Does the Enlightenment’s Great Female Intellect Need Rescuing?
She does not omit a candid note of qualification: “But can such a tender heart be satisfied by a sentiment as peaceful and as weak as that of close friendship?” Her wistful worldliness is captured in another sharp bit of breakup counsel: “Never show an eagerness when your lover cools off, and always be a degree colder than they are; that will not bring them back, but nothing will.”
It is neither du Châtelet’s love affair nor the wise, melancholy little book on happiness that makes her reputation in scholarly circles today. Instead, it’s her “Foundations of Physics”—originally published as “Institutions de Physique”—which she wrote while she was still with Voltaire and finished toward the end of their affair, in 1740. The work is a formidable read, and it has only recently been translated into English in full, by a collective of women scholars. Exactly what the book is about is hard to say; some insist that it is a search for the metaphysical foundations of physics, others that it is a search for the physical foundations of metaphysics.
Janiak, though, fairly summarizes its importance as the first blossoming of a pluralistic, social view of the growth of scientific knowledge. “Voltaire’s vision of science and of Newton’s heroic role in helping to make it a modern site of intellectual progress is far more familiar today than du Châtelet’s alternative vision of science as a collaborative endeavor that exceeds the powers of even the greatest genius,” he writes. “When confronted with a debate among the revolutionaries of the past, whether it concerns hypotheses, the nature of matter, the large-scale structure of space and time, or the shape of knowledge, du Châtelet seeks to find the insights hidden in opposed positions.” Voltaire and his Enlightenment confrères, the argument goes, were drawn to great-man theories of scientific discovery—Newton and the apple bonking him on his head were enough to usher in a revolution—and so silenced the collective, proto-feminist view purveyed by the “Institutions.” This is the sense in which Janiak believes that du Châtelet was “betrayed” by the Enlightenment.
Certainly her “Institutions” displayed a far subtler understanding of the limits and the power of Newtonian physics than Voltaire did. Newton was right, she understood, not because he saw farther than anyone else but because his weird idea was open to public inspection by people capable of criticizing it. Edmond Halley could show that Newton’s physics predicted the paths of comets, and experiments conducted by Pierre-Simon Laplace could show that Newton’s theory about the speed of sound was basically right, once some adjustments were applied. It was this understanding of science as a collaboration across time that inspired du Châtelet to offer a memorable aphorism: “Physics is an immense building that surpasses the power of a single man.”
Her understanding of science as a social enterprise was genuinely prescient. She grasped, as early as anyone, the critical difference between science as a specific set of ideas and science as a peculiar kind of social practice. That was the point of her architectural metaphor. Many hands make light work, the old saw has it, and many heads explain light. Her chapter on the role of the hypothesis would by itself be enough to earn her a large place in the history of the philosophy of science: recognizing the imaginative centrality of shared speculation, she insisted that, though no number of positive affirmations can establish a theory, one falsification can disprove it. “A single experiment is not enough to confirm a hypothesis, but one alone is sufficient to reject it,” she wrote, two centuries before Karl Popper made the idea a commonplace of twentieth-century science.
Another guiding impulse in “Institutions” foreshadowed a less edifying tendency. Du Châtelet was searching for a grand synthesis of Newtonian, Cartesian, and Leibnizian ideas, in the way that Viennese visionaries of the nineteen-twenties hoped to unify all the sciences, and in the way that later thinkers tried to reconcile quantum physics with Einstein—and both with theology. On the one hand, then, there is her persuasive idea that science is a social act with many assessors; on the other is the view that no one hypothesis can win, and that the truth is best available in a composite of theories and ideas. Either can be called “pluralism,” but the biographer does not always keep the two senses straight; to be fair, neither did du Châtelet.
The view that the models of celestial mechanics proposed by Leibniz, Descartes, and Newton all contain truth is appealingly broadminded; it is not, unfortunately, true. Descartes’s legible, sensible view that it took one thing to push another just isn’t so, while Newton’s weird idea—that action can take place in a vacuum through occult attraction—describes the way the world works, and not just the world but the whole damn universe. A pluralistic marriage of the two is no more possible than is a true marriage of Lamarck (who thought that giraffes grew tall by seeking to eat the tops of tall trees) and Darwin (who guessed that they developed long necks by chance and stepwise selection, with the treetop eating a lucky and lingering aftereffect). The pluralistic souls who tried to augment Darwin with some idea of transgenerational acquired traits were wrong—sometimes catastrophically wrong, as with the rise of Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia. (Various modern attempts to rescue neo-Lamarckism have, so far, failed, or been subsumed by the neo-Darwinian synthesis.) Science is inhabited by a community, but it isn’t built by a committee.
Where du Châtelet was certainly right, however, was in recognizing the error in using a scientific model, validated within its domain, to explain everything else. She saw, as Voltaire did not, that attempts to extend Newtonian attraction at a distance to electricity and even to animal secretions—to make of it a theory of everything—were mistaken. To do so was like imagining that, because a key is perfectly shaped to fit a particular lock, it possesses some energized quality of “keyness” that can open any other. The scientific revolution did not depend on the constant replacement of spiritual explanations with mechanical ones—action at a distance hardly qualified as mechanical. It depended on what actual experience said afterward about the truth of a hypothesis. (In French, the words for “experiment” and “experience” are the same.) Newton did not give us a clockwork universe, working blindly to rule; he gave us a universe in which everyone can see the hands on the clock, and check the time for themselves.
Hovering behind Janiak’s book is another, Nancy Mitford’s “Voltaire in Love,” her 1957 account of the same story and people, albeit with an emphasis marginally more on the man and far less on the science. Her book captures the spirit of the couple perfectly and places their intellectual adventures intelligently within the context of French society life. We learn exactly how and when those servants were fired and then rehired, and Mitford makes much of what is omitted elsewhere, that du Châtelet was a compulsive gambler who loved high stakes but, despite her mathematical prowess, almost always lost, sometimes at enormous expense.
Yet Mitford’s book is never once cited, even in a footnote, in the new one; in a curious irony, Janiak has, in effect, done to Mitford what he complains was done to du Châtelet—written a brilliant woman right out of history as a mere amateur. That’s too bad, since Mitford was extraordinarily knowing about the social milieu in which du Châtelet moved, which had changed little from the Marquise’s day to hers. Her storytelling makes du Châtelet and Voltaire both come alive as Enlightenment people. She tells the hilarious story of how Voltaire and du Châtelet, when she became pregnant by another lover, arranged to bring her husband back to the dinner table and encouraged him to tell his military tales, while du Châtelet wore a conspicuously low-cut gown to encourage his concupiscence. Husband and wife went off to bed, three weeks later she announced her pregnancy, and the proprieties were saved. Apocryphal? Perhaps, but anyone who knows the still intact social habits of the Parisian gratin will vouch for its plausibility.
Mitford also grasped the politics of Parisian intellectual life and knew that it is an anachronism to see Voltaire’s single-minded sponsorship of Newton as having been fathered by ideological rigor. Voltaire’s avidity was, instead, part of the performance of his role as Top French Thinker—a position that might be unofficial but is as sharply defined as the papacy and has been handed on from one intellectual to the next over the centuries. It is incumbent on anyone in the role to be aggressive and audacious, and more so in public manner than in private belief. Americans and Brits, being less royalist and more empirical in temperament, are bewildered by the general French understanding that the top thinker is supposed to be imperious and maximalist.
But it comes with the role. The political absolutism of Sartre was a way of asserting fearlessness: Nothing, not even the presence of the U.S. Army, can intimidate me! French intellectuals no more expect their top figure to split the differences and see the middle way than Catholics expect the Pope to see all sides of an issue. (As the famous motto had it, “Better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Raymond Aron,” the sane pro-democracy centrist.) For Voltaire, asserting Newtonianism was simply a strategic way of asserting Voltairianism, which he cared about more than he did about gravity. Danton’s line “L’audace, toujours l’audace”—audacity, always audacity—expresses a shared tenet of French intellectual life.
Whatever the truth of the tale about the décolleté dress and the husband’s deception, the pregnancy had a tragic result: though the baby was delivered safely, the Marquise, like so many women of the time, fell sick shortly afterward, and died within the week. Voltaire mourned her. “It is not a mistress I have lost,” he wrote, emphatically. “Rather, I have lost half of myself, a soul for which mine seems to have been made.”
The subtitle of this new book seems earned—du Châtelet really did play a significant part in the making of modern philosophy. But the Enlightenment’s “most dangerous woman”? Surely this grafts the preoccupations of a later era onto her eighteenth-century life. In her book about happiness, “danger” is a word that occurs only once, in the context of gambling, while amour rings throughout the text. She never would have taken herself to be dangerous; she would have wanted to be known to be wise.
And loving. She learned more than we may realize from her childhood mentor, Fontenelle. His “Conversation on the Plurality of Worlds,” which she must have read as an adolescent, tells a story of courtship through learning: a philosopher woos a marquise by introducing her to a Copernican-Cartesian view of the universe, and particularly to the doctrine that the stars we see have worlds like ours orbiting them. The plurality of worlds becomes the foundation for a plurality of viewpoints. Science emerges as a version of the pastoral, with the physicist as swain. Romance and research are seen as twinned enterprises, a vision that set a keynote for du Châtelet’s own life.
