Notes on Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Denis Diderot

Summary

Brief history

Diderot's life is centered around his work as a writer with increasingly radical ideas in Old Regime France, accordingly gaining notoriety as his carrer progressed and his body of work increased. Although initally having nothing more to his name than his education, and having suffered the oppresion of the "idea" police (due to secular undertones of his writings), Diderot's contributions, especially on the Encyclopédie as both editor and writer - a work whose publication sparked a intense debate between skeptics and theists -, eventually garnered him the status of a celebrity, becoming one of the most well regarded thinkers at the time of the Enlightment. Later in his life, Diderot managed to secure the patronage of Catherine the Great of Russia (one of the enlighted despots), allowing to live the rest of his life comfortably. In these twilight years, his ideas only became more radical, distancing himself more from the rest of the french society, including the revolutationaries, being denied a place at the French Revolution pantheon amidst the likes of Rousseau and Voltaire. Such radicalism, when coupled with the idiosyncracity of his philosohical work (far more literary rather than systematic - something very much new for the time), pushed him to annals of french culture, with interest in his work only being revided after 1870.

Philosophy

Diderot's major philosophical concerns were in the realm of materialism and esthetics, while also touching upon ethics and even anthropology. First and foremost, he was an self-titled eclectic, someone aversed to sectarianism and commited to dealing sincerely with truth. The ecletic, to Diderot, is both an experimentalist and user of language.

His materialism was very influenced by the work of, at the time, very influential philosopher Nicholas Malenbranche. Both saw how our acquisiton of knowledege was limited by our senses, but while Malenbranche believed mathematical reason to be our way to achieve truth (here in the divine sense), Diderot instead though of language as our bridge for comprehending Nature. This preocupation on how we use language to interface with the world - very much a malenbranchian concern - is a recurring theme in Diderot's work. Diderot was also fascinated with the nascent science of biology (at the time called life sciences), and combined them with his particular strand of malenbranchian philosophy. The product was a very idiosyncratic view on materialism, that mixed both empiricism and metaphysics, a experimental metaphysics - a method that placed emphasis on practice to yield knowledge, but that didn't shy away from metaphysical musings to fill in empty gaps.

Within this methodology, Diderot's understands each sense having their own metaphysics - with each sense creating their own worlds - and, going further, that each molecule itself having the hability to sense; and, although this idea is apparently derived from various sciences (natural history, chemistry, medicine, etc), it's not grounded in any experimentation, thus making it speculative metaphysics.

The problem of the feeling of objects is clarified by what Diderot calls the animalization of matter, that is, matter is either alive or potentially alive. In Diderot's own example, if a marble statue is grounded into dust and mixed with the earth as fertizer for plants, which then grow and eaten by animals, who in turn are eaten by us. Matter, in this sense, is in a transitory state, eventually becoming alive.

Now, in respect to the soul, Diderot differed from other materialists, treating it as any other body part, naturalising it. All while treating believing the brain as imbued with some special quality beyond that of other body parts; in a passage he compares it with a book that reads itself with its embodiment, the brain-reader, as self-organizing — a discussion about brain plasticity far ahead of its time.

His materialism further diverged in other two points: the issue of individuality and the causality. Diderot held a strong belief that all effects must be born of some cause, otherwise nature would be constantly taking leaps. This is already in accordancy with many materialists, the point of contention lies on the issue of the causality. Diderot's conception of cause was very discrete; a human must have particular human causes and effecs, further even, every human has causes specific to himself. Individuality arises here at the organisational level, with differences in the disposition of atomic biological parts that compose us bringing innate differenciation between humans. This is suggests that we are, unlike most conceptions of humas as fully modifiable blank slates, only partially modifiable. Inside Diderot's materialism, arises also the idea of vicissitude, which is the concept that all things are in motion, mutating as time goes.

Diderot's had also contributions on the artistical side, in both performance (in the form of theatre) and the visual arts. His main concern here was on the interplay of experiences between subject and object, viewer and painting or audience and play, and on the actions of language in these relations. It was Diderot who coined the idea of the fourth wall and further concluded, disagreeing with Rousseau, that theatre could be used to encourage virtuous behaviour. And, to understand our comprehension of art, he developed a concept called perception of relations, which is both a theory of judgement and, at a more basic level, a theory of cognitive function; it attempts to explain why we find certain visuals appealing, and grounds a certain hyper-reactivity to art on fundamental organical differences.

Further differing from other materalists, was Diderot's understanding of the ethics surrounding his materialistic views, which are commonly associated with a cynical, solipsistic and self-interested conception of morality. Diderot opposed this idea, instead judging that we, by nature, are oriented towards virtue and those that stray from that path are going against the grain. Furthermore, despite having not authored any treatise on ethics (out of fear that a failure to produce one of meaningful quality would encourage the unethical behaviour), Diderot observed a necessity that any ethical theory should take our passions into consideration, as they cement our social bonds.

Lastly, in face of the problem of our finitude in face of the inifinite complexity of Nature, Diderot's has a very anthropocentric proposition: human presence and observation gives vibrancy to the otherwise mute scenery of the world.

Short commentary

Diderot is a philosopher in tension with himself. While in one hand he recurrently attempts to describe the world through the eyes of an empiricist, holding experimentation in high regard; in the other, he reaches for the metaphysics whenever he feels is the most appropriate (or convenient, depending on the what reader feels about his work). At the same time, dislikes both those who rely solely on abstratc mathematics to understand nature, and the experimentalists that seek to reduce all to mere trial and error. And while he reaches to the newborn science of biology for aid in his explanation, to provide him groundwork, he ultimately has to leap attempt metaphysical leaps to get anywhere.

Above all, Diderot dons the trappings of an Enlightment scientist upon the soul of an artist, and not any artist, but the one closer to language than any other: the writer. From here, is easy to understand his infatuation to language, what other profession is so acutely aware to how we can shape the world through language other than the writer? This is a major recurring concern in his work: the distinction from what is and what we make it be; and what other tool is as varied and multifaceted as language itself? Be it analyzing how we interface with art or how our senses and use of language shape of understanding of Nature, or even within his own materialism, Diderot seems to be keenly preoccupied with how we shape our own knowledge and our very selves.

No wonder, he placed ecleticism in such high regard, the artist-philosohper must be averse to dogmatism at all levels, otherwise he wouldn't get anywhere. Here Diderot gives us a valuable lesson in his philosphical methodology: be open to all, be critic of all.

Major works