Malebranche, Taste, and Sensibility: The Origins of Sensitive Taste and a Reconsideration of Cartesianism's Feminist Potential1

In some hands, it could in fact result in conclusions very close to those of the later eighteenth century's more straightforward materialist essentialism.\n Long recognized in terms of the General Will, the love of order, the inherent sentiment in the human heart that draws us towards the good and which for Malebranche was a function of God's grace but which was naturalized in Rousseau (much of this developed in the ideas of the Savoyard vicar), this influence seems present too, I would contend, in Rousseau's presumption of all-encompassing, fixed cognitive and psychological differences derived from biological sex, in his views on feminine taste, and in his thought on women's feminizing and trivializing influence on French taste and on men's creative and intellectual productions and judgments.79 Rousseau was not alone in these decades in espousing a physiological gender essentialism some elements of which should be traced back to Malebranche, but it does seem that he may have become, as far as women are concerned, one of his greatest legacies.