, the charter of universalism, that 'reason … is found whole and entire in each man,' and that 'where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures'" (56). 19Interestingly, for Beauvoir childhood plays a crucial role in the habituation of social roles, values, and prejudices.In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she writes that "Man's unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child" (35), but her reading of Descartes in this respect bears more similarities to Poullain, who challenged the reification and "inevitability" of social convention, than to Descartes, who wavered between faulting as the origin of prejudice and habit either social reification or the natural composition of the body itself.Beauvoir criticizes both the Freudian determination of penis envy from an anatomical lack (Second Sex 287) and (implicitly) Sartre's bizarre claim that a woman's existence "in the form of a hole" is first grasped in the infant's "ontological presentiment" of sexuality (Being and Nothingness 782), because childhood must also be historically situated.