Nísia Floresta

Josh Landy
Everybody deserves an education. But what exactly should they learn?

Ray Briggs
What could it mean to be a conservative feminist?

Josh Landy
Are women the same as men—or better?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that began at the philosophers’ corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today it’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re thinking about the life and thought of Nísia Floresta.

Josh Landy
She is often called the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft because people thought her first book was a translation of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, even though we now know she was really translating a political pamphlet by someone who wrote under the name Sophia.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but she does have some things in common with Wollstonecraft, like women’s rights, for example.

Ray Briggs
Yes. Just like Wollstonecraft she called for women to have the same rights as men. That was part of her commitment to Cartesian Dualism.

Josh Landy
Yeah, if I understand correctly, she’s basically following Descartes and thinking that the soul is totally separate from the body. So, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a man’s body or a woman’s body or whatever, your soul has the same capacities. Women are just as smart and as competent as men. So why shouldn’t they have the right to vote? To run for office to contribute to public debates?

Ray Briggs
Exactly. And to do that they need to be educated.

Josh Landy
Which is something Floresta had a lot to say about. One of her most interesting thoughts, in my view, is that education isn’t just a matter of teachers in schools.

Ray Briggs
Right. It also includes how you bring up your kids when floresta was writing. Brazil still had slavery, and people made slaves raise their children for them. Floresta objected to this. She strongly opposed slavery, and she said mothers should raise their own children.

Josh Landy
Mothers, okay—but what about fathers?

Ray Briggs
Well she didn’t have a lot to say about them.

Josh Landy
I don’t get it, Ray. You and I agreed a moment ago that floresta is calling for the equality of men and women. So why shouldn’t she want them to be equal partners in the raising of children.

Ray Briggs
children? Well, she is sometimes called the conservative feminist. She thought women should have different roles from men and they should cultivate feminine virtues,

Josh Landy
Feminine virtues, doesn’t that idea put her in bad company. Floresta was fairly well known for attacking enlightenment philosopher John Jacques Rousseau, for example, that guy was all about feminine virtues right? I mean, I know Floresta’s position isn’t exactly the same as Rousseau’s but still, what makes her version any better than his version.

Ray Briggs
Please, Rousseau was awful. He said women should be educated to please men, he says, to be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him and manhood to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy. These are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught when she is still young.

Josh Landy
And what’s your problem with that? Okay, yeah, that’s pretty troubling. But I still don’t see how Floresta entirely escaped some version of this. She’s saying, women have special duties, including things like self-sacrifice. I mean, that may not be as loopy as Rousseau, but its fair to women?

Ray Briggs
Well Floresta thinks is good for women, it makes them morally better than men? Wouldn’t you want to be morally superior?

Josh Landy
At the cost of self-abnegation, it just seems like a high price to pay, right? I mean, on that logic, the most virtuous people around would be people with no freedom at all.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and that’s what she thought. In one of her essays. She talked about an African man who was forced into slavery, and she said he was spiritually superior to his captors.

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s inspiring in some ways, but it still leaves me with a worry. Why can’t we have freedom and virtue both at once?

Ray Briggs
That is ultimately what floresta wanted. She believed in indigenous rights and in the abolition of slavery. And she thought virtue would absolutely survive in a world of universal freedom.

Josh Landy
Look, I want that too. I just don’t quite see yet how all the parts of Floresta’s philosophy fit together.

Ray Briggs
Well maybe our guest will help you. It’s Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Josh Landy
But first we’ll take a little look into Floresta’s historical context, we sent our roving philosophical reporter Mary Catherine O’Connor, to find out what was happening in 19th century Brazil. She files this report.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

We often think of things getting lost in translation. But back in 1995, a historian found something in translation that had been hiding in plain sight for 163 years.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

My name is Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke, and I’m a research associate at the Law Center of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

One of the people Pallares Burke has studied is Nísia Floresta, a Brazilian intellectual born in 1810.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Nísia Floresta claimed to be the first feminist in the country, and perhaps in South America. She certainly participated in the debates of the time about central issues, such as women’s education, women’s rights, slavery.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

We know that floresta had a difficult early life, she either entered freely or was forced into a short-lived marriage at age 13. And then, when she was 17, she suffered the loss of her father who was murdered. She may have had some education but was likely self taught.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Achieving a success that was not expected in a patriarchal and conservative country like Brazil.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

And Floresta was long associated with philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, not just because of their similar stances on women’s rights, but because of translation.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

In 1832 she published what was presented as the translation of a very progressive book by the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Except that’s not actually what Floresta had published, as Pallares Burke discovered.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

It all started with my interest in the circulation of ideas. I decided to put the two texts together, the so-called that was presented as the free translation of Mary Wollstonecraft with the actual text of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Pallares Burke wanted to see how they differed, because Floresta was believed to have made a loose translation of Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. But she discovered that Floresta had actually made a direct translation of a different feminist text—and in some ways, a more radical one—by someone who wrote under the pseudonym “Sophia, a person of quality.” Pallares Burke was excited to share this news beyond her academic circles.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

I thought it was going to be the beginning of a very interesting intellectual discussion.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

But she got a chilly reception to an article she wrote for a newspaper in northern Brazil, where Floresta was born.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

And it was a disaster. To my sadness, to my surprise, the Secretary of Culture of the Rio do Norte wrote to the newspaper saying that I had offended her memory.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

What’s worse, she says is that even 30 years since her discovery, the idea that Floresta had translated Wollstonecraft is still being repeated, even by some Brazilian teachers. Plus, Pallares Burke thinks that narrow focus obscures Floresta as a larger contributor to social discourse in post colonial Brazil.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Such as the situation of the indigenous population, the African slaves, and Republicanism.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Floresta was also an educator and an author of many books of her own. She was outspoken and unconventional. We may never learn whether she knowingly deceived readers of her translation. But perhaps the bigger takeaway is that some things are unknowable.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

There is a very interesting art historian, Ernest Gombrich, He says history, both collective history and individual history, are like a Swiss cheese—full of holes—that the best research carried out by the best historian cannot really fill.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

For Philosophy Talk, I’m Mary Catherine O’Connor.

Josh Landy

Thanks for that super interesting report, Mary Catherine. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about the philosophy of Nísia Floresta.

Ray Briggs

We’re joined now by Nastassja Pugliese. She’s Professor of Philosophy and Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and author of the Cambridge elements volume on Nísia Floresta. Nastassja, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nastassja Pugliese

Hi, thank you for having me.

Josh Landy

It’s great to have you on the program. Tell us, Nastasja, how did you first get interested in Nísia Floresta?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, you know, my thought is I’m really moved by symbols and analogies, and I love a good metaphor. And when I first saw the full pseudonym of Nisa floresta, which is Nisa Foresta Brasileira Augusta. I was like, what is this Brazilian Florest, what is this distinguisdly Brazilian about? So, and actually this immediately, maybe recall Antonio Candido’s famous dictum, he’s a very famous historian of Brazilian literature. And he says very unfortunately, that Brazilian literature is a secondary branch of the Portuguese literature, which is the second rate bush in The Great Garden of Muses. So this dictum always bothered me and all of a sudden I kind of had with Floresta in front of me, not just a twig or shrub, but a whole Floresta, a whole forest to investigate. So it was eye opening, heartwarming, and I had this sense of civic duty that impelled me to study her. So it was actually a good transformation of my view of philosophy and the history of philosophy.

Ray Briggs

Oh, that’s great. So earlier, Josh and I were remarking that Floresta was a translator. And while she didn’t actually translate Wollstonecraft, she had a lot in common with Wollstonecraft philosophically. Can you tell us more about what they had in common?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, I usually say that Floresta has been characterized as a resilient Wollstonecraft for the wrong and the right reasons. So, she did not have a direct influence on Floresta. It was basically indirect. The main thing that they had in common is that both wanted to open space for women in the social sphere and also value the private sphere that they were in. And they also had its common enemies in Jacques Rousseau. So, both Floresta and Wollstonecraft were thinking about education as a tool for advancing women’s rights. So, I think that’s basically where they are thinking together, although they did not have exactly the same sense of, of what virtue is. And we’re not actually defending the the same view of virtue for women.

Josh Landy

Well, any enemy of Jean Jacques Rousseau is a friend of mine. I wonder about one other connection there might be between Nisa floresta, and Wollstonecraft and also Margaret Cavendish, we’ve done shows on both of those, if I understand correctly, all three of these thinkers point among other things to the tendency of this male dominated society to cause women to focus on the wrong things. They cause women instead of focusing on education, and direct contributions to public debates and so on, instead to waste their time thinking about jewelry, and dresses and so on. Does that Is that does that seem right as a characterization of part of Nísia Floresta’s thought,

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh, that’s right. Definitely. Floresta is going against the feel that women should be educated to please men and to please others, and take care only of their own looks and of their own bodies. So, she’s actually against doing physical interventions in order to become more pleasing to men who sees interest. She’s interested in the intellectual education of women. She thinks that it is this inequality that we see among men and women in society, is due to the fact that women were prevented from engaging in the intellectual sphere that is necessary for their participation in the public sphere. So, the first step for the public participation of women as governors in the military shift in defense that women could be in the military if they want. The first step is actually to take care of our own intellectual capacities and advance our learning.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re discussing the life and thoughts of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Ray Briggs

Should feminists be paying more attention to indigenous rights? What about the rights of children? Was Nisa floresta conservative or ahead of her time?

Josh Landy

Bringing up brilliant Brazilians—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Maria Bethânia and “Carcará,” a song about economic migration in Brazil—a popular theme in Foro music. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the philosophy of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Josh Landy

It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, which is generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs

Got questions about this groundbreaking South American thinker? email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy

So Nastassja, before the break, you were telling us that there’s an interesting difference between Floresta and Wollstonecraft when it comes to the definition of virtue. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, so Wollstonecraft defended the difference between private virtues and public virtues. And for Floresta, she was sort of recognizing the public aspects of the private virtues. And we can actually find two moments in her theory of virtue. The one that starts on her translation of the feminist pamphlets, and then another one that we can find in writing such Women. In the first moment of her ideas of virtue, she is defending the universality of intellectual virtues, meaning that both men and women have the capacity to think and to know. And the argumentative strategy that she develops involves describing how male dominance over women is pervasive, making them Blackstein for thinking, and then they see themselves as intellectually inferior. But actually, that’s, that’s not the case. But at the end, what she’s arguing in this first moment of her theory of virtue is that women are more eloquent than men. Because if women do not have the legal structure to occupy the social space, if they do not have the advantages of having the rights to occupy the public space, and if they’re being able to convince men that they have the ability to occupy the public space, this means that they’re more eloquent than men, because they are soon becoming able to occupy the space, even if they do not have the advantages of the lobby on their side.

Josh Landy

She has that great line, right? Women can persuade what they pleased without the help of laws, which is, it’s such a great argument for women’s superiority and eloquence, if I understand correctly, she’s also claiming that women have a superiority in the domain of generosity, self denial care, is that is that correct too?

Nastassja Pugliese

Perfectly that’s the second moment of her theory of virtue, when she gets a little bit more detached from the influence of the social Cartesianism of the book that she translated.

Ray Briggs

Social Cartesianism—helped me out.

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, it’s just the idea of applying to the reading of the social structures of society, the principles of Cartesian philosophy, such as the Cartesian Dualism, that the mind is different from the body. And, for example, that the idea that you have to question everything before you accept them as true. So that’s the tradition of social Cartesianism. And she’s sort of she can be read as being part of as, or at least dialoguing or criticizing this tradition. But when she’s writing her own philosophy, kind of getting detached a little bit or moving away from social Cartesianism, she is defending the idea that there are properly female virtues. And I think that here, we should read for us with a little bit of generosity of ourselves, because she has a specific audience, which is 19th century Brazilian reader readers, which are actually the aristocracy of resilient society in the 19th century. So she she wanted to convince these people that house work, the domestic work, that caring for children and breastfeeding, and being the head of the household, is a virtue is actually a civic, a way to contribute to society. Right. So she wants to highlight the fact that the work that women do, not that what what they should do, she’s not talking about normativity here or what they should do, but she’s talking about what they are doing and how we can actually value this labor. And then by doing that she’s elevating these virtues that usually attributed to women like self sacrifice, generosity, of course, she’s a Christian philosophy. She’s very Catholic. So she was actually here embracing your whole ethics of care that comes from the Catholic tradition. So she thinks that women should be moderated and not overestimate their capacities because she does think that this is part of a strategy of for women, that women have to entertain social relationships. So moderation is actually a strategy. It’s not that you should self sacrifice and erase yourself. But she’s actually recognizing, pointing out the now see you in a way that motherhood involves self sacrificing, and this should be valued.

Ray Briggs

So this is super interesting, because I feel like there’s a kind of deep critique of Cartesianism here, where the social Cartesianism, as you said, starts from this assumption that everybody is the same and has the same capacities. But then we have this observation that women in Floresta’s society, are just getting a bunch of different like opportunities and like denial of opportunities to grow their capacities, so that even if they start off the same as men, they’re going to end up different. Do you think this is like a fatal challenge to social Cartesianism? How should I understand it more like in its philosophical context?

Nastassja Pugliese

I think that it is the perfect place to make this critique because she’s experiencing the noxious effects of colonialism. We are talking about a moment where Brazil has just started to live as an independent nation and nation independent from Portugal. So, in this sense, she is criticizing the heritage, the colonial heritage, the European heritage, and the way that Brazilians have been educated from the moment that the European colonizers arrived here to that point on. So, she’s using the language of Europeans as tyrannical oppressors, as ambitious colonizers who caused suffering by barbaric means. So, she’s looking at those ideas of the Enlightenment because of course, Brazil was not alienated from the the intellectual developments of Europe because there was a great traffic of ideas and books in the Atlantic Ocean, right? So, they were reading all the major exemplars or the major philosophers of the Enlightenment. But at the same time that these Europeans had these great ideas, these ideas were not being implemented in the colonies. So that’s where the critique of Cartesianism comes into play. If there is an ethic equality it is an actual givenness. It’s naturally given. Well, it’s not being frankly observed in the colonies.

Ray Briggs

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about 19th century Brazilian philosopher Nísia floresta, when Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, so Nastasia This is so interesting, sort of the clash between these Enlightenment ideals that Floresta is getting from Europe, and how they’re failing to play out in the Brazilian context she’s in and she, she seems much more aware that not all of the women in her world are like upper class white women that I think a lot of Europeans were thinking around the same time. Like why do you think that she has this sort of attention to like, enslaved women and indigenous women that we kind of often see not happening?

Nastassja Pugliese

Since Floresta is someone who is thinking about the ideas, the philosophical foundations that are behind the construction of a nation that theoretically so she is not like the social contract theorist who heard about an A noble savage or as a group, a group of indigenous nations that were living in an idyllic place in a faraway land in the terra incognita. She’s actually there. She’s seeing these people, she’s seeing enslaved black women and enslaved black man, she’s seeing Indigenous women and Indigenous men and indigenous indigenous child, and she’s seeing the way that resilience or those that are living and inhabiting Brazil actually treat the foreign, it’s making them more easily incorporated to the culture then those were actually they’re creating the country. Right. So she’s actually someone who is thinking in practical terms and taking her own experience as an object of thoughts. It’s an object of reflection. Yeah.

Josh Landy

And she’s thinking broadly about freedom and oppression, right? Because obviously, she’s a feminist. She’s pushing for the equality of women. But she’s also opposed to slavery. She’s opposed to racism. She’s opposed to colonization. And one of the things that fascinated me, if I’m understanding correctly, is that she’s one of the earliest thinkers to push the argument that injustice isn’t just bad for the disadvantaged. It’s bad for everyone. Can you say a little bit about that?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah. And that’s a great contribution of Floresta, I think. So, I want to go a little bit back in time because for that. So, she’s not defending freedom in the same way that others are defending freedom as, as the core of every civi right, she’s actually realizing, and this is very important, that if equality comes first, you have to be recognized as an equal in order to reclaim your social freedoms. So, what she’s doing with her critique of colonialism is actually criticizing a mechanism that she’s observing, which is people are being are suffering pain, right. So, inequality causes suffering. And inequality prevents the oppressed from experiencing their own virtues and capacities, right. So the instrumentalisation of the suffering is, is a problem because it actually is reproduced as a habit in the nation. So, if, for example, you have in your household, we are talking about 19th century Brazilian households, if you have enslaved people inside your household and you treat them with violence, you’re actually teaching your child that violence is okay. That it actually can ensure treat someone who is inside rebels with violence. So, she, she thinks stop the psychological humiliation that we see and colonization. And the physical punishment is detrimental for the social understanding of dignity, and for equality. So, if we want a society based on freedom, we need to stop this mechanism of producing pain in others.

Ray Briggs

So, this brings me to a thing that you’ve said about foresters, ideas about education, where I think sometimes you read like European thinkers from around this period. And they think like education is something that you build a school to do. And then you get like, take young women, and you would send them off to the school to get educated, but she’s thinking of it in this much more holistic way, where part of it takes place kind of in your house when you’re a kid, just watching how people interact with each other. So, was like, how did that insight kind of affect the people who read her or thought about her ideas and read after her?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, so first up, influenced a lot of other women who actually took ownership of their own intellect and started to write about women’s rights in the public sphere, and the print culture of the 19th century in Brazil. So, what was it and they were also engaging in the public sphere as educators, usually they were women were school directors, just like Floresta. So, for us, that is thinking about education as what you do inside a school, but not limited to what you do inside the school because she thinks that the school is not, is alone cannot do the work that the whole society is supposed to, to, to do. So, she thinks of education, as in conversely, what is socially learned through all kinds of interactions with others that we have in the social environment. So education is what happens in the church. It’s what happens in the commerce when you’re going to to buy something at the local shop. And also, what do you do when you are inside the school learning, learning content, historical content?

Josh Landy

So, does this bring us back to something you were saying earlier about the political potential of the private? Because you have obviously, she’s talking a lot about mothers educating their children, we might think of also a bit of both parents. But is this is this idea that education isn’t just something that happens in a school, it also happens out there in the social world, and very much happens in the household, with parents bringing up their kids is this aversion and is this an example of the hidden power that women have even in this very patriarchal society?

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh yeah—women as mothers she’s… So, she Floresta is, is not exactly a conservative feminist. She, she, she would say that she’s not even a feminist because she’s not willing to. She’s not interested in being part of a political party that actually was constructed right after for Floresta’s death; right right after she passed away. The first feminist party of Brazil was constructed by someone who was influenced by Floresta. But she herself was interested in the education of women, she wanted to think about curriculum, and schools and how we should construct like social relations, that gives back the dignity of those people who have been stripped out of their dignity through the process of colonization. So women, as mothers, they have this sort of natural role of being caretakers, and the first educators and the first examples of virtue of moral action for their, their kids. And their kids, you know, would be future citizens of Brazil. So that that was the way that she would connect. women as mothers as the primary caretakers, the primary educators, the primary moral exemplars with women, the political role of women, when they become able to occupy the public sphere. So, in the sense, they have a lot to say when they become university professors and governors.

Ray Briggs

So this kind of makes me curious about like big concepts like conservative or feminist and how you even apply them in this case, because it sort of seems like what she’s doing is making a bunch of practical interventions like she sees ways that the society around her is broken. And they’re kind of like obvious when you’re looking at the like, imagine if you’re looking at the face of like an enslaved person who’s being hurt in your home, you can just see that there’s a problem here. So one way we could understand floresta is not as having really a grand philosophical, like theoretical project, but it’s having a very practical set of projects that she’s just using the best available tools for? Do you think that that’s a good description of her? Do you think that’s selling her short?

Nastassja Pugliese

Now, I think that’s an interesting description. It’s not false at all, because she is a practical philosopher. And we should also think of her as someone who was self-educated. So when we think about great 19th century philosophers, they usually were either part of the European elite, or they were inside universities. So they had some training that for us or herself didn’t have, so we shouldn’t expect from her great Treaties, right? So she is actually a practical philosopher, and she wants to induce practical transformations in the country. So I would just say that when we study, great thinkers from the past, we should be careful with anachronism. So what is an anachronism is this expectation of seeing the answers for our own contemporary questions on their writings? So we shouldn’t be afraid of not expecting from Floresta or from any other, what we would call proto-feminist. So those women who are actually paving the way for feminism as an organized movement to come about. So they were actually constructing the foundations, they were paving the way they are not in a position to answer the practical questions that today we have, although they can and they certainly do inspire us with their very interesting and Enlightenment ideas about questions that today we have, like, for example, should women breastfeed.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re exploring the life and thoughts of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Ray Briggs

What kind of village does it take to raise a post colonial child? How do you educate everyone without erasing anyone’s culture? Can a 19th century thinker like Nísia Floresta help 21st century citizens live better lives?

Josh Landy

Education without discrimination? Plus, commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher—when philosophy taught continues?

Brazilian singer Mariana Aydar and a samba song called “Minha Missão” — “My Mission.” I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray brakes our guest is Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. And we’re thinking about 19th century Brazilian philosopher Nísia Floresta.

Josh Landy

It’s part of our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in this series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women.

Ray Briggs

So Nastassja, we were just talking about all the inspiration that Nísia Floresta’s work can give us today. So, what’s one thing that you think that Nísia Floresta should inspire us to do now?

Nastassja Pugliese

So I think that Floresta was a thinker of the notion the concept of citizenship. So what it is to be recognized as a citizen in a nation, and I think this is a very important question for a global world, right. And she is someone who is highlighting the fact that the first owners of the Brazilian land were actually stripped away from their lands by the colonizer. So Brazil, actually is a nation that starts by moving away, the rightful owners of the land from their own land. So what to do with that. She is looking at the indigenous nations and say, there should be a way to recognize indigenous nations as citizens of Brazil, because they are like a founding stone of Brazilian nation. And then she’s thinking about what to do. And one of the things that she’s claiming that we should is absorbed in our educational goals, is to see the habits of indigenous Brazilian women, and incorporate as part of the Brazilian habits, the habits of Brazilian women in general, for example, breastfeeding one’s child. So that I think is the first and foremost suggestion that she gives. But then after Floresta is done, we see for Linda Tao, through her example, she is willing to include indigenous nations as citizens of Brazil, by teaching them how to read and write because in this in this way, they would have the capacity to vote and reclaim their own rights within the civil laws and the civil structure that was already built. So now we have this problem of how today we should look to indigenous schools and our interactions with indigenous people in the indigenous reserves that were created. And hey, one of the indigenous posts of the early 18th century and 20th century in Brazil was actually named after Floresta.

Ray Briggs

So I have some questions about this. I mean, particularly involving the Catholic Church, which in its efforts to educate indigenous people was pretty brutal, I would say and terrible. So I think one of my worries about this is sort of how to educate indigenous people where it’s not just taking away their culture and replacing it with some European culture that you think is better. What might somebody Floresta inspired who is concerned about this have to say?

Nastassja Pugliese

That’s a very delicate issue. Because yes, we cannot deny the violence that indigenous suffered from the Catholic Church within the ‘Juntas.’ But at the same time, the Juntas does were this intersection between their culture and the law, right. So we can see examples of Indigenous women’s who had been held captive, and they were able to reclaim their freedom by going to the Juntas does and requiring their freedom by means of juridical legal process. And they were these processes, these legal processes were actually judged and they were protected by the law. Another example is Antonio Vieira, who actually wrote the first dictionary of the Portuguese language. And this was a way of solidifying the territorial unity of Brazilian lands because Portuguese was spoken from the north to the south of Brazil and the indigenous were actually starting to learn the language of the oppressor, in fight against them. So I know that if we were to go back in time, things should have been done differently. But the thing is that they were done this way. So what we can learn today from this fact that our civilization is still trying to strip indigenous nations from their own lands, they’re still on the peril of losing their reserves and their richness due to, you know, economic interest in in their demarcated lands. So what are we going to do now, in order to protect their land? And by using Floresta’s own view of education, do good to them in a way that the whole society can actually profit from this good.

Josh Landy

Yeah, that’s a really that’s a great way of putting it and, and there are other things I take it that that we could learn from floresta for today, perhaps slightly broader questions about her framework around education. I mean, the abolition of corporal punishment in schools seems like a good idea. It’s largely been adopted. I mean, when I was growing up, that was still a thing, unfortunately, but not anymore. Another thing I really like, and her way of thinking about it is that education is really, for virtue, it’s for morality, it’s not to make money. And that will be a lovely thing to see adopted in schools and universities. I want to ask a difficult question that I have, which is about modes of instruction, because Floresta seems to be suggesting that, although, you know, she sides with Rene Descartes and saying that men and women are fundamentally the same, because we’re ultimately minds. And, you know, there’s nothing gendered about minds, she seems to call for different instruction for men and women. Can you say something about that, and whether that’s, that’s a model we should be borrowing today or should not be borrowing today?

Nastassja Pugliese

So with respect to money, I think that was hinted at before. The problem is with access, right, so she is asking us to become to observe moderation. And with that, I will connect with your question because Floresta has a school for girls. So in 19th century, Brazil, the first educational law is from the 15th of October from 1827, propagated by the Emperor and in that curriculum on that educational law, we had a separation of school for boys and schools for girls. And they have different curriculum, it’s impressive. So on that law, we can see that women were, should not be allowed to learn more than the four operations of arithmetic because it will be useless to their upbringing. So there’s this idea of behind the curriculum of the school for girls that they should be educated for something useful, right? So in one sense, the context in which Floresta is thinking is a context where there is a separation, not only with respect to the gender of the schools, but a separation of the curriculum. And she is not interested in thinking about men’s education, because they already have it all. She’s she’s interested in forming future female citizens that are actually empowered and are able to help build a nation that is autonomous, self sufficient, and aware of its own dignity.

Ray Briggs

So this actually kind of raises a question that the view that she’s responding to says, well, women should only be educated for useful things. But then there’s this question like useful for what and I think that floresta has a different idea of useful from a lot of her contemporaries, which have these really narrow pictures of what women’s roles can be. So maybe the women right now around here are not being allowed to participate in democratic society as much as they could be. But that’s, that’s a contingent fact. So like, how should we even be thinking about a useful education? Like there are some things that aren’t practical if we have just a really narrow set of purposes, but then become practical, if we care about citizens ship in some broader sense?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, exactly. I think that the useful education is an education that is related with practical ability. So here in this context, we are talking about teaching someone how to knit and cook and carpentry. But nowadays, when we think of useful education, we do think about some knowledge that will allow us to perform as social function that will make us you know, be good citizens because we are doing our part. So it’s a little bit different. Because nowadays, the social division of labor is more complex to the point that those that have education, they are actually I mean, higher education, I mean, going to the universities, and so on and so forth. They develop intellectual virtue. So it’s part of the labor, the intellectual, it’s part of, you know, the intellectual labor is, is still labor, right. But at that time, we were talking about something much more mundane. Like being able to women being able to take care of the economy of the household. So nowadays, women have much more space to occupy in the public sphere. But still, I think that the fact that we are still in the need of talking about women’s rights, just is an indication that there’s still a long way to go.

Josh Landy

Well you have certainly developed our intellectual virtue today. Nastassja, thank you so much for joining us.

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh, thank you.

Josh Landy

Our guest has been Nastassja Pugliese, professor of philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and author of the Cambridge elements volume on Nísia Floresta. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs

I’ve just really enjoyed the way that talking about Nísia Floresta has expanded what I’m thinking of education as being like, where education happens everywhere and what it’s for, like anything you could possibly do with it. So I think that she’s much more on the side of ahead of her time than conserving sort of old things used to working with old tools.

Josh Landy

Is there even education on the radio?

Ray Briggs

I hope so!

Josh Landy

We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and liberate your mind in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs

And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy

Now, a man who talks like a Brazilian miles an hour—It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales

Ian Shoales… Proto feminist Nísia Floresta was born in Papary, in what was soon to become the independent nation of Brazil, in 1810. Not much is known about her childhood, but she was self taught to an amazing degree, learning English, Portuguese, French, Italian, even as revolts and unrest swirled around her. She was married off at 13, but it did not take and she returned to the shelter of her family. Her father, a lawyer, was assassinated, in 1828 at the order of a powerful member of the state. Floresta married, and had two children, at which time her husband died. She began teaching to support herself. And also writing. Unusually, she would publish in newspapers, which did much to spread her ideas. She happened to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, and was so taken by it, she translated it into Portuguese, rather freely, and attached her own thoughts to the matter, giving herself and her ideas a British stamp of approval, as it were. She was pretty unstoppable. She started her own school. Not just a school a college, for women. A real college too, no home ec here, teaching the classics and all the other things the boys learn. She resigned as director after twenty years and traveled to Europe with her daughter. There she met Victor Hugo and August Comte, then returned to write more newspaper articles, which were compiled into one volume. And she wrote two other books, and volunteered as a nurse during a cholera epidemic in Rio, before returning to Europe in 1856, only returning to Brazil in 1872, where she remained until her death in 1885. She was the first in Brazil to champion women’s rights, and also the rights of Native Americans, and slaves. Some modern readers of her life and work have wondered how radical she really was because she did not call for the torching of the patriarchy, or even that there WAS a patriarchy, unless you consider paternalism its equivalent. Instead, perhaps influenced by Comte, she seemed to believe in change from within. After all, she and everybody had seen what happens with revolutions, in France anyway. Guillotines and then Bonaparte. Let’s be sensible ladies! Her idea being it seems, that when we are all equally educated, paternalism loses its soft power, and we can all, guys and gals alike, mansplain ourselves into an incremental utopia. As she wrote, “…as a paternal government is the most proper one to make people happy, and a properly cultivated intelligence of those nations is the best incentive for them to fulfill their duties, so too is the moral education the safest guide to women.” She may have meant this ironically, who knows, but maybe it is just safety first. She ought to know, having been being a child bride and having a parent shot. Society’s much easier to change than the ideological underpinnings of a nation. “The lack of a good education is the primary cause that contributes to women to lose their north, which is nothing else but morality, in the midst of the corruption of society.” Men, she seems to say, “Always seeking to hold their intelligence, to weaken their senses, they make women unable to occupy…the care of purifying their heart; women would never …achieve such a thing if their intelligence remains without culture.” So fellas, what do you say, give the gals a break! It’s just culture. We know you can live without it. It’s harder for women, you know? I gotta go.

Josh Landy

Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco. Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs

Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The senior producer is Devin Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy

Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs

Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy

And from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates. Support for this episode, and all the episodes in our “Wise Women” series, comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs

The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy

Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs

And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy

And thank you for thinking.Josh Landy

Everybody deserves an education. But what exactly should they learn?

Ray Briggs

What could it mean to be a conservative feminist?

Josh Landy

Are women the same as men—or better?

Ray Briggs

Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy

…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs

And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy

Continuing conversations that began at the philosophers’ corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs

Today it’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re thinking about the life and thought of Nísia Floresta.

Josh Landy

She is often called the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft because people thought her first book was a translation of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Ray Briggs

Yeah, even though we now know she was really translating a political pamphlet by someone who wrote under the name Sophia.

Josh Landy

Yeah, but she does have some things in common with Wollstonecraft, like women’s rights, for example.

Ray Briggs

Yes. Just like Wollstonecraft she called for women to have the same rights as men. That was part of her commitment to Cartesian Dualism.

Josh Landy

Yeah, if I understand correctly, she’s basically following Descartes and thinking that the soul is totally separate from the body. So, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a man’s body or a woman’s body or whatever, your soul has the same capacities. Women are just as smart and as competent as men. So why shouldn’t they have the right to vote? To run for office to contribute to public debates?

Ray Briggs

Exactly. And to do that they need to be educated.

Josh Landy

Which is something Floresta had a lot to say about. One of her most interesting thoughts, in my view, is that education isn’t just a matter of teachers in schools.

Ray Briggs

Right. It also includes how you bring up your kids when floresta was writing. Brazil still had slavery, and people made slaves raise their children for them. Floresta objected to this. She strongly opposed slavery, and she said mothers should raise their own children.

Josh Landy

Mothers, okay—but what about fathers?

Ray Briggs

Well shouldn’t have a lot to say about them.

Josh Landy

I don’t get it, Ray. You and I agreed a moment ago that floresta is calling for the equality of men and women. So why shouldn’t she want them to be equal partners in the raising of children.

Ray Briggs

children? Well, she is sometimes called the conservative feminist. She thought women should have different roles from men and they should cultivate feminine virtues,

Josh Landy

Feminine virtues, doesn’t that idea put her in bad company. Floresta was fairly well known for attacking enlightenment philosopher John Jacques Rousseau, for example, that guy was all about feminine virtues right? I mean, I know Floresta’s position isn’t exactly the same as Rousseau’s but still, what makes her version any better than his version.

Ray Briggs

Please, Rousseau was awful. He said women should be educated to please men, he says, to be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him and manhood to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy. These are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught when she is still young.

Josh Landy

And what’s your problem with that? Okay, yeah, that’s pretty troubling. But I still don’t see how Floresta entirely escaped some version of this. She’s saying, women have special duties, including things like self-sacrifice. I mean, that may not be as loopy as Rousseau, but its fair to women?

Ray Briggs

Well Floresta thinks is good for women, it makes them morally better than men? Wouldn’t you want to be morally superior?

Josh Landy

At the cost of self-abnegation, it just seems like a high price to pay, right? I mean, on that logic, the most virtuous people around would be people with no freedom at all.

Ray Briggs

Yeah, and that’s what she thought. In one of her essays. She talked about an African man who was forced into slavery, and she said he was spiritually superior to his captors.

Josh Landy

I mean, that’s inspiring in some ways, but it still leaves me with a worry. Why can’t we have freedom and virtue both at once?

Ray Briggs

That is ultimately what floresta wanted. She believed in indigenous rights and in the abolition of slavery. And she thought virtue would absolutely survive in a world of universal freedom.

Josh Landy

Look, I want that too. I just don’t quite see yet how all the parts of fluoresces philosophy fit together,

Ray Briggs

Well maybe our guest will help you. It’s Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Josh Landy

But first we’ll take a little look into Floresta’s historical context, we sent our roving philosophical reporter Mary Catherine O’Connor, to find out what was happening in 19th century Brazil. She files this report.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

We often think of things getting lost in translation. But back in 1995, a historian found something in translation that had been hiding in plain sight for 163 years.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

My name is Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke, and I’m a research associate at the Law Center of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

One of the people Pallares Burke has studied is Nísia Floresta, a Brazilian intellectual born in 1810.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Nísia Floresta claimed to be the first feminist in the country, and perhaps in South America. She certainly participated in the debates of the time about central issues, such as women’s education, women’s rights, slavery.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

We know that floresta had a difficult early life, she either entered freely or was forced into a short-lived marriage at age 13. And then, when she was 17, she suffered the loss of her father who was murdered. She may have had some education but was likely self taught.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Achieving a success that was not expected in a patriarchal and conservative country like Brazil.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

And Floresta was long associated with philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, not just because of their similar stances on women’s rights, but because of translation.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

In 1832 she published what was presented as the translation of a very progressive book by the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Except that’s not actually what Floresta had published, as Pallares Burke discovered.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

It all started with my interest in the circulation of ideas. I decided to put the two texts together, the so-called that was presented as the free translation of Mary Wollstonecraft with the actual text of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Pallares Burke wanted to see how they differed, because Floresta was believed to have made a loose translation of Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. But she discovered that Floresta had actually made a direct translation of a different feminist text—and in some ways, a more radical one—by someone who wrote under the pseudonym “Sophia, a person of quality.” Pallares Burke was excited to share this news beyond her academic circles.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

I thought it was going to be the beginning of a very interesting intellectual discussion.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

But she got a chilly reception to an article she wrote for a newspaper in northern Brazil, where Floresta was born.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

And it was a disaster. To my sadness, to my surprise, the Secretary of Culture of the Rio do Norte wrote to the newspaper saying that I had offended her memory.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

What’s worse, she says is that even 30 years since her discovery, the idea that Floresta had translated Wollstonecraft is still being repeated, even by some Brazilian teachers. Plus, Pallares Burke thinks that narrow focus obscures Floresta as a larger contributor to social discourse in post colonial Brazil.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

Such as the situation of the indigenous population, the African slaves, and Republicanism.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

Floresta was also an educator and an author of many books of her own. She was outspoken and unconventional. We may never learn whether she knowingly deceived readers of her translation. But perhaps the bigger takeaway is that some things are unknowable.

Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares Burke

There is a very interesting art historian, Ernest Gombrich, He says history, both collective history and individual history, are like a Swiss cheese—full of holes—that the best research carried out by the best historian cannot really fill.

Mary Catherine O’Connor

For Philosophy Talk, I’m Mary Catherine O’Connor.

Josh Landy

Thanks for that super interesting report, Mary Catherine. I’m Josh Landy, with me is my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about the philosophy of Nísia Floresta.

Ray Briggs

We’re joined now by Nastassja Pugliese. She’s Professor of Philosophy and Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and author of the Cambridge elements volume on Nísia Floresta. Nastassja, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nastassja Pugliese

Hi, thank you for having me.

Josh Landy

It’s great to have you on the program. Tell us, Nastasja, how did you first get interested in Nísia Floresta?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, you know, my thought is I’m really moved by symbols and analogies, and I love a good metaphor. And when I first saw the full pseudonym of Nisa floresta, which is Nisa Foresta Brasileira Augusta. I was like, what is this Brazilian Florest, what is this distinguisdly Brazilian about? So, and actually this immediately, maybe recall Antonio Candido’s famous dictum, he’s a very famous historian of Brazilian literature. And he says very unfortunately, that Brazilian literature is a secondary branch of the Portuguese literature, which is the second rate bush in The Great Garden of Muses. So this dictum always bothered me and all of a sudden I kind of had with Floresta in front of me, not just a twig or shrub, but a whole Floresta, a whole forest to investigate. So it was eye opening, heartwarming, and I had this sense of civic duty that impelled me to study her. So it was actually a good transformation of my view of philosophy and the history of philosophy.

Ray Briggs

Oh, that’s great. So earlier, Josh and I were remarking that Floresta was a translator. And while she didn’t actually translate Wollstonecraft, she had a lot in common with Wollstonecraft philosophically. Can you tell us more about what they had in common?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, I usually say that Floresta has been characterized as a resilient Wollstonecraft for the wrong and the right reasons. So, she did not have a direct influence on Floresta. It was basically indirect. The main thing that they had in common is that both wanted to open space for women in the social sphere and also value the private sphere that they were in. And they also had its common enemies in Jacques Rousseau. So, both Floresta and Wollstonecraft were thinking about education as a tool for advancing women’s rights. So, I think that’s basically where they are thinking together, although they did not have exactly the same sense of, of what virtue is. And we’re not actually defending the the same view of virtue for women.

Josh Landy

Well, any enemy of Jean Jacques Rousseau is a friend of mine. I wonder about one other connection there might be between Nisa floresta, and Wollstonecraft and also Margaret Cavendish, we’ve done shows on both of those, if I understand correctly, all three of these thinkers point among other things to the tendency of this male dominated society to cause women to focus on the wrong things. They cause women instead of focusing on education, and direct contributions to public debates and so on, instead to waste their time thinking about jewelry, and dresses and so on. Does that Is that does that seem right as a characterization of part of Nísia Floresta’s thought,

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh, that’s right. Definitely. Floresta is going against the feel that women should be educated to please men and to please others, and take care only of their own looks and of their own bodies. So, she’s actually against doing physical interventions in order to become more pleasing to men who sees interest. She’s interested in the intellectual education of women. She thinks that it is this inequality that we see among men and women in society, is due to the fact that women were prevented from engaging in the intellectual sphere that is necessary for their participation in the public sphere. So, the first step for the public participation of women as governors in the military shift in defense that women could be in the military if they want. The first step is actually to take care of our own intellectual capacities and advance our learning.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re discussing the life and thoughts of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Ray Briggs

Should feminists be paying more attention to indigenous rights? What about the rights of children? Was Nisa floresta conservative or ahead of her time?

Josh Landy

Bringing up brilliant Brazilians—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Maria Bethânia and “Carcará,” a song about economic migration in Brazil—a popular theme in Foro music. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the philosophy of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Josh Landy

It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, which is generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ray Briggs

Got questions about this groundbreaking South American thinker? email us at comments@philosophytalk.org. Or you can comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Josh Landy

So Nastassja, before the break, you were telling us that there’s an interesting difference between Floresta and Wollstonecraft when it comes to the definition of virtue. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, so Wollstonecraft defended the difference between private virtues and public virtues. And for Floresta, she was sort of recognizing the public aspects of the private virtues. And we can actually find two moments in her theory of virtue. The one that starts on her translation of the feminist pamphlets, and then another one that we can find in writing such Women. In the first moment of her ideas of virtue, she is defending the universality of intellectual virtues, meaning that both men and women have the capacity to think and to know. And the argumentative strategy that she develops involves describing how male dominance over women is pervasive, making them Blackstein for thinking, and then they see themselves as intellectually inferior. But actually, that’s, that’s not the case. But at the end, what she’s arguing in this first moment of her theory of virtue is that women are more eloquent than men. Because if women do not have the legal structure to occupy the social space, if they do not have the advantages of having the rights to occupy the public space, and if they’re being able to convince men that they have the ability to occupy the public space, this means that they’re more eloquent than men, because they are soon becoming able to occupy the space, even if they do not have the advantages of the lobby on their side.

Josh Landy

She has that great line, right? Women can persuade what they pleased without the help of laws, which is, it’s such a great argument for women’s superiority and eloquence, if I understand correctly, she’s also claiming that women have a superiority in the domain of generosity, self denial care, is that is that correct too?

Nastassja Pugliese

Perfectly that’s the second moment of her theory of virtue, when she gets a little bit more detached from the influence of the social Cartesianism of the book that she translated.

Ray Briggs

Social Cartesianism—helped me out.

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, it’s just the idea of applying to the reading of the social structures of society, the principles of Cartesian philosophy, such as the Cartesian Dualism, that the mind is different from the body. And, for example, that the idea that you have to question everything before you accept them as true. So that’s the tradition of social Cartesianism. And she’s sort of she can be read as being part of as, or at least dialoguing or criticizing this tradition. But when she’s writing her own philosophy, kind of getting detached a little bit or moving away from social Cartesianism, she is defending the idea that there are properly female virtues. And I think that here, we should read for us with a little bit of generosity of ourselves, because she has a specific audience, which is 19th century Brazilian reader readers, which are actually the aristocracy of resilient society in the 19th century. So she she wanted to convince these people that house work, the domestic work, that caring for children and breastfeeding, and being the head of the household, is a virtue is actually a civic, a way to contribute to society. Right. So she wants to highlight the fact that the work that women do, not that what what they should do, she’s not talking about normativity here or what they should do, but she’s talking about what they are doing and how we can actually value this labor. And then by doing that she’s elevating these virtues that usually attributed to women like self sacrifice, generosity, of course, she’s a Christian philosophy. She’s very Catholic. So she was actually here embracing your whole ethics of care that comes from the Catholic tradition. So she thinks that women should be moderated and not overestimate their capacities because she does think that this is part of a strategy of for women, that women have to entertain social relationships. So moderation is actually a strategy. It’s not that you should self sacrifice and erase yourself. But she’s actually recognizing, pointing out the now see you in a way that motherhood involves self sacrificing, and this should be valued.

Ray Briggs

So this is super interesting, because I feel like there’s a kind of deep critique of Cartesianism here, where the social Cartesianism, as you said, starts from this assumption that everybody is the same and has the same capacities. But then we have this observation that women in Floresta’s society, are just getting a bunch of different like opportunities and like denial of opportunities to grow their capacities, so that even if they start off the same as men, they’re going to end up different. Do you think this is like a fatal challenge to social Cartesianism? How should I understand it more like in its philosophical context?

Nastassja Pugliese

I think that it is the perfect place to make this critique because she’s experiencing the noxious effects of colonialism. We are talking about a moment where Brazil has just started to live as an independent nation and nation independent from Portugal. So, in this sense, she is criticizing the heritage, the colonial heritage, the European heritage, and the way that Brazilians have been educated from the moment that the European colonizers arrived here to that point on. So, she’s using the language of Europeans as tyrannical oppressors, as ambitious colonizers who caused suffering by barbaric means. So, she’s looking at those ideas of the Enlightenment because of course, Brazil was not alienated from the the intellectual developments of Europe because there was a great traffic of ideas and books in the Atlantic Ocean, right? So, they were reading all the major exemplars or the major philosophers of the Enlightenment. But at the same time that these Europeans had these great ideas, these ideas were not being implemented in the colonies. So that’s where the critique of Cartesianism comes into play. If there is an ethic equality it is an actual givenness. It’s naturally given. Well, it’s not being frankly observed in the colonies.

Ray Briggs

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about 19th century Brazilian philosopher Nísia floresta, when Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, so Nastasia This is so interesting, sort of the clash between these Enlightenment ideals that Floresta is getting from Europe, and how they’re failing to play out in the Brazilian context she’s in and she, she seems much more aware that not all of the women in her world are like upper class white women that I think a lot of Europeans were thinking around the same time. Like why do you think that she has this sort of attention to like, enslaved women and indigenous women that we kind of often see not happening?

Nastassja Pugliese

Since Floresta is someone who is thinking about the ideas, the philosophical foundations that are behind the construction of a nation that theoretically so she is not like the social contract theorist who heard about an A noble savage or as a group, a group of indigenous nations that were living in an idyllic place in a faraway land in the terra incognita. She’s actually there. She’s seeing these people, she’s seeing enslaved black women and enslaved black man, she’s seeing Indigenous women and Indigenous men and indigenous indigenous child, and she’s seeing the way that resilience or those that are living and inhabiting Brazil actually treat the foreign, it’s making them more easily incorporated to the culture then those were actually they’re creating the country. Right. So she’s actually someone who is thinking in practical terms and taking her own experience as an object of thoughts. It’s an object of reflection. Yeah.

Josh Landy

And she’s thinking broadly about freedom and oppression, right? Because obviously, she’s a feminist. She’s pushing for the equality of women. But she’s also opposed to slavery. She’s opposed to racism. She’s opposed to colonization. And one of the things that fascinated me, if I’m understanding correctly, is that she’s one of the earliest thinkers to push the argument that injustice isn’t just bad for the disadvantaged. It’s bad for everyone. Can you say a little bit about that?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah. And that’s a great contribution of Floresta, I think. So, I want to go a little bit back in time because for that. So, she’s not defending freedom in the same way that others are defending freedom as, as the core of every civi right, she’s actually realizing, and this is very important, that if equality comes first, you have to be recognized as an equal in order to reclaim your social freedoms. So, what she’s doing with her critique of colonialism is actually criticizing a mechanism that she’s observing, which is people are being are suffering pain, right. So, inequality causes suffering. And inequality prevents the oppressed from experiencing their own virtues and capacities, right. So the instrumentalisation of the suffering is, is a problem because it actually is reproduced as a habit in the nation. So, if, for example, you have in your household, we are talking about 19th century Brazilian households, if you have enslaved people inside your household and you treat them with violence, you’re actually teaching your child that violence is okay. That it actually can ensure treat someone who is inside rebels with violence. So, she, she thinks stop the psychological humiliation that we see and colonization. And the physical punishment is detrimental for the social understanding of dignity, and for equality. So, if we want a society based on freedom, we need to stop this mechanism of producing pain in others.

Ray Briggs

So, this brings me to a thing that you’ve said about foresters, ideas about education, where I think sometimes you read like European thinkers from around this period. And they think like education is something that you build a school to do. And then you get like, take young women, and you would send them off to the school to get educated, but she’s thinking of it in this much more holistic way, where part of it takes place kind of in your house when you’re a kid, just watching how people interact with each other. So, was like, how did that insight kind of affect the people who read her or thought about her ideas and read after her?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, so first up, influenced a lot of other women who actually took ownership of their own intellect and started to write about women’s rights in the public sphere, and the print culture of the 19th century in Brazil. So, what was it and they were also engaging in the public sphere as educators, usually they were women were school directors, just like Floresta. So, for us, that is thinking about education as what you do inside a school, but not limited to what you do inside the school because she thinks that the school is not, is alone cannot do the work that the whole society is supposed to, to, to do. So, she thinks of education, as in conversely, what is socially learned through all kinds of interactions with others that we have in the social environment. So education is what happens in the church. It’s what happens in the commerce when you’re going to to buy something at the local shop. And also, what do you do when you are inside the school learning, learning content, historical content?

Josh Landy

So, does this bring us back to something you were saying earlier about the political potential of the private? Because you have obviously, she’s talking a lot about mothers educating their children, we might think of also a bit of both parents. But is this is this idea that education isn’t just something that happens in a school, it also happens out there in the social world, and very much happens in the household, with parents bringing up their kids is this aversion and is this an example of the hidden power that women have even in this very patriarchal society?

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh yeah—women as mothers she’s… So, she Floresta is, is not exactly a conservative feminist. She, she, she would say that she’s not even a feminist because she’s not willing to. She’s not interested in being part of a political party that actually was constructed right after for Floresta’s death; right right after she passed away. The first feminist party of Brazil was constructed by someone who was influenced by Floresta. But she herself was interested in the education of women, she wanted to think about curriculum, and schools and how we should construct like social relations, that gives back the dignity of those people who have been stripped out of their dignity through the process of colonization. So women, as mothers, they have this sort of natural role of being caretakers, and the first educators and the first examples of virtue of moral action for their, their kids. And their kids, you know, would be future citizens of Brazil. So that that was the way that she would connect. women as mothers as the primary caretakers, the primary educators, the primary moral exemplars with women, the political role of women, when they become able to occupy the public sphere. So, in the sense, they have a lot to say when they become university professors and governors.

Ray Briggs

So this kind of makes me curious about like big concepts like conservative or feminist and how you even apply them in this case, because it sort of seems like what she’s doing is making a bunch of practical interventions like she sees ways that the society around her is broken. And they’re kind of like obvious when you’re looking at the like, imagine if you’re looking at the face of like an enslaved person who’s being hurt in your home, you can just see that there’s a problem here. So one way we could understand floresta is not as having really a grand philosophical, like theoretical project, but it’s having a very practical set of projects that she’s just using the best available tools for? Do you think that that’s a good description of her? Do you think that’s selling her short?

Nastassja Pugliese

Now, I think that’s an interesting description. It’s not false at all, because she is a practical philosopher. And we should also think of her as someone who was self-educated. So when we think about great 19th century philosophers, they usually were either part of the European elite, or they were inside universities. So they had some training that for us or herself didn’t have, so we shouldn’t expect from her great Treaties, right? So she is actually a practical philosopher, and she wants to induce practical transformations in the country. So I would just say that when we study, great thinkers from the past, we should be careful with anachronism. So what is an anachronism is this expectation of seeing the answers for our own contemporary questions on their writings? So we shouldn’t be afraid of not expecting from Floresta or from any other, what we would call proto-feminist. So those women who are actually paving the way for feminism as an organized movement to come about. So they were actually constructing the foundations, they were paving the way they are not in a position to answer the practical questions that today we have, although they can and they certainly do inspire us with their very interesting and Enlightenment ideas about questions that today we have, like, for example, should women breastfeed.

Josh Landy

You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re exploring the life and thoughts of Nísia Floresta with Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Ray Briggs

What kind of village does it take to raise a post colonial child? How do you educate everyone without erasing anyone’s culture? Can a 19th century thinker like Nísia Floresta help 21st century citizens live better lives?

Josh Landy

Education without discrimination? Plus, commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher—when philosophy taught continues?

Brazilian singer Mariana Aydar and a samba song called “Minha Missão” — “My Mission.” I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs

…except your intelligence. I’m Ray brakes our guest is Nastassja Pugliese from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. And we’re thinking about 19th century Brazilian philosopher Nísia Floresta.

Josh Landy

It’s part of our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can find all the episodes in this series at philosophytalk.org/wise-women.

Ray Briggs

So Nastassja, we were just talking about all the inspiration that Nísia Floresta’s work can give us today. So, what’s one thing that you think that Nísia Floresta should inspire us to do now?

Nastassja Pugliese

So I think that Floresta was a thinker of the notion the concept of citizenship. So what it is to be recognized as a citizen in a nation, and I think this is a very important question for a global world, right. And she is someone who is highlighting the fact that the first owners of the Brazilian land were actually stripped away from their lands by the colonizer. So Brazil, actually is a nation that starts by moving away, the rightful owners of the land from their own land. So what to do with that. She is looking at the indigenous nations and say, there should be a way to recognize indigenous nations as citizens of Brazil, because they are like a founding stone of Brazilian nation. And then she’s thinking about what to do. And one of the things that she’s claiming that we should is absorbed in our educational goals, is to see the habits of indigenous Brazilian women, and incorporate as part of the Brazilian habits, the habits of Brazilian women in general, for example, breastfeeding one’s child. So that I think is the first and foremost suggestion that she gives. But then after Floresta is done, we see for Linda Tao, through her example, she is willing to include indigenous nations as citizens of Brazil, by teaching them how to read and write because in this in this way, they would have the capacity to vote and reclaim their own rights within the civil laws and the civil structure that was already built. So now we have this problem of how today we should look to indigenous schools and our interactions with indigenous people in the indigenous reserves that were created. And hey, one of the indigenous posts of the early 18th century and 20th century in Brazil was actually named after Floresta.

Ray Briggs

So I have some questions about this. I mean, particularly involving the Catholic Church, which in its efforts to educate indigenous people was pretty brutal, I would say and terrible. So I think one of my worries about this is sort of how to educate indigenous people where it’s not just taking away their culture and replacing it with some European culture that you think is better. What might somebody Floresta inspired who is concerned about this have to say?

Nastassja Pugliese

That’s a very delicate issue. Because yes, we cannot deny the violence that indigenous suffered from the Catholic Church within the ‘Juntas.’ But at the same time, the Juntas does were this intersection between their culture and the law, right. So we can see examples of Indigenous women’s who had been held captive, and they were able to reclaim their freedom by going to the Juntas does and requiring their freedom by means of juridical legal process. And they were these processes, these legal processes were actually judged and they were protected by the law. Another example is Antonio Vieira, who actually wrote the first dictionary of the Portuguese language. And this was a way of solidifying the territorial unity of Brazilian lands because Portuguese was spoken from the north to the south of Brazil and the indigenous were actually starting to learn the language of the oppressor, in fight against them. So I know that if we were to go back in time, things should have been done differently. But the thing is that they were done this way. So what we can learn today from this fact that our civilization is still trying to strip indigenous nations from their own lands, they’re still on the peril of losing their reserves and their richness due to, you know, economic interest in in their demarcated lands. So what are we going to do now, in order to protect their land? And by using Floresta’s own view of education, do good to them in a way that the whole society can actually profit from this good.

Josh Landy

Yeah, that’s a really that’s a great way of putting it and, and there are other things I take it that that we could learn from floresta for today, perhaps slightly broader questions about her framework around education. I mean, the abolition of corporal punishment in schools seems like a good idea. It’s largely been adopted. I mean, when I was growing up, that was still a thing, unfortunately, but not anymore. Another thing I really like, and her way of thinking about it is that education is really, for virtue, it’s for morality, it’s not to make money. And that will be a lovely thing to see adopted in schools and universities. I want to ask a difficult question that I have, which is about modes of instruction, because Floresta seems to be suggesting that, although, you know, she sides with Rene Descartes and saying that men and women are fundamentally the same, because we’re ultimately minds. And, you know, there’s nothing gendered about minds, she seems to call for different instruction for men and women. Can you say something about that, and whether that’s, that’s a model we should be borrowing today or should not be borrowing today?

Nastassja Pugliese

So with respect to money, I think that was hinted at before. The problem is with access, right, so she is asking us to become to observe moderation. And with that, I will connect with your question because Floresta has a school for girls. So in 19th century, Brazil, the first educational law is from the 15th of October from 1827, propagated by the Emperor and in that curriculum on that educational law, we had a separation of school for boys and schools for girls. And they have different curriculum, it’s impressive. So on that law, we can see that women were, should not be allowed to learn more than the four operations of arithmetic because it will be useless to their upbringing. So there’s this idea of behind the curriculum of the school for girls that they should be educated for something useful, right? So in one sense, the context in which Floresta is thinking is a context where there is a separation, not only with respect to the gender of the schools, but a separation of the curriculum. And she is not interested in thinking about men’s education, because they already have it all. She’s she’s interested in forming future female citizens that are actually empowered and are able to help build a nation that is autonomous, self sufficient, and aware of its own dignity.

Ray Briggs

So this actually kind of raises a question that the view that she’s responding to says, well, women should only be educated for useful things. But then there’s this question like useful for what and I think that floresta has a different idea of useful from a lot of her contemporaries, which have these really narrow pictures of what women’s roles can be. So maybe the women right now around here are not being allowed to participate in democratic society as much as they could be. But that’s, that’s a contingent fact. So like, how should we even be thinking about a useful education? Like there are some things that aren’t practical if we have just a really narrow set of purposes, but then become practical, if we care about citizens ship in some broader sense?

Nastassja Pugliese

Yeah, exactly. I think that the useful education is an education that is related with practical ability. So here in this context, we are talking about teaching someone how to knit and cook and carpentry. But nowadays, when we think of useful education, we do think about some knowledge that will allow us to perform as social function that will make us you know, be good citizens because we are doing our part. So it’s a little bit different. Because nowadays, the social division of labor is more complex to the point that those that have education, they are actually I mean, higher education, I mean, going to the universities, and so on and so forth. They develop intellectual virtue. So it’s part of the labor, the intellectual, it’s part of, you know, the intellectual labor is, is still labor, right. But at that time, we were talking about something much more mundane. Like being able to women being able to take care of the economy of the household. So nowadays, women have much more space to occupy in the public sphere. But still, I think that the fact that we are still in the need of talking about women’s rights, just is an indication that there’s still a long way to go.

Josh Landy

Well you have certainly developed our intellectual virtue today. Nastassja, thank you so much for joining us.

Nastassja Pugliese

Oh, thank you.

Josh Landy

Our guest has been Nastassja Pugliese, professor of philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and author of the Cambridge elements volume on Nísia Floresta. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs

I’ve just really enjoyed the way that talking about Nísia Floresta has expanded what I’m thinking of education as being like, where education happens everywhere and what it’s for, like anything you could possibly do with it. So I think that she’s much more on the side of ahead of her time than conserving sort of old things used to working with old tools.

Josh Landy

Is there even education on the radio?

Ray Briggs

I hope so!

Josh Landy

We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and liberate your mind in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs

And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy

Now, a man who talks like a Brazilian miles an hour—It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales

Ian Shoales… Proto feminist Nísia Floresta was born in Papary, in what was soon to become the independent nation of Brazil, in 1810. Not much is known about her childhood, but she was self taught to an amazing degree, learning English, Portuguese, French, Italian, even as revolts and unrest swirled around her. She was married off at 13, but it did not take and she returned to the shelter of her family. Her father, a lawyer, was assassinated, in 1828 at the order of a powerful member of the state. Floresta married, and had two children, at which time her husband died. She began teaching to support herself. And also writing. Unusually, she would publish in newspapers, which did much to spread her ideas. She happened to read Mary Wollstonecraft’s VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, and was so taken by it, she translated it into Portuguese, rather freely, and attached her own thoughts to the matter, giving herself and her ideas a British stamp of approval, as it were. She was pretty unstoppable. She started her own school. Not just a school a college, for women. A real college too, no home ec here, teaching the classics and all the other things the boys learn. She resigned as director after twenty years and traveled to Europe with her daughter. There she met Victor Hugo and August Comte, then returned to write more newspaper articles, which were compiled into one volume. And she wrote two other books, and volunteered as a nurse during a cholera epidemic in Rio, before returning to Europe in 1856, only returning to Brazil in 1872, where she remained until her death in 1885. She was the first in Brazil to champion women’s rights, and also the rights of Native Americans, and slaves. Some modern readers of her life and work have wondered how radical she really was because she did not call for the torching of the patriarchy, or even that there WAS a patriarchy, unless you consider paternalism its equivalent. Instead, perhaps influenced by Comte, she seemed to believe in change from within. After all, she and everybody had seen what happens with revolutions, in France anyway. Guillotines and then Bonaparte. Let’s be sensible ladies! Her idea being it seems, that when we are all equally educated, paternalism loses its soft power, and we can all, guys and gals alike, mansplain ourselves into an incremental utopia. As she wrote, “…as a paternal government is the most proper one to make people happy, and a properly cultivated intelligence of those nations is the best incentive for them to fulfill their duties, so too is the moral education the safest guide to women.” She may have meant this ironically, who knows, but maybe it is just safety first. She ought to know, having been being a child bride and having a parent shot. Society’s much easier to change than the ideological underpinnings of a nation. “The lack of a good education is the primary cause that contributes to women to lose their north, which is nothing else but morality, in the midst of the corruption of society.” Men, she seems to say, “Always seeking to hold their intelligence, to weaken their senses, they make women unable to occupy…the care of purifying their heart; women would never …achieve such a thing if their intelligence remains without culture.” So fellas, what do you say, give the gals a break! It’s just culture. We know you can live without it. It’s harder for women, you know? I gotta go.

Josh Landy

Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco. Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Ray Briggs

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Josh Landy

Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs

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Josh Landy

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Ray Briggs

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Josh Landy

Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs

And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy

And thank you for thinking.