Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

by Andrew S. Curran

among other things, the philosophe dreamed of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and genetic manipulation two hundred years before Dolly the

Diderot’s effusive art criticism inspired Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire. Émile Zola credited Diderot’s “vivisections” of society as the foundation of the naturalism that characterized his and Balzac’s novels.8 Social theorists, too, were

Karl Marx, who borrowed deeply from Diderot’s musings on class struggle, listed the writer as his favorite author.9 And Sigmund Freud credited the ancien régime thinker for recognizing the unconscious psychosexual desires of childhood in Rameau’s Nephew long before he or his fellow psychoanalysts had.10 If many critics

Diderot has now become the most relevant of Enlightenment

prominent atheist of his era. What we lack in terms of early correspondence is perhaps compensated by the multiple, overlapping descriptions of Diderot provided by his friends and associates. By the 1750s, people began calling him le philosophe (the philosopher as opposed to a

pantophile, according to Voltaire: the type of thinker who falls desperately in love with every subject he studies, be it mathematics, sciences, medicine, philosophy, politics, classical antiquity, drama, literature, musicology, or the fine arts. This passion for learning made him seem like an ancient truth-seeker, a simple and “honest soul” who was “born without ambition.”12 But his friends also dubbed him le philosophe because he had become the greatest advocate for the emancipatory power

subjecting religion, politics, contemporary mores, and a whole host of other notions to withering interrogation. 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,

Goethe and Madame de Staël, neither of whom ever met the philosophe, knew that, by reputation, no one’s conversation ever surpassed Diderot’s in liveliness, strength, wit, variety, and grace.14 Rousseau called him an “astonishing, universal, perhaps singular genius.”15 Friedrich

Catherine the Great.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The fundamental difference between the two men was one of temperament. Diderot was intensely optimistic, a powerful conversationalist, and far more effusive and confident than the introverted Rousseau. Some of this surely had to do with their respective familial histories. Diderot had

chosen to leave his family, while Rousseau had felt orphaned or abandoned from his first moments on earth. Referring, in The Confessions, to the fact that his mother had died nine days after he was born, Rousseau famously proclaimed that “I cost my mother her life. So my birth was the first of my misfortunes.”34 Raised by his aunt and his father and lacking the formal education enjoyed by Diderot, the boy learned to read and write by poring over long adventure

freethinking and clandestine books that served to introduce “irreligion” and even atheism into the capital’s cultural fabric. The oldest of these

they also conceded that England had originated many of the ideas and methods associated with what would, in retrospect, be called the Enlightenment.13 Diderot’s first

Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (Letters Concerning the English Nation) appeared in Parisian bookshops.

He had, in essence, redefined the role of the philosophe, of the public intellectual. And he had passed this idea on to younger writers like Diderot as well.

true knowledge is limited to what we can learn through our senses, anyone involved in seeking out nature’s secrets must rely on observation and experiment — on a so-called empirical approach — and avoid building huge systems based on fantasy. Like Bacon before him,

forge a relationship with God based on their capacity to think, not obey. This was a revelation to Diderot: according to the deists, God gave us the tools necessary to believe in Him, and to live a simple and moral life, but He had not given us organized religion; we had inflicted that problem on ourselves.

he walked out of Vincennes, he was forever branded as one of the most dangerous evangelists of freethinking and atheism in the country.