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What is compelling about Diderot’s retelling of his friend’s life is not the fact that this abandoned child grew up to become famous, but that the animal called d’Alembert — like Falconet’s statue — is no more than a temporary assemblage of atoms arising from, and soon to return to, a bubbling, material universe.19 The process, as Diderot explains it, is as simple as it is inevitable: “[T]he formation of a man or animal need refer only to material factors, the successive stages of which would be an inert body, a sentient being, a thinking being, and then a being who can resolve the problem of
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Well into the eighteenth century, nature remained laden with inflexible, religious-inspired concepts. To begin with, there was the orthodox understanding of time, which, at least officially, maintained that animals and humans had come into existence at the time of the Creation, 5,769 years before.36 The second related notion was that animals and humans had appeared in their present forms during this biblical drama. The final, and perhaps less obvious, sacrosanct idea had to do with humankind’s supposedly exceptional place within God’s kingdom. According to Christianity’s sacred writings, man
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By the end of his dream, d’Alembert has come to realize that humans come into this world as contingent flukes, lead their lives without knowing who they really are, and return to a bewildering world of matter without ever knowing why.
Diderot also assumed that the complicated world of sex was rarely only about procreation. Once again beating Freud to the punch, he was convinced that human sexuality did not confine itself to what happened in the bedroom.
Crébillon’s most famous novel in this vein, The Sofa (1742), tells the tale of an Indian aristocrat who is not only magically transformed into a divan by Brahma, but sentenced to spend his life banished between couch cushions until such time that two virgins consecrate their love “on” him. His episodic adventures as a sofa, during which he is bumped about in a variety of ways, provide the salacious content of the novel.
During those moments where Diderot abandoned anatomy for what we might call proto-sociology, he proclaimed that the world’s women were trapped within an unforgiving system that was engineered by men for men, and that produced misery for one-half of the planet’s population. Once a woman was no longer beautiful, he wrote pessimistically in a short 1772 essay entitled “On Women,” she becomes a person who is “neglected by her husband, forgotten by her children, nothing in society, and for whom her only and last resort is religion.”15 This sad state of affairs dovetailed with the overall miserable
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Philosophes waged war against various forms of intolerance during the era, but the persecution of homosexuals was not one of them. Indeed, in his capacity as editor of the Encyclopédie, Diderot followed long-standing tradition in labeling homosexual acts as both immoral and warped.
Whatever Diderot’s actual proclivities, his overall philosophical orientation led him to reconsider both sexual norms and the immutability of gender categories. Some of this broad-minded stance may flow directly from his understanding of sexual anatomy. By the late 1760s, Diderot was not only convinced that the two sexes shared common anatomical structures in utero, but that the categories of gender themselves had also emerged from a biologically fluid past where, as he put it in D’Alembert’s Dream, “perhaps man is only a freakish form of woman, or woman a freakish form of
And yet, despite the fact that Diderot’s provocative thoughts on sex sought to question the stranglehold that Christian morality had on humankind, his goal was rarely to titillate or overthrow established customs; it was, rather, to incite us to consider a fuller understanding of our nature as sexual beings.
Time and again, Diderot expressed two major regrets in his life. The first was wasting his best years toiling on the 74,000-article Encyclopédie. The second was marrying a perpetually tetchy woman; of the two blunders, he perhaps regretted the second one more. Though he thought and wrote a great deal about love and sex — not to mention the fact that our primary responsibility in life is to be happy — the flesh-and-blood Diderot often felt that his marriage was a brutal chore.
But the middle daughter was a frail, bespectacled, whip-smart, and often-melancholy thirty-eight-year-old spinster. This was Louise-Henriette Volland, the woman who would arguably become the most important person in Diderot’s life. We now know Louise-Henriette by the distinctive Greek-inspired nickname that Diderot gave to her: Sophie, which evoked her wisdom.
Having once tiptoed stealthily around the Volland apartment, the charming and generous Diderot had become an integral part of the family’s social fabric and identity. Sometime during the 1760s, Madame de La Carlière went so far as to purchase and proudly display a bust of the famous philosophe in their salon.
Madame de Maux had other ideas. Far less compliant than her young lover, she explained to Diderot that the poor boy “had desires” that needed to be met.40 Later in the month, she proposed the simplest solution to Diderot: why should you not both be my lovers? Diderot, who had no problem sharing himself with Toinette, Sophie, and now Madame de Maux, recoiled at the idea and issued an ultimatum that would prove the end of the amorous portion of their relationship.
Diderot’s materialist pipe dream obviously echoes his belief that death is not really an ending, but a simple shifting of forms. But this fantasy also contains a powerfully erotic message. As Diderot’s and Sophie’s bodies break down over the centuries, he imagines that his dusty remains might start to quiver and, through molecular attraction, seek out the vestiges of his mistress. True love, in this letter, functions on an atomic level. Like iron dust being attracted to a magnet, Diderot’s molecules scurry about in a quest for the carnal and intellectual joy that he had felt in an earlier
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While the intimacy and frequency of their correspondence pale in comparison to the exchange between Voltaire and Catherine, the empress ultimately had a far greater effect on the Encyclopedist’s life than she did on Voltaire’s.
Over the next few years, Diderot also became one of Catherine’s most important art brokers, jubilantly spending her money (in consultation with Golitsyn) on what he believed to be the best available canvases and sculptures. His most significant impact as cultural agent began in 1768, after Golitsyn left Paris to become ambassador to Holland. Collaborating far more closely at this point with Grimm and François Tronchin — the latter a Genevan art enthusiast who would later sell his own collection to Catherine — Diderot utterly transformed the empress’s burgeoning holdings.
Drawing heavily from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments, Catherine showed herself to be open to some of the most liberal reforms ever advanced by a sitting monarch, including progressive penal and judicial reforms that outlawed
The intensity (and the lack of ceremony) that Diderot brought to their conversations in the Little Hermitage is now a thing of legend. During sometimes heated exchanges, the philosophe cajoled, contradicted, and even reached out and pounded on Catherine’s leg as he would while speaking to d’Holbach or Grimm. In a letter that the empress sent to Voltaire in January 1774, she admitted to being impressed by the limitless imagination of the most “extraordinary man” she had ever
Advocating for much more than superficial changes to the era’s political institutions, Rousseau sought to revolutionize not only the way people thought about themselves, but their political birthright as well. More than any other thinker before him, he positioned the subjugated peoples of Europe on the right side of history.
the creation of a new binding political pact that would replace the individualism and self-love of current society with a form of absolute democracy and collectivism guaranteed by the general will of the population. The dialectical message proposed by Rousseau was that the people were supposed to sacrifice their freedom in order to be truly free. Those who violated this trust, he argues in The Social Contract, must be put to death.
Diderot interrupted their discussion one day to ask the empress, who always was very attentive during their conversations, why none of his suggestions had been implemented. Her answer spelled out very clearly just where Diderot’s jurisdiction began, and where it ended. Monsieur Diderot, I have listened with the greatest pleasure to all the inspirations flowing from your brilliant mind. But all your grand philosophies, which I understand very well, would do marvelously in books and very badly in practice. In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only
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Diderot began the Plan with several powerful maxims that reflected his view that the function of education was not to produce a better-educated aristocracy; it was a weapon to be deployed against superstition, religious intolerance, prejudice, and social injustice. “To instruct a nation,” Diderot writes in the first line of the Plan, “is to civilize it.”15 Education, as he went on, not only “gives man dignity”; it has a necessarily emancipatory or transformative effect on both the enslaved and the ignorant: “the slave [who is instructed] soon learns that he was not born for servitude” while
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Perhaps the most radical aspect of his plan took place on a general curricular level: anticipating the birth of the great research universities of the future, he knocked Greek and Latin from their privileged pedestal, and called for a far more practical and concrete course of study that gave pride of place to the teaching of math and experimental science, the latter in a laboratory setting. This new type of pedagogy, he insisted, would finally allow experimentation to take precedence over received ideas.
Among the many projects he worked on during his last years, he wrote a play that he would eventually entitle Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? (Is He Good? Is He Wicked?).24 In stark contrast to his far more earnest and moralizing bourgeois dramas, this short comedy recounts a day in the life of Hardouin, a Parisian man of letters who, very much like Diderot himself, experiments with the idea that working in the interest of the greater good often means moral compromise, if not downright
In addition to a far-reaching survey and history of European commercial activities, the book had replaced the Encyclopédie as the venue for some of the era’s most liberal positions on both global and domestic politics. Despite the fact that the History’s disparate points of view often come into direct contradiction — the inevitable pitfall of multiple authors — the most powerful portions of the book unequivocally put forth a vision of history according to which tyrants, magistrates, and priests had not only instituted various forms of despotism in Europe, but had exported it to the world’s
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He warns the doomed Louis XVI that the country as a whole is a powder keg: “Cast your eyes over the capital of your empire and you will find two classes of citizens. Some, wallowing in wealth, flaunt a luxury which provokes indignation among those not corrupted by it.”41 A paragraph later, the aging philosophe predicts that empires such as his own “cannot endure, without morals and virtue,” then asks the king why he continues to condone the “insatiable greed” of his courtiers, allowing all the “protected men” of his kingdom to shelter themselves from the burden of taxation while the people
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Diderot embedded many other such messages in the History as well, even when he was not speaking to the king directly. On the subject of freedom of the press, for example, the philosophe was categorical: “Wherever the sovereign does not allow people to express themselves freely on economic and political subjects, he provides the most convincing evidence of his inclination to
In addition to rejecting the era’s illegitimate race science, he attributed the existence of the trade, which had always been blamed on Africans themselves, to European greed. He also solemnly informed readers of the History that the responsibility for the forced enslavement and murder of millions of Africans not only lay with slave merchants and planters, but regular Europeans as well: “The insatiable thirst for gold has given birth to the most infamous and atrocious of all trades, that of slaves. People speak of crimes against nature and they do not cite slavery as the most horrific. The
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Yet in the same years that he was castigating the horrors of the plantation system, he was also applauding the birth of a new kind of country in “Septentrional” or North America: a federation of independent states that combined the freedom of democracy with the political strength of a monarchy.48 If this new republic were only able to rid itself of human bondage, he believed, it might actually become the promised
In addition to asserting that the American colonies had the absolute moral and political right to unshackle themselves from their oppressive mother country, he provided an enthusiastic summary of the political foundations and ideology of the new nation, not only translating portions of Thomas Paine’s 1776 Common Sense and summarizing the main points of the Declaration of Independence, but analyzing the new country’s Articles of Confederation as well.56 It is no exaggeration that Diderot was the single most important French interpreter of the remarkable political experiment taking place on the
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People of North America: may the example of all those nations that have preceded you, and especially that of your motherland, be your guide. Beware the abundance of gold that brings about the corruption of morals and the scorn of law; beware of an unbalanced distribution of wealth that will produce a small number of opulent citizens and a horde of citizens in poverty…58 The real threat to American democracy, as Diderot had also suggested in his Essay on Seneca, came less from foreign powers than from the unintended consequences of future success: luxury goods, the rise of class tensions,
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Diderot’s unsent letter allowed the philosophe to express his fury without breaking off his friendship with Grimm entirely. Perhaps as important, it also gave him the opportunity to clarify what he believed was the moral responsibility of the philosophe: being honest, resolute, and audacious in the pursuit of truth, whether one trumpets one’s name, as Raynal had done, or whether one writes in the shadows, as he himself often chose to do.
I do not flatter myself into thinking that, when the great revolution comes, my name will still survive….This feeble work [the History of the Two Indies], whose sole merit will be to have inspired better books, will undoubtedly be forgotten. But at least I will be able to tell myself that I contributed as much as possible to the happiness of my fellow men, and prepared, perhaps from afar, the improvement of their lot. This sweet thought will for me take the place of glory. It will be the charm of my old age and the consolation of my final moment.
After years of exchanging letters — with Diderot, the epistolary mode had the distinct advantage of allowing the other person to respond without being interrupted — Voltaire had finally witnessed the Encyclopedist’s legendary ability to leap from one idea to the next without stopping to take a breath.
The end of life did not seem to worry him in the least, however. To begin with, as a disciple of both Montaigne and Seneca, he knew that the only thing one accomplished by dreading the inevitable was ruining the present. Yet more than simply accepting Montaigne’s tenet that “to philosophize is to learn how to die,” Diderot had also cultivated a thoughtful atheist understanding of life and death. In the materialist primer that he worked on well into the 1780s — the Elements of Physiology — he summed up what he believed to be the important things in life: “There is only one virtue, justice; one
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Determinism, it would seem, has the space for action, if not total psychological freedom. One of the wonders of this book is that Diderot does not tell us this directly: we absorb this message through the act of reading and laughing, which is part of the philosophical
the clergy plan on avenging themselves upon him and making his cadaver suffer every religious snub unless he satisfies the externals [by recognizing the divinity of Jesus Christ and the Christian God].”30 The pious Toinette was torn about what to do about this. While she “would have given her life for [Diderot] to be a believer,” she also wanted to prevent her husband from being coerced into accepting Christ in order to ensure himself a decent burial.
Shortly before she left, she heard him paraphrase a famous quote from the Philosophical Thoughts that summed up his entire career: “The first step toward philosophy,” he apparently said, “is incredulity.” These were the last words she heard him say.
In the months before he died, Diderot had prepared for what he hoped would be a postmortem afterglow. Writing for future generations, as he had revealed in the Encyclopédie article “Immortality,” had been the single biggest motivating factor in his highly policed and self-censored career: “We hear in ourselves the tribute that [posterity] will one day offer in our honor, and we sacrifice ourselves. We sacrifice our life, we really cease to exist in order to live on in their
Why Revolutionaries would consider the most progressive thinker of the Enlightenment at odds with their liberal values may not seem immediately obvious to us.40 And yet the politically astute leaders of the Revolution realized that there was no better way of dooming the movement than by letting it be contaminated by the atheism that Diderot represented. To do so would deprive the French citizenry not only of a God, but the comforting prospect of some form of afterlife.
Maximilien Robespierre, who was both a deist and a disciple of Rousseau, articulated Diderot’s sins far more succinctly. Since, from his point of view, the Revolution required a Supreme Being both to guarantee transcendence for its citizens and to justify the terror needed to purify the body politic, Diderot and the Encyclopedists were necessarily de facto counterrevolutionaries:
Neither Diderot’s detractors nor his disciples were wrong to emphasize the author’s career-long campaign against God. And yet, today, incredulity is far from the most compelling aspect of his writing. What really distinguishes him from his peers is what he accomplished after doing away with the deity. Although Diderot is undoubtedly the steward of the age of the Encyclopédie, he is also, paradoxically, the only major thinker of his generation who questioned the rational perspective that is at the heart of the Enlightenment project.
Writing in an era of powerful systems and systemization, Diderot’s private thinking opened philosophy up to the irrational, the marginal, the monstrous, the sexually deviant, and other nonconformist points of view.52 His most important legacy is arguably this cacophony of individual voices and ideas.53 Readers today continue to be amazed by his willingness to give a platform to the unthinkable and the uncomfortable, and to question all received authorities and standard practices — be they religious, political, or societal. As philosophers go, Diderot is neither a Socrates nor a Descartes, nor
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