Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

by Andrew S. Curran

“Posterity is to the philosophe,” he once stated, as “heaven is to the man of religion.”3

As was often the case, the sharp-tongued Voltaire, who both admired and distrusted Diderot, came up with the cleverest remark on the subject; he apparently joked that the Encyclopedist’s mind “was an oven that burns everything that it cooks.”7

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.”13

Years of reading, thinking, and writing about this dazzling intellect have convinced me that our era can learn a lot from Diderot. Yet doing justice to a man who might write on ancient Chinese and Greek music first thing in the morning, study the mechanics of a cotton mill until noon, help purchase some paintings for Catherine the Great in the afternoon, and then return home and compose a play and a twenty-page letter to his mistress in the evening, is as challenging as it is enchanting.

Here I focus on the compelling questions that preoccupied Diderot during his lifetime. What is the incentive to be moral in a world without God? How should we appreciate art? What does it mean to be human, and where do we come from? What is sex? What is love? And how might a writer or philosophe effectively intervene in political affairs?