In the Meditations Descartes grounds human identity in the capacity for rational thought. He argues that reason is the foundation for both knowledge and freedom. Nearly fifty years later, Gabrielle Suchon took up the same commitment to rationality in her Treatise on Ethics and Politics, but she turned it towards a very different purpose. Suchon’s writing was one of the first systematic feminist philosophers. She uses rationalist principles to challenge the moral, educational, and political restrictions that were put on women in seventeenth century France. The comparison between Descartes and Suchon reveals the possibilities and limits of early modern rationalism. Both philosophers established reason as the basis of autonomy. Suchon extended this principle to insist that women possess the same rational and moral abilities as men do. She turned Cartesian individualism into a strong argument for women’s freedom, virtue, and equality. Descartes’ goal, by contrast, was not social or political reform but the establishment of a secure foundation for knowledge by grounding all certainty in the thinking self.
Descartes wrote the Meditations to build human knowledge on a basis of certainty and establish reason as the core of human identity. Suchon was writing in a society that denied women the right to education and autonomy. She used philosophical reasoning to articulate one of the earliest feminist critiques. Although Descartes and Suchon write in different genres and have different philosophical goals, both belong to early modernism and focus on grounding human life in rational principles Descartes focuses on modeling the human subject defined by the capacity for thought. He presents reason as universal and independent of social identity. Suchon adopts this same commitment to universalism, but she applies it to the social world at the time, in which women were denied education, freedom, and authority. Putting the two in comparison highlights how Suchon transforms rationalist ideas, that Descartes keeps abstract, into concrete arguments for gender equality. Together, these categories show that while Descartes and Suchon share a rationalist foundation, their projects ultimately diverge in purpose and scope.
Both of these philosophers act on the premise that reason is the essential feature of human nature. Both treat rationality as a universal faculty shared equally by all people. In the Meditations Descartes arrives at this conclusion by taking away any aspect of life that can be doubted (Including sensation, bodily identity, and even math) and he did this until he found something that could not be removed, this was the act of thinking itself. For him, the “I”, the self, is a mind that thinks. Therefore rationality is both universal and fundamental, anyone capable of thought possesses the same essential nature. Suchon shares this rationalist premise, but molds its implications to a moral capacity that establishes the fundamental equality of the genders. By her logic, because women possess the same rational soul as men, they possess the same natural capacities for judgment, virtue, and intellectual achievement. Descartes used rationality to secure certainty about the self while Suchon used it to expose the injustice of women’s social position. By grounding her feminist critique in the same concept of reason that underlines cartesian philosophy, she effectively redirects rationalism from an inward mission to a gender-inclusive moral philosophy. She used this to challenge the structures of the society that she was living in.
Both Descartes and Suchon believe that genuine freedom comes from the proper use of reason, but they understand the meaning of freedom in different ways. To Descartes freedom is mainly an internal and intellectual matter. In meditation IV, he argues that will is naturally free because we independently choose to either accept or reject ideas. We exercise our freedom best when we correctly use reason, when we judge only the things that we clearly and distinctly understand. Under this definition freedom is essentially freedom of judgement. The ability to control our own thinking and avoid being misled by appearances or confusion. Suchon agrees that freedom involves rational self-control, but she insists that true freedom must also be external and practical. For her, women cannot be genuinely free as long as they are denied their education, pressured into marriage, and restricted by the laws and customs created by men. Freedom for her therefore includes the ability to choose one’s way of life, to pursue knowledge, and to act according to one’s own moral judgement. While Descartes focuses on freeing the mind from error, Schuon focuses on freeing women from social oppression. Therefore, both philosophers treat autonomy as if it is rooted in reason, but Suchon expanded the idea into a broader political argument. While Descartes seeks inner intellectual independence, Suchon argues for both internal autonomy and real-world social liberation.
These philosophers both appeal to a universal idea of what it means to be human, they use this in different ways. Descartes’ philosophy is built around the belief that all human beings share the same basic structure of rationality. When using the term “I” he is not describing a particular person. Instead this is abstract and stands for any thinking being who can doubt, reason, and reflect. This means that Descartes’ ideals are theoretically universal, but this also means that he never directly acknowledges the real social differences that shape people’s lives. His method assumes that everyone has equal access to the life of the mind despite the fact that in seventeenth century Europe, many groups (including women) did not. Suchon takes the same idea of universal rationality but applies it more concretely. She argues that if reason really does belong to all human beings, then women must be included in this category. For Suchon, universality is not just an abstract philosophy claim, it has real ethical consequences. If women possess the same rational capacities of men, then denying them freedom, education, and moral authority is not only unjust, but also irrational. By insisting that the universal human subject is also female, Suchon reveals the gap between philosophical universality and the social reality of women’s oppression. In doing this, she transforms the universalism that Descartes takes for granted into a powerful feminist argument towards equality.
Ultimately, comparing Suchon and Descartes shows that while early modern rationalism often remained abstract and genderless, its core principles could be transformed into powerful tools for challenging social inequality and defending women’s moral autonomy.