Abstract
In this paper, I examine Marie Thiroux D’Arconville’s moral psychology as presented in two of her works: Des Passions [On the Passions] and De L’Amitié [On Friendship]. This moral psychology is somewhat unique as it centers human action on three principal sentiments: l’amour, which is best understood as lust or a physical love; l’ambition, the principal human vice; and l’amitié, a characteristic friendship proper to the truly virtuous. I aim to show that these three passions tell a story of moral development. Through l’amour we come to form projects and engage in goal directed action, and thus become moral agents. While l’ambition is, for her, the cause of many of the horrors of human history, I suggest that Thiroux D’Arconville also sees it as the passion through which we come to form collective projects. Finally, in her account of l’amitié we can find her account of virtue. Interestingly, while Thiroux D’Arconville talks of virtue as a matter of choosing well, she does not offer a voluntarist account of choice. Rather, I argue, she models moral choices on a naturalist Stoic model. I will also discuss Thiroux D’Arconville’s very interesting remarks on relations between men and women, including those regarding sexual desires, marriage, and friendship.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that at least one printing of the two-work edition was mistakenly attributed to Denis Diderot—the British Library catalogues an edition of the work under his name. (See the edition of 1770, published in Frankfurt). Also in both the 1764 and 1770 two-work editions, Des Passions was advertised in the frontispiece as being by the same author as De L’Amitie.
- 2.
Marie Thiroux D’Arconville, Des Passions (London [Paris], 1764), 3.
- 3.
Ibid., 9: ‘As our being is composed of two distinct substances, though one is subordinate to the other….’
- 4.
There is, perhaps, an alternative way of reading Thiroux D’Arconville here. She might be taken to be distinguishing mere desires or needs from passions properly speaking, which intrinsically involve the imagination. I do not think this can be correct. For one, throughout her discussion Thiroux D’Arconville refers to love, which she has clearly marked as a passion. For another, Thiroux D’Arconville is clear that even basic animal love does have an object—that to which we are attracted. Insofar as it involves some kind of representation, even basic animal love would seem to involve the imagination.
- 5.
See Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women and the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 195–98. Schiebinger argues that Thiroux D’Arconville’s anatomical drawings exaggerated features of the female anatomy to cartoonish levels: women’s skulls were disproportionately small, their pelvises disproportionately large, ribs narrow, and spines more curved. The skeleton thus effectively confirmed stereotypes driving political debates about the status of women: women were taken to be less intelligent and designed to carry children.
- 6.
Thiroux D’Arconville, Des Passions, 8–9.
- 7.
See also ibid., 114 and 169.
- 8.
While there it is hard to know what Thiroux D’Arconville might have read, it is clear from her eclectic interests that she was quite widely read in the sciences, from her translation of and work in chemistry, and in literature. While it might seem reasonable to think that she would have read Aristotle, it does not seem that there were many editions of Aristotle’s ethical works published in the early part of the eighteenth century in France. (There were, however, many editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.) It thus seems likely she would have gotten her understanding of Aristotelian friendship second hand, though it is hard to ascertain her specific source.
- 9.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translatore Terence Irwin (Hackett Publishing, 1985). The words in square brackets are added by Irwin, who notes that they are not found in manuscripts.
- 10.
While one might assume that the Stoic thought that greatly influenced seventeenth century philosophy had lost sway in the eighteenth century, I think this is misguided. By the eighteenth century figures an array of ancient philosophies—Scepticism, Epicureanism, Platonism, as well as Stoicism—had been revived, and authors were able to pick and choose strands of each to weave them together. That Stoic thought was still influential is evidenced by the large number of editions of Cicero (in French) in the first half of the eighteenth century. These editions include his essays on old age (De la vieillesse [De senectute]) and friendship (De l’amitié [De amicitia]), in particular.
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Shapiro, L. (2019). L’Amour, L’Ambition and L’Amitié: Marie Thiroux D’Arconville on Passion, Agency and Virtue. In: O’Neill, E., Lascano, M.P. (eds) Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_8
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