Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely

by Andrew S. Curran Narrated by Paul Boehmer

Overview

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopédie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity-for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot's most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire.



In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/10/2018
Curran (Sublime Disorders: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe) returns to the subject of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) in this marvelous account of the philosophe’s life and work. But this is much more than a biography, as Curran renders in vivid detail the social and intellectual life of 18th-century France. Curran discusses Diderot’s education by the Jesuits and initial intention of becoming a priest, the publication of his first influential text, Pensées philosophiques, his resulting imprisonment (which Curran sees as a formative experience), and his decades-long labor on his masterpiece, the Encyclopédie. This last is typical of Curran’s thorough approach: readers learn about the financial and political aspects of publishing such an expansive work (such as its printer’s prized status as one of six designated “printers of the king”); its proto-hypertext cross-referencing tool, the “System of Human Knowledge,” often deployed satirically, such as by connecting “cannibalism” and “communion”; and its political impact, which included a diplomatic incident between France and Switzerland. Equally fascinating are Curran’s summaries of Diderot’s remarkable contributions as art critic, playwright, and sexologist, the last represented by his outlandish novel Les bijoux indiscrets, which features talking vaginas. Readers will be left with a new appreciation for Diderot, of his wide-ranging thought, and of his life as an expression of intense intellectual freedom. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

Engrossing…a narrative sustained with appealing clarity and energy…readers of this biography are likely to be impressed by the scope of Diderot’s thought and by his courage.” —Washington Post

“Making sense of these mercurial works is not easy, and situating them in such a life as Diderot’s is even more challenging, so it is remarkable that…Curran succeeds admirably in both regards…the most accessible version of the life and work of this protean figure…excellent.” —New York Review of Books

“Curran does a terrific job of sorting through the crazily complicated history of the Encyclopédie’s publication…[a] revivifying new book.” —The New Yorker

“[The Encyclopédie’s] publication history is elegantly untangled by Mr. Curran, whose clear style and interest in the psychology of it all transforms it into a lively narrative…you are bound to be exhilarated by [Diderot’s] creativity.” —Wall Street Journal

“A clear and compelling account of this magnificent but mercurial thinker…With confidence and care, Curran traces Diderot’s breathtaking intellectual itinerary…cogent and insightful.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] marvelous account of the philosophe’s life and work. But this is much more than a biography, as Curran renders in vivid detail the social and intellectual life of eighteenth-century France…Readers will be left with a new appreciation for Diderot.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A lively biography…An intellectually dense and well-researched yet brisk journey into one of history’s most persuasive dissenters.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Absorbing…In this extremely well-written biography, Curran vividly portrays Diderot as a brilliant man filled with contradictions and passions who acted as a central figure in the advancement of intellectual freedom.” —BookPage (starred review)

“In this new biography, Curran looks to remind us just what a radical Diderot was in his time.” —New York Times Book Review

“[Curran’s] fluent and spirited book surpasses its predecessor in finding a center of gravity in the Enlightenment’s most kaleidoscopic thinker.” —New Republic

“A triumphant work…intelligent and highly readable.” —NB

“Curran’s critical biography…grapples dexterously with the ramifications of Diderot’s more original philosophy.” —New Criterion 

“Deeply researched and absorbing.” —The American Scholar

“A fascinating biography of Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot—one of history’s most famous contrarians.” —Business Insider

“This enjoyable biography of French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) engages with the life of this man who was imprisoned for his atheism—and with his ideas, which brashly challenged beliefs about religion, race, royalty, sex and morality.” —Newsday

“As befits the biography of an author who labored to make his treatment of ponderous philosophical questions as amusing as possible, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely entertains…More than a biography, it constitutes a stepping stone into the French Enlightenment.” —History Today
 
“[A] lucid biography…Curran is particularly attuned to the theme of illusion in Diderot’s life and work, and how some of Diderot’s most powerful conceits…compelled hidden and silent things to reveal themselves and speak.” —Bookforum

“[A] marvelous and eye-opening book.” —Catholic Herald 

“An exuberant exploration of this endlessly fascinating writer—we need our Diderots now more than ever.” —Sarah Bakewell, New York Times bestselling author of At the Existentialist Café

“Denis Diderot was many things—freethinking philosophe, tireless encyclopedist, trenchant art critic, iconoclastic dramatist, daring sexologist, spirited dialogist, and intimate adviser to Catherine the Great—and Andrew Curran brings them all vividly to life in this enlightening and engaging book.” —Michael Massing, author of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
 
“Andrew Curran has given us an invigorating and wide-ranging new biography of the brilliant Encyclopédiste, bringing to life his complicated relationships and the ideas he explored throughout his protean intellectual career.” —Leo Damrosch, author of Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake

“Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely not only offers an absorbing sketch of life in eighteenth-century France; it provides dazzling insight into critical issues including the existence of God and freedom of speech. Among the many things that this book accomplishes, it gives readers a taste of the emancipatory power of philosophy.” —Thierry Hoquet, author of Revisiting the Origin of Species: The Other Darwins
 
“In this lively and elegantly crafted portrait of one of the eighteenth century’s greatest minds, Curran gives us a Diderot at once true to his times and intensely relevant to our own. It is a book that will both enlighten and entertain specialists and general readers alike.” —Darrin M. McMahon, author of Happiness: A History
 
“Curran narrates with verve the story of Diderot’s life, but also his late masterpieces, unknown in their own time and written for posterity. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely gives us, as hoped, a Diderot for today.” —Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Common Sense: A Political History
 
“One of the most creative and intriguing thinkers of eighteenth-century France comes to life in Andrew Curran’s new biography of Denis Diderot. In this bibliographical tour de force, Curran shows us a protean writer who stands for the French Enlightenment, an age whose greatest writers took up the challenge—and embraced the pleasure—of ‘thinking freely.’ Rigorously researched and engagingly written, Curran’s book deftly paints the vivid picture of a multi-faceted and daring thinker who constantly raised essential questions about what it means to be human.” —Daniel Brewer, author of The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought

“A thrilling narrative that grants the reader an intimate look at Diderot’s life and intellectual development. Its impish tone and conversational quality remind us of those ‘fireplace conversations’ that Diderot saw as one of life’s greatest pleasures.” —Elena Russo, author of Styles of Enlightenment
 
“Why read about Diderot’s life today? Because his philosophy was about life. Because this philosopher’s thinking is very much alive, today more than ever. And because this biography is brimming with life—ideas of life and the life of ideas.” —Éric Fassin, author of Populism Left and Right

“Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely weaves together biography and intellectual history to tell a compelling tale. Following the philosophe from his childhood as a cutler’s son to his service, late in life, as a cultural attaché to Catherine the Great, Curran shines new light on Diderot’s major writings by situating them in their personal, cultural, and political contexts. Along the way, Curran recaptures the radicalism of the monumental Encyclopédie and other texts that are now cornerstones of the Enlightenment canon but were condemned as dangerous—even blasphemous—by church and state alike in the 1700s.” —Laura Auricchio, author of The Marquis: Lafayette Reconsidered
 
“This superbly written and impeccably researched book recreates with vivid details the life and works of the most irrepressible mind of the Enlightenment. Analyzing Diderot’s relentless pursuit of freedom in an era of censorship and fanaticism, Curran uncovers the multiple facets of his genius and his relevance for our times. Thanks to this book Diderot’s voice is sure to be silenced and overlooked no more.” —Ourida Mostefai, author of Rousseau and L’Infame: Religion, Toleration, and Fanaticism in the Age of Enlightenment

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2018-10-02

A lively biography of Denis Diderot (1713-1784), provocateur, polymath, and central figure in the French Enlightenment.

Ironically, the philosopher whose name is strongly associated with freethinking kept his freest thoughts under wraps: Thanks to an early lesson in the consequences of candor, he intentionally left mountains of unpublished writings to be discovered after his death. Early writings skewering organized religion and questioning God's existence earned him public book-burnings and a three-month prison stint. In the ensuing years, he would save his most provocative thoughts about sex and politics for the drawer; his posthumous novel The Nun questioned the immorality of incest and adultery. But he put some of his most challenging ideas in plain sight, if subtly, through his life-consuming, multivolume Encyclopédie, which tweaked the sensibilities of religious leaders while also striving to "pull back the world's curtain" through anatomical and mechanical illustrations that were rarely available to the public. Curran (Humanities/Wesleyan Univ.; The Anatomy of Blackness, 2011, etc.) gamely sifts through the mountain of Diderot's output—he was a prolific art critic, lead writer of the Encyclopédie, and an inveterate correspondent—without for a moment making it feel burdensome. Rather, he ably balances the details of Diderot's life with thoughtful considerations of the source and depth of his philosophical byways, taking his more peculiar ideas seriously but not literally. Curran's mission is served by his subject's wealth of experiences: In addition to his run-ins with state and religious leaders, he found a patron and intellectual sparring partner in Catherine the Great and corresponded with Benjamin Franklin before the American Revolution his writings helped inspire. As Curran writes, Diderot argued that kings and religious leaders "were complicit in running a massive illusion factory"; a more skeptical world may be Diderot's greatest legacy.

An intellectually dense and well-researched yet brisk journey into one of history's most persuasive dissenters.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170980390
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/24/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

unburying diderot
 
Sometime during the snowy winter of 1793, under cover of night, a small group of thieves pried open a wooden door leading  into  the  Church of Saint-Roch. Forced entry into the Paris sanctuary was nearly a weekly occurrence during this time of revolution. In the early 1790s, anticlerical vandals had pulled enormous religious paintings  off  the  walls  and  slashed  the canvases. Other trespassers had made off with more portable works of art, including an exquisite statue sculpted by Étienne-Maurice Falconet. On this particular night, however, the intruders came to steal whatever copper, silver, or lead they could find in the crypt located underneath the Chapel of the Virgin. Setting to work in front of the chapel’s altar, the grave robbers used long iron bars to lever aside the mattress-sized marble slab in the center of the floor. Though they surely had no idea who was buried in the vault, the most loutish of the group, assuming he could read, would still have recognized the name of the writer Denis Diderot inscribed on one of the caskets. Dead for nine years, the notorious atheist had been the driving force behind the most controversial  book  project  of  the  eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie.

This massive dictionary had not only dragged sacrilege and free-thinking out into the open, but triggered a decades-long scandal that involved the Sorbonne, the Paris Parlement, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the king, and the pope.
None of this old history mattered to the burglars. After removing Diderot’s lead coffin from the vault, the men simply shook his decomposing body onto the church’s marble floor. The following day, Denis Diderot’s remains (along with the other desecrated cadavers from the crypt) were presumably gathered up and transferred without ceremony to a mass grave about a mile to the east. Nobody noticed; nobody reported it in the press. Assuming the church’s few remaining parish priests had realized that Diderot had been buried in the church, they were undoubtedly relieved to be rid of the scandalous unbeliever.
Some twenty years before his remains were carted out of Saint-Roch, Diderot had prophetically remarked that whether “you rot beneath marble or under the ground, you still rot.” Yet being discarded and forgotten among a mound of recently guillotined aristocratic corpses would not have been his preference. Atheist or not, Diderot had long expressed a keen interest in being remembered and, if all things worked out, celebrated by future generations. “Posterity is to the philosophe,” he once stated, as “heaven is to the man of religion.”
Diderot’s interest in speaking to future generations from beyond the grave had come about out of necessity. In 1749, shortly after the then thirty-four-year-old writer had published a work of intemperate atheism entitled the Lettre sur les aveugles (Letter on the Blind), two gendarmes showed up at his house, arrested him, and dragged him off to Vincennes prison. Three months later, shortly before he was released, the lieutenant-général de police made a special trip to the prison to warn the writer that any further immoral or irreligious publications would bring about a jail sentence measured in decades, not months.
Diderot took this threat seriously. For the next thirty-three years, he avoided publishing the kind  of  inflammatory books that he had authored as a young man. Much of the energy that he might have devoted to such endeavors was redirected toward the all-consuming Encyclopédie. When he finally completed the last volume of illustrations, in 1772, the now-elderly writer was well aware that he was a celebrity throughout Europe and even in parts of North America, but he was not really considered a literary great. His fate, as he admitted quite openly, was perhaps to “survive” long after his reputation as an Encyclopedist had faded, growing ever older and vanishing without leaving a significant work behind. This, in fact, seemed to be the case when he died in 1784. Although several obituaries credited him for being the leader of the generation of thinkers that had utterly changed the country, they also hinted that he had not lived up to his indisputable genius. Even his friends reluctantly agreed. Jacques-Henri Meister, who revered the man, wistfully acknowledged that Diderot never produced a book that would have placed him among the first tier of “our philosophes or our poets.”
Charitable friends blamed the writer’s supposedly limited literary production on the burden of the Encyclopédie. Others privately ascribed this failing to his famously whirligig brain. As was often the case, the sharp-tongued Voltaire, who both admired and distrusted Diderot, came up with the cleverest remark on the subject; he apparently joked that the Encyclopedist’s mind “was an oven that burns everything that it cooks.”
What Voltaire and virtually everybody else did not know was that Diderot had actually written an astonishing range of improbably modern books and essays for the drawer, as the French like to say. Holed up in his sixth-floor garret office on the rue Taranne for the last third of his life, Diderot produced this cache of writing with the hope that it might one day explode like a bomb. This moment was prepared for carefully. When the author reached his sixties — borrowed time during the eighteenth century — he hired copyists to produce three separate collections of manuscripts. The first and most complete set was entrusted to his daughter, Angélique, whom we know as Madame de Vandeul; a second, less complete group of writings was transferred to his designated literary heir and devotee, Jacques-André Naigeon. And six months after his death, thirty-two bound volumes of manuscripts along with Diderot’s entire library of three thousand books traveled by ship to Catherine the Great in Saint Petersburg.
Diderot’s unedited books, essays, and criticism far surpassed what he had published during his lifetime. Among these writings were two very dissimilar, but equally brilliant novels. The first of these, La religieuse (The Nun), is a gripping pseudo-memoir of a nun who suffers unspeakably cruel abuse after she announces that she wants to leave her convent. The second, Jacques le fataliste, is an open-ended antinovel where Diderot used fiction to take up the problem of free will. But there were also thick notebooks of revolutionary art criticism, a godless science-fiction-like chronicle of the human race, a secret  political  treatise  written for Catherine the Great, a humorous satire on the absurdity of Christian sexual mores set in Tahiti, as well as some of the most moving love letters in the history of French literature. To become familiar with the range of Diderot’s work is to be stupefied: among other things, the philosophe dreamed of natural selection before Darwin, the Oedipus complex before Freud, and genetic manipulation two hundred years before Dolly the Sheep was engineered.
These hidden works did not appear in the months after Diderot died; they trickled out over the course of decades. Several of his lost books were published during the waning years of the French Revolution; others appeared during  the course of the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30), while still more of his writing emerged during the Second Empire (1852–70). Perhaps the most significant addition to Diderot’s corpus came in 1890 when a librarian discovered a complete manuscript version of Diderot’s masterpiece, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew), in a bouquiniste’s stand on the banks of the Seine. In this riotous philosophical dialogue, the writer courageously gave life to an unforgettable anti-hero who extolled the virtues of evil and social parasitism while preaching the right to unbridled pleasure.
To say that the arrival of these lost books had an effect on subsequent generations would be putting it mildly. Diderot’s effusive art criticism inspired Stendhal, Balzac, and Baudelaire. Émile Zola credited Diderot’s “vivisections” of society as the foundation of the naturalism that characterized his and Balzac’s novels. Social theorists, too, were spellbound by Diderot’s prescient thought. Karl Marx, who borrowed deeply from Diderot’s musings on class struggle, listed the writer as his favorite author. And Sigmund Freud credited the ancien régime thinker for recognizing the unconscious psychosexual desires of childhood in Rameau’s Nephew long before he or his fellow psychoanalysts had. If many critics continued to disdain the writer as too atheistic, too paradoxical, and too unrestrained, Diderot was nonetheless becoming the preferred writer of the nineteenth-century avant-garde.
 
The full extent of Diderot’s influence was not truly known, however, until a young German-American academic, Herbert Dieckmann, located the final lost cache of Diderot’s writings. Having heard rumors that Diderot’s conservative descendants continued to possess some of the lost manuscripts  originally given to the writer’s daughter, the Harvard professor finally obtained permission to visit the family château in Normandy in 1948. After overcoming the postwar suspicions of the caretaker, who was initially put off by his German-accented French, Dieckmann was ultimately directed to some armoires on the château’s second floor. Entering a room that contained several large free-standing closets, he sidled over to the first one and peeled back the door panel. Hoping, perhaps, to find a lost work or two, he was confronted with an enormous stockpile of Diderot’s bound manuscripts. So stunned was Dieckmann that he simply dropped to the floor. Diderot’s final cache, the lost collection of manuscripts he had given to his daughter, had at last been found.
What are now known as the Vandeul archives — labeled as such since they came from Diderot’s daughter — have become the most important source for what we know about Diderot and his works. Most astonishing, perhaps, was the discovery of several manuscripts annotated in his hand that revealed that he had been the primary ghostwriter for abbé Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes (Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies), the best-selling critical examination of European colonization. It had been Diderot, as it turned out, who had penned   the most influential and best-known anticolonial sections of this multivolume book, including an imagined exchange between an enslaved African who not only claimed the right to be free, but who predicted a day when Caribbean slaves would justifiably put their masters to the sword. Composed in 1779, a decade before the events in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) would prove him right, this is perhaps the most telling example of the writer’s radical politics, not to mention his ability to see into the future. Some three hundred years after he was born, Diderot has now become the most relevant of Enlightenment philosophers. That he refrained from publishing (or taking credit for) his most forward-looking ideas during his lifetime was not simply a matter of avoiding persecution; he intentionally chose to forgo a conversation with his contemporaries in order to have a more fruitful dialogue with later generations — us, in short. His heartfelt hope was that we, the sympathetic and  enlightened interlocutors of the future, might finally be capable of sitting in judgment of his hidden writings, writings that not only question the moral, aesthetic, political, and philosophical conventions of the ancien régime, but our own as well.

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