Editing Denis Diderot

'''DIDEROT, Denis (1713-1784).''' The most eminent thinker among the materialists of the French Enlightenment, he is the leader and soul of the Encyclopedists. During a quarter of a century, he published, along with d’Alembert, the famous Encyclopedia called “the Holy Alliance against fanaticism and tyranny.” The publication of this undertaking, persecuted by the State and the Jesuits, demanded a sustained moral effort, an unflagging will-power, the greatest obstinacy and absolute devotion. Engels wrote, “If anyone has enthusiastically dedicated his entire life to truth and to the right—in the best sense of the word—it was Diderot.” He wrote on the most diverse topics, on natural science and mathematics, history and society, the economy and the State, law and morals, art and literature. Raised in strict Catholicism, Diderot developed with remarkable logic, evolving from deism to militant materialism and atheism, and finally embodying the highest goals of the revolutionary bourgeois philosophy of the French Age of Enlightenment. He exerted the most profound and long-lasting influence on the society of his time. But his thought was not restricted to the narrow limits of vulgar materialism. A number of glimmers of dialectical thought are to be found in his works. Already in his Philosophic Thoughts (the Hague, 1746), which were burned by the public hangman by order of the Parliament, and in his Wandering of a Skeptic (1747), confiscated before publication, he vigorously attacks the Church. His atheistic work, An Essay on Blindness (London, 1749), cost him a year in prison. Diderot is justly considered a precursor of Lamarck and Darwin, for he already maintains, clearly and resolutely, the idea of the evolution of organisms and of the initial existence of a “primitive being” from which, by progressive transformations, the later diversity of the animal and plant kingdoms derived. Just as there is an individual evolution, there is also, according to Diderot, an evolution of species. Logically pursuing the idea of evolution, Diderot finally demands the recognition of the evolution of all inanimate matter. In this work, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754), in order to explain psychic phenomena, he imagines the hypothesis of atoms endowed with sensation, which already exist in animals and which bring about thought in man. All natural acts are signs of a substance which comprises all of being, in which the unity of forces in perpetual transformations and reciprocal action is apparent. Among his most daring and clever materialist writings should be noted: A Conversation between d’Alembert and Diderot (1769) and D’Alembert’s Dream (1769), which are at the same time complete literary masterpieces. Diderot was, moreover, an eminent dramatist and a master of prose. In his struggle for reforms in art and the theater, he advocates naturalism, the uncamouflaged representation of living, concrete reality. Diderot composed, moreover, numerous witty novels and short stories (he was, by the way, Marx’s favorite author) whose importance can be seen in the fact that men such as Lessing, Schiller and Goethe not only admired them but translated many of them into German as well. His most famous work is Rameau’s Nephew (1762) which Engels calls a “masterpiece of dialectics.”