The Socratic Pedagogy of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Abstract

Though she is primarily considered a poet and a playwright, Novohispanic nun Juana Inés de la Cruz is also one of the most distinguished women philosophers from the Early Modern periodin particular, one who offered a substantial defense of the right of women to be educated in seventeenth-century New Spain. Her most well-known arguments are contained in her famous Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz (The Answer to Sor Filotea de la Cruz). In this piece, Sor Juana aims to provide a systematic response to the bishop of Puebla Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, writing under the pseudonym Sor Filotea de la Cruz, who reprimanded and reminded her of her position as a nun and of the demands associated with this role by ecclesiastical and civil authorities.Numerous scholars have studied in detail the strategies and arguments that Sor Juana deploys to respond to Sor Filotea. For instance, both Georgina Sabat Rivers (1994) and María Luisa Femenías (2006) have pointed out that Sor Juana develops in the Answer a catalog of illustrious women that preceded her to create a philosophical tradition that legitimizes her endeavors to cultivate herself. Joan Gibson (2006) has argued that Sor Juana, following the admonition of Luis Vives according to which women should be taught to be chaste, uses the logic of chastity that was imposed on women to maintain that its upholding requires the education of women by women.Although much has been written about the many strategies that Sor Juana uses in the Answer to vindicate the right of women to be educated, little has been said so far about whether Sor Juana advocates some specific pedagogy in her works. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that there is a philosophical pedagogy underlying Sor Juana's works that is in many respects Socratic. By this we mean that, in order to argue for the right of women to be educated, and given her social position, Sor Juana deploys a method of teaching that mirrors Socrates' strategies. We conclude that the development and use of Socratic pedagogy emerges as a reaction to the paternalistic/authoritarian pedagogic model that was imposed by scholastic philosophy in colonial New Spain in the seventeenth century.In order to show this, we proceed in the following way. In Section 35.2, we present what we take to be four important elements of Socratic pedagogy, and which we identify in Sor Juana's work: (i) the use of autobiography as a pedagogical tool, (ii) the deployment of complex irony as a way to engage interlocutors, (iii) the use of shame as an attempt to correct behavior and promote virtue, and finally, (iv) the characterization of the quest of knowledge as an erotic enterprise. In Section 35.3, we examine how Sor Juana uses autobiography in the Answer to defend herself against some of the charges raised against her. In Section 35.4, we present a few examples of Sor