Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) was a French writer and intellectual.
Warning: This is an old (!) translation, and typography of the time makes ‘s’ in the middle of a word look like ‘f’. At the end of a word, it will look normal. Thus ‘easiness’, for example, looks like ‘eafinefs’ on p. 69.
1 Setup and question
The dialogue has three interlocutors: Timocrates, Cephisa, and Telesila. Timocrates moderates the discussion. The fact that two of the interlocutors, and the interlocutors who drive the philosophical discussion, are women, may be just as significant as the fact that the discussion is between men and women. The text serves indirectly as testament to an emerging salon culture—Scudéry herself ran a particularly prominent salon—that upended traditional gender roles in the arts and literature.
Let’s get to the question. See p. 62.
2 Debate
- Cephisa gives as it were the Cartesian answer: I know myself well, and others only with difficulty; see p. 62 green and p. 63
- Telesila gives the reverse answer: It is more difficult to know myself than to know others. See p. 65.
Cephisa offers up an observation about herself. Telesila rejoins that much of our “self-knowledge” is in fact self-flattery. See p. 66.
In response to Cephisa’s claim to know herself, Timocrates mentions there may be unflattering dimensions of her person she conceals, which provides an occasion for Cephisa to recollect one of the principles of the dialogue, “that we should always speak sincerely,” which, she thinks, recommends against speaking of themselves. See p. 67.
3 Varieties of knowledge
What should be clear already from the dialogue is that the question of self-knowledge and knowledge of others here is somewhat different from similar questions that appear in Descartes. Descartes asks questions, let’s say, about propositional knowledge: knowledge of states of affairs.
Scudéry on the other hand frames questions about knowledge in moral and social terms. Knowing here is immediately connected to character and to the interpretation of our own and others’ motivations.
At the same time, these varieties of knowledge seem to share certain problems and suppositions. Simply put: An answer to Cartesian questions about the possibility of knowledge ought to inform, say, our confidence in estimates about others’ characters. The inscrutability of our own or others’ motives ought to inform our confidence in estimates about the nature, content, and reach of our knowledge.
All of this is to say that, while it might be worth distinguishing moral from intellectual questions about knowledge, this distinction may also just be a way of capturing the relatively broad scope of consequences about knowledge and self-knowledge. Scudéry’s questions about discerning motive are at once Cartesian questions about knowledge of the physical universe, and vice versa.
4 Self-knowledge
One of the distinctive features of the Meditations is that you can more or less substitute yourself for ‘I’ throughout, that is, for Descartes. That is because Descartes’ subject doesn’t really have any thoughts; it is a purely formal placeholder.
On the other hand, Scudéry’s ‘I’ or ‘self’ seems to be (at least conceived as) relatively specific. Cephisa says, in describing the dialogue’s operative conception of self-knowledge, that “I know what I think, what I love, what I hate, what I a have mind to, and what not” (p. 69). These are not replaceable placeholders the way that “I see,” “I think,” “I imagine” might be.
Self-knowledge is thus in Scudéry a highly individual affair, and it is perhaps this that accounts for the relatively complexity of the question as Telesila poses it. In Descartes it is enough to have a thought, any thought, to know that I am capable of thinking—and this is more or less the foundation of Cartesian self-knowledge. In Scudéry self-knowledge is a more particular affair. See pp. 69–70.
Later Timocrates and Telesila argue that self-knowledge is not something to be earned meditatively byt “in the Crowd of the World.” See pp. 77–78.
5 Self-knowledge and the will
Self-knowledge in Scudéry becomes a sort of ethical commitment: one that we do not succeed at (in the way that all of us must at the Cartesian project) merely by attempting it. See pp. 70–71.
Telesila seems to tease Cephisa about fixing her hair in the mirror; Cephisa seems to respond that self-knowledge is as easy as doing that (p. 74), with which Timocrates disagrees (p. 75). The question here—a question worth pondering for Descartes also—is about the relative scope of the will vis-a-vis the mind. Neither position is exceedingly attractive:
- If you think of the will as capable of overpowering the mind, you suppose a conception of the will premised on judgments or perceptions that need not be about anything, or that may be false, in prompting the will to act
- If you think of the mind as capable of overpowering the will, you think it is impossible to act in ways that are contrary to our beliefs
6 Self-knowledge and knowledge of others
In the end, Timocrates ‘declares’ Telesila the ‘winner’, but there is a concluding note that seems in a sense to flatten the distinction. Note first of all the claim at p. 78 in green. The inscrutability of individuals may be something that extends to myself and to others.
One of the ways in which the dialogue exemplifies this is through the interlocutors’ agreeing to disagree. See p. 79. And see Timocrates’ concluding note at pp. 79–80 in green.