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Man and Mind in Diderot and Helvétius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
On 2 May 1760 a new play by Charles Palissot, entitled Les Philosophes, had its first performance in Paris. The immortality achieved by this comedy has nothing to do with inherent literary value; it has survived because those whom it attacks were among the most important thinkers in eighteenth-century France, and because Diderot, one of its victims, retaliated in that brilliant satire known as Le Neveu de Rameau. In Palissot's comedy, the philosophes are referred to as “un tas de charlatans, / Qu'on voit sur des tréteaux ameuter les passants.” The notions of ethics and human nature supposedly espoused by these rabble rousers are essentially a popularization of the ideas of Helvétius, whose De l'esprit was publicly condemned less than two years before. “Les hommes sont égaux par le droit de nature,” Valère declares, much to the satisfaction of his servant; men are guided by “l'attrait du bonheur,” whose source is in the passions; personal interest is the only motivation (ii.i). And we catch glimpses of conduct consistent with a conscious, literal following of these and other maxims. But, significantly, Diderot's works are the ones that are mentioned, not Helvétius'. Diderot's play, Le Fils naturel, is made an important source of inspiration for Cydalise, an eighteenth-century Philaminte, in the writing of her book; she experiences great difficulty thinking up a first line for her preface, but, having abandoned “J'ai vécu” (used by Duclos), decides upon some thing “plus pompeux et plus philosophique”: the words with which Diderot opens his Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, “Jeune homme, prends et lis” (II.iii). The whole “boutique philosophique” is thus ridiculed, with little attempt being made to discriminate among the ideas of the individual thinkers; Diderot and Helvétius are made to share the same philosophy.
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References
1 Charles Palissot, Les Philosophes, ii.v.
2 Voltaire and d'Alembert are spared; Voltaire, for reasons given by C. F. Zeek in “Palissot and Voltaire” in MLQ, x, 429–437; d'Alembert, it is suggested by Jean Fabre in his critical edition of Le Neveu de Rameau (Genève, 1950), p. 147, because he had withdrawn from the joint-editorship of the Encyclopédie in 1758.
3 See, e. g., Louis Ducros, Diderot, l'homme et l'écrivain (Paris, 1894), p. 311; Jean Thomas, L'Humanisme de Diderot, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1938), pp. 69, 108; Jean Luc, Diderot, l'artiste elle philosophe (Villeneuve Saint-Georges, 1938), p. 149.
4 Emile Bréhier, Histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1947), ii, 438.
5 Œuvres complètes (Paris, 1821–23), iii, 10–11. The very subtitle of Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines reveals this tendency: “Ouvrage où l'on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l'entendement humain.”
6 For this whole question, see Ernst Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Tubingen, 1932), esp. pp. 21, 32, 132.
7 Œuvres complètes (Londres, 1781), i, 7. All references are to this edition.
8 Diderot, Œuvres complètes, eds. Assézat et Tourneux (Paris, 1875–77), ii, 272. All references are to this edition.
9 See the unpub. diss. (Columbia, 1950), by M. W. Wartofsky “Denis Diderot and Ludwig Feuerbach,” p. 92.
10 Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, Œuvres, ii, 12.
11 Jean-François Marmontel, Mémoires, ed. Barrière (Paris, 1857), p. 229.
12 Lettres à Sophie Volland, ed. Babelon (Paris, 1930), m, 109.
13 We shall see presently (p. 720) what Diderot has to say of this terminology.
14 Œuvres, in, 90. Helvétius is willing to use characteristics of external organization to distinguish man from animal. Inspired by Bufion, he says that sensibility and memory have remained “facultés stériles” in animals chiefly because of the difference between man's hand and the animal's paw; sense of touch, manual skills, and discoveries presupposing hands are thus denied to animals (i, 2). It should be noticed that he speaks of factors that would be irrelevant in distinguishing between men. Nowhere is physical organization, inner or outer, allowed to assume this rôle.
16 Cf. “Tout étant égal d'ailleurs, celui qui a le palais obtus ne sera pas aussi bon cuisinier que celui qui l'a délicat. Le myope sera moins bon observateur des astres, moins bon peintre, moins bon statuaire, moins bon juge d'un tableau que celui qui a la vue excellente” (ii, 320).
16 Aspects of the brain-sense relation according to Diderot are to be found scattered throughout the pages of his later works, esp. in the Eléments de physiologie and Le Rêve de d'Alembert: description of the brain—ix, 309, 279, 318; unity and collective sensitivity of the brain and nervous system—ix, 313, n, 141, 153; nature of sense organs and nerves—ix, 311–318, passim, 349, ii, 144–145.
17 ii, 366. See his interesting remarks about insanity, ix, 360.
18 Such are the invention of the same arts and laws where needs and political conditions were similar, the universal admiration accorded certain poetic imagery, the near similarity in reactions to simple and magnificent scenes of natural beauty.
19 ii, 279; cf. xiv, 434, xi, 135–136.
20 xvi, 485–486; cf. Lettres à Sophie Volland, i, 255.
21 ii, 353. Two decades earlier Diderot seems to have had greater confidence in the capacities of the average man; in advocating the immediate popularization of Enlightenment philosophy, he wrote: “Si nous voulons que les philosophes marchent en avant, approchons le peuple du point où en sont les philosophes. Diront-ils qu'il est des ouvrages qu'on ne mettra jamais à la portée du commun des esprits? S'ils le disent, ils montreront seulement qu'ils ignorent ce que peuvent la bonne méthode et la longue habitude” (ii, 38–39). But such statements are still a long way from Helvétius' extreme conclusions.
22 ii, 341. Cf. interesting corollaries of this attitude in his remarks on literary style of certain contemporaries, ii, 339–340.
23 The various passions are considered in detail in Sec. iv of De l'homme.
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