It is less than two years since Trinity College Dublin decided to strip George Berkeley’s name from its main library because of his record as a slave-owner – and just a few months since Eavan Boland’s name was placed on the door instead.
However, it seems like a lifetime ago in the context of the culture wars.
Donald Trump’s election has put the “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) agenda on the backburner in the United States. One of his first executive orders was to rename North America’s tallest mountain Mount McKinley, undoing a 2015 decision that had restored the peak’s Alaska Native name, Denali. His crusade to unwind the “woke” agenda is unlikely to end there.
Not that we should be deterred in Ireland or Europe from addressing inclusivity issues, both past and present. When it comes to historical commemoration, the gender imbalance is still glaring. It took until last October before Ireland could say it had a public space named after a woman writer. Mary Lavin Place remains an exception.
An obvious but little talked about difference between great men and great women of history is that great men never had to worry about dying in childbirth. Exploring Wikipedia recently, I stumbled across a page on famous women whose lives had been cut short due to pregnancy, listing hundreds of writers, artists, scientists and politicians.
Among the names I recognised was Mary Wollstonecraft, the English writer and philosopher who famously went toe-to-toe with Edmund Burke on the political and cultural questions of the late 18th century. Burke died aged 68 – and there’s a statue of him at the front gate of TCD. Wollstonecraft died aged 38, giving birth to her second daughter Mary Shelley, future author of Frankenstein. A sculpture of Wollstonecraft, who lived in Dublin for a time, was added to Trinity’s long room in 2023 with statues of three other women – placed alongside the room’s 40 original busts, all of men.
Someone on the list who I was less familiar with was Émilie Du Châtelet (1706-1749). She died aged 42 during complications during childbirth. I only know of her thanks to a new biography: The Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous Woman by Andrew Janiak, a professor of philosophy at Duke University in the US.
It’s a fascinating story, not just about a brilliant mathematician and physicist but also about how individuals get written into – and out of – the history books.
Du Châtelet “was not hidden during her lifetime”, Janiak says. “Instead, she was famous during the Enlightenment. Her ideas were discussed, debated and even copied wholesale by the most famous figures in her milieu. And yet she is not nearly as well known today as she was two centuries ago. Why is that?”
Speaking to The Irish Times, Janiak says: “Du Châtelet challenged the status quo profoundly.” As well as combating misogyny, she was willing to stand against her long-time intellectual collaborator and romantic partner, Voltaire.
Voltaire was a fanboy of Isaac Newton and did much to popularise the English scientist’s work, creating something of a Newtonian cult in physics. Du Châtelet was more circumspect, believing that no one should become a “disciple” of another thinker – and that no reputation was too big to question.
Her writing helps us think about commemoration today. The Enlightenment gave rise to a habit of worshipping “great men”. Is the correct response now to worship “great women”?
Janiek is emphatic about Du Châtelet deserving wider recognition, “but she also issues a caveat for us”, he says.
To be happy, one must have freed oneself from prejudices, must be virtuous, healthy, have tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions
— Émilie Du Châtelet
“She contends that the worship of great figures is predicated on an individualistic conception of knowledge production in the sciences. She advocates instead for a collective orientation toward knowledge, remarking that physics is like an immense building that exceeds the powers of even the greatest genius like Newton. We should not see him as having stood on the shoulders of giants, nor should we see him as a ‘master builder’; rather, he helped to build the house of science.”
Du Châtelet’s premature death leaves us wondering about lost opportunities to hear her voice. Three years before she died, she wrote her first book of a personal nature, setting out five conditions for happiness: “In order to be happy, one must have freed oneself from prejudices, one must be virtuous, healthy, have tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions.”
The first four conditions are relatively uncontroversial, but the fifth is intriguing, given her scientific background. Richard Dawkins and other “great men” of new atheism would baulk at being “susceptible to illusions”.
Du Châtelet’s position “certainly sounds unscientific”, Janiak says. “After all, shouldn’t philosophers and scientists pursue the truth wherever it might lead, and don’t illusions get in the way of that pursuit?
“That certainly might be the case in some domains, but in others she endorsed them. One of her examples seems particularly compelling: if I go to the opera – today, we might say the cinema – then my happiness will depend on whether I let myself fall prey to the illusions of the art form ... All in all, Du Châtelet may have been a hard-nosed scientist, a brilliant thinker, a profound philosopher, but she also liked to put down the world of science for a while and have a great evening at the theatre in Paris. Who could blame her?”
