Denis Diderot

Source

• Born: 5 October 1713
• Birthplace: Langres, France
• Died: 31 July 1784
• Best Known As: Enlightenment editor of Encyclopédie

Denis Diderot is one of the towering figures of the 18th century Enlightenment period, thanks largely to his editorship of the Encylopédie, one of the great attempts to catalog human knowledge. A prolific writer and talented talker, Diderot moved away from his early Jesuit training to an atheistic materialism, and had a great influence on the intellectual and political development in pre-revolution France. Diderot never got rich (for ready cash he sold his private library to the empress of Russia, Catherine the Great), but his years working on the Encyclopédie made him famous, and his friends included Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

(b Langres, 5 Oct 1713; d Paris, 31 July 1784). French critic. He was the chief architect of the Encyclopédie (for which he wrote articles on instruments) and had a strong impact on musical thought. In works such as Le neveu de Rameau (c 1760) he judged the Italian style then popular to be too shallow (unlike Rameau s) and recommended a reform of French theatre, including the use of classical subjects in opera. Gluck and Traetta successfully took up these ideas. Unlike Rousseau, he defended ‘pure’ instrumental music as the highest form of art, unrestrained by concrete ideas and capable of rendering the deepest feelings.

The French philosopher, playwright, and novelist Denis Diderot (1713-1784) is best known as the editor of the "Encyclopédie".

On Oct. 15, 1713, Denis Diderot was born in Langres, Compagne, into a family of cutlers, whose bourgeois traditions went back to the late Middle Ages. As a child, Denis was considered a brilliant student by his Jesuit teachers, and it was decided that he should enter the clergy. In 1726 he enrolled in the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand and probably later attended the Jansenist Collège d'Harcourt. In 1732 he earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. He then abandoned the clergy as a career and decided to study law. His legal training, however, was short-lived. In 1734 Diderot decided to seek his fortune by writing. He broke with his family and for the next 10 years lived a rather bohemian existence. He earned his living by translating English works and tutoring the children of wealthy families and spent his leisure time studying. In 1743 he further alienated his father by marrying Anne Toinette Champion.

The Encyclopédie

On Jan. 21, 1746, André François le Breton and his partners were granted permission to publish a 10-volume encyclopedia. On the advice of the distinguished mathematician Jean D'Alembert and with the consent of Chancellor D'Aguesseau, Diderot was named general editor of the project.

For more than 26 years Diderot devoted the bulk of his energies and his genius to the writing, editing, and publishing of the Encyclopédie. For Diderot, the aim of the work was "to assemble the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth; to explain its general plan to the men with whom we live … so that we may not die without having deserved well of the human race." Such was the plan and the purpose of the Encyclopédie, and it was also the credo of the Enlightenment. But the project was more than just the compilation of all available knowledge; it was also a learning experience for all those regularly connected with it. It introduced Diderot to technology, the crafts, the fine arts, and many other areas of learning. It was an outlet for his curiosity, his scholarly interests, and his creativity.

In 1751 D'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse and the first volume were published. In January 1752 the second volume appeared, but the opposition of the Jesuits and other orthodox critics forced a temporary suspension. Publication was soon resumed and continued at the rate of one volume a year until 1759, when the Royal Council forbade further operations. Diderot and Le Breton, however, continued to write and publish the Encyclopédie secretly until 1765, when official sanction was resumed. In 1772 the completed work was published in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates under the title Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers.

Other Writings

Throughout the period of his association with the Encyclopédie, Diderot continued to devote himself to other writing. In 1746 he published Philosophical Thoughts, which was concerned with the question of the relationship between nature and religion. He viewed life as self-sufficient and held that virtue could be sustained without religious beliefs. In Sceptics Walk (1747) and Letters on the Blind (1749) Diderot slowly turned from theism to atheism. Religion became a central theme in his writings, and he aroused the hostility of public officials who considered him a leader of the radicals, "a clever fellow, but extremely dangerous."

In 1749 Diderot was imprisoned for 3 months because of his opinions in Philosophical Thoughts. Although he had stated, "If you impose silence on me about religion and government, I shall have nothing to talk about," after his release he reduced the controversial character of his published works. Therefore most of his materialistic and anti-religious works and several of his novels were not published during his lifetime.

During his long literary career Diderot moved away from the mechanical approach to nature, which was characteristic of the Englishtenment's use of the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. Such works as D'Alembert's Dream, Conversation between D'Alembert and Diderot, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, Elements of Physiology, and Essay on Seneca vividly point to the evolution of his thought and to its modernity.

In his mature writings Diderot tends to see man as an integral part of an organic and vitalistic nature, governed by laws that are incomprehensible to him. Nature, according to Diderot, is a continually unfolding process, which reveals itself, rather than being revealed by man. Forms in nature develop from earlier forms in a continually evolving process, in which all elements, animate and inanimate, are related to one another. Man can know nature only through experience; thus rationalistic speculation is useless to him in understanding nature.

Diderot is one of the pre-19th-century leaders in the movement away from mathematics and physics, as a source of certain knowledge, to biological probability and historical insight. As one modern scholar has stated, Diderot's approach to nature and philosophy was that of mystical naturalism.

Later Years

Following the completion of the Encyclopédie, Diderot went into semiretirement; he wrote but infrequently published his works. His earnings as editor of the Encyclopédie guaranteed him a modest income, which he supplemented by writing literary criticism. In addition, he sold his library to Empress Catherine of Russia, who allowed him to keep it while he lived and paid him an annual salary as its librarian. On July 30, 1784, Diderot died in the home of his daughter, only 5 months after the death of his beloved mistress and intellectual companion, Sophie Voland.

The great paradox of Diderot's life is found in the tensions that existed between his basically bourgeois nature and his bohemian tendencies. This struggle was mirrored in his novel Rameau's Nephew, in which the staid Rameau and his bohemian nephew represent aspects of Diderot's personality. Fittingly, Diderot's last words, "The first step toward philosophy is incredulity," are an adequate measure of the man.

Further Reading

Two biographies of Diderot are outstanding: Lester G. Crocker, Diderot: The Embattled Philosopher (1952), an accurate and penetrating work, but with a tinge of romanticism; and Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot: The Testing Years, 1713-1759 (1957), apparently a more scholarly work, but in reality lacking only the romanticism of Crocker. Both works show notable scholarship in the area of Diderot studies. Among the shorter works, George R. Havens, The Age of Ideas (1955), contains four excellent and highly original chapters on Diderot.

(1713-84) French philosopher and co-editor (with Jean d'Alembert) of the original seventeen-volume Encyclopédie (1751-65): one of the most remarkable works of the French Enlightenment and a testament to the new intellectual enthusiasm of that age for secular rationalism and socially progressive ideas. The Encyclopédie issued a direct challenge to royal absolutism and the religious supremacy of the Catholic Church throughout Europe.

Diderot's political ideas were rooted in his philosophical materialism and atheism, and an awareness of the link between political institutions and a society's underlying culture and socio-economic characteristics: a view he shared with Montesquieu and Rousseau. Diderot desired to enhance conditions of human freedom, a goal which in his view required an open society and toleration of each individual's chosen route to happiness through the exercise of individual rights. Property rights served as the only rational basis of citizenship. A political ruler must act as a guardian of such rights in the national interest.

Towards the end of his life, influenced by the American Revolution, Diderot advocated the principle of popular sovereignty, and defended the people's right of revolution against tyrannical authority. Although he died in 1784, his radical ideas were a key intellectual component in the early stages of the French Revolution.

— Keith Taylor

(click to enlarge)
Denis Diderot, oil painting by Louis-Michel van Loo, 1767; in the Louvre, Paris. (credit: Giraudon/Art Resource, New York)

(born Oct. 5, 1713, Langres, France — died July 31, 1784, Paris) French man of letters and philosopher. Educated by Jesuits, Diderot later received degrees from the University of Paris. From 1745 to 1772 he served as chief editor of the 35-volume Encyclopédie, a principal work of the Enlightenment. He composed such influential works as Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751), which studies the function of language, and Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754), acclaimed as the method of philosophical inquiry of the 18th century. The first great art critic, he was especially admired posthumously for his Essay on Painting (written 1765). His novels include The Nun (written 1760) and Rameau's Nephew (finished 1774); he also wrote plays and theoretical works on drama. See also Jean Le Rond d'Alembert.

For more information on Denis Diderot, visit Britannica.com.

Diderot, Denis (1713–84), pre‐eminent French Enlightenment philosopher. Especially known as the editor of the Encyclopédie, Diderot was a prolific writer of essays, fiction, letters, and plays. He wrote numerous short stories (contes in French), which, besides treating ethical problems, explore the formal limits of the genre (e.g. Ceci n'est pas un conte (This is not a Tale)). His one fairy tale properly so called, L'Oiseau blanc, conte bleu (White Bird, Blue Tale), was published posthumously, although it was probably composed early in his career. The religious satire and oriental setting in this tale resemble Diderot's more famous Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), yet the metamorphosis of the hero into a white pigeon, his adventures in that guise, and his final de‐metamorphosis and marriage more clearly recall folkloric models. Through allegory, Diderot's tale derides fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine—such as the trinity and the Virgin Mary—and this helps explain why it was never published in his lifetime. L'Oiseau blanc also contains allusions to the frivolity at the court of Louis XV, although this critique is more personal than political.

— Lewis C. Seifert

Diderot, Denis (1713-84). Regarded today as one of the three greatest French writers of the 18th c., Diderot is a striking example of a writer whose reputation has grown with time. Many of his best works were unknown to his contemporaries, for whom he was principally the editor of the Encyclopédie. For the 19th c. he was above all a free-thinking philosophe and was claimed as an ancestor by left-wing and anticlerical thinkers. More recently, as the full range of his work has become better known, readers have been most impressed by the adventurous and subtle qualities of his immensely varied writings.

He was born in Langres, the son of a cutler whose virtuous image haunts many of his works. His mother died when he was young. Of his two sisters, one died mad in a convent, while his younger brother became a priest. He attended the local Jesuit college, then moved to Paris, where he graduated as Master of Arts at the age of 18. Rejecting a legal career, he launched into a bohemian life of expedients, including translation from the English. In 1742 he married the penniless Antoinette Champion; of their several children only one, Angélique, reached adult years.

His first significant publication was a relatively free translation from the English moralist Shaftesbury, the Essai sur le mérite et la vertu (1745); this book announces the views that permeate much of his later writing. At the same time he embarked on a major undertaking, the editing of the Encyclopédie, which occupied many years of his life and enabled him to make a living from literary earnings. Apart from his editorial work (which entailed writing a vast number of filler articles), his main contributions were in the fields of philosophy, science, art, and technology.

In the late 1740s he wrote some fiction, notably the episodic Les Bijoux indiscrets (1748), which combines an exotic and licentious plot with some adventurous philosophical explorations. In the same period a series of essays on religion and philosophy, the Pensées philosophiques (1746), La Promenade du sceptique (1747), and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749), show him working his way from a form of deism tinged with scepticism to a position of materialist atheism; to this, with some hesitations, he adhered for the rest of his life. The Lettre deals largely with the problems of perception posed by Locke's philosophy, and illustrates Diderot's typical mixing of empirical evidence and imagination in dealing with philosophical problems; it is most remarkable for the eloquent cosmic vision attributed to the blind mathematician Saunderson, in which Diderot for the first time envisages the great flux of nature which knows no Newtonian order. For this work he was imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes, and was only released on promising to publish no further subversive books—a promise which had a considerable effect on his subsequent writing, forcing him to adopt indirect methods, or to write for posterity. Two philosophical works followed. The Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1752) is mainly concerned with questions of art and language; in places it anticipates Romantic notions of poetry. The Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (1753) is a series of richly suggestive reflections on scientific method and owes a good deal to the writings of Francis Bacon. In these early works one can already see Diderot's characteristic modes of writing; using dialogue to test out views one against another, and allowing himself the digressive freedom of loose forms such as the letter, he enjoys pushing ideas to the limit, challenging the reader with bold, paradoxical insights.

By 1750 he was a leading figure in Paris literary circles and in the philosophe movement. Among his close friends were Grimm, Condillac, d'Alembert, Holbach, and above all Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom he was to quarrel bitterly and irreconcilably in 1758. In 1755 he fell in love with an unmarried woman, Sophie Volland, to whom he addressed over the next twenty years an unparalleled sequence of letters, his nearest approach to an autobiography.

The theatre was one of his main interests in the 1750s. Two theoretical works, Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757) and Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1758), spell out his proposals for a new kind of theatre, the drame or serious play of contemporary middle-class life, written in prose and making considerable use of gesture and tableau effects. His two plays which illustrate these theories, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), seem declamatory and sentimental to modern taste, but Diderot's innovatory approach was very influential all over Europe in the next 150 years.

Prose fiction also occupied him a great deal. In the Éloge de Richardson (1762) he praised the realism and emotional power of the English novelist, and in 1760 he wrote his own novel of female suffering, La Religieuse. At about the same time, smarting from the persecution of the Encyclopédie, he began one of his masterpieces, Le Neveu de Rameau. He also became increasingly involved with the visual arts, and in 1759 produced the first of his many accounts of the biennial exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the Salons; in connection with these he wrote in 1766 his theoretical Essais sur la peinture.

Diderot was keenly interested in mathematics and the natural sciences, attending chemistry lectures and following recent developments in medicine and biology. The latter are the subject of his Eléments de physiologie (1773) and of the remarkable group of dialogues entitled Le Rêve de d'Alembert (1769), in which he proposes an eloquent materialist account of human and animal life.

In order to provide a dowry for his daughter (who married in 1772), he accepted patronage from Catherine the Great of Russia, who was anxious to present herself as an enlightened monarch. In 1773, therefore, he travelled to St Petersburg, staying there for several months and having frequent and lengthy meetings with the empress, whom he tried to win over to his own views on government and society. His disillusionment with her reforms is reflected in the political writings which assume an increased importance in his later years. In works such as Mémoires pour Catherine II (1773) and Observations sur le Nakaz (1774), he adopts a democratic and often radical standpoint. This is even more true of his voluminous and anonymous contributions to Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes.

But he was more a moralist than a political thinker. He was fascinated by the moral dilemmas faced by would-be free individuals in ‘civilized’ society, and this preoccupation is evident in a number of remarkable tales and dialogues of the 1770s, Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants, Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, Ceci n'est pas un conte, Madame de la Carlière, and the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. Related questions are discussed at about the same time in a critical commentary on Helvétius's De l'homme and in a much-discussed work of dramatic theory, Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773), where he defends the view that great acting requires detachment rather than involvement. The most important work of his later years, however, was the novel Jacques le fataliste. He continued writing up to the year before his death, the last significant titles being the comedy Est-il bon? Est-il méchant? (1781) and the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1782). The former is his most successful dramatic work, and shows him attempting to come to terms with his own moral contradictions; the Essai, in the form of an extended commentary on the life and writings of Seneca, is in fact an apologia pro vita sua, partly provoked by the imminent publication of Rousseau's Confessions.

During his lifetime many of Diderot's greatest writings were not published, and circulated only in manuscript, notably in his friend Grimm's Correspondance littéraire. They have only gradually become known over the ensuing 200 years. Together they make up an astonishing body of work. In almost every field he touched on—art criticism, metaphysics, biology, moral philosophy, political thought, theatre, fiction—he made innovative contributions. The central theme of his thought is probably to be found in the elaboration of a materialist view of the world, and the consequential search for an appropriate morality, aesthetics, and politics. But it would be wrong to reduce him to a single philosophy. He thrives on contradiction. Characteristically weaving together reflection and story-telling, he is always testing theory against experience. As a writer, he is notable for his Protean energy, his humour, irony, and openness. Adopting, transforming, and combating the ideas of others, he brings opposing voices and views into contact and conflict, and involves his reader in an adventure of the mind.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• A. Wilson, Diderot (1972)
• J. Chouillet, Diderot (1977)
• P. France, Diderot (1982)

Diderot, Denis (1713-84) The principal editor of the Encyclopédie, and together with Voltaire the leading figure of the 18th-century Enlightenment in France, enjoying a long and eventful career dedicated to the acquisition and dissemination of learning. Diderot was an outspoken champion of the modern, secular, and scientific world view in an age where free-thinking was still dangerous in France. His philosophical works include Le Neveu de Rameau (composed in the 1760s, pub. in German, 1805, trs. as Rameau's Nephew) and Le Rêve de d'Alembert (composed in 1769, pub. 1782, trs. as D'Alembert's Dream), both of which breathe a delightful spirit of conversational play and banter, while in fact discussing with great seriousness the foundations of ethics and the nature of animal creation, albeit in the light of the speculative biology of the time. He burned what he believed to be the only manuscript of the latter work, in the presence of D'Alembert, who had been asked to seek its destruction by the saloniste Julie de l'Espinasse, who appears in the story. Fortunately, unknown to Diderot, an additional copy had been made.

Diderot, Denis (1713–1784), philosophe and encyclopedist. Denis Diderot was born in Langres on 5 October 1713, the son of Didier Diderot, a master cutler. Although Diderot's fate will forever be linked to his role as general editor with Jean Le Rond d'Alembert of the Encyclopédie (1751–1772), he was perhaps the French Enlightenment's most profound thinker and most innovative writer, making remarkable contributions in the domains of philosophy, art criticism, theater, the essay, and prose fiction. Some of Diderot's greatest works, however, were not published until as late as 1830; he is simultaneously one of the most brilliant and (in his time) one of the most overlooked writers of the eighteenth century.

Educated by the Jesuits first in Langres, then in Paris at the Collège d'Harcourt or the Collège Louis-le-Grand (or both; biographers are uncertain), Diderot showed great intellectual talent from an early age. Following his studies, he was encouraged by his father to pursue a career in law, but Diderot, whose heart was devoted to humanistic study, was unwilling to commit himself to mercenary aims. His father refused to support him in undertaking a life without financial security, and the young Diderot had no choice but to subsist by his own lights, independent but poor.

Diderot frequented cafés such as the fabled Procope and the Cafédela Régence, making the acquaintance of the day's Parisian luminaries. He surreptitiously married Antoinette Champion in 1743; the only surviving child of that unhappy marriage, Angélique, would later write Diderot's memoirs. In 1746 he published his first major work, the Philosophical Thoughts, in which he embraced theological skepticism; the later Addition to the Philosophical Thoughts (1762) is a far more vehement critique of the church and of Christian dogma.

It was also in 1746 that Diderot was commissioned, with d'Alembert, to edit a translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728). This initial project developed over the years into the Encyclopédie, the Enlightenment's most audacious attempt not only at mapping but at restructuring human knowledge in a secular and often rabidly anticlerical schema. It was part polemic and part a summa of existing knowledge, drawing on Baconian organization. Perhaps because of Diderot's artisanal and provincial family background, the Encyclopédie paid special attention to the mechanical as well as the liberal arts, to agriculture as much as philosophy, and to the rapidly expanding bourgeois economy as much as theology and mathematics. The fourteen years it took to produce the seventeen volumes of text, and the further seven to produce eleven volumes of plates (other editors added additional volumes of text, plates, and an index, so that by 1780 the Encyclopédie stood at thirty-five volumes), saw d'Alembert's abandonment of the project in 1758, condemnations and revocations of the work's royal privilege, and countless hours of Diderot's labor. In the end it was to become the Enlightenment's single greatest monument, in spite of heavy-handed censorship, which was circumvented in part by an elaborate system of subversive cross-references.

In 1749 Diderot was imprisoned for three months at Vincennes, primarily for his Letter on the Blind. In 1755 he met Sophie Volland, who became the love of his life and with whom he maintained a brilliant correspondence; indeed, some of Diderot's finest sentences are to be found in his letters to her. She remained his lover and intellectual interlocutor until her death in February 1784, five months before Diderot's on 21 July.

Much of Diderot's work appeared only posthumously. His writings that were known to his contemporaries were generally undervalued, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, despite a bitter break with his friend in 1757, later wrote that Diderot's genius would only be understood in centuries to come. Diderot's contributions to philosophy and literature are many. In the theory and practice of the theater, he rejected the rigidity of classical forms, proposing instead le drame bourgeois (bourgeois drama), a form of theater abandoning both the aristocratic values and the Aristotelian formality of the previous century. His play The Natural Son (1757), and the analytical texts Commentaries on the Natural Son (1757), the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry (1758), and the Paradox on the Actor (published 1830), articulated his new vision of the theater, which was to have a profound impact on the Romantics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Diderot is also widely hailed as the first modern art critic, with his Salons (1759–1781), written for Friedrich Melchior von Grimm's Literary Correspondence (1753–1790), his 1766 Essays on Painting, and his 1776–1781 Detached Thoughts on Painting. In his fiction Diderot experimented with dialogic and conversational forms (most remarkably in Rameau's Nephew, published in 1821, retranslated from German), and with narrative style in Jacques the Fatalist and His Master (published 1796), which was heavily influenced by Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). Diderot's philosophy finds its richest and most mature expression in D'Alembert's Dream (written 1769, published 1830), in which he proposed a biological "continuism," arguing for the connection between all forms of matter, prefiguring, but also more radical than, Darwinism and modern genetics. The scientific experimentalism of his Letter on the Blind, considered the first scientific treatise on blindness, and Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751), supports a materialism far bolder than that suggested in the Philosophical Thoughts, resulting in a worldview marked not only by the deep unity of matter but in which there seems little place for God or Christian morality. Materialism therefore naturally posed moral questions: In a society in which Christian dogma may well be obsolete, how is one to account for ethical behavior? Diderot concluded that one is simply "well or ill born": morality is also a function of matter. In the Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage (1796), he showed the arbitrariness of Western sexual mores, pointing to the factitious quality of any morality not deriving from the natural system, and adumbrating the more radical materialism and rejection of conventional morality of Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade (1740–1814). Considering the inventive audacity of his works, it is understandable that Diderot preferred to keep many of them relatively private until after his death.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Diderot, Denis. Correspondance. Edited by Georges Roth. 16 vols. Paris, 1955–.

——. Diderot on Art. Edited and translated by John Goodman. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1995.

——. Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. Repr. 5 vols. Paris, 1969.

——. Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Translated by Michael Henry. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 1986.

——. Oeuvres. Edited by Laurent Versini. 5 vols. Paris, 1994–1997.

——. The Paradox of Acting. Translated by Walter Herries Pollock. New York, 1957.

——. Political Writings. Edited and translated by John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

——. Rameau's Nephew, and D'Alembert's Dream. Translated by L. W. Tancock. Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York, 1966.

Secondary Sources

Anderson, Wilda. Diderot's Dream. Baltimore, 1990.

Darnton, Robert. "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Ency-clopédie." In his The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, 1985.

Fellows, Otis. Diderot. Rev. ed. Boston, 1989.

Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. London, 1992.

Rex, Walter E. Diderot's Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in His Major Works. Oxford, 1998.

—PATRICK RILEY, JR.

Quotes:

"It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire."

"Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to."

"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid."

"The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population."

"The best doctor is the one you run to and can't find."

"The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion."

See more famous quotes by Denis Diderot

"Diderot" redirects here. For the lunar impact crater, see Diderot (crater).

Denis Diderot

Western Philosophy 18th-century philosophy
Diderot by Louis-Michel van Loo
Full name	Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie.

Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. His articles included many topics of the Enlightenment.

Contents 1 Life and death 2 Early works 3 Encyclopédie 4 Other works 5 Bibliography 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 External links

Life and death

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Denis Diderot, 1769

Denis Diderot was born in the eastern French city of Langres and commenced his formal education in the Lycée Louis le Grand. In 1732, he earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study law. His study of law was short-lived; in 1734, Diderot decided instead to become a writer. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a rather bohemian existence.

In 1743, he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion, a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social status, poor education, fatherless status, lack of a dowry, and, at thirty-two, being four years his senior. The marriage produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angélique, after both Diderot's dead mother and sister. The death of his sister, a nun, from overwork in the convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion. She is assumed to have been the inspiration for his novel about a nun, La Religieuse, in which he depicts a woman who is forced to enter a monastery, and suffers at the hands of the other nuns in the community.

He had affairs with the writer Madame Puisieux and with Sophie Volland. His letters to Sophie Volland contain some of the most vivid of all the insights that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle of Paris during this time period.

Though his work was broad and rigorous, it did not bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain the bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Académie française. When the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no alternative than to sell his library. When Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library. She then requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, and act as her librarian with a yearly salary. In 1773 and 1774, Diderot spent some months at the empress's court in Saint Petersburg.

Diderot died of gastro-intestinal problems in Paris on July 31, 1784, and was buried in the city's Église Saint-Roch. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the National Library of Russia.

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Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Temple Stanyan's History of Greece (1743); with two colleagues, François-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of Robert James's Medical Dictionary^[1] (1746–1748) at about the same time he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), with some original notes of his own. In 1746, he wrote his first original work: the Pensées philosophiques^[2], and he added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. He then composed a volume of bawdy stories, Les bijoux indiscrets (1748); in later years he repented this work. In 1747, he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first at the extravagances of Catholicism; second, at the vanity of the pleasures of the world which is the rival of the church; and third, at the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world.

Diderot's celebrated Lettre sur les aveugles ("Letter on the Blind") (1749), introduced him to the world as a daringly original thinker. The subject is a discussion of the interrelation between man's reason and the knowledge acquired through perception (the five senses). The title, "Letter on the Blind For the Use of Those Who See" also evoked some ironic doubt about the who exactly were "the blind" under discussion. In the essay, a blind English mathematician named Saunderson argues that since knowledge derives from the senses, then mathematics is the only form of knowledge that both he and a sighted person can agree about. It is suggested that the blind could be taught to read through their sense of touch (a later essay, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute). What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles so remarkable, however, is its distinct, if undeveloped, presentation of the theory of variation and natural selection.^[3]

This powerful essay ... revolves around a remarkable deathbed scene in which a dying blind philosopher, Saunderson, rejects the arguments of a providential God during his last hours. Saunderson's arguments are those of a Neo-Spinozist, Naturalist, and Fatalist, using a sophisticated notion of the self-generation and natural evolution of species without Creation or supernatural intervention. The notion of "thinking matter" is upheld and the "argument from design" discarded ... as hollow and unconvincing. The work appeared anonymously ... and was vigorously suppressed by the authorities. Diderot, who had been under police surveillance since 1747, was swiftly identified as the author ... and was imprisoned for some months at Vincennes, where he was visited almost daily by Rousseau, at the time his closest and most assiduous ally.^[4]

After signing a letter of submission and promising never to write anything prejudicial against religion ever again (with the result that from then on his most controversial works were henceforth published only after his death), Diderot was released from the dungeons of the Vincennes fortress after three months. In collaboration with d'Alembert, he subsequently embarked on his greatest project, The Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers.

Encyclopédie

Title page of the Encyclopédie.

Main article: Encyclopédie

André Le Breton, a bookseller and printer, approached Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation of Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences into French, first undertaken by the Englishman John Mills, and followed by the German Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal. During this translation his creative mind and astute vision transformed the work. Instead of a mere reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work, which would collect all the active writers, ideas, and knowledge that were moving the cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths; however, they were comparatively ineffective due to their lack of dispersion. His enthusiasm for the project was transmitted to the publishers; they collected a sufficient capital for a more vast enterprise than they had first planned. Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague; the requisite permission was procured from the government.

In 1750 an elaborate prospectus announced the project to a delighted public, and in 1751 the first volume was published. This work was very unorthodox and had many forward-thinking ideas for the time. Diderot stated within this work, "An encyclopedia ought to make good the failure to execute such a project hitherto, and should encompass not only the fields already covered by the academies, but each and every branch of human knowledge." Upon encompassing every branch of knowledge this will give, "the power to change men's common way of thinking." This idea was profound and intriguing, as it was one of the first works during the Enlightenment. Diderot wanted to give all people the ability to further their knowledge and, in a sense, allow every person to have any knowledge they sought of the world. The work, implementing not only the expertise of scholars and Academies in their respective fields but that of the common man in their proficiencies in their trades, sought to bring together all knowledge of the time and condense this information for all to use. These people would amalgamate and work under a society to perform such a project. They would work alone in order to shed societal conformities, and build a multitude of information on a desired subject with varying view points, methods, or philosophies. He emphasized the vast abundance of knowledge held within each subject with intricacies and details to provide the greatest amount of knowledge to be gained from the subject. All people would benefit from these insights into different subjects as a means of betterment; bettering society as a whole and individuals alike.

This message under the Ancien Régime would severely dilute the regime's ability to control the people. Knowledge and power, two key items the upper class held over the lower class, were in jeopardy as knowledge would be more accessible, giving way to more power amongst the lower class. An encyclopedia would give the layman an ability to reason and use knowledge to better themselves; allowing for upward mobility and increased intellectual abundance amongst the lower class. A growth of knowledge amongst this segment of society would provide power to this group and a yearning to question the government. The numerated subjects in the folios were not just for the good of the people and society, but were for the promotion of the state as well. The state did not see any benefit in the works, instead viewing them as a contempt to contrive power and authority from the state.

Diderot's work was plagued by 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 editors 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 Malesherbis 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 only 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. Diderot was left to finish the task as best he could. He wrote several hundred articles, some very slight, but many of them laborious, comprehensive, and long. He damaged his eyesight correcting proofs and editing the manuscripts of less competent contributors. He spent his days at workshops, mastering manufacturing processes, and his nights writing what he had learned during the day. He was incessantly harassed by threats of police raids. The last copies of the first volume were issued in 1765. At the last moment, when his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered a crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced. It was twelve years, in 1772, before the subscribers received the final 27 folio volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers since the first volume had been published.

Other works

Statue of Denis Diderot in the city of Langres, his birthplace

Although the Encyclopédie was Diderot's monumental piece, he was the author of many other works that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and creative ideas. He wrote sentimental plays, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), accompanying them with essays on theatrical theory and practice, including Les Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (Conversations on Le Fils naturel), in which he announced the principles of a new drama—the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classical French stage. His art criticism was also highly influential. Diderot's Essais sur la peinture was described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as "a magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch."

Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. They were brought together by their friend in common at that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Grimm wrote newsletters to various high personages in Germany, reporting the happenings of art and literature in Paris, then the intellectual capital of Europe. Diderot helped Grimm between 1759 and 1779, by writing an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings in the Paris Salon. These reports are highly readable pieces of art criticism. According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new way of laughing, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot," Anne Louise Germaine de Staël wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius." Jean-Baptiste Greuze was Diderot's favorite contemporary artist.^[5] Greuze's most characteristic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same sentiments of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life, which Diderot had attempted to represent upon the stage. Diderot was above all things interested in the life of individuals. He did not care about the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He was delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Diderot's interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form. However, in two of his most remarkable pieces, this interest is not sympathetic, but ironic. Jacques le fataliste (written in 1773, but not published until 1792 in German and 1796 in French) is similar to Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey. His dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew) is a "farce-tragedy" reminiscent of the Satires of Horace. A favorite classical author of Diderot's, Horace's words Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis are quoted at the top of the Nephew. Diderot's intention in writing the dialogue is disputed; whether it is merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of irony to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original. Whatever its intent, it is a remarkable conversation, representing an era of that held the art of conversation in the highest regard. The writing and publication history of the Nephew is likewise a bit mysterious. Diderot never saw the work through to publication during his lifetime, but there is every indication it was of continual interest to him. Though the original draft was written in 1761, he made additions to it year after year until his death twenty-three years later. Goethe's translation (1805) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Friedrich Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been dead for forty years (1823). Diderot's miscellaneous pieces range from a graceful trifle like the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (Regrets for my Old Dressing Gown) up to Le Rêve de d'Alembert, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. Diderot was not a coherent and systematic thinker, but rather "a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). He did not develop a comprehensive system of materialism, but he may have made some contributions to the atheistic materialist works of his friend Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach.

Bibliography

Monument to Denis Diderot in Paris, VIe arrondissement, by Jean Gautherin

• Essai sur le mérite et la vertu, written by Shaftesbury French translation and annotation by Diderot (1745)
• Pensées philosophiques, essay (1746)
• La promenade du sceptique (1747)
• Les bijoux indiscrets, novel (1748)
• Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient (1749)
• L'Encyclopédie, (1750-1765)
• Lettre sur les sourds et muets (1751)
• Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, essai (1751)
• Le Fils naturel (1757)
• Entretiens sur le Fils naturel (1757)
• Le père de famille (1758)
• Paradoxe sur le comédien (1758)
• Discours sur la poesie dramatique (1758)
• Salons, critique d'art (1759–1781)
• La Religieuse, Roman (1760; revised in 1770 and in the early 1780s; the novel was first published as a volume posthumously in 1796).
• Le neveu de Rameau, dialogue (1761?)
• Lettre sur le commerce de la librairie (1763)
• Mystification ou l’histoire des portraits (1768)
• Entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
• Le rêve de D'Alembert, dialogue (1769)
• Suite de l'entretien entre D'Alembert et Diderot (1769)
• Paradoxe sur le comédien (1769?)
• Apologie de l'abbé Galiani (1770)
• Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, essai (1770)
• Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants (1771)
• Jacques le fataliste et son maître, novel (1771-1778)
• Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772)
• Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, in collaboration with Raynal (1772–1781)
• Voyage en Hollande (1773)
• Éléments de physiologie (1773–1774)
• Réfutation d'Helvétius (1774)
• Observations sur le Nakaz (1774)
• Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1778)
• Lettre apologétique de l'abbé Raynal à Monsieur Grimm (1781)
• Aux insurgents d'Amérique (1782)

See also

French literature portal

• Contributions to liberal theory
• Diderot Effect
• Encyclopedist
• Encyclopédistes
• Liberalism
• University of Paris VII: Denis Diderot

Notes

1. ^ Mark Twain, "A Majestic Literary Fossil", originally from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 80, issue 477, p. 439-444, February 1890. Online at Harper's site. Accessed September 24, 2006.
2. ^ Bryan Magee. The Story of Philosophy. DK Publishing, Inc., New York: 1998. page 124
3. ^ Diderot's contemporary, also a Frenchman, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, who in 1745 was named Head of the Prussian Academy of Science under Frederic the Great, was developing similar ideas. These proto-evolutionary theories were by no means as thought out and systematic as those of Charles Darwin a hundred years later.
4. ^ Johnathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750. (Oxford University Press. 2001, 2002), p. 710
5. ^ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters. Cornell Paperbacks, 1981, pp.222-225. ISBN 0-8014-9218-1

References

This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (October 2009)

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-679-41421-5.
• Gregory, Mary Efrosini. Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species (Studies in Philosophy). New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN 0415955513.
• Havens, George R. The Age of Ideas. New York: Holt, 1955. ISBN 0-89197-651-5.
• Simon, Julia. Mass Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. ISBN 0-7914-2638-6.
• Hoyt, Nellie and Cassirer, Thomas.Encyclopedia, Selections:Diderot, D'Alembert, and a Society of Men of Letters. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc, 1965. LCCN 65-26535. ISBN 0-672-60479-5.
• Goncourt, Edmond and Jules. French Eighteenth-Century Painters. Cornell Paperbacks, 1981, ISBN 0-8014-9218-1

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Denis Diderot

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Denis Diderot

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Denis Diderot

• Works by Denis Diderot at Project Gutenberg
• Diderot's listing at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (in French)
• Denis Diderot Website (in French)
• The Project Gutenberg eBook of Diderot by John Morley
• (French) On line version of the Encyclopédie. The articles are classified in alphabetical order (26 files). Use Mozilla Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, which doesn't open big files.
• The ARTFL Encyclopédie, provided by the ARTFL Project of the University of Chicago (articles in French, scans of 18th century print copies provided)
• The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, product of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (an effort to translate the Encyclopédie into English)
• Denis Diderot,“État de la Chine selon ses détracteurs,” 1781.
• Short biography
• Denis Diderot Bibliography
• Le Neveu de Rameau - Diderot et Goethe

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Persondata
NAME	Diderot, Denis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	French philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	October 5, 1713(1713-10-05)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Langres, Champagne, France
DATE OF DEATH	July 31, 1784
PLACE OF DEATH	Paris

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