Introducton
Denis Diderot ( 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher,
art critic, and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and
is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the
Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert.
Diderot's literary reputation during his lifetime rested primarily on
his plays and his contributions to the Encyclopédie; many of his most important
works, including Jacques the Fatalist, Rameau's Nephew, Paradox of the Actor,
and D'Alembert's Dream, were published only after his death.
Diderot's work was mired in controversy from the beginning; the project
was suspended by the courts in 1752. Just as the second volume was completed
accusations arose, regarding seditious content, concerning the editor's entries
on religion and natural law. Diderot was detained and his house was searched
for manuscripts for subsequent articles. But the search proved fruitless as no
manuscripts could be found. They were hidden in the house of an unlikely
confederate—Chretien de Lamoignon Malesherbes, the very official who ordered
the search. Although Malesherbes was a staunch absolutist—loyal to the
monarchy—he was sympathetic to the literary project. Along with his support,
and that of other well-placed influential confederates, the project resumed.
Diderot returned to his efforts only to be constantly embroiled in controversy.
These twenty years were to Diderot not merely a time of incessant
drudgery, but harassing persecution and desertion of friends. The ecclesiastical
party detested the Encyclopédie, in which they saw a rising stronghold for
their philosophic enemies. By 1757 they could endure it no longer. The
subscribers had grown from 2,000 to 4,000, a measure of the growth of the work
in popular influence and power. The Encyclopédie threatened the governing
social classes of France (aristocracy) because it took for granted the justice
of religious tolerance, freedom of thought, and the value of science and
industry. It asserted the doctrine that the main concern of the nation's
government ought to be the nation's common people. It was believed that the
Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society,
and that the dangerous ideas they held were made truly formidable by their open
publication. In 1759, the Encyclopédie was formally suppressed. The decree did
not stop the work, which went on, but its difficulties increased by the
necessity of being clandestine. Jean le Rond d'Alembert withdrew from the
enterprise and other powerful colleagues, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot,
Baron de Laune, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired a
bad reputation.
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In 1745 the publisher André Le Breton approached Diderot with a view to
bringing out a French translation of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, after two
other translators had withdrawn from the project. Diderot undertook the task
with the distinguished mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert as coeditor, but
soon profoundly changed the nature of the publication, broadening its scope and
turning it into an important organ of radical and revolutionary opinion. He
gathered around him a team of dedicated litterateurs, scientists, and even
priests, many of whom, as yet unknown, were to make their mark in later life.
All were fired with a common purpose: to further knowledge and, by so doing,
strike a resounding blow against reactionary forces in church and state. As a
dictionnaire raisonné (“rational dictionary”), the Encyclopédie was to bring
out the essential principles and applications of every art and science. The
underlying philosophy was rationalism and a qualified faith in the progress of
the human mind.
In 1749 Diderot published the Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on
Blindness), remarkable for its proposal to teach the blind to read through the
sense of touch, along lines that Louis Braille was to follow in the 19th
century, and for the presentation of the first step in his evolutionary theory
of survival by superior adaptation. This daring exposition of the doctrine of
materialist atheism, with its emphasis on human dependence on sense impression,
led to Diderot’s arrest and incarceration in the prison of Vincennes for three
months. Diderot’s work on the Encyclopédie, however, was not interrupted for
long, and in 1750 he outlined his program for it in a Prospectus, which
d’Alembert expanded into the momentous Discours préliminaire (1751). The
history of the Encyclopédie, from the publication of the first volume in 1751
to the distribution of the final volumes of plates in 1772, was checkered, but
ultimate success was never in doubt.
Diderot was undaunted by the government’s censorship of the work and by
the criticism of conservatives and reactionaries. A critical moment occurred in
1758, on the publication of the seventh volume, when d’Alembert resigned on
receiving warning of trouble and after reading Rousseau’s attack on his article
“Genève.” Another serious blow came when the philosopher Helvétius’ book De
l’esprit (“On the Mind”), said to be a summary of the Encyclopédie, was
condemned to be burned by the Parlement of Paris, and the Encyclopédie itself
was formally suppressed. Untempted by Voltaire’s offer to have the publication
continued outside France, Diderot held on in Paris with great tenacity and
published the Encyclopédie’s later volumes surreptitiously. He was deeply
wounded, however, by the discovery in 1764 that Le Breton had secretly removed
compromising material from the corrected proof sheets of about 10 folio
volumes. The censored passages, though of considerable interest, would not have
made an appreciable difference on the impact of the work. To the 17 volumes of
text and 11 volumes of plates (1751–72), Diderot contributed innumerable
articles partly original, partly derived from varied sources, especially on the
history of philosophy (“Eclectisme” [“Eclecticism”]), social theory (“Droit
naturel” [“Natural Law”]), aesthetics (“Beau” [“The Beautiful”]), and the
crafts and industries of France. He was moreover an energetic general director
and supervised the illustrations for 3,000 to 4,000 plates of exceptional
quality, which are still prized by historians today.
Philosophical and
scientific works.
While editing the Encyclopédie, Diderot managed to compose most of his
own important works as well. In 1751 he published his Lettre sur les sourds et
muets (“Letter on the Deaf and Dumb”), which studies the function of language
and deals with points of aesthetics, and in 1754 he published the Pensées sur
l’interprétation de la nature (“Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature”), an
influential short treatise on the new experimental methods in science. Diderot
published few other works in his lifetime, however. His writings, in manuscript
form, were known only to his friends and the privileged correspondents of the
Correspondance littéraire, a sort of private newspaper edited by Baron Grimm
that was circulated in manuscript form. The posthumous publication of these
manuscripts, among which are several bold and original works in the sciences,
philosophy, and literature, have made Diderot more highly appreciated in the
20th century than he was in France during his lifetime.
Among his philosophical works, special mention may be made of L’Entretien
entre d’Alembert et Diderot (written 1769, published 1830; “Conversation
Between d’Alembert and Diderot”), Le Rêve de d’Alembert (written 1769,
published 1830; “D’Alembert’s Dream”), and the Eléments de physiologie
(1774–80). In these works Diderot developed his materialist philosophy and
arrived at startling intuitive insights into biology and chemistry; in
speculating on the origins of life without divine intervention, for instance,
he foreshadowed the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and put forth a
strikingly prophetic picture of the cellular structure of matter. Though
Diderot’s speculations in the field of science are of great interest, it is the
dialectical brilliance of their presentation that is exceptional. His ideas,
often propounded in the form of paradox, and invariably in dialogue, stem from
a sense of life’s ambiguities and a profound understanding of the complexities
and contradictions inherent in human nature.
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