Voltaire and his squeeze (for most of her adult life), the Marquise du Châtelet were not convinced by John Locke’s "thinking matter” as a decent system given by godot-almighty.
Apart from a few sane nutcases, most of European thinkers were still in the grip of Christian thinking — though these philosophers were trying to shake the apple tree through secular investigation. Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet — mistress of Voltaire — was such an important intellectual and scientist of the 18th century.


John Locke had written:

We have the Ideas of Matter and of Thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know, whether any material being thinks, or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own Ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some System of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined to matter so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance.

Because of her well-known long collaboration and romantic involvement with Voltaire, barely tolerated by her husband in a ménage à trois, Du Châtelet’s achievements have often been second fiddle in Voltaire's shadow. Yet, her own works focused on the empowerment of individuals, including women, to issues of social contract, and to the conceptualisation of energy, deriving its quantitative relationships to the mass and velocity of an object.

Her philosophical magnus opus, Institutions de la Physique (Paris, 1740, first edition), Foundations of Physics, generated heated debates, was republished and translated into several languages within two years of its original publication. She participated in the famous vis viva debate, concerning the best way to measure the force of a body and the best means of thinking about conservation of energy principles

Leinniz's concept of vis viva (living force) was the precursor to our modern concept of kinetic energy. His formula (mv2) was near to the modern non-relativistic 1/2mv2, with the half quotient eventually getting eliminated in the "derivatived" relativistic Einstein formula E = mc2. Now you know.

Vis viva became a bone of contention between the Newtonians and the Cartesians. The debate mixed technical, philosophical and even theological issues that would be strange to modern thinkers — except to bogans from the shire who have not a clue about anything philosophical that does not have barbecue and sausages in it — or a hot cross bun at Easter. Praise the lodylord and Mister Rabbit...

Madame du Châtelet's ideas were taken posthumously into the text of the Fench Enlightenment major book, the Encyclopédie of Denis (no freedom until the last king is hung with the entrails of the last priest) Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, first published shortly after the Marquise du Châtelet's death.

Books and plays have been written about her life and her work since then. In the early 21st century, her quaint big ideas have seen renewed interest.

Du Châtelet criticised John Locke's philosophy as she emphasised the necessity of the verification of knowledge through experience. Good. Her critique of Locke first appeared in her Bernard de Mandeville commentary on the Fable of the Bees. In the preface, she also argued in favour of women's education, particularly secondary education, as was available for young men then. Good. The lack of women's education prevented them to become eminent in the arts and sciences. Not good. She supported universal principles which precondition human knowledge and actions. Not good... Du Châtelet supported this universal presupposition, because if there were no such beginning, all our knowledge would be relative. Here comes Einstein again...

Thus du Châtelet did not like John Locke's unconvincing aversion to innate ideas and to a-priori principles. The debate went on and on, and is still part of our modern discussion, including a long one between Einstein and Bohr: The agnostic relativists versus the atheistic quantum mechanists. "Don't tell god what He (god is a male) can or can't do..." In a strange way, the quantum mechanists are more in favour of a "predestined future" than the relativists. This debate could make for another long rhetorical development on a bright Sunday barbecue, but we won't go there, yet.

Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, himself a scientist who invented the "principle of least action", and Julien Ofray de la Mettrie referenced du Châtelet's deliberations on motion and free will, on "thinking matter" and numbers — and on the proper way to do metaphysics. Du Châtelet rebuked Maupertuis for finding the truth with mathematical laws. She was a clever woman who was "sometimes never wrong". We know.

Here we enter the old chestnut of who discovered what, especially when everyone with a brain is looking for a better answer than Eve and Adam, and the Devil's rotten apple in regard to the bizarre human condition... Lucky, came the family of bright pommy thinkers, starting with granddaddy placing his left toe in the theory of evolution, to culminate with Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species". The monkeys were emerging from under the elegant and perfumed clothes.

Meanwhile, the "principle of least action" — or the principle of stationary action — is a variational principle that, when applied to a mechanical system can be used to obtain the equation of motion for that system. Here, friction between surfaces is often ignored, as if systems were operating in the best of the worlds. In quantum mechanics, an action is minimised or maximised, with nothing in between. This is the quanta. If something happens in between, then a new particle is invented with a smaller quanta. Simple... Not really.

The principle of least action has been used to derive Newtonian, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian equations of motion, and even general relativity with the Einstein-Hilbert action.

The physicist Paul Dirac, followed by Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman, demonstrated how this principle can be used in quantum calculations. It was historially called "least" because the solution requires finding the path with the least value.

This is where Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis' principle is more important than Madame du Châtelet's views. Quantum mechanics is only a mathematical model of matter that accurately predicts the behaviour of matter by making assumption about what matter is.

The present principle of least action used in classical and electromagnetic expressions is a direct concequence from being applied to quantum mechanics, yet in a reversed perversity, the "stationary action" of classical mechanics helped develop quantum mechanics.

The least action principle remains central to modern physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, relativity, quatum mechanics, particle physics (including string theory) and topology... Meanwhile, we, artists, tend to complicate things with volutes and distortions.

While sciences try to use the least action principle in search of the truth, the artful kingdom — say art of all sorts, politics, religions and economics — are economical with the truth in order to propagate the porkies principle. It has to be said here that "economics" may claim to use the least action principle by using statistics and numbers, but in economics the least action principle ony appears in tax evasion and minimisation of wages.

The least action principle is preceded by earlier concepts in optics... In Catoptrica, Euclid wrote that when light reflects in a mirror, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. Hero of Alexandria showed that this was the shortest path in length and in time — hence the least action principle being observed. 

Scholars credit Maupertuis for formulating the principle of lest action as he wrote first about it in 1744. However Leonhard Euler also discussed the principle in 1744 as well, while Gottfried Leibniz had had views on the subject 39 years earlier.

While Voltaire remained a Newtonian, the Marquise adopted some of Leibniz arguments against Newton. Both had fun.

Voltaire, who used about 176 noms-de-plume to stay clear of the authorities for writing his anti-government bile, did a couple of stints in prison at the Bastille. The first instance (1717-1718) was for writing a satirical verse in which he mentioned the Régent having an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

In plays and other works, Voltaire argued for freedom of thought and religious tolerance while campaigning to eradicate the religious and monarchical authority. He was in favour of a constitution monarchy that protectected people's rights.

His second stint at the Bastille was due to Rohan-Chabot, a French nobleman, of whom Voltaire had said that his name "Voltaire" would be honoured while the nobleman would dishonour his own... Offended, de Rohan-Chabot arranged for Voltaire to be beaten up by thugs a few days later. Seeking redress, Voltaire challenged de Rohan-Chabot to a duel, but the nobleman's powerful family had Voltaire arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille on 17 April 1726. Voltaire asked to be exhiled instead and the authorities escorted him of May 2, to Calais and sent him to Britain. Good Riddance.

In Britain, Voltaire appreciated the representative monarchy, a concept that challenged the French absolute monarchy. He circled in the high English society, meeting Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift and many other members of the nobility and royalty. Voltaire's exile in Great Britain greatly influenced his thinking. He was enthused by Britain's freedom of speech and of religion — freedom which with Assange in prison has gone to the dogs...

Returned to France and making a small fortune on the kingdom’s lottery, Voltaire wrote more stuff. In a visit to Paris in 1744, Voltaire found a new love — his niece. At first, his attraction to Marie Louise Mignot was sexual, as evidenced by his letters to her (discovered in 1957). They remained together until Voltaire's death. Meanwhile, the Marquise du Châtelet also took a lover, the Marquis de Saint-Lambert with whom she had a kid… She died in 1749, during childbirth of the said child who died 20 months later. Sad.

In parallel to these characters, misogynist JJ Rousseau was pushing his own social ideas that shook Europe. His views encouraged the revolution of the people, for the people by the people, a true revolution of the masses — contrary to the earlier one of the USA that was a revolution for the rich by the rich people who hated paying taxes on tea. There, nothing much has changed since in the Americas, the idea of behaving like armed little shits for freedom of making cash whichever way is sub-ingrained in the US constitution.

Despite 250 years of progressive enlightenment, obviously evolving into secularity and atheism intellectually applied to social constructs, there are still a few ningnong hell-bent on believing that Noah’s Ark’s ridiculous adventures is key to our relationships. Mind you, all the silly bits around Abraham’s sacrifices and Moses’ plagues of frogs were enforced by Emperor Constantine because it would better to unify “his” people by living in FEAR of one god, rather than be amused by a skewer of legendish Roman godots which started to look a bit ragged and had been behaving badly.

The concept of one godot was soon adopted by Mohammed in his quest to unify the “Arab world”.

Preceding Voltaire by a couple of hundred years, Rabelais enjoyed himself as a spanner in the works. A monk and a physician, Rabelais used his spare time to write and publish humorous pamphlets critical of established authority, preoccupied with the education and monastic moires of the time.

In 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier (a nonsensical anagram of François Rabelais), he published his first book, Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, the first of his Gargantua series. 

The inspiration for this came from an allegory about giants — the anonymous legends of les Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua, which were sold as popular cheap literature in pamphlets by travelling salesmen, and found at stalls at fairs in Lyon. 

"LEs gra(n)des et 
inestimables Cronicques: du grant et enor- 
me geant Gargantua: Contenant sa genealogie/ 
La grandeur & force de son corps. Aussi les merveil-
leux faictz darmes qu’il fist pour le Roy Artus/ com- 
me verrez cy apres. Imprime novellement. 1532 ”


THE great and
inestimable Chronicles: of the big and enor-
mous giant Gargantua : Containing his genealogy/
the bigness & strength of his body. As well the marvel-
lous facts of battle that he did for King Artus/ as
you can see thereafter. Just printed. 1532.”


Note that “mass” printing has barely been invented — as Gutenberg's first book ever printed in Europe, from movable type, was the “Forty-Two-Line” Bible completed in 1455. 


Pantagruelism is an "eat, drink and be merry" philosophy, which led Rabelais into disfavour with the church. His book brought him popular success and the admiration of critics, while it gave him a conduit to dissect, inspect and criticise the way societies were (badly) run… Nothing has changed much since.


This first book, critical of the monastic and education system, contains the first known occurrence in French of the words encyclopédie, caballe, progrès and utopie among others. 

Despite this book's popularity, the series about the life and exploits of Pantagruel's father Gargantua were condemned by La Sorbonne in 1543 and by the Catholic Church in 1545.

With support from the du Bellay family, Rabelais received approval from King Francis I to continue to publish his works. However, after the king's death in 1547, the academic élite turned against Rabelais, and the French Parliament suspended the sale of his fourth book (Le Quart Livre) published in 1552.

Rabelais often traveled to Rome with his friend Cardinal Jean du Bellay, for whom Rabelais was the “physician”. He lived in Turin as part of the household of du Bellay's brother, Guillaume, for a short while. Rabelais spent much time lying low, under threat of being condemned of heresy "depending upon the health of his various protectors". He had to make sure his benefactors such as the Cardinal du Bellay didn’t die. His own life depended on this fact.

Now, all of this could seem esoteric and obscure… But in our time of government decrees to force us into isolation and other weird behaviour, we have to ask what these brave libertine (before the word became associated with debauchery) would have done in pamphlets and other formats of satirical protests. They would have gone ballistic, like kids in lolly-shops, in our world of emails, internet, TV and radio. They would have been like a million Sammy J who excelled himself tonight with a video conferencing going apeshit. Magnificent. But we need more: we need a revolution but we have been too comfortable for too long.
Someone somewhere must be laughing their heads off, as in one swoop from fear of a virulent disease, most of science, religions, governments and nearly all the people have joined forces to destroy the spirit of humankind — a spirit based on freedom, equality, sharing and conviviality… unless you live in countries where godot’s (say Allah) decrees — in which the spirit of humankind has been imprisoned anyway... 

Welcome to the old normal, before the French revolution...

The bogans of these time gone by — about to be fed cakes instead of bread — were far more astute than the sheep of today… Propaganda has won. The satirists don’t have a chance.

GL.
Awaiting the next Rabelais...