Emilie du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science (review)

This collection does not so much rewrite Enlightenment philosophy and science as re-assess Châtelet's 'cultural capital' (the phrase is Adrienne Mason's, in her excellent essay on translation) and enable us to understand better than we have before how she was perceived by her contemporaries, and how and why she was able to associate herself with 'les gens de lettres'. John Iverson shows us how strong this association was in his analysis of her inclusion in the German collection of scholars' portraits, the Bilder-Sal . . . berühmter Schrifftsteller (1745), and Adrienne Mason reminds us of the importance of translation at the time, showing thereby that her work on Newton was by no means perceived as subsidiary. There is much corrective and comparative analysis of her and Voltaire's work: Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach demonstrates that her Examens de la Bible (unpublished ms) and his La Bible enfin expliquée (1776) were not only composed at different times, but that they probably did not have sight of each other's manuscripts, or any part of them, in the same way that they submitted their essays on the nature and propagation of fire separately to the Académie royale des sciences in 1738. Jean-François Gauvin compares Châtelet's mathematical and theoretical approach to science with Voltaire's more empirical one in his essay on the 'cabinet de physique' assembled at Cirey. Barbara Whitehead shows that Châtelet's Discours sur le bonheur (circulated in manuscript during her lifetime but first published in 1779, i.e. after Voltaire's own death) distinguishes itself from similar discourses by her contemporaries Helvétius, d'Holbach, La Mettrie and of course Voltaire, by being explicitly personal rather than generalizing. J. Patrick Lee describes an anthology of poetry assembled by Châtelet, showing that she excised the contributions which were too obviously by Voltaire. Marie-Thérèse Inguenaud provides a very complete if dismaying account of Châtelet and Graffigny's relationship. All this work is helpful and presented with careful erudition, but the real excitement of the collection lies inevitably with those essays which tackle her mathematics and philosophy head on. Paul Veatch Moriarty's superb account of the principle of sufficient reason in her Institutions de physique (1740) explains why Châtelet attempted so doggedly to match Leibnizian/Wolffian thinking with Newtonianism: for her, empirical discoveries that did not fit into a presupposed rational structure could only ever be part of the full explanation, whilst to lack the principle of sufficient reason further implied that chance ruled the universe. The principle of sufficient reason therefore means, for Châtelet as for science in general after her until the advent of quantum mechanics, that 'the universe was subject to rational explanation' (p. 213). This essay overturns Barber's view of Châtelet's philosophy as an 'odd hybrid' (p. 12) and is salutary for those of us who, unaware of the continuing seriousness with which the principle of sufficient reason is taken by philosophers, assume that Voltaire dispatched it once and for all in Candide. Antoinette Emch-Dériaz and Gérard G. Emch, intellectual historian and mathematical physicist respectively, raise the stakes even further: they examine Châtelet's translation of 'fudged' parts of Newton's Principia to see whether she picks up on, signals or even corrects his 'dubious passages' (p. 251). They conclude that, in the translation itself, she 'was as faithful as she could have been', that in the Exposition abrégée she was 'bolder' and that in the Solution analytique she both 'furthered and critiqued' her source text (p.251). In reading their exuberant essay, I got as close as an innumerate person can to understanding what Châtelet was trying to do, and to seeing how she contributed to the international mathematical conversation, and if we want to re-evaluate her importance for the Enlightenment...