Hiérarchie des esprits et esprit fort : le discours médical

Did the mind have a gender during the Early Modern period? According to Londa Schiebinger (The Mind Has No Sex?, 1989), Cartesian philosophy caused an abrupt change within the medical tradition by rendering the link between gender and temperament obsolete. Poullain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Sexes, published in 1673, is a good example of this shift. It is in the light of this thesis that I intend to assess the Libertine authors and examine the question of the supposed link between male gender on the one hand, and incredulity and scepticism toward superstitions on the other. As far as La Mothe Le Vayer, Naudé or Cyrano are concerned, an ‘asexual’ and universal rationality does not exist. These Libertine authors reject Cartesian dualism and dismiss the very notion of ‘common sense’. Instead these writers promote a faculty of ‘good thinking’ (or “Ingenium”), directly inherited from Pierre Charron. To understand the masculinity of the ‘free-thinker’, one must consider the medical origins of the supposed hierarchy between the minds. This was constructed from the ancient theory of humours and temperaments, derived from Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen, which was revived by Huarte in 1575 and re-appropriated by Charron and his Libertine successors. By re-examining the medical and philosophical discourses which made up the masculinity of the ‘free thinker’, I will argue that this male ideal is built upon a model of monological masculinity (with inevitable nuances and variations), rather than by opposition to the Female.