Émilie Du Châtelet (1706-1749) verwerkte de TTP in haar “Examen de la Genèse”

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.
 

Ze begon aan een Grammaire raisonné die ze niet afmaakte. Haar ideeën over het Deïsme en de metafysica paste ze toe in een studie over de Bijbel, waaraan ze waarschijnlijk in 1736 begon en die mogelijk pas in het jaar waarin ze stierf, 1749, gereed kwam en waarvan het handschrift lang onuitgegeven bleef: Examen de la Genèse.

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

Emilie Du Châtelet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings. Edited by Judith Zinsser. University of Chicago Press, 2009 - books.google Judith Zinsser heeft in haar inleiding op het deel waarin hoofdstukken uit haar Bijbelexegese werden opgenomen niets erover dat haar methode van exegese iets van de TTP zou hebben.

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]
                                                                  ___________________

Jonathan Israel in Radical Enligtenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (2001) schreef in de Inleiding op pp. 85-86 het volgende  over de marquise du Châtelet:
 
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.

 

 

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Judith Zinsser, La Dame d'Esprit. A Biography of Marquise Du Châtelet. Viking Adult; 1st edition, 2006
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]

Ruth Hagengruber (Ed.), Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton. Springer Science & Business Media, 2011 - books.google [geen enkele referentie naar Spinoza]