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His Encyclopédie summed up this mission quite succinctly when it said that the role of the philosophe is to “trample underfoot prejudice, tradition, antiquity, shared covenants, authority — in a word, everything that controls the mind of the common herd.”
Like many of his fellow philosophes, Diderot harbored a great deal of scorn for the “frivolities” of the scholastic method, which involved the often tortured application of Aristotelian ideas to Church dogma. While details of these years are scant, it is quite easy to imagine how this increasingly skeptical thinker would have become exasperated among a sea of aspiring ecclesiastics, all engaged in scholasticism’s impenetrable debates on the distinctness of substantial forms, the different types of matter, the immateriality of the soul, and the final causes of all bodies. Voltaire best summed
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“My gosh, nothing, nothing at all. I like to study; I am very happy, very content; I don’t ask for anything
Despite the fact that Diderot takes little responsibility for his own actions, he nonetheless acknowledges the legitimacy of his own longing, as well as his lifelong tendency to embrace existence fully, completely, and audaciously, with little regard for the potential consequences. It was this precise aspect of his temperament that would soon lead him to write a series of books challenging the religious foundations of the ancien régime itself.
As a young man, the former abbot had become preoccupied by what he believed to be a series of major inconsistencies in Christian dogma, the most famous being the age-old problem of evil. How could it be, he wondered, that the Christian deity was both a benevolent father who loved and protected his flock as well as an implacable magistrate who indignantly condemned the unrighteous to a never-ending gnashing of teeth in a sea of fire and torment?
More than two hundred thousand were driven from the country, fleeing to England, Germany, Holland, and America. Where, Diderot wondered, was God’s will in all this religious infighting and persecution?
By the end of the seventeenth century, a new generation of English-language writers began to put forward a more “reasonable” and Bible-free understanding of the deity’s existence.24 Partisans of this natural theology included the Irishman John Toland, who, in his 1696 Christianity Not Mysterious, asserted not only that God’s existence was best extrapolated through the experimental method preached by Locke, but that there was a need to demythologize the faith, to make it natural.25 Matthew Tindal developed similar ideas in his 1730 Christianity as Old as the Creation, claiming that the
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Combating this cheerless view of the human condition was far more difficult for Diderot than it might appear. The notion that humans were debased creatures who carried the burden of original sin was, for most people, a foundational reality of existence, not only endorsed by Saint Augustine and the Jansenists, but inculcated in most Christians from a tender age in church, during catechism and confession.
Turgot understood better than most people what Diderot’s intention was in these philosophical thoughts: creating a knowable and likable persona who could appeal to people’s common sense and aesthetic sensibility with irony, pithy aphorisms, and, as it turned out, intoxicating tidbits of sacrilege.
Royal interdiction did not put an end to the movement, however; instead, it drove them underground and inspired more violent practices that would demonstrate their unworthiness and devotion to God.48 In addition to driving nails into their own flesh, women — it was always women — were subjected to horrifying suffering, including having full-grown men stand on their throats.
Diderot then wonders aloud why this all-powerful being only intervenes in the interest of his immediate worshippers, and lets thousands die on a daily basis: “Regarding the portrait of the deity that [some] have painted, regarding His tendency to anger, regarding the severity of His revenge, regarding the disparity between those whom He lets perish and those to whom He deigns to lend a hand…[bearing all this in mind], the most decent soul would be tempted to wish that this God did not
While it may be hard to understand now, the most frightening aspect of a godless world was not godlessness itself; it was what remained after God was gone: soulless humans who seemed little more than machines living in a world that was potentially determinist, where all future events were preordained, not by an omniscient deity, but by a set of mechanistic rules.52 Such was the dark side of the joyous impiety that Diderot preached. Part of this threat may explain why Philosophical Thoughts is not a work of straightforward atheism.
Overlapping to a large degree with how Diderot himself felt in 1746, the skeptic’s voice comes across most effectively in a series of aphorisms emblematic of the Enlightenment movement as a whole. The first became Diderot’s mantra: “Skepticism is the first step toward truth.”56 The second is a logical clarification of this point: “What has never been called into question has never been proven.”57 And the third is a forceful declaration of the right to think freely: “One can demand of me that I seek truth, but not that I must find
This atheistic fever is supposed to be contagious, infecting us with the idea that we are little more than the fleeting result of
When he first arrived at the prison, he played the defiant philosophe; soon thereafter he became the suffering prisoner; by the end of his stay, he was the remorseful sycophant. Some years later, he famously justified such moral shilly-shallying as the direct result of unequal power relations. Humans, he suggested, actually have very little agency most of the time, and must strike poses depending on who has influence over them; life, in short, demands moral compromises.
Far more influential and prominent than the short single-authored works that Diderot had produced up to this point in his life, the Encyclopédie was expressly designed to pass on the temptation and method of intellectual freedom to a huge audience in Europe
(It is also here that Diderot states, somewhat pessimistically, that, in times of despair or revolution, the Encyclopédie might serve as a “sanctuary” of preserved knowledge, akin to a massive time
Whereas Bacon had carefully and sagely preserved a second and separate level of knowledge for theology outside the purview of the three human faculties, Diderot made religion subservient to philosophy, essentially giving his readers the authority to critique the divine.
In their correspondence, Diderot and d’Alembert often described the Encyclopédie project as a theater of war where Enlightenment intellectuals intent on ushering in an era of social change struggled against the constant scrutiny and interference of the French Church and state.
As he finally completed work on the last volume, he blamed the radically uneven quality of the articles on the unending compromises he was obliged to make to satisfy the censors. And yet one of the many ironies associated with the Encyclopédie is that the same conservative constituencies that succeeded in censoring and shutting down the publication of the Encyclopédie on two occasions — a story to which we will return — were partially responsible for the genius and texture of this huge dictionary. After all, it was the most repressive elements of the ancien régime that spawned the book’s
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He writes: “Whenever [an absurd preconception] commands respect, [the corresponding] article ought to treat it respectfully, and with a retinue of plausibility and persuasion; but at the same time, this same article should also dispel such rubbish and muck, by referring to articles in which more solid principles form a basis for contrary
The article on “Freedom of Thought,” for example, pointed to Diderot’s biting entry on ecclesiastical “Intolerance,” inviting its reader to cultivate a critical viewpoint. Other references were more playful, including the renvoi that Diderot embedded in the article “Cordeliers” or “Franciscans.” This humorless entry begins with the history of the religious order before arriving at an in-depth description of the Cordeliers’ vestments, particularly their hoods; it then concludes by praising the religious order for its sobriety, piety, morals, and the great men it has produced in the service of
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The most famous example is the entry on “Anthropophages” or “Cannibals”: its cross-references directed readers to the entries for “Altar,” “Communion,” and “Eucharist.” The possibility of finding such scandalous satire incited the Encyclopédie’s audience to read the book more comprehensively than one did a typical dictionary.
If someone is delivered poorly at birth by a midwife, has a stroke, or is hit violently on the head, says Diderot, “bid adieu to one’s judgment and reason” and “say goodbye” to the supposed transcendence of the soul.39 Diderot’s critics understood perfectly well what the philosophe was saying in this article: the true location of the soul is in the imagination.
Diderot seemed equally uninterested in portraying the often brutal conditions under which the French working class labored. If the occasional plate inadvertently conjures up the reality of the era’s laborers — in the image on this page, for example, one can see a young boy holding a pitcher into which an engraver is pouring acid — the intent of the editors and the artists was hardly to raise consciousness about the plight of either slaves or the workhands who made the country function.
the greatest threat posed by the Encyclopedists was not the book’s anthropocentrism or even its anticlericalism, but the unmistakable tendency to define the Enlightenment project as diametrically opposed to traditional religion in general.
Opponents of the dictionary project immediately saw Prades’s thesis as an excuse to indict the Encyclopédie and the liberal atmosphere it was creating. Early in 1752, only days after the second volume of the Encyclopédie appeared, the Paris Parlement denounced Prades’s thesis, claiming that it was emblematic of “a new science that substituted itself for the dogma of the faith and the natural notions of our
The real advantage of the rue Taranne, however, was the separate study located on the sixth floor, just under the building’s mansard roof. It was here that Diderot spent most of the next thirty years, bent over his desk, surrounded by his library, and dressed in his robe de chambre and slippers.
In October 1757, Jacob-Nicolas Moreau, a journeyman columnist and government propagandist writing for the Mercure de France, published some “Useful Advice” for the country’s philosophes, in the process coining the pseudo-ethnographic term Cacouac to describe the freethinking “tribe.” Allegedly derived from Greek (from kakos, “bad, mean”) and designed to recall the senseless quacking of ducks, the term implicitly accused the philosophes of being a race of “strange,” “malevolent,” and “corrupted” creatures, whose venom was derived from their perverted ideas.32 Encouraged by the success of his
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This rationalization, according to Rousseau, did not satisfy Diderot, who reportedly stormed off in a huff.40 Future squabbles between the two men tended to follow a similar pattern. Often precipitated by seemingly insignificant events, these disputes raised bigger philosophical questions related to how we should conduct our lives; what company we should keep; and how we should maintain our integrity and purity in a corrupted
Even Rousseau’s greatest admirers admit that his sense of persecution and emotional volatility helped bring about his own worst nightmare: being abandoned by his friends, particularly Diderot. Throughout his writings, Rousseau had professed a love of humanity that knew no bounds; his real problem was getting along with actual humans, with their foibles, their inconsistencies, and their self-absorption, especially when it got in the way of his own.
Helvétius’s On the Mind was anything but inoffensive, however. In this systematic rendering of the human mind and its motivations, the irreligious writer went further than Diderot had ever gone in reducing the human condition to a series of mechanical reactions to either pleasure or pain. Humans, he theorized, conduct their lives solely based on their ability to derive sensual gratification or to sidestep discomfort and agony, be it physical or psychological. This understanding of the human psyche, in addition to challenging the notion of the soul, the utility of religion, and the
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From his view, all justifications for human bondage, be they scientific, religious, or economic, are disallowed by humankind’s defining principle: liberty. To drive home this last point, Jaucourt proclaims memorably that he would prefer that the European colonies in the Caribbean “be destroyed” rather than allow such a horrific practice to continue.69 These ideas, which Jaucourt synthesized from a variety of sources, became the foundation of even more incisive and violent condemnations of the slave trade, some of them put forward by Diderot himself years later.
Diderot discovered that Le Breton had truncated dozens of potentially touchy articles in a number of volumes, including entries on morality, political oppression, philosophy, royal power, and religion. In the article “Luxure” (“Lust”), the editor had cut the quip (italicized) at the end of the following phrase: “In the Christian religion, lust is one of the seven deadly sins; one can imagine how many people must be damned since the slightest sin in this category is
Although he rarely said a positive word about the Encyclopédie after the final volumes appeared, his labor had given him a panoramic understanding of knowledge that few people have ever achieved. Indeed, decades of self-inflicted intellectual labor, coupled with his prodigious memory and an ability to see well beyond his own era, had prepared Diderot for the second and undoubtedly greatest phase in his career, the one he carried out in the shadows.
Two years later, in 1753, he also brought out a series of pithy essays on scientific methodology that he entitled Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (On the Interpretation of Nature). This short book avoided the type of polemical materialism that he had preached in the Letter on the Blind, but it also implored a new generation of savants to embrace the power and unpredictability of a true and radical investigation of nature, one where the scientist does not seek preordained answers, but simply
Diderot hoped that theatergoers who attended these realistic and stylistically unaffected plays would “believe that they were among their family, and [would] forget that they were at the theater.”7 In describing just how such plays should be staged, Diderot is generally credited with inventing what is now commonly referred to as the theory of the fourth wall. Beseeching future actors to forget the audience and their highly codified and stylized forms of acting, he writes: “Imagine a great wall on the edge of the stage that separates you from the parterre. Act as if the curtain did not
It is a habit of mine to go for a walk in the Palais Royal pleasure gardens every afternoon at five, whatever the weather. That’s me you see there, always by myself, daydreaming on d’Argenson’s bench. I have conversations with myself about politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I give in to my mind’s every fancy. I let it be master and allow it to pursue the first idea that comes to it, good or mad, and to behave just like those young libertines of ours we see chasing some flighty, pretty courtesan with bright eyes and a snub nose along Foy Walk, leaving her for another one, stalking them all
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Initially brought to life as Diderot’s whipping boy, the character of Rameau (referred to as Lui or Him in the dialogue) ultimately became a strident voice for the philosophe’s most nagging doubts. By the time Diderot finished this curious book, he knew he had achieved something monumental. In addition to creating a new type of literature that allowed him to interrogate his deepest beliefs, he had also shown that philosophy could be much more than a positive set of ideas. It could come alive, twist itself, contain the roots of its own contradiction, and be a vehicle for rendering the
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And yet Moi also admits that he respects the way in which this nonconformist speaks honestly about his sloth, greed, and cowardice.31 Men like Lui, he continues, have one real asset: they have a liberating effect on those who take the time to speak with them. Highlighting and disrupting the “annoying uniformity that our education, social conventions, and codes of conduct have inculcated in us,”32 the Rameaus of the world function like a “pinch of yeast” that ferments among us, bringing out the truth.
By the end of Rameau’s Nephew, Lui has left much of Moi’s benevolent humanism — and what will later be called the philosophy of the Enlightenment project — in tatters. Lui reduces virtue, friendship, country, the education of one’s children, and achieving a meaningful place in society to nothing more than our vanity, to our tainted, narcissistic desire to make ourselves more attractive to our entourage. No matter who we are, he suggests, we are all corrupted, acting out various pantomimes to get what we want and to take advantage of those around us. The only difference between Lui and us is
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the Louvre’s Salons did not limit or control their audiences through ticket pricing or hierarchical seating. Indeed, the Academy (at the king’s invitation) opened the Louvre’s doors to anyone who was interested in seeing the art. Free and open to the public, the Salon drew both the expected audience of foreign diplomats, aristocrats, financiers, tax farmers, rich merchants, and budding artists, and a range of so-called commoners, including laborers and servants. These working-class communities joined the fray, commenting on, interpreting, and evaluating the art that they would probably never
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Indeed, during the hours that he spent slipping in and out of the crowds at the Louvre, he took great pleasure in listening in to the “verdicts of old men,” “the thoughts of children,” “the judgments of men of letters,” “the opinions of sophisticates,” and “the views of the people.”10 These varied perspectives, he wrote, infused his own thinking on art. If he undoubtedly believed that a discriminating palate was a real and measurable thing — a capacity to sense the “true and the good, along with the circumstances rendering it beautiful” — he was also convinced that anyone could acquire an
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And yet, the very fact that Diderot recognized the incongruity of writing about decontextualized paintings (for people who would never see the art itself) led him to compensate by creating an entirely different kind of art criticism. By the time that he wrote his longest and most famous Salon reviews, those of 1765 and 1767, he was not only entering into an imagined dialogue with the painters and sculptors who had produced the art; he often plunged directly into the compositions himself, sometimes as a character in the painting and sometimes as a fellow artist. In his hands, art criticism
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For a piece of art to be successful, from his perspective, it needed a unified composition whose formal elements — these included rendering, staging, conceptual clarity, contrast, and execution — achieved or even surpassed the potential of its medium.
By the mid-1760s, Diderot was impatient to experience more of this kind of art, art that might make him recoil, yet delight him aesthetically. In his review of the Salon of 1765, he proclaims that “I hate all the mean, petty [actions] that indicate merely a base soul, but I do not hate great crimes, first, because they make for beautiful paintings and fine tragedies; and also because grand, sublime actions and great crimes have the same characteristic
Diderot believed that there is a fundamental difference between the classical notion of beauty and the feeling brought on by something that is so morally or physically immense that it defies our ability to rationally process what we are experiencing. Such overwhelming moments of aesthetic shock, in his opinion, were a perfect antidote to the boredom of eighteenth-century rococo pastorals. A great painting, as he put it in his Notes on Painting, sometimes required a subject that was “savage, crude, striking, enormous.”
The visual arts, he often maintained, had a duty to become more relevant to the middle class and, like the Enlightenment project as a whole, to communicate values leading to a more just and honest society. “To make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridiculousness salient,” he proclaims solemnly in his Notes on Painting, “such is the project of any honest man who takes up the pen, the paintbrush, or the
Whatever the case, the occasional eruption of heavy-handed moralism in his Salon reviews not only leads him astray from his otherwise freethinking inclinations; it prevents him from appreciating the genius of some of his era’s best painters.
Like much of his art criticism, Diderot’s appraisal of the Girl with a Dead Canary reveals the writer’s amusing tendency to interrupt himself, and to leap from one point of view to the next. When Diderot first addresses the young girl — this allegory of distraught femininity — he shows his empathy for her anguish and tries to dry her tears.
