Denis Diderot
From Philosopedia
Diderot, Denis (5 October 1713 - 31 July 1784)
A French atheist and Encyclopedist, Diderot was a materialist philosopher.
Contents |
The Encyclopédie
When readers passed by A, B, and C in the new encyclopedia and came to the D's, they found Dieu, or God. “Mon Dieu, they exclaimed, “you cannot put an entry for Dieu in an encyclopedia! The very idea is blasphemous!”
But Diderot did, and other corresponding entries were included which shocked the populace and theologians of that time. The Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers par une société de gens de lettres, mis en ordre et publié par M. Diderot et M. D’Alembert (1745—1772) [[1]] easily made the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1759.
His Views
Diderot believed that God is an utterly useless idea in science and philosophy and the cause of endless dissension and inhumanity, notes Lester G. Crocker, who edited Diderot’s Selected Writings.
In 1746 Diderot published Philosophic Thoughts, which was condemned to be burned but did much to advance freedom of opinion. In 1749 his Letters on the Blind resulted in his imprisonment at Vincennes because of its materialistic atheism.
His Critics
Rousseau [[2]], who called him “a transcendent genius,” visited Diderot in prison, where he was imprisoned for three years.
During the French Revolution, Pierre Maréchal [[3]] considered Diderot one of the most important atheists of all time, finding that his work was a resounding blow against the church’s reactionary ideas.
Auguste Comte [[4]] called Diderot “the greatest thinker of the eighteenth century.”
Other Works
Diderot also was a novelist, satirist, and playwright.
He wrote The Father of the Family (1758), the first “bourgeois drama.”
His "Essai sur la peinture" was so liked by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that he thought it should be translated because it was such a magnificent work.
His Appearance
John Morley [[5]] gave an interesting description of Diderot’s personal appearance:
- His conversational powers were great and showed the fertility of his genius.
“When I recall Diderot,” wrote Joseph de Maister,
- the immense variety of his ideas, the amazing multiplicity of his knowledge, the rapid flight, the warmth, the impetuous tumult of his imagination, all the charm and all the disorder of his conversation, I venture to liken his character to Nature herself, exactly as he used to conceive her - rich, fertile, abounding in germs of every sort, gentle and fierce, simple and majestic, worthy and sublime, but without any dominating principle, without a master and without a God.
Diderot's Wit
Among Diderot’s witty observations are the following:
- • Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian. - Addition to Philosophical Thoughts (c. 1762)
- • The Christian religion: the most absurd in its dogmas, the most unintelligible, the most insipid, the most gloomy, the most Gothic, the most puerile.
- • The Christian religion teaches us to imitate a God that is cruel, insidious, jealous, and implacable in his wrath.
- • Fanaticism is just one step away from barbarism.
- • Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
- • A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.
- • I have eyes and a heart and I like to look at a pretty woman, like to feel the curve of her breast under my hand, press her lips to mine, drink bliss from her eyes and die of ecstasy in her arms. Sometimes a gay party with my friends, even if it becomes a little rowdy, is not displeasing to me. But I must confess that I find it infinitely sweeter to . . . tell her whom I love something tender and true which brings her arms about my neck.
Diderot's Influence
P. N. Furbank’s critical biography, Diderot, shows that when Diderot could find no experts who dared write for his encyclopedia, he wrote the articles himself. And when a spy reported to the police some of the material he was working on, it was the king who saved him. According to Voltaire [[6]], who got the story from one of the king’s servants, Louis had inquired how gunpowder worked, both in killing human enemies and in killing partridges. “Alas, it is the same with everything in the world,” replied Mme. de Pompadour. “I don’t know what the rouge I use is made of, and I should be hard put to it if someone asked me how my silk stockings are made.” At this point, a duke informed Louis it was a shame he had had the encyclopedia confiscated, for it contained the answers. When the king sent footmen to find the volumes, according to Voltaire’s story, Mme. de Pompadour learned the difference between French and Spanish rouge as well as how a stocking-machine worked. Meanwhile, the king learned how gunpowder worked and read all about the rights of the crown. Thereupon, the “dangerous work” was pronounced an “excellent book” and Diderot was protected.
Rationalist that he was, Diderot “joined the party of humanity,” illustrating that a philosopher not only lives by reason but also can be virtuous, decent, and regard civil society as his “divinity.”
His Final Years
Checkered as Diderot’s life had been, his closing years were full of peace and comfort. Superstition was mortally wounded, the Church was terrified, and it was clear that the change the philosophers had worked for was at hand. As Morley observed, “the press literally teemed with pamphlets, treatises, poems, histories, all shouting from the house-tops open destruction to beliefs which fifty years before were actively protected against so much as a whisper in the closet. Every form of literary art was seized and turned into an instrument in the remorseless attack on L’Infame.”
In the spring of 1784 Diderot was attacked by what be felt was his last illness. Dropsy and emphysema set in, and in a few months the end came. A fortnight before his death he was removed from the upper floor in the Rue Taranne, which he had occupied for thirty years, to palatial rooms provided for him by the Czarina in the Rue de Richelieu. Growing weaker every day he was still alert in mind. He did all he could to cheer the people around him, and amused himself and them by arranging his pictures and his books. In the evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on science and philosophy to the friends who were eager as ever for the last gleanings of his prolific intellect.
On the evening of 30 July 1784, he sat down to table, and at the end of the meal took an apricot. His wife, with kind solicitude, remonstrated. “Mais quel diable de nial veux-tu que cela me fasse? (How the deuce can that hurt me?),” he said, and ate the apricot. Then he rested his elbow on the table, trifling with some sweetmeats. His wife asked him a question and, on receiving no answer, looked up and saw he was dead. He had died as the Greek poets say that men died in the golden age - they passed away as if mastered by Sleep. In the last conversation that his daughter heard him carry on, his last words were the pregnant aphorism that “the first step towards philosophy is incredulity.”
Incredibly, Diderot’s son-in-law arranged for special dispensation to have Diderot buried in consecrated ground at Saint-Roch.
(See entry for Ephraim Chambers, originator of the Cyclopaedia of Arts and Sciences (1728).)
{BDF; FFRF; FO; FUS; JM; JMRH; PUT; RAT; TYD}
