The Enlightenment's Most Dangerous Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the Making of Modern Philosophy

by Andrew Janiak

Suppressed for centuries, the ideas of French philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet's are ever relevant today...Just as the Enlightenment was gaining momentum throughout Europe, philosopher Émilie Du Châtelet broke through the many barriers facing women at the time and published a major philosophical treatise in French. Within a few short years, she became she was read and debated from Russia to Prussia, from Switzerland to England, from up north in Sweden to down south in Italy. This was not just remarkable because she was a woman, but because of the substance of her contributions. While the men in her milieu like Voltaire and Kant sought disciples to promote their ideas, Du Châtelet promoted intellectual autonomy. She counselled her readers to read the classics, but never to become a follower of another's ideas. Her proclamation that a true philosopher must remain an independent thinker, rather than a disciple of some supposedly “great man” like Isaac Newton or René Descartes, posed a threat to an emerging consensus in the Enlightenment. And that made her dangerous. After all, if young women took Du Châtelet's advice to heart, if they insisted on thinking for themselves, they might demand a proper education--the exclusion of women from the colleges and academies of Europe might finally end. And if young women thought for themselves, rather than listening to the ideas of the men around them, that might rupture the gender-based social order itself. Because of the threat that she posed, the men who created the modern philosophy canon eventually wrote Du Châtelet out of their official histories. After she achieved immense fame in the middle of the eighteenth century, her ideas were later suppressed, or attributed to the men around her. For generations afterwards, she was forgotten. Now we can hear her voice anew when we need her more than ever. Her lessons of intellectual independence and her rejection of hero worship remain ever relevant today.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 3, 2024

About the author

Andrew Janiak is a professor of philosophy at Duke University, where he directs the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. He received an M.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D from Indiana University. His dissertation was directed by Michael Friedman.

Reviews

[Kenny]

There's a lot in this book that's really excellent. As much as I do disagree with quite a few of his specifics, I agree strongly with Janiak that Du Châtelet is a wrongly forgotten figure within the French Enlightenment. I'd personally have liked to hear more about what was actually unique and groundbreaking about Du Châtelet's philosophical work, because what was held up in this book as her distinctive contribution did not seem particularly interesting to me, but this could very well be my own incomprehension - I do not work in the history of science (or the history of the philosophy of science, or even the philosophy of science). In part though, that just accompanies the difficulty of bringing any woman philosopher into the early modern canon (setting aside the worry, per Linda Nochlin, that maybe there shouldn't be such a thing as a canon). John J. Conley has made the point in detail, and to an extent Janiak follows him in this observation, that the cards were stacked against women trying to join the academy in the early modern period. Not only were they taken insufficiently seriously by their male colleagues, they were also for the most part deprived of the education which would enable them to take full part in the philosophical debates of the time. Some women were still able to influence, in significant ways, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and Du Châtelet was clearly one such person. At the same time though, she wrote fairly little in her relatively brief life. Finishing this book, I was left with the impression that she should be placed on a level with other significant Enlightenment French philosophers like Diderot (who I think should be esteemed more highly as a philosopher than he is, but did not have the systematicity or depth of Leibniz or Hume).

I do not feel I can give this book five stars for the simple, and possibly partisan reason that I think the parts of the book that discuss Diderot distort him and his ideas. Diderot did say that Du Châtelet's commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason leads to a kind of Spinozism. Janiak seems not to realise that for Diderot, in his familiar, playful way, this is actually an endorsement. Diderot was a Spinozist. Not only this, he was a vocal opponent of both the patriarchy and the system of slavery, so it was hard not to feel that he was being done an injustice by being portrayed as someone who actively upheld the patriarchy in his time, and who undermined the severity of slavery in his own writings. Does Janiak know that Diderot was a major contributor to Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes, a withering and influential attack on the institution of slavery? I suspect that much of the confusion here comes from the fact that Janiak is a historian of the philosophy of science, and not a historian of political philosophy. Familiarity with the history of republican political thought makes a lot of sense of Diderot's ideas and claims (I noticed that Quentin Skinner is not cited even once in this book). It would make a lot of good sense of why Diderot contrasts eclecticism with slavery: operating within the republican political tradition, Diderot's concept of slavery cuts across multiple domains in an ultimately coherent way.

I have spent a lot of this review, which is about a book whose subject is an important woman philosopher and her removal from the history of philosophy, complaining that an important male philosopher has been misrepresented. I'm sure that is problematic in its own way. I don't doubt for a second that Du Châtelet was a victim of patriarchy, in the ways that Janiak describes. I only hesitate over whether Diderot was a part of this story in the way Janiak claims, and was saddened to see this champion of progress in the 18th century being torn down to make way for Du Châtelet. Maybe that needs to happen, and maybe I am too resistant to this criticism of Diderot because he is a philosopher for whom I have a lot of respect.

[Kris]

Coming from a reader with no education in philosophy, this seems like a very well-researched and thought out book (the notes and citations sections have HEFT). Alongside that, the author clearly has great respect and reverence for Emilie du Chatelet. I did come into it thinking (hoping) this would be a more historical biography than an overall lecture on philosophy so that's more of a "me" problem since there are large parts of this book which become somewhat of a snore fest with what's supposed to be additional context of the thinking of the time, but is really just a slog of male philosophical thinking and teachings that go on and on and on. Coming from a self-proclaimed feminist author, the focus on the men in philosophy outside of the context of du Chatelet's life and works I felt really took away from the entire point of the book.

I would love to have learned more about her personal life and obstacles she faced directly rather than explicitly focusing on how she was essentially written out of history after the fact. The middle and ending chapters which touch on how specifically she is nearly erased from the history of major philosophical thinkers were the most interesting parts but I was hoping to have read much more about her contemporary years and influence as well as how her works directly influenced future female philosophes and womens' rights overall. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but the repetitive restating of the author's ideas and conclusions throughout the work felt like padding without which this book would have been much shorter and easier to read.

Overall a very interesting topic, but major redactions could be made without losing any real substance.

Thank you Goodreads for the free copy in exchange for my honest review.

[J.]

Émilie Du Châtelet's philosophical treatise, published in French amidst the European Enlightenment, marked a significant intellectual achievement for women in a historically restrictive era. Her work garnered widespread attention, sparking debate across Europe. Beyond her gender, Du Châtelet's contributions were notable for their emphasis on intellectual autonomy. In contrast to contemporaries like Voltaire and Kant who cultivated disciples, she advocated for independent thought, urging readers to engage with classical texts while rejecting unquestioning adherence to any single intellectual authority. Her assertion that a true philosopher must be an independent thinker, unburdened by the discipleship of figures like Newton or Descartes, challenged the emerging consensus within the Enlightenment and established her as a disruptive force within the philosophical landscape.

[Irene]

Academic

Well researched.
Recognition of a brilliant French woman who collected brilliant men.
As a reader, I was curious about her childhood & family of origin.
What made her curious and was she liked as a person?