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The Dark Side of Diderot / Le Diderot des ombres

by James Hanrahan (Volume editor) Síofra Pierse (Volume editor)
©2016 Edited Collection X, 270 Pages

Summary

This collection of essays investigates the darker aspects of Diderot, writer, art critic, philosopher and encyclopédiste. The chapters focus on the schism between positive images of the Enlightenment and an undercurrent of disorder, transgression and clandestine intellectual and social practices. Diderot’s role in this fissure is critically scrutinised through an analysis of the interface between Enlightenment and its dark side. In his reticence before authority and censorship, in the richness and complexity of his literary and philosophical works, in the emotional conflict of his theatre, or in his innovative aesthetic vision, Diderot consistently evokes the darker side of the Enlightenment.
Cet ouvrage interroge l’aspect plus sombre de Diderot, écrivain, critique d’art, philosophe et encyclopédiste. Les contributeurs traitent du clivage entre d’un côté, les images positives des Lumières et, de l’autre, le désordre, la révolte, la transgression, les pratiques sociales et intellectuelles clandestines qui en constituent son corollaire parfois sous-jacent. Le rôle de Diderot au cœur de ce clivage sera analysé dans le cadre d’une interrogation plus large du couple Ombres/Lumières. Diderot incarne – dans ses réticences devant les autorités et la censure, dans la richesse et la complexité de ses ouvrages littéraires et philosophiques, dans les conflits affectifs de son théâtre, ou encore dans sa vision esthétique innovatrice – une alternative, plus sombre, à la marche des Lumières triomphantes.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction: Darkness in Diderot
  • Narrative Inversions
  • Travailler les ombres, travailler le négatif: l’exemple du Supplément au voyage de Bougainville
  • Le Rêve de d’Alembert: les lumières de d’Alembert à l’ombre du songe, ou comment d’Alembert perdit la raison et conquit le cosmos
  • Subversive Scepticism: Diderot and Narrative Doubt
  • Uneasy Ambiguities
  • Venality, Theatricality and Sociability: Le Neveu de Rameau as a Prostitution Narrative
  • Vertiges de La Religieuse
  • La Mélancolie de Dorval
  • Embracing the Dark Side
  • Diderot on Origins, a zone d’ombre of Enlightenment Thought
  • The Shadows Around the Light: Diderot’s Play on Obscurity for the Purposes of Subversion in the Encyclopédie
  • Diderot’s Ghosts
  • Le Goût des ruines
  • Bibliography
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Series Index

← vi | vii →

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank all contributors and interlocutors for their creative input into deciphering the darker sides of Diderot.

We would also like to thank all at Peter Lang, especially Alessandra Anzani, Jasmin Allousch, Hannah Godfrey, copy-editors and the anonymous readers.

The following were extremely generous in their invaluable grants and supports: National University of Ireland (NUI Publication Grant); Trinity College Dublin (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies); UCD (School of Languages and Literatures, and College of Arts and Celtic Studies); Veolia Water (Ireland).

Finally, we would like to thank the artist Nicolas Freytag who so generously and enthusiastically permitted us to reproduce one panel showing Diderot’s image from his striking triptych, Culte des grands hommes (2012), on the cover of this book. ← vii | viii →

← viii | ix →

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used by contributors to this collection of essays. Where possible, contributors have used the edition of Diderot’s works commonly referred to as DPV.

DPVDenis Diderot, Œuvres complètes, ed. by H. Dieckmann, J. Proust and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1975–)
DSDiderot Studies
EncyclopédieEncyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition), ed. by Robert Morrissey, <http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/>
RDERecherches sur Diderot et l’Encyclopédie <http://rde.revues.org>
VersiniDenis Diderot, Œuvres, ed. by Laurent Versini, 5 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1994–1997)

← ix | x →

← x | 1 →

JAMES HANRAHAN AND SÍOFRA PIERSE

Introduction: Darkness in Diderot

In Diderot’s Encyclopédie article ‘Socratique’, he uses the well-established metaphors of shadows and light in his eulogistic account of Socrates’ life, asserting at one point that Socrates knew,

que la vérité est comme un fil qui part d’une extrémité des ténèbres et se perd de l’autre dans les ténèbres; et que dans toute question la lumière s’accroît par degrés jusqu’à un certain terme placé sur la longueur du fil délié, au-delà duquel elle s’affaiblit peu à peu et s’éteint. Le philosophe est celui qui sait s’arrêter juste; le sophiste imprudent marche toujours, et s’égare lui-même et les autres: toute sa dialectique se résout en incertitudes. C’est une leçon que Socrate donnait sans cesse aux sophistes de son temps, et dont ils ne profitèrent point. Ils s’éloignaient de lui mécontents sans savoir pourquoi. Ils n’avaient qu’à revenir sur la question qu’ils avaient agitée avec lui, et ils se seraient aperçus qu’ils s’étaient laissés entraîner au-delà du point indivisible et lumineux, terme de notre faible raison.1

As this extract shows, Diderot, like so many of his contemporaries, uses light as a metaphor for humankind’s capacity to access truth through reason.2 But human capacities are always limited and, Diderot argues, one can only be enlightened to a certain extent. Of course, Diderot does not believe in ‘l’unicité du vrai’,3 so what is worthy of note here is his interpretation ← 1 | 2 → of Socrates’ vision of truth – that it can only be seen to a certain, partial extent because, for the most part, it lies in darkness and obscurity. The light of our reason changes by gradation, increasing until it reaches a point after which it decreases. When truth is accessed by one’s ‘faible raison’, it always retains an element of obscurity. The result of such a vision of truth could be seen as damaging to the power of the metaphor of the light of reason, but the latter retains its validity when it is considered not from the stark perspective of an opposition between light and dark, but from the perspective of gradation from darkness into light, where light almost always contains its part of darkness (and vice versa). This idea sums up the overarching perspective from which contributors to this collection have considered the ‘dark side’ of Diderot.

Gradations of Darkness

The opposition between light and darkness is probably as old as time and it forms part of nearly all cultural and mythological traditions.4 As Roland Mortier showed, by the middle of the eighteenth century lumen naturale, the natural light of man’s reason – used increasingly in the plural form lumières – referred to a critical mindset that refused to accept the received ideas of tradition, myth and superstition.5 In their place, such a critical mindset relied on the individual’s independent thinking, an attitude summed up by Kant’s exhortation, ‘Sapere aude!’, which still today represents for many the attitude and the legacy of the siècle des Lumières. While Kant may have been the first to define Aufklärung as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred ← 2 | 3 → immaturity’,6 the term lumières and related images of light proliferated in the writings of the philosophes, where they were generally used to distinguish the new ideological attitude of this self-consciously enlightened era from the darkness of the ideological paradigms of the past. One example should suffice to illustrate this well-established point.7 In Diderot’s short article ‘Bramines’, he ridicules the intellectual authority of this sect of Indian philosophers whose ideas he finds fantastical, thus revealing both his attachment to the binary opposites ténèbres/lumière and his belief that the period he is living through is benefitting from the rise of the latter at the expense of the former:

Tout se tient dans l’entendement humain; l’obscurité d’une idée se répand sur celles qui l’environnent: une erreur jette des ténèbres sur des vérités contiguës; et s’il arrive qu’il y ait dans une société des gens intéressés à former, pour ainsi dire, des centres de ténèbres, bientôt le peuple se trouve plongé dans une nuit profonde. Nous n’avons point ce malheur à craindre: jamais les centres de ténèbres n’ont été plus rares et plus resserrés qu’aujourd’hui: la philosophie s’avance à pas de géant, et la lumière l’accompagne et la suit.8

In the Encyclopédie, the chevalier de Jaucourt explains, relying on Biblical sources, that the term ténèbres when used figuratively can mean misfortune, disgrace, death or ‘l’ignorance de la vérité’.9 As can be seen from the opening quotation in this introduction and the excerpt from ‘Bramines’, Diderot considered ténèbres precisely in this way, as those zones of darkness that represent our inability to access truth. While it requires little effort to find positive references to a secularized notion of lumières in the ← 3 | 4 → eighteenth-century French canon, such lexical archaeology ignores the vast swathe of gradation that connects ténèbres and lumières. If one is to learn anything from the secularization of the notion of lumières and its subsequent usage as a positive value judgement in contrast to what would consequently be dismissed as the ténèbres of scholastic Catholic dogma, it is that lumières and ténèbres are relative rather than absolute values. Diderot’s Encyclopédie article ‘Théosophes’ shows to what extent this remained the case in the second half of the eighteenth century. Theosophy was an esoteric philosophy, a mixture of science and Christian mysticism, associated with Paracelsus (1493–1541) and his later followers and imitators. While Diderot refers to Paracelsus as an ‘auteur obscur’, he portrays him rather sympathetically, writing that theosophers ‘regardaient en pitié la raison humaine; ils n’avaient nulle confiance dans sa lueur ténébreuse et trompeuse; ils se prétendirent éclairés par un principe intérieur, surnaturel et divin qui brillait en eux’.10 Diderot’s sympathy is particularly evident when he links this ‘principe intérieur’ to Socrates’ daimon, both of which he characterizes in the same manner, as a kind of intuition:

Il leur semble que c’est une voix secrète qui parle au fond de leur cœur, et qui les avertit. Ils se croient inspirés, et ils le sont en effet, non par quelque puissance surnaturelle et divine, mais par une prudence particulière et extraordinaire.11

Diderot has a lot less approval for Paracelsus’s followers, whose inspiration he attributes to ‘quelque dérangement périodique de la machine’,12 and yet, in his conclusion, he admits that, regarding the theosophers in general, ‘il est difficile de prononcer s’ils ont plus nui que servi au progrès des connaissances humaines’.13 This is hardly surprising, as earlier in the article he locates them intellectually as somewhere between genius and madness, attributes that ‘se touchent de bien près’.14 It is evident that Diderot is ← 4 | 5 → particularly sensitive to the gradations between what is bright and what is ‘obscur’. As Peter France articulates, for Diderot the world ‘is a great dark space with scattered points of light’, yet the philosophe is keen to peer into the darkness to identify better any flickers of light that may be discernible from within the various shadows.15

In his Eloge de Richardson, Diderot, borrowing the Platonic metaphor of the cave, gives it a meaning of his own that, as Jacques Chouillet has shown, is a central image in the philosophe’s aesthetic vision.16 Referring to the English novelist, Diderot states that:

C’est lui qui porte le flambeau au fond de la caverne; c’est lui qui apprend à discerner les motifs subtils et déshonnêtes qui se cachent et se dérobent sous d’autres motifs qui sont honnêtes et qui se hâtent de se montrer les premiers. Il souffle sur le fantôme sublime qui se présente à l’entrée de la caverne; et le More hideux qu’il masquait s’aperçoit.17

While Chouillet’s focus was mainly on the emotional darkness of La Religieuse, he draws parallels with other areas of Diderot’s œuvre, such as the Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature and the Salons. This aesthetic attachment to ténèbres has been analysed more recently, specifically in relation to the Salons, by Michel Delon, who shows that in his appreciation of paintings Diderot is much more attached to ombres and ténèbres than light, because ‘l’obscurité est plus sublime que la lumière’.18 While Delon affirms that ‘l’homme des Lumières n’a jamais nié ce qui reste d’irrationnel et d’inconnu dans la vie morale et qui lui fournit son dynamisme’,19 one could argue that the metaphor of lumières and its monolithic heritage can nonetheless often hide this darkness and these shadows. In his conclusion, ← 5 | 6 → Delon suggests that for Diderot, ‘l’idéal de la vie sur la toile ce sont “les tons, les dégradations, les nuances”’.20 Delon’s assessment suggests parallels between Diderot’s aesthetic and philosophical visions, which typically avoid Manichean dichotomies to reveal instead a preference for nuance and gradation between light and darkness.

Diderot and the Dark Side

Diderot’s focus on the dark side, with all the multifaceted implications inherent in this complex term, extends beyond the scope of any one particular enquiry or narrative tool: it is arguably a foundation stone underpinning the force and equilibrium of his entire corpus. This is not to say that all Diderot’s thought can be synthesized around this one idea, but rather to recognize its role in his œuvre and the scope of its connections with other themes. As Thierry Belleguic has argued,

Ce n’est sans doute pas dans la positivité des savoirs, dans l’orientation des paradigmes politiques, épistémologiques ou esthétiques que se situe la postérité de Diderot, mais plutôt dans une curiosité ouverte à tous les possibles, dans un rapport non ‘totalitaire’ au savoir, dans l’accueil fait à la part dombre qui nous constitue, irréductiblement, et que nulle philosophie ne saurait épuiser, dans la qualité d’une attention aux plus infimes circonstances, dans le vif argent d’une parole, enfin, qui sait animer les mots et le monde, et nous inviter, en nous mettant ‘à sa place’, à une semblable ouverture au dialogue et au bruissement infini des choses.21

This ‘accueil fait à la part d’ombre’ can be seen to encompass many shades of shadows and darkness, while running the gamut of humour, didacticism and horror. In this collection, exploration of Diderot’s dark side is greatly enriched in every aspect by its bilingual nature, not least by the differing ← 6 | 7 → connotations inherent in the English term dark side and the French term ombres. While the English term might colloquially conjure up millennial throwbacks to the Sith or Pink Floyd, the term primarily encapsulates the intense power evinced by dark, sinister elements such as disorder, transgression or clandestine practices. Some essays in this collection emphasize the extent to which Diderot’s writings tilt to the dark side, embracing equal parts of darkness and obscurity that are to be found side-by-side with Socratic points of light and truth. In parallel, the French term ombres conjures up manifold layers of ambiguity from the darkness of sundown, through shades, shadows, suspicion, solemnity, gravity, gravestones, dullness, dusk and demise. Correspondingly, other essays engage with nuance and insinuation, and inter alia, analyse materialistic dichotomies, and consider suppression and textual negativities. Within Diderot’s darknesses, the interface between the terms dark side and ombres is noteworthy: together, these signifiers and the vast gradations that they encompass permit a broad survey of textual material with a focus on a wide diversity of topics from the tensions and interplay between lumières and ombres, to dark emotions, narrative trickery, gothic darkness and spectral imagination.

Yet, in spite of all this emphasis on darkness, an underlying element that never fails to strike any modern reader of Diderot is, paradoxically, his mischievous sense of humour. In his study French Laughter, Walter Redfern notes that ‘Diderot the social animal […] led a frequently ludic life’ and that this deeply influenced his works, which ‘depend greatly on humour for their sustenance and dynamism’.22 Although quirky and seemingly quite dark in nature, the philosophe’s use of humour is so playful and infectious that it permeates his works, whether they be novels, letters, stories, plays or philosophical dialogues. While taunting censors, imagining his own death, tricking or testing colleagues, readers or narratives, Diderot’s wittiness provides a rich array of comic expression that reaches from the deadpan to the gallows, and from the satirical to the playful. His humorous expression is thus part of the very fabric of Diderot’s thinking and writing, as evidenced ← 7 | 8 → in his correspondence, in his mischievous dismissal of revenants in art and in his burlesque treatment of the judgement of Renardeaux in Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?. It extends to his tackling of pyrrhonian sceptics in La Promenade du sceptique and through the vast range of comic flavours served up across the spectrum of his literary works, including plays, short stories and novels. Nor can the philosophe resist descending into pathos, despair or bawdiness as the occasion may require. It is arguably this undercurrent of humour in Diderot’s works that facilitates the concomitant omnipresence of that core trope that ripples through this volume’s essays: the nature and form of myriad, gradated darknesses. Since Diderot seems drawn to evoking the abyss in extremely stark terms, the shades and levels of darkness in Diderot’s writings are on occasion horrendous and terrible in human terms. As Redfern argues, ‘his deepest conviction was that we are all, in the last resort, incorrigible’.23

Details

Pages
X, 270
Year
2016
ISBN (PDF)
9783035307856
ISBN (ePUB)
9783035397161
ISBN (MOBI)
9783035397154
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034318488
DOI
10.3726/978-3-0353-0785-6
Language
English
Publication date
2015 (December)
Keywords
humanism theater enlightment
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2016. X, 270 pp.

Biographical notes

James Hanrahan (Volume editor) Síofra Pierse (Volume editor)

James Hanrahan is Ussher Lecturer in eighteenth-century French studies at Trinity College Dublin. Síofra Pierse is Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone studies at University College Dublin.

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Title: The Dark Side of Diderot / Le Diderot des ombres
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