[D66] The Man Who Questioned Everything

[A.O.]

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/03/07/diderot-man-who-questioned-everything/

The Man Who Questioned Everything

    By Lynn Hunt, www.nybooks.com
    View Original

The Man Who Questioned Everything
March 7, 2019 Issue
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
by Andrew S. Curran

Other Press, 520 pp., $28.95
Catherine and Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the
Enlightenment
by Robert Zaretsky
Harvard University Press, 258 pp., $27.95

The most radical thinker of the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot
(1713–1784), is not exactly a forgotten man, though he has been long
overshadowed by his contemporaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
After the French Revolution of 1789, the French right routinely blamed
every ill of modern life on Voltaire and Rousseau. The expressions “It’s
the fault of Voltaire” and “It’s the fault of Rousseau” became so
familiar that Victor Hugo could satirize them in a ditty sung by the
urchin Gavroche in Les Misérables (1862): “Joy is my character; ’tis the
fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau; ’tis the fault of Rousseau.”
Voltaire and Rousseau were among the first to be buried in the French
Pantheon of the nation’s heroes; Diderot has yet to be, despite a
concerted campaign leading up to the three-hundredth anniversary of his
birth in 2013.

Diderot was simultaneously too much a man of his time and too much ahead
of his time. He devoted the best years of his life to organizing,
editing, and writing many of the 74,000 articles of the Encyclopedia
(1751–1772), a vast compendium of knowledge amounting to seventeen
volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates, and laced with acerbic
commentary that alarmed the authorities for attacking religion and
subverting government. Known mainly to scholars today, at the time the
project served as a thrilling treasury of Enlightenment ideas, if you
knew where to find the nuggets hidden under the most unlikely headings.
In the article “Nonetheless, However, Nevertheless, Notwithstanding,”
for example, Diderot argued that even anti-Christian—i.e.,
atheist—writers could “nonetheless” be good parents, good friends, and
good citizens. Since many articles were unsigned and the known
contributors came from every corner of French life, no one could be sure
what other ideas were Diderot’s.

As if that exhausting labor were not enough, Diderot anonymously
contributed heaps of pages to another sprawling but influential work,
this one on European colonialism. The History of the Two Indies appeared
under the name of his friend the ex-Jesuit Guillaume Raynal. Diderot’s
involvement in turning the second and third editions (1774 and 1780)
into incendiary denunciations of European colonialism and the slave
trade remained largely unknown before the second half of the twentieth
century; the papers he left to his daughter were only inventoried in
1951, thanks to the work of Herbert Dieckmann, a German émigré professor
then at Harvard, and scholars are still sorting out what came from
Diderot’s pen.

As a man of his time, Diderot loved company and he loved Paris, the very
place that Voltaire and Rousseau were always fleeing. His connection,
unlike theirs, was not with public opinion but with the people he could
talk to: his wife and daughter, his lovers, his countless friends, and,
eventually, one ruling monarch in faraway Russia, Catherine the Great.
In an age of conversation, he stood out for his volubility. When
excited, he could hardly contain himself and would frequently grab his
interlocutor’s arm or leg to drive home his point. Catherine found it
helpful to keep a table between them during their Saint Petersburg
tête-à-têtes. A passionate enthusiast about a staggering range of
topics, from science and metaphysics to painting and novels, Diderot
tirelessly promoted his colleagues but proved too gullible. For four
years he gave work to a penniless copyist who turned out to be a spy
planted by the Paris chief of police, a friend of Diderot’s from his
school days. In the worst of all betrayals, the Encyclopedia’s publisher
secretly bowdlerized the final volumes in order to forestall the
censors, leaving its furious editor with no option other than nursing
his wounds in private.

Diderot was far from being an intellectual magpie who simply scavenged
bits to build a nest out of other people’s ideas. He took seriously his
own pronouncement in the article “Encyclopedia” in volume 5:

    I have said that an Encyclopedia could only be attempted in a
philosophical century; and I said it because this work requires a more
courageous spirit than can commonly be found in centuries of
pusillanimous taste. We must examine everything, stir up everything
without exception and without restraint.

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