Denis Diderot

11 Key excerpts on "Denis Diderot"

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  A History of Modern French Literature

  From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century

  • Christopher Prendergast(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Le neveu de Rameau, and the Figure of the Philosophe in Eighteenth-Century Paris

  KATE E. TUNSTALL

  Diderot is the central figure of the Enlightenment. True, he is not as well known as either the older Voltaire or his exact contemporary, Rousseau, both of whose self-promotional strategies made them into public figures and causes célèbres. However, insofar as he edited, with the mathematician and physicist, d’Alembert, the single most ambitious publishing enterprise of the period, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des arts, des sciences et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or Reasoned dictionary of the arts, sciences and crafts, 1751–72), and, moreover, given that when d’Alembert left the partnership in 1759, he continued to edit that work single-handedly, there can be no question but that Diderot played the crucial role in shaping and disseminating Enlightenment ideas and values. The Encyclopédie, it should be noted, comprises twenty-eight folio volumes, seventeen of which are text, and eleven of illustrations. It contains seventy-four thousand entries, written by more than 130 contributors, including Voltaire and Rousseau; Diderot, in addition to his editorial responsibilities, wrote more than five thousand of the entries himself.

  This alone accounts for the importance of Diderot in the French and European Enlightenment. In his lifetime, it was for this work that he was primarily known to the public, and not for the works of literature that we read today—La religieuse (The Nun, 1760), Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew, 1761– or 1772–74), Le rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream, 1769), and Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist, 1778–80). The latter were only published posthumously. One explanation for this is that Diderot could not afford to repeat the experience of the summer of 1749, when, following the anonymous publication of his Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind, 1749), he was arrested and then imprisoned for three months. The Lettre was not his first publication, and, in fact, he had already acquired something of a reputation: the Paris Parlement (the supreme court) had condemned his Pensées philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts, 1746) almost as soon as it was published, also anonymously, and decreed that it be “shredded and burned,” while at a more local level, his parish priest had been secretly informing on him to the police, reporting that, in addition to the atheistic Lettre sur les aveugles, he was also the author of the teasingly erotic Les bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels

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  Being Human

  An Historical Inquiry Into Who We Are

  • J. Andrew Kirk(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  An Analytical Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades by a Society of Men of Letters . Diderot wrote many of the articles himself. It is not surprising that he has received many accolades from subsequent historians and philosophers:

  No-one in the 18 th Century promoted that cause (enlightenment) more vigorously than Diderot . . . No-one in the Enlightenment achieved greater originality by way of transliteration and commentary, through the re-association of the ideas of other authors.282

  Besides the work he put into the encyclopedia, Diderot was a prolific writer of books and articles on philosophy, art, drama, and the natural sciences, and also novels and correspondence. Much of his natural, moral, and political philosophy was written as comments or annotations on the thought of others. Nevertheless, he has never been considered a great writer. He was, however, regarded by his contemporaries as an eloquent conversationalist and debater.

  Diderot also deserves his prominent place in the history of philosophy for his ability to review, test, and evaluate some of the most crucial enigmas of human existence:

  Diderot spent much of his adult life wrestling with conundrums posed by fatalism and free-will, materialism and living beings, and the mind and its place in nature.283

  As we shall see, he was much better at outlining the problems than resolving them. He was not a systematic thinker. Indeed, his fundamental intellectual assumptions did not allow an orderly, structured arrangement of his thinking:

  His thought is hostile to systems for their inability to apprehend the multi-faceted nature of an ever-changing reality and man’s constantly evolving perception of that reality.284

  He was often caught in dilemmas of his own making. As we trace the most characteristic aspects of his thinking, it should become clear why this was so. His Early Writings

  Diderot was brought up in an orthodox Catholic family. His parents would have liked him to have studied for the priesthood. However, after a period of education in the Jesuit college in his home town in Langres, he moved to Paris and began to study law. After a short time, he gave this up as a possible career and decided that he would become a writer. He wrote his first original work in 1746 , Pensees philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts

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  Events That Formed the Modern World

  From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

  • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Diderot was born in Langres, France, on October 5, 1713. He was the son of an artisan, who sent his son to be educated by Jesuits. Although his education prepared him for the priesthood, Diderot opted instead to become a writer. He went to Paris to further his studies and received a master’s of arts degree from the University of Paris in 1732. Diderot then worked as a law clerk for some time. However, he soon grew dissatisfied and briefly considered going into the theater. Then, while working as a tutor, Diderot found some opportunities as a freelance writer, but he continued to have financial difficulties. During that period, he spent his spare time among the intellectual elite of Paris, conferring in coffeehouses with such luminaries of the era as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  From his intellectual contacts, Diderot began to develop an interest in philosophy. In 1745, he translated a philosophical treatise by an English author, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. The following year, Diderot published his own philosophical work, the Pensées Philosophiques (Philosophical Thoughts ). Although it owed much to Shaftes­bury, it also contained original ideas, many of which were strongly anti-Christian. This work established Diderot as a leading proponent of deism, the belief that there was a supreme being who created the world, but that that divinity bore no relation to any earthly religion. Deism was widely embraced by the philosophes of the Enlightenment and later by the revolutionary government of France. Two years after Pensées Philosophiques, Diderot published Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels ), a scandalous novel.

  Because of Diderot’s rising stature in intellectual circles, a publisher offered him a project in 1745: the translation of the English work Cyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge about various arts and sciences. With the help of the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Diderot began translating the work, but the two soon developed more ambitious ideas for the project. They decided to engage the leading writers, critics, philosophers, clerics, and men of letters of the day to produce an even greater compendium, one that would reflect the full range of Enlightenment thought. Diderot believed that the finished product would give his audience the tools they required to challenge the established political, social, and religious institutions of eighteenth-century France. His ambitious agenda attracted many of the great thinkers of the day, among them Rousseau and Voltaire. Diderot was himself one of the Encyclopédie

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  Studies in Law and Politics

  • Harold Laski(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is worth insisting that they are only commonplaces because Diderot, and others about him, were prepared to risk their liberty for their diffusion. He organized a great army to do battle for the right of intelligence to the profit of its victories. He gathered about him every man in his generation whose achievement we respect. It is not fanciful to compare the fellowship of the Encyclopaedists to an army upon the march; and to the general who directed its strategy belongs the credit for the victory.

  IV

  Had Diderot done no more than bring the Encyclopaedia to completion he would have an assured place in history. But it is, in fact, only a small part of his labours. In the evolution of philosophy he played an important part in three ways. Beginning as a deist in the English mode of the eighteenth century, he was rapidly converted, largely by his interest in physiological discovery, to an atheistic materialism which, whatever its defects, is a current of decisive importance in the great stream of metaphysics. Here, indeed, he is not an originator; both La Mettrie and D’Holbach played a more important part than he. But what he was striving to do was to extend the meaning of Newtonian physics into a system of all-embracing laws which should resume not less the animate than the inanimate universe. His attempt, with all its vigour and ingenuity, must be held to have failed very largely because it lacks a comprehensive theory of knowledge. But it was a challenge to alternative systems of inestimable value; and its search for a bridge between science and philosophy may be held, without injustice, to be the starting-point for all who seek a rational explanation of life.

  Nor is this all. Diderot, with Rousseau, must be held to be one of the outstanding figures in the eighteenth-century effort to vindicate the right of human nature to respect. His considered rejection, for example, of Christian asceticism is built upon the insistence that a denial of the right of impulse to satisfaction disfigures the nature of man. He searched for principles of conduct which should at once satisfy the ultimate factors of our constitution and the limitations upon their expression which experience indicates as necessary. He refused to admit that an ethic can be true which starts, as Christianity starts, by assuming that man is in a state of sin. Much of this work is a brilliant exposition only of what was in the mental climate of his generation. Its value, as in the famous Letter on the Blind,

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  Prose of the World

  Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment

  • Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  On the one hand, his very lack of a conceptual “system” or well-rounded intellectual “identity” most likely explain why he has always been a readers’ favorite among the great French philosophes of the eighteenth century; on the other hand, and unlike in the cases of Voltaire or Rousseau, this lack has also made it impossible for Diderot’s work to fulfill particular functions or to address particular questions in historically specific situations. His texts have provoked an infinity of commentaries and studies on microscopic problems; there are several well-documented and even well-written biographies; but we have no comprehensive concepts with which to describe Diderot, no well-rounded image, no coherent Anschauung. Herbert Dieckmann, arguably the most eminent specialist within a good hundred years of Diderot scholarship, wisely held back from such comprehensive statements and interpretations; and even the great Jean Starobinski must have felt the impossibility of living up to the task when, in the memorial year of 2013, he ended up republishing his superb Diderot essays as a collection—rather than bringing them together in a new monograph. *   *   * And yet again, who was Denis Diderot? In our contemporary language, such a question presupposes a distinction between personal (individual) identity and public (social) identity, a distinction that we can emphasize and make visible by reserving the pronoun “Who” for personal identity (that is for all those—often difficult to distinguish—features that seem to make somebody unique), while we connect the word “What” with public or social identity (that is with somebody’s perception in the public space and with the image that she or he is able to project)

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  Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary

  • Arpad Szakolczai(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  He duly tried to slip out of the family home around midnight, but his father caught him and, learning what he was up to, travelled with him to Paris the next day, enrolling him to the school (Trousson 2005 : 30–1). Information about the next, long period of Diderot’s life, up to his marriage, is extremely scarce. Eventually, for reasons and in a manner the details of which we simply ignore, though we can make some guesses, especially given that he would consider for his life priests as seducers, he not only completely lost his faith but also any interest in a stable career, keeping only an unquenchable thirst for knowledge (Trousson 2005 : 41). As he refused to embark on any concrete line of study in spite of repeated warnings by his father, his allowance was cut and thus he spent four or five years in dire straits—though both his parents found means to offer him occasional assistance. During this period, he evidently lived a life of some libertinage; Diderot admitted that in his first free years of Paris he lived a ‘quite dissolute’ existence (Trousson 2005 : 49). He certainly had a great passion for the theatre, especially comedies (Trousson 2005 : 225); as he later recounted, he lived in between the Sorbonne and the ‘boards’ (Trousson 2005 : 47). He even had the dream of becoming an actor, and a main reason was that in this way he could be close to the actresses, who were ‘easy’ (Trousson 2005 : 47). Diderot as Enlightened Critic Diderot is best known through his launching of the Encyclopédie, this precursor to and already monument of positivism; thus, he was considered primarily as a philosopher and a thinker; in particular, as a precursor to critical thinking. The significance of Diderot as critic is illustrated by the claim, made by René Wellek in his classic book A History of Modern Criticism, that there is a break between Voltaire and Diderot, and really the latter should be considered as the first critic (Wellek 1955, I: 46)

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  Modernity and Crisis in the Thought of Michel Foucault

  • Matan Oram(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and his coeditor Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1717–1783) together with the latter’s disciple Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) were associated with the Encyclopédie project as its mainstays from its inception in 1745. Over a century earlier, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) typified this kind of analytical thought as mathematici (to differentiate it from dogmatici) in his description of analytical-rational-mathematical reasoning. 10 Condorcet, for example, was convinced that mathematical science “… would subject all the contingencies of human life and action to mathematical rule.” 11 The science of the probable was believed to conquer skepticism, so that moral and political sciences could be considered as being able to attain the same degree of precision as the physical sciences. This new way of knowing was maintained to be all-embracing, as Daniel Brewer describes d’Alembert’s thought, which he outlines as a ‘portrayal of mind’ that … can be seen as an opening conceit of an intellectual news story as he [d’Alembert] sets up to describe a dynamic multifaceted epistemological event that is reconfiguring the intellectual culture in France. Thought has awoken, observes the mathematician and coeditor of the Encyclopédie, freeing itself from the obscurantist yoke of opinion and superstition […] in all disciplines and forms of thought, notes d’Alembert, new ways of knowing are taking shape. All beliefs and ideas have been reexamined, from secular science to divine revelation, from questions of metaphysics to standards of taste, from music to morals, from scholastic theology to commerce, and from the politics of absolutism to popular rights

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  The History of Pedagogy

  • Gabriel Compayré, W. H. Payne(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  1 Cours d’études, Tome X . Introduction.

  1. 347. Diderot (1713–1784). – To him who knows nothing of Diderot save his works of imagination, often so licentious, it will doubtless be a surprise to see the name of this fantastic writer inscribed in the catalogue of educators. But this astonishment will disappear if we will take the trouble to recollect with what versatility this mighty spirit could vary the subject of his reflections, and pass from the gay to the solemn, and especially with what ardor, in conjunction with D'Alembert, he was the principal founder of the Encyclopédie, and the indefatigable contributor to it.
  2. 348. His Pedagogical Works. — But there is no room for doubt. Diderot has written at least two treatises that belong to the history of education: first, about 1773, The Systematic Refutation of the Book of Helvetius on Man, an incisive and eloquent criticism of the paradoxes and errors of Helvetius; and, in the second place, about 1776, a complete scheme of education, composed at the request of Catherine II., under the title, Plan of a University.1
     1 See Œuvres complètes of Diderot. Edited by Tourneux, 1876–77. Tomes II. and III.
  3. 349. his merits as an educator . — Doubtless Diderot did not have sufficient gravity of character nor sufficiently definite ideas to be a perfect educator; but, by way of compensation, the natural and acquired qualities of his mind made him worthy of the confidence placed in him by Catherine II. in entrusting him with the organization, at least in theory, of the instruction of the Russian people. First of all, he had the merit of being a universal thinker, “sufficiently versed in all the sciences to know their value, and not sufficiently profound in any one to give it a preference inspired by predilection.” Engaged in the scientific movement, of which the Encyclopédie

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  The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment

  • J.B. Shank(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  parti philosophique. In narrating their own history, however, the philosophes rarely paid attention to the accidents and contingencies that had actually shaped this history. Like all political movements, they constructed a mythology of origins consonant with their own interests, and to their credit their story has proven so powerful that it has since been accepted uncritically by historians and modern Enlightenment ideologues ever since. Speaking from a position somewhere outside the Enlightenment, this book has offered a different and more complex account of this history, one that has tried to show the actual historical linkages that tied Newton to Enlightenment in France. Newton’s solitary genius is still offered far too often as the singular reason for his status as the father of modern physics, while the French Enlightenment continues to be celebrated too frequently as Newton’s natural and unmediated off spring. Each of these mythologies needs to be scrutinized, and if this book strikes a heavy blow against this overly pervasive and persuasive edifice, it will have accomplished its goal.

  1 . My account of Diderot’s early years is drawn primarily from “Part I : The Testing Years,” in Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (Oxford, 1972). Other works that have been important in shaping my understanding of Diderot and his work are Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: The Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, 1979); Lynne Dixon, Diderot, Philosopher of Energy (Oxford, 1988); Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1962); Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (Paris, 1954), esp. 528–611; and Franco Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot (1713–1753), trans. by Juliette Bertrand (Geneva, 1967).

  2 . Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et des Grands, sur la reputation, sur les mécènes, et sur les recompenses litteeraires, in Oeuvres de d’Alembert, 5 vols. (Paris, 1821–1822),4: 335–373.

  3 . Wilson, Diderot, 15–28.

  4 . Review of Histoire de Grèce, traduite de l’anglais de M. Temple Stanyan, in Journal des savants (1743): 451–462, (1745): 547–555, (1746): 231–238. Diderot’s translation skills are noted in the last review, 238.

  5 . Wilson, Diderot, 47–50.

  6 . See Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1996).

  7 . Diderot, Principes de la philosophie morale; ou Essai de M.S*** sur le mérite et la vertu. Avec réflexions (Amsterdam, 1745).

  8 . Review of Principes de la philosophie morale, ou Essais de M. S.*** , in Jugemens sur quelques ouvrages nouveaux 8:86–87.

  9 . Review of Principes de la philosophie morale

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  The Color of Equality

  Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought

  • Devin J. Vartija(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  68

  But the crucial point for our discussion of equality is that the concept became politicized in the encyclopedists’ criticism of absolutism, as the freedom and equality of autonomous individuals were ushered in to defend citizens’ rights against an overbearing monarchical and ecclesiastical establishment. Upon comparing the political philosophy of Diderot’s Encyclopédie with Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, one is immediately struck by the scantiness and nonpolemical nature of Chambers’s work compared with its successor. Political philosophy is both more fully developed by Diderot and his collaborators, and it is more polemical, in fitting with the philosophes’ aims of spreading enlightenment by, in Diderot’s words, “teaching men to doubt,” by bringing all topics to the table for open and vigorous discussion.69

  Society, Toleration, and Equality

  The intellectual history of equality cannot be separated from the social experiences of the thinkers who theorized and transformed the concept. One of the reasons that equality came to the fore in Enlightenment thought was as a result of structural changes in eighteenth-century society—in particular, the growth of the public sphere and new forms of sociability.70 Literacy rates increased over the course of the eighteenth century in France, from 29 percent at the beginning of the century to 47 percent toward the end for men, and from 14 percent to 27 percent for women.71 Additionally, there was an increase in the proportion of the population that owned books and in the size of their libraries. New forms of sociability were connected to the rise of the public sphere, as men and women of varying ranks mingled in the growing urban centers that boasted an increasingly large number of coffeehouses, taverns, salons, public libraries, Masonic lodges, and literary societies.72 Intimately connected to these developments, and particularly from the 1750s onward, public opinion as a political force grew in importance.73 In many of these new spaces, traditional distinctions of status were temporarily suspended, making civic equality both thinkable and acceptable to a growing number of people from all levels of society.74

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  Education and Philosophy

  An Introduction

  • Ansgar Allen, Roy Goddard(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The ideas that in their early stage caused John Donne to feel that the world had lost coherence and, in their fuller development prompted the unease of the deeply conservative Swift, were simmering in Donne’s sixteenth century, and no doubt earlier. In the seventeenth century they were carried forward to a fruition that threatened the complete overthrow of traditional thinking. The eighteenth century was to see the culmination of what amounted to a transformation in humanity’s understanding of how knowledge was to be acquired, how and for what purposes that knowledge might be used, and in its apprehension (in more than one sense of that word) of its place within a reordered universe. This was not an intellectual revolution conducted by a few great thinkers, but a process carried forward through fierce debate amongst the educated citizenry of the times. That debate, however, was shaped by the major contributions – philosophical and scientific, but also cultural and political – of many figures. In this chapter and the next we will refer to some of these thinkers but our account of the Enlightenment will be built around an examination of the writings of four philosophers whose ideas are often cited as the most influential in determining the directions and the contours of modern thought – the Frenchman René Descartes, the Englishman John Locke, the Scot David Hume and the German Immanuel Kant.

  René Descartes

  Doubting everything

  Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650, his most important texts being published between 1637 and 1644. A notable characteristic of his thought is its refusal to begin from the ideas of earlier thinkers. His approach was summed up in a later work where he wrote of being ‘obliged to write here as though I were treating a topic which no one before me had ever described’.5

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