Revisiting Diderot

A friend sent me a note a few weeks ago alerting me to the appearance of a new biography of Denis Diderot, the eighteenth century French thinker who, among other things, edited the multi-volume Encyclopedia that's considered one of the cornerstones of the Enlightenment. Diderot also wrote pioneering works in both art criticism and dramatic theory, and his brief dialogue, Rameau's Nephew, is now taken to be a high-water mark in French literature, though Diderot was reluctant to publish it.

I haven't thought much about Diderot in recent decades, but I secured a review copy of the biography, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, by Andrew Curran, from the editor of Rain Taxi; I enjoyed reading it, wrote a brief review, and went on to read much lengthier reviews of the book in both the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. While preparing my little piece, I also checked P.N. Furbanks biography of Diderot (1992) out of the library and gave it an extended look, and wrestled my copy of A.M. Wilson's massive biography (1972) up the stairs from the basement "stacks," though I can't claim to have looked at it much.

In the course of absorbing all this material I was reminded of how much I used to admire the way Diderot integrated serious ideas into a stylistically elevated yet entirely casual narrative. I have always considered the opening paragraph of Rameau's Nephew as a matchless example of those qualities—something you would never come across in the works of Hume or Rousseau.

  "Rain or shine, it is my custom towards five o'clock in the afternoon to walk in the Palais-Royal. There I may be observed, always alone, musing on the bench by the  Hotel d'Argenson. I am my own interlocutor, and discuss politics, love, taste, and philosophy. I give my mind full swing: I let it follow the first notion that presents itself, be it wise or foolish, even as our wild young rakes in Foy's Alley pursue some courtesan of unchastened mien and welcoming face, of answering eye and tilted nose, and then quit her for another, touching all and cleaving to none. My thoughts are my wantons."

Diderot goes on to describe the various chess-players he watches if the weather is inclement.

"Paris is the corner of the world, and the rue de la Regence the corner of Paris where the best chess is played: here, at Rey's, the profound Legal, the subtle Philidor, the solid Mayot do battle with each other; here may one witness the most astonishing strokes, and hear the most foolish conversation, for if, like Legal, one may be a man of parts and a great chess-player, one may equally be a great chess-player and an ass ..."

Rameau's Nephew?

The reader's reaction to all of this might be a hearty "Who cares?" On the other hand, it's refreshing, I think, to conjure, along with Diderot, such moments of idleness, pleasure, and anticipation, without making a big deal about it. Who can say what stray and brilliant thought might roll into view?

As it happens, on one of these occasions Diderot meets up with a man he describes as "one of the oddest personages this country affords, where God has not been sparing of them. He is a fellow made up of insolence and cringing, of folly and good sense: notions of good and bad conduct must needs be strangely mixed up in his head ..."

At this point Diderot's reverie becomes a dialogue, during which he discusses a wide range of ethical and aesthetic issues with someone who shares virtually none of his bourgeois sentiments. It's an interesting conversation, to say the least, with none of the tendentious interrogations that sometimes mar Plato's  dialogues. It would be a mistake to imagine that Diderot "wins" the debate, but equally wrongheaded to suggest, as Curran does, that in Rameau's Nephew Diderot is somehow repudiating the power of reason itself. Diderot's belief that, as Curran puts it, humans "are inescapably drawn to the beauty of doing good," is well founded. But since the eighteenth century, it's never been fashionable to say so.

There is little point in examining Rameau's Nephew in detail here, or Diderot's more speculative and scientifically oriented companion dialogue, D'Alembert's Dream. What struck me on reconsidering them in the context of his biography was the discretion with which Diderot chose to limit his philosophical oeuvre to two unforgettable gems of artistry and thought, unlike, for example, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, who chose to rehash a limited set of ideas again and again. And again.

     

A second issue that arose as I read the recent reviews of the new bio involves the concept of enlightenment itself. We are in the habit of imagining that enlightenment is a good thing. Would you rather "be in the dark" about things, or would you rather be enlightened?

On the other hand, as Adam Gopnik observes at some length in his review of the new biography, the Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement, has come in for a good deal of criticism in the last hundred years. He writes:

"The Enlightenment’s supposed faith in reason ... is held responsible for racism, colonialism, and most of the other really bad isms. Enlightenment order is now understood as overlord violence pursued through other means. Its true symbol is not some peaceful Temple of Reason but the Panopticon—the all-surveying, single-eye system of Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison. Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a “scientific” hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. “Reason” became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation."

This is a more-than-decent synopsis—Gopnik is good at such things—of an argument that has been fashionable for half a century, but also historically jejune. Gopnik doesn't buy it, and neither do I. Racism, colonialism, and authoritarianism predate the Enlightenment by centuries, if not millennia. 

An illustration about bee-keeping
 from the Encyclopedia.

Meanwhile, the basic principles of the Enlightenment are as sound today as they were when Diderot and others advanced them in the eighteenth century. Chief among them are the notions that experience is a better source of truth that divine revelation; that every individual ought to be subject to the same laws, privileges, and civil procedures; that some sort of reflexivity ought to hold between those in power and the people over which they rule. 

The arguments offered against the Enlightenment follow a logic amounting to something like this: the Germans transported Jews to the gas chambers by rail, therefore, civilization was better off before the steam engine was invented.

Among the many things that the Enlightenment has produced are ecology, habeas corpus, feminism, penicillin, social security, national parks, public libraries, cell phones, and Wikipedia. Books still need editors, and parks still need rangers. But that doesn't make the Enlightenment evil.

   

In his biography of Diderot F.R. Furbank raises the issue of whether we ought to speak of "The Enlightenment" or simply of enlightenment with regard to the era. It's a matter of getting to know things better—what they are, how they work, what they portend. I suspect that Diderot would agree. Though his biographers invariably describe him as an atheist and a materialist, it's clear from his voluminous writings, including his fresh and inconsequential letters to Sophie Volland, that he was cultivating an ideal of curiosity, conviviality, and fellow-feeling to which the concept of spirit could easily be applied.