De
verlichte Franse essayist, filosoof en wis- en natuurkundige Gabrielle Émilie
Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet werd bekend om haar op het werk
van Newton gebaseerde Institutions de
physique (1740), haar vertaling van Newton’s Principia Mathematica (postuum gepubliceerd in 1756 in Frankrijk nog steeds dé standaardeditie) en door haar romantische relatie
met Voltaire die ging wonen in haar Château de Cirey vlakbij Chaumont in
Lotharingen waar diverse geleerden graag naar toe trokken om er met het
intellectuele koppel te studeren en converseren. Voltaire verklaarde dat hij
Newton en de natuurkunde begreep door haar uitleg. Ze vertaalde ook Mandeville’s
The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices,
Public Benefits als La Fable des
abeilles (1735) waar Voltaire graag gebruik van maakte bij zijn Traité de métaphysique.
Mary
Ellen Waithe schreef daarover in hoofdstuk 8, "Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de
Breteuil du Châtelet-Lomont," [in haar: M.E. Waithe (Ed.), History of Women Philosophers.
Volume III, Modern Women Philosophers, 1600 - 1900. Dordrecht/Boston/London:
Kluwer Academic Publishers [Springer Science & Business Media], 1991, p.
127-152] op p. 131 (cf. books.google; voor de noten zie 't origineel):
This five-volume work is an acerbic refutation of the
major arguments of the Bible. According to Besterman, the original survives only
in the library of Troyes. Wade reproduces in précis a portion refuting the arguments of the Book of Genesis. The
Examen shows that Mme du Châtelet had
studied Spinoza's Theologico-Political
Treatise. In it, du Châtelet follows Spinoza's method of Bible criticism,
rather than his specific conclusions. Her interest in the idea of Genesis even
led her to read Newton's Chronology of
Ancient Kingdoms Amended. Given the close conceptual relationship between
metaphysical questions about the nature of the universe and religious doctrines
about its origin, it is not unexpected that a philosopher like du Châtelet,
whose primary interests were in metaphysics, would investigate religious as
well as scientific claims about the origins of the universe.
Deze
informatie vond ik toen ik via ‘t Spinoza Research Network op de website van 't Department of Philosophy, University of
Washington kwam, waar Michael Rosenthal aankondigde dat van 2-4 maart 2018 het Pacific
Northwest/Western Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy wordt
georganiseerd; bij de oproep voor bijdragen was dit portret ter illustratie
bijgevoegd. Ik wilde meer over haar weten en met name of ze iets met Spinoza
van doen kon hebben gehad. Hier dus het antwoord. Maar het is niet eenvoudig te vinden, want meestal wordt hieraan niet gerefereerd.
Niets
hierover vind je
Op
Wikipedia - Emilie du Châtelet Critical
Essays - Emilie du Chatelet – Scientific Works - Émilie Du Châtelet, éclairages et documents
nouveaux -
Of
bij
Judith
P. Zinsser, Emilie Du Chatelet: Daring
Genius of the Enlightenment. Penguin, 2007 –books.google
Judith
P. Zinsser, Julie Candler Hayes (Eds.), Emilie
Du Châtelet: rewriting Enlightenment philosophy and science, Nummer 1.
Voltaire Foundation, 2006
Niets
in
Misschien
in de heruitgave?
Madame
Du Châtelet, Examens de la Bible. Édités
et annotés par Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach. Paris, Editions Honoré Champion,
collection "Libre pensée et Littérature Clandestine", 2011. [cf.]
Ik
eindig met een in het Engels vertaald citaat uit haar postuum gepubliceerde Discours sur le bonheur (1779)
Discourse on
Happiness: In order to be happy, one
must have freed oneself of prejudices, one must be virtuous, healthy, have
tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions. . . . One must begin by
saying to oneself, and by convincing oneself, that we have nothing to do in the
world but to obtain for ourselves some agreeable sensations and feelings. The
moralists who say to me, curb your passions and master your desire if you want
to be happy, do not know the route to happiness. One is only happy because of
satisfied tastes and passions . . . It is passions that one should ask of God,
if one dated to ask him for something, and Le Notre was quite right to ask the
pope for temptations rather than indulgences. The first is to be resolute about
what one wants to be and about what one wants to do. This is lacking in almost
all men; it is, however . . . without it one swims forever in a sea of uncertainties,
one destroys in themorning what one made in the evening. [hier gevonden]
___________________
A woman with a formidable philosophical reputation for a time was Voltaire's mistress, Gabrielle-Emilie, marquise du Châtelet, whom he celebrated in print in 1738, as a paragon of female intellectual power, and a true disciple of Newton and of 'truth'. Furthermore, this 'Minerve de la France', as he calls her, not only shared his conversation, scientific experiments, and bed but soon rebelled against his uncompromising Newtonianism, demonstrating a spirited independence of mind. When Voltaire insisted she read Locke, she urged him to read Leibniz. Engaging a young Swiss savant, Samuel Köning [1712-57], a devotee of Wolff, to tutor her in mathematics, she systematically explored Wolffianism, and by 1739 was in contact with Wolff himself. For a while, indeed, Wolff placed such importance on her intervention that he believed he would, through her—his 'Apostle to the French'—check the progress of what he called Voltaire's 'Newtonianischen Philosophie' and the 'not very useful principles of the present-day English' in France, hastening that of Wolffianism.
Wolff's
Huguenot ally in Berlin, Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711-97), modelled the heroine of his philosophical novel, La Belle Wolfienne, on Voltaire's
marquise. A key work of philosophical popularization of the Early
Enlightenment, it appeared in Frankfurt in six volumes in 1741-2 [1741–1753],
and was plainly directed at women as much as, or more than, men. Its object is
to persuade readers that the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy is the best and
only way to rescue 'la vertu, la societe, [et] l'eglise' from the radicals and
'fatalistes' and, in particular, Spinoza, the forces posing the greatest threat
to religion, authority, and civilization. Initially, its heroine learns,
Spinoza won 'quelques partisans' eager to throw off the yoke of religion which
had become burdensome to them. But eventually the philosophical tide turned and
now the Leibnizian-Wolffian system had triumphed: Spinoza's 'ordre kernel,
immuable, independent ou Dieu n'y entre par rien' was everywhere collapsing
before Wolff's proofs that another set of general laws would have been possible
had God so chosen. But if Spinoza's necessite
now lay crushed under Wolff's raison
suffisante, according to the Wolffians, Gabrielle-Emilie's prestige as a
high-level broker in the international power-game of philosophy was soon
impaired by doubts as to whether she was really 'une dame solidement savante'.
Some mocked her pretensions, dismissing her as a superficial female, vain and
coquettish. ‘aiant vif, inquiet, curieux et bisarre', a woman merely affecting
to cultivate philosophy for the purpose of ‘couvrant l'irregularito de sa
conduite'.
That
at least a few high-born ladies amassed whole collections of radical
philosophical literature for their private use is demonstrated by such examples
as that of Caroline von Hessen (1721-74), wife of the Landgrave of
Hesse-Darmstadt. By the 1740s this lady was in regular contact with a Frankfurt
bookseller who had been in difficulties with the authorities on more than one
occasion for selling forbidden philosophical books. Daughter of a pious mother,
her father, Duke Christian III of Pfalz-Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld, was widely
reputed a libertine and freethinker. Her personal cabinet of books, remarkably,
included not only Bayle, Locke, and Montesquieu but Mandeville's Free Thoughts on Religion (1720) in its
French edition of 1722, Collins—again in French, La Mende, and several works of
the marquis d'Argens.
***
Martin
Schönfeld, geeft in zijn hoofdstuk "German Philosophy After
Leibniz," [in: Steven Nadler (Ed.), A Companion
to Early Modern Philosophy. John Wiley & Sons, 2008] nadere
informatie over de interesse van de marquise du Châtelet in het Wolffianisme en
over de Wolffiaan Johann Heinrich Samuel Formey die tijdens de regeerperiode
van Frederik de Grote secretaris was van de Berlijnse Academie en de auteur was
van La Belle Wolfienne - books.google geeft direct de pagina.
Op
5-01-2014 had ik een uitgebreid blog over de: "Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711
- 1797) Spinozisme is voor koppige rancuneuze mensen. "
Op
grond van deze neiging van Gabrielle-Emilie, marquise du Châtelet naar het
Wolffianisme kan ik het me zo slecht voorstellen dat ze de TTP en Spinoza’s
methode van Bijbelexegese in haar aanpak van de Bijbel zou hebben gevolgd,
zoals Mary Ellen Waithe schrijft. Het lijkt me dringend gewenst dat er iemand eens een
promotieonderzoek doet naar du Châtelet’s houding t.o. Spinoza of dat er eens
een aantal studiedagen aan worden gewijd. Het is toch opmerkelijk dat zulke studies niet te vinden zijn (de Duitse Spinoza Bibliografie heeft helemaal niets!).
Pas nadat ik het vorige had geschreven, zag ik de
reactie van Bas Beekhuizen die wees op dit boek:
David Bodanis, Passionate
Minds: Emilie du Chatelet, Voltaire, and the Great Love Affair of the
Enlightenment. Crown/Archetype, 2009. Daarin laat books.google op p. 108 deze passage lezen:
They
had texts of the Bible in French and Latin, and they ordered commentaries from
Paris, all sorts of them, and reports in English, and texts printed in
Latin—especially those of Spinoza—and they began to collate them and read
sections aloud to each other, starting at their regular 11 A.M. coffee.
(Voltaire especially was partial to coffee, and sometimes a little quinine
powder before snacks; Emilie would sip her coffee but preferred fresh fruit,
though it's unclear if she shared Voltaire's great passion for rhubarb.) After
a while they began to assign each other a few verses of the Bible each morning,
and they'd report on them in the afternoon. "I hardly spent two hours
apart from him," Emilie remembered later, "and then we'd send each
other little notes from our rooms."
Het
is slechts een snipper, maar mogelijk kan dit al enigszins doorgaan voor enige
ondersteunende informatie voor de bewering van Mary Ellen Waithe.
___________________
De meest complete hedendaagse biografie over haar volgens J. B. Shank in The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment [University of Chicago Press, 2008 - books.google]
Stan,
BeantwoordenVerwijderenEr bestaat een leuk boek over haar: Bodanis, David (2006). Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Chatelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings. ISBN 0-307-23720-6. Emilie & Voltaire heet het in de Nederlandse vertaling. Andere van Bodanis boeken gaan over het Elektrisch Universum en over hoe je Einsteins E=mc2 moet duiden.
Dat vind ik nu eens een heel leuke bijdrage van je, Bas. Op p. 108 van Passionate Minds, zo laat books.google zien, komt Spinoza voor! Ik ben de hele dag op zoek naar aanvullende en ondersteunende informatie over wat Mary Ellen Waithe schreef. En zie hier is een snipper. Dank. Ik ga die passage aan het blog toevoegen.
BeantwoordenVerwijderen