PHILOSOPHY
Meetings chaired by Victor Suchar unless otherwise stated

DIDEROT: A PASSIONATE MATERIALIST

Diderot and Materialism

Diderot was a central figure of the French Enlightenment, editor of the Encyclopedie, and is frequently classified as a materialist. What is 'materialism', and how much does the further study of Diderot's life and work bear out this label?
Materialism can be defined as the belief that only the material exists and that this matter is eternal and necessary. Therefore 'soul' is a superfluous hypothesis and everything in nature is causally determined, including human actions, so that there is no 'freewill'. The moral life is as much subject to inexorable laws as are physical phenomena.
Diderot has been regarded as a materialist by admirers and detractors. The first complete edition of Diderot's works was produced in 1797-8 by Diderot's friend and literary executor Naigeon, an atheistic materialist who saw Diderot in the same mould. Diderot was Karl Marx's favourite prose writer, and Diderot was declared a saint of the positivist calendar by Auguste Comte. In the Soviet Union he was seen as a precursor of dialectical materialism. Since the royalist and catholic Abbe Barruel invented in 1796 the idea of a masonic-philosophic conspiracy against throne and altar Diderot has also been attacked by political and moral conservatives who see his philosophy a destructive of eternal values.
Was Diderot a figure of mechanistic coldness and amorality? He was certainly a vivid personality who stamped his most abstruse speculations with his energy. He has been described as an eternal adolescent full of the enthusiasm of discovery. Born in 1713 in Langres, 150 miles south west of Paris, his father was a master-cutler, and at the age of ten he went to the local Jesuit school. In 1728 or 1729 he was sent to Paris, to a Jansenist college and then to the University of Paris in 1732 for a course which would lead to a doctorate of theology. At some stage he abandoned the idea of a career in the university or the church.
Diderot briefly considered studying the law, but he was more interested in study for its own sake, particularly mathematics. He then began a period in the 1730s living a bohemian existence. Paris was to be as central to his life as London to Johnson or Dickens The 1730s is the least well documented period of Diderot's life, but there is some evidence of his mixing with the colony of hard-up writers and intellectuals there who were inclining to the deistic, sceptical and atheistic views of the Enlightenment. He married in 1742, but still in 1747 Diderot's local parish priest was writing to the lieutenant-general of police to complain that Diderot had been heard to utter blasphemies in his own household.
Diderot was commissioned to translate an English history of Greece in 1742, and then in 1745 appeared his translation of Shaftesbury's 'Inquiry concerning virtue and merit' of 1699, with Diderot's accompanying notes. Shaftesbury was Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), a typical latitudinarian Christian of the early Enlightenment who wrote of Christianity as a 'witty and good natured religion' and replaced the traditional Christian emphasis on sin, judgement and hell with one in which a benevolent God of a benevolent natural order was the perfect audience for the self-interested human pursuit of virtue.
It is not clear to what extent Diderot believed in Shaftesbury's God by this stage, but what he did seem to draw from Shaftesbury was the enthusiasm for 'virtue', which is seen to accord with our true self-interest. Many years later Naigeon was to call Diderot's religiosity in his notes to Shaftesbury a 'perfect crisis' which expelled God from his system, and certainly in Diderot's next work, his first independent one, the 'Philosophical Thoughts' of 1746 he is more ambivalent about belief in God. Probably written as a counterblast to Pascal's 'Pensees' of 1670, Diderot's work wavers between lukewarm theism, atheism and scepticism, but it seems to rest mainly in the latter.
In 1749 and 1751 Diderot published 'Letters on the blind' and 'Letters on the deaf and dumb', in which he addressed the problem of human knowledge of the external world which philosophers had grappled with since Descartes. As an Enlightenment disciple of John Locke, Diderot believed that all knowledge was derived from the senses, the mind being a blank slate at birth, and in 'Letters on the blind' he considered the problem of how blindness would lead to differences in perceiving the world and hence seemed to point to a relativism in human knowledge of that world. The blind Cambridge mathematician Nicholas Saunderson, who died in 1739, is discussed and Diderot dramatises Saunderson's different perception of, for instance, God, from the sighted person through a challenge to an Anglican clergyman who Diderot has visiting Saunderson on his death bed in an attempt to convert him. The clergyman speaks of the design of creation, but Saunderson says 'if you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him'. At this stage of his philosophical development Diderot seems to be hoping that mathematics might offer a key to interpreting nature which overcomes the gap between the perceptions of that nature by the blind and the sighted. Diderot temperamentally did not rest in scepticism about the nature of ultimate reality. In the 'Letter on the deaf and dumb' he continued the search for a unifying principle of nature.
During the 1750s Diderot increasingly moved towards an interest in the life sciences as a basis for an understanding of the cosmic process. This interest was to come to maturity in Diderot's two dialogues, collectively called 'D'Alembert's dream', written in 1769. In the first dialogue Diderot proposes a materialist view of the universe to his friend D'Alembert, who is more of a sceptic about totalising cosmic explanations. Diderot argues that all matter is sensitive, though active or inert, and that changes from inert matter to active life can be explained in purely physical terms. Therefore, a stone might come to feel. And an egg, which is an insensitive mass until the germ of life appears in it, can overthrow all the schools of theology and churches in the world.
In the second dialogue D'Alembert's platonic companion Julie de L'Espinasse has been nursing D'Alembert all night after he has returned delirious from his conversation with Diderot. Doctor Bordeu is called, and he and Julie discuss what D'Alembert has been rambling about including the possibility of 'polyp'-type creatures. This speculation derives from Abraham Trembley's discovery of the freshwater polyp in 1740, which combines the characteristics of animal and plant. Bordeu speculates wildly about myriad minute creatures that might exist after decomposition of the human body. He and Julie also discuss eugenics and cross-breeding, and the supposed moral consequences of materialism where homosexuality and masturbation are just part of the natural order and less harmful than many 'moral' acts.
The dialogues reflect Diderot's interest in contemporary scientific debate such as the difference over spontaneous generation of life from matter between the English John Needham and Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani in the 1760s. While his theory of sensitive matter is written entirely in ignorance of modern understanding of genetics and DNA, the speculation that mutations lead to changes in species is grasping at evolutionary theory a century before Darwin. Diderot's far-reaching speculations present a more dynamic materialism than the mechanistic materialism of other Enlightenment thinkers like Lamettrie and Holbach, and contain a visionary and poetic element which in some ways give him more in common with later romantic writers than with his contemporaries.

Diderot and Postmodernism

Looking at Diderot's most enduring project, the Encyclopedie, brings us on to an area where Diderot's work has a completely different and unexpected reputation from his materialist one. The Encyclopedie had its origins in the 1740s, and by 1748 he and D'Alembert were joint editors. In 1748 Diderot wrote a 'Prospectus' saying that they would create a permanent sanctuary for man's knowledge. They actively recruited contributors, and Diderot took responsibility for the articles and plates of crafts and manufacturing processes, which have become iconic of the Enlightenment and its spirit of worldly practicality, as well as writing on any subject for which no other contributor could be found. Volume one appeared in 1751, and from then to 1773 the Encyclopedie took up a huge amount of Diderot's energies, especially after D'Alembert left him as sole editor in 1757. In 1755 the fifth volume contained a long article by Diderot with philosophical reflections on the concept of an encyclopaedia itself. This article is very interesting when seen in the light of an intellectual development of two centuries later in western cultures, postmodernism.
Postmodernism is an amorphous term for the supposed recognition of the fact that the claims of classical texts and world views to be 'foundational', an unchanging window on to truth, has been replaced by a recognition that all reality is enclosed within language, that all is 'within the text'. The Enlightenment discourse of knowledge, reason, and progress, supposedly deconstructing the older Christian one of divine providence in history, has itself supposedly been deconstructed by postmodernism. The Encyclopedie, with its reputation as a manifesto of durable scientific knowledge and mastery over nature, has been the target of postmodern deconstruction. In 'The Order of Things' in 1966 Michel Foucault suggested that the eighteenth century mind-set included the assumption that the world in its totality could be captured with an encylopeadia, and this general view of the Enlightenment as an imperialism of (usually western) science and reason has been repeated in postmodern discourse many times since the 1960s.
There is now evidence of a reaction in academia against this stereotype of the Enlightenment, a reaction typified by the collection of articles in 'Postmodernism and the Enlightenment' edited by Daniel Gordon and published in 2001, in general pointing out the greater complexity of 'enlightened' thought than is usually credited by postmodernists. An article by David Rosenberg 'An eighteenth century time machine: The Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot' in the collection points out that Diderot, in spite of his words in the 'Prospectus' of 1748 about the Encyclopedie as a sanctuary of human knowledge, was well aware that knowledge was expressed in language which changes over time, and quotes him to that effect from the article of 1755. Even his alphabetical ordering of the Encyclopedie, with its result of putting subjects in a sequence which cuts across their classification in any scheme of knowledge, was, according to Rosenberg, part of a recognition that acts of ordering the universe of knowledge are recognised as acts, products of a structuring imagination.
This recognition by Diderot has led to a substantial amount of postmodern and related literary theory that is enthusiastic about Diderot's open-ended conception of knowledge below the surface of his 'official' rationalism and materialism. An example is Jay Caplan's 'Framed Narratives: Diderot's genealogy of the beholder' of 1985 which argues that dialogue is a central feature of Diderot's work, which moves between mutually exclusive dialogic positions which are intentionally not satisfactorily resolved. Caplan suggests that Diderot's preference for dialogue is related to his brand of dynamic materialism in seeking after what is for him the essential changeability of reality.
The text that has most excited and puzzled literary theorists is 'Rameau's Nephew'. It is a dialogue in which 'I' (a fictionalised Diderot) meets and talks in the Palais-Royal gardens with 'he', who is the real historical figure of Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer Jean-Phillipe Rameau, who was known in Paris society as an unsuccessful musician, hanger-on to the wealthy and eccentric, with a gift for bitter and mocking satire. In the dialogue he is presented as a sort of monster of nihilism and cynicism who alternatively shocks and amuses the upright 'I', and his expulsion from the household of a wealthy patron (based on a real event) becomes an occasion for a lengthy and rambling discussion of sycophancy, being oneself and wearing masks, and the psychology of moral behaviour. The nephew argues that self-interest of the basest type is all, behind the mask of 'morality', though he has to admit to 'I' that his love for his daughter perhaps also mocks the mask of his own cynicism.
'Rameau's Nephew' has been extravagantly praised since its first publication in 1805: by Goethe, who thought it a masterpiece and 'immorally moral'; Hegel, who was impressed by its dialectic of good and evil; and Freud, intrigued by the statement in it that a man in his unsocialised state might seduce his mother and murder his father. The most useful overall interpretation is that it is an exploration by Diderot of his own inner tensions between 'enlightened' altruism and the temptations of baseness and self-seeking, though the dialogue presents no simplistic resolution of these tensions.

Diderot and Meaning

Do materialism and postmodernism have much to say about the central question of life - how to live, and by what values? Diderot was an attractive character in his essential humanism in spite of his flaws, and in general terms often proclaimed adherence to a moral code in a fairly uncomplicated way. His favourite quotation was from Terence: 'I am a man, therefore nothing human is alien to me'. In his extensive correspondence he often expressed himself in similar vein. He writes in one letter 'To do good, to know the true, that's what distinguishes one man from another'. Yet elsewhere he had said that if there was a God He would care more for the purity of our souls than for the truth of our opinions. A conflict between the search for truth and the pursuit of goodness was an undercurrent in Diderot that arguably became stronger as his speculative materialism developed, with its accompanying determinism and denial of human freewill. It could be argued that it was this conflict, rather than an open-ended 'dialogism' as seen by the postmodernists, which was at the root of Diderot's refusal to countenance 'closure' on truth - if that truth is a blind materialism and determinism, it cannot be lived by the moral nature. He wrote in a letter that 'I love that philosophy which raises up humanity', yet elsewhere that 'I am furious at being entangled in a confounded philosophy which my mind cannot refrain from approving and my heart from denying'. This conflict might have given rise to that strain of rather effusive 'virtuosity' in Diderot that can sometimes, as critics have noted, seem rather 'stagey' and artificial. His effusions about the physical delights of seeing a good act seem more appropriate to sexual excitement, and lead the sympathetic historian of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay, to call Diderot a 'voyeur of virtue'.
In 1773 Diderot considered questions of determinism and morality in his 'Refutation of Helvetius', where he challenged Helvetius' simplistic morality of pleasure and pain with an appeal to higher and lower pleasures in much the same vein as J.S Mill was to do in response to Benthamism in the following century. However, in the same work Diderot still said that it is difficult to understand ethics without understanding biology, which is surely a fallacy in the light of the distinction between matters of fact and value. Some of Kant's major works of his developed philosophy were published in the last four years of Diderot's life before his death in 1784, and one feels that they could have provided answers to some of Diderot's confusions about morality.
These confusions about ethics also seem to extend to Diderot's politics. He did have a gut instinct for political freedom, so that for example notes he provided to his friend Raynal's 'History of the two Indies' in 1780 effectively changed the work from being an apologia for a benign colonialism to an attack on all colonialism. Yet when he finally responded to Catherine the Great's invitations to visit Petersburg in 1773-4, Diderot's relationship with her was one of fawning flattery. Given that he thought of himself as philosophic adviser to an enlightened ruler it is difficult not to believe that he let himself be taken in. Even allowing for the difficulties of living in the real world, and not engaging in guilt by association, the combination of Diderot's flatteries and Catherine's violent suppression of the Pugachev serf rebellion in Russia in 1773-5 do leave a bad taste. One of Diderot's weakest written works, a Life of Seneca in 1777, defends the Stoic philosopher of virtue, who actively served Nero and accumulated riches while claiming to despise them, with weak arguments based on pragmatism, and might well seem to be a rationalisation of Diderot's experience with Catherine. What makes the seeming lack of 'centredness' in Diderot's political thought the more striking after this experience is that back in 1770 he had written a poem celebrating the strangling of the last king with the guts of the last priest.
Isaiah Berlin once made a distinction between the intellectual hedgehogs and foxes, based on an ancient Greek poetic fragment in which the fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one thing. There are those, like Shakespeare, who range across the diversity of human experience and observe what they see, and those like Tolstoy who are seized by a desire for the one truth of human existence. I hope that enough has been said to show that Diderot was a wonderful fox. A final example of this is an essay he wrote in 1769 on 'Regrets for the passing of my old dressing gown', in which he reflects on parting with an old and comfortable dressing gown for a fashionable new silk one after persuasion by friends, then progressively replaces carpets, curtains, and furniture, as each in turn seems to require 'improving' by comparison with the other new purchases, until he no longer feels at home. Diderot, who saw the benefits of technology and science for human well-being and was in some sense a herald of western modernity, also was able to see the downside of conspicuous consumption.
I hope that it has also become clear that inside Diderot the fox there was, in Diderot's own passionate way, an ethical hedgehog struggling to get out.

Simon Farrow