The Enlightenment is under very bad weather right now. The French eighteenth-century movement that once was seen to have bathed Europe in the light of reason—fighting for science against superstition, and for liberty against bondage—has become the villain of many a postmodern seminar and of even more revisionist histories, from left and right alike. The Enlightenment’s supposed faith in reason—its desire to be sure that every “passion’ll / soon be rational,” to adapt the enlightened Ira Gershwin—is held responsible for racism, colonialism, and most of the other really bad isms. Enlightenment order is now understood as overlord violence pursued through other means. Its true symbol is not some peaceful Temple of Reason but the Panopticon—the all-surveying, single-eye system of Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison. Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a “scientific” hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. “Reason” became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.
Well, all views produce counter-views, but—and this is one of the lessons of the Enlightenment itself—they tend to come less often from within the era’s Academy of Orthodoxy than from traditions blooming outside it. So, these days, the anti-Enlightenment view is countered most potently by a set of parallel popular enthusiasms. Outside academia, the Enlightenment is not just in good odor but practically Hermès-perfumed. Voltaire has been the subject of (by my count) five popular and mostly positive biographies in the past decade alone, and now the brightest Enlightener of them all, Denis Diderot, is being newly enshrined in two fine books written by American scholars for a general audience: Andrew S. Curran’s “
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely” (Other Press) and Robert Zaretsky’s “
Catherine & Diderot” (Harvard), an account of Diderot’s legendary collusion with a Russian autocrat.
Diderot is known to the casual reader chiefly as an editor of the Encyclopédie—it had no other name, for there was no other encyclopédie. Since the Encyclopédie was a massive compendium of knowledge of all kinds, organizing the entirety of human thought, Diderot persists vaguely in memory as a type of Enlightenment superman, the big bore with a big book. Yet in these two new works of biography he turns out to be not a severe rationalist, overseeing a totalitarianism of thought, but an inspired and lovable amateur, with an opinion on every subject and an appetite for every occasion.
He was and remains, as Zaretsky says simply, a mensch. He is also a very French mensch. He is a touchingly perfect representative—far more than the prickly Voltaire—of a certain French intellectual kind not entirely vanished: ambitious, ironic, obsessed with sex to a hair-raising degree (he wrote a whole novella devoted to the secret testimony of women’s genitalia), while gentle and loving in his many and varied amorous connections; possessed of a taste for sonorous moralizing abstraction on the page and an easy temporizing feel for worldly realism in life; and ferociously aggressive in literary assault while insanely thin-skinned in reaction, littering long stretches of skillful social equivocation with short bursts of astonishing courage.
It has been said that there were two Enlightenments, one high and one low. The high Enlightenment was the Enlightenment that produced the weighty works and domineering ideas; the low, or popular, Enlightenment was—in ways that scholars as unlike as Jürgen Habermas and Robert Darnton have been illuminating for the past half century—the Enlightenment of the cafés and conversation, or, at times, of pamphleteering and pornography.
Until the moment, in the late seventeen-forties, when he was asked to undertake the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was mainly a figure of the low Enlightenment, and might have seemed a quite improbable encyclopedist. The ne’er-do-well son of a wealthy provincial bourgeois family, he ducked out of an apprenticeship in law and became a figure of the cafés, known for his conversation and social amiability. His friendship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which lasted for nearly twenty years—longer than almost anyone else sustained a friendship with the ornery and paranoid Swiss philosophe—began when they met drinking coffee and playing chess in the Café de la Régence, one of the cafés clustered around the Palais Royal, in Paris, where the real reservoir of Enlightenment social capital was produced. Diderot has such an engaging aura in his writing that an idealized Fragonard portrait of a reader at work—open collar, wigless, bright-eyed and wry—was, until 2012, falsely identified as Diderot. (He isn’t nearly so handsome in any of the surviving frontispieces to his work.) It was the way Diderot ought to have looked, even if he didn’t...
And then, sometime after his return to France, Diderot revised, though he did not publish, the single literary work of his that seems likeliest to last: the philosophical dialogue called by tradition “Rameau’s Nephew.” Set in the Café de la Régence, the same café where he had met Rousseau, it pits a stylized version of an actual louche character of the time—the notorious Jean-François Rameau, who really was the composer’s nephew—against an equally stylized version of Diderot himself. The two—called Lui and Moi, Him and Me—argue about life, inheritance, meaning, pleasure. Lui, Rameau, is the louder voice in the dialogue, speaking up unapologetically for the view that there is nothing in life worth pursuing except immediate physical gratification: food, sex, even defecation. All the higher motives and values that Moi invokes are pious fictions. Rameau’s nephew, as Curran writes, “reduces virtue, friendship, country, the education of one’s children, and achieving a meaningful place in society to nothing more than our vanity. . . . We are all corrupted, acting out various pantomimes to get what we want.” Even his own selfishness, Lui maintains, is the result not of choice but of constitutional and inherited tendencies, the “obtuse paternal molecule” (a strikingly prescient term for DNA) that runs in the Rameau line.
Rameau’s nephew is an amazing invention, alive as a human being on the page in a way that most of the participants in the philosophical set pieces of the time are not. He speaks up so lucidly and passionately for his reductive view that, when the dialogue was at last published—first in German, and long after Diderot’s death—his position was taken for the author’s. It certainly is the more memorable of the two voices.
Remarkably, though, the Diderot character never counters his opponent with references to God or grace or natural law or even the abstract Deistic divine. Instead, his ripostes are every bit as anchored in a materialist view of existence as Rameau’s nephew’s. The argument is simply that there is, in effect, a kinder way to see the material. Confronted with the fact that the most admired moralists in French literature were actually hideously selfish and competitive men, Diderot replies by appealing to the long horizontal frame of history, and by offering the classic incrementalist antidote to cynicism—their shabby original motives are less important than their shining long-term effect:
Let’s view the matter from the only truly interesting perspective, and disregard for a moment our position in time and space, and look beyond to the centuries to come, to the furthest lands and the peoples yet to be born. Let’s consider the good of our species. . . . Let’s accept things as they are. Let’s see what we lose and what we gain in doing so, and let’s leave aside the big picture which, in any case, we don’t have a clear enough view of to be able to apportion praise or blame, and which may in itself be neither good nor bad, but simply necessary.
A long perspective, an acceptance of “things as they are,” an empirical summary of gains and losses without hysteria about either: this is still the liberal materialist’s answer to the cynical materialist’s despair, what we have in place of faith.
“Rameau’s Nephew” is, in this way, the first debate between two such materialists, both of whom reject superstition and the supernatural but end in radically different places. We live within that dialogue today, with some of us accepting that the material view of a world without inherent meaning can produce only fatalism, others that it can give us the great if ambiguous gift of freedom. W
hen Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett debate free will, they are reprising Diderot’s dialogue—with Harris arguing, like Rameau’s nephew, that free will is a comforting illusion, enforced by those parental molecules, and Dennett replying, in the voice of Moi, that what we call free will is an emergent property of minds and moves, and that we are as free as we have to be to will what we need. Experience, the expanding germ of thought, is enough. If we experience our lives as free, they are acceptably so. Rameau’s nephew insists that we are soulless bags of meat and blood, even as our minds pretend to have motives; Moi insists that what it means to have a soul is to be a bag of meat and blood with a mind inside.
It’s an argument worth having. In some ways, it is the only argument worth having, since the specific cases are not decidable in advance in one way or another. Sometimes we’ll decide that Lui is right and that what looks like a turbulence of soul and spirit—as with certain psychological disorders—is best viewed as a physiological condition; sometimes Moi seems righter, and our response to other things—human altruism—is little dimmed by talk of flesh and inheritances. We never know until we ask.
Diderot was one of the first to ask. His materialism touches the edge of pathos in its unflinching acceptance of transience. Curran reproduces one of the most moving passages in all his work, from a letter to Sophie Volland, his lover of more than two decades, in which he wrote:
Those people who are buried next to each other are perhaps not as crazy as one might think. Their ashes might press and mix together, and unite. What do I know? Maybe they haven’t lost all feeling or all the memories of their first state. Perhaps there is a flicker of heat that they both enjoy in their own way at the bottom of the cold urn that holds them. Oh, my Sophie, I could touch you, feel you, love you, look for you, unite myself with you, and combine myself with you when we are no longer here. . . . Allow me this fantasy.
“A flicker of heat” was enough to live by. When Voltaire and Diderot met at last, in Paris, in 1778, the long-awaited meeting of the two master minds of the Enlightenment, they had a squabble about Shakespeare. Diderot made a joke about a giant statue that used to stand in front of Notre-Dame, saying that Voltaire’s plays couldn’t touch Shakespeare’s balls. Voltaire did not take it well, and the two parted on sour terms. But the episode is a reminder that the health and vitality of the French Enlightenment lay in the fact that it began and ended in a love of art and literature.
The two American academic authors of these revivifying new books are testaments to Diderot’s legacy, both in the avid lucidity of their writing and in the good humor of their attitudes. They don’t blame him for not being what he couldn’t yet be, nor do they subordinate character to circumstance; they see that without extraordinary characters like Diderot and Catherine the Great there never would have been such a circumstance.
Indeed, one can’t help loving Diderot, even while realizing that the one typical gift of French intellect he lacks is wit. He is funny and good-natured, but, though he attempted a few aphorisms, he left not a single memorable one behind. To think freely, as he did, is to think past shapely sentences to those open books. You can’t make an encyclopedia with a miniaturist’s mind. Wit is, typically, a conservative genre: it summarizes what’s known; to condense a truth to an aphorism, you need to be fairly certain that your listener will accept it as a truth. Diderot was the enemy of truths that people knew already, and so he couldn’t compact—only enlarge.
He wasn’t a wit, but he had a sense of humor, which he applied to the world. His break with Rousseau was caused in part by his inability to accept Rousseau’s sober self-approval for having turned his back on the fashionable world. (“I ask your forgiveness for what I say to you about the solitude in which you live,” Diderot wrote amiably enough in a postscript to a letter, but then added, “Adieu, Citizen! Although a Hermit makes for a very peculiar Citizen.” Rousseau couldn’t stand being kidded that way.)
Heroic materialism may be the hope of our existence; but comic material is the salve of our lives. Diderot exists in memory to show that materialism can be miserable or it can be magical. It all depends on the material, and on the light.
Adam Gopnik
♦This article appears in the print edition of the March 4, 2019, issue, of The New Yorker with the headline “Diderot Dicta.”
Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “
At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York.”
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