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Overview
The tensions in Diderot's thought, Professor Crocker shows, reflect his understanding of reality itself—paradoxically, an anarchic order, a dynamic universe governed by laws but always changing in a chaotic way.
The book examines Diderot's approach to aesthetics as a human ordering response to the world, and his approach to morals and politics as practical ways of dealing with the problems of order and disorder in the context of life in society. In light of the concepts of order and disorder, the inextricable associations of all of these realms of thought in Diderot's work become clear, and a unity is perceived.
Since the problem of order and disorder was fundamental to an age faced with the dissolution of the Christian view of cosmic order, this novel approach to Diderot's work suggests new ways of understanding the Enlightenment as a whole.
Originally published in 1974.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691618524 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1277 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Diderot's Chaotic Order
Approach to Synthesis
By Lester G. Crocker
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1974 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07199-2
CHAPTER 1
Cosmic Order
THE UNIVERSE, FOR DIDEROT, IS MATTER and process. Any static or synchronic conceptualization, even including motion and its laws, is inadequate, although these mechanical phenomena are basic elements on which change and "le devenir" ("becoming") depend. The shift to a diachronic universe has momentous consequences. It is the offspring of Descartes and Leibniz, rather than of the Christian or the Newtonian world-views, and was reinforced by the nascent but powerful notion of geological and biological evolution. It calls renewed attention to the problem of order. While none of the previous theological and moral components is lost, the problem now acquires new metaphysical dimensions, precisely in regard to the nature of process, that is, of the cosmic processes that were being discovered. Obviously, both the physical and the biological are involved, and one of Diderot's merits is to have perceived their ultimate inseparability.
The boundaries of the problem, in Diderot's mind, are the contradictory coexistence of law and the turbulent workings of law. This highly paradoxical and unsolvable antinomy constitutes not only the base of the problem but the circle in which his thought wanders, in apparently uncertain and contradictory fashion. It will become clear, I hope, that the apparent contradictions are only restatements of the problem itself and are contained in its very nature.
Diderot did not see all its aspects at once. Its dimensions grew as he advanced from one problem to another or reached different stages of his thought. He glimpsed the universality of its import from the very beginning, however.
The Pensées philosophiques (1746) is concerned with disputes about religious and cosmic questions. Yet it begins with a conventional defense of the passions, typical of the morale laïque that was being held up against Christianity, but at the same time quite unconventional when viewed against the problem of order. In a romantic, almost rebellious tone, Diderot exalts the passions as the free exercise of energy without which greatness is impossible. Intrinsically disorderly because unrestrained, they are nonetheless useful and necessary. Establishing his point in four of the five Pensées devoted to the subject, he undoes it in the remaining one (Pensée IV), in which he argues that the passions will be harmless only as long as they are in "harmony" among themselves; in that case, "do not fear any disorders from them." The discipline and self-domination required for such a harmony contradicts the central point of the argument (Pensée III): "Constraint annihilates the greatness and energy of nature" (mutatis mutandis, "of the soul").
The analogy of the passions of the soul (to use Descartes' phrase) and the energy of nature is prolonged in the description of a beautiful and useful tree. In Diderot's synthetic, analogy-seeking mode of thought, the basic question, at this point, is the same for man and for nature. Both are characterized by energy. Its effects, when restrained only by an inner harmony, are aesthetically satisfying and physically beneficial. The criteria are entirely anthropocentric and subjective.
We can see that Diderot is only nibbling at the edges of a vast problem; but the points he makes will acquire amplitude and significance.
He reaches deeper ground in the dialogue between the atheist and the deist that begins in Pensée XV. The argument mingles two problems which are not necessarily the same: the origin of the known universe and the character of its processes. The motion of particles may have engendered this world, the atheist contends, even though he cannot explain how. Admitting it is a world of orderly process, he is compelled to hold up the moral and human sphere ("the disorders that rule the moral sphere"), and to fall back on Bayle's famous paradox of God's "impuissance ou mauvaise volonté." At this stage of his life, Diderot was still a deist, but he was fighting a losing battle. In making the world into a self-regulating machine, the disciples of both Descartes and Newton were only one step away from atheism, even though the latter required God for occasional repairs and adjustments.
The deist's defense now proceeds to the firmer terrain of biology. First, the origin of life is inexplicable without a special entity, germ cells. If the motions of particles can perhaps explain the physical order, they cannot explain life, only what develops from what is already living. Life, then, represents an ordering designed by God (Pensée XIX). It is not producible by processes characterized by chance. Living organisms are the passive and static products of God's design. In the deist's mind, then, temporal processes are not a real factor in the cosmos. The world is "a machine which has its wheels, its cords, pulleys, springs and weights" (Pensée XVIII). Second, the clear evidences of adaptation to function, as in the wing of a butterfly, are a crushing witness to the workings of a divine intelligence (Pensée XX).
In his rebuttal (Pensée XXI), the atheist removes the original ordering of the world ("this order that astounds you") from the realm of intelligence to the simple mechanical motions of particles arranging themselves strictly according to chance, or the calculus of probability. There is no effort to explain why particles combine or form themselves into an order. The idea of process, however, is introduced by the atheist when he speaks of "those admirable orderings in the infinite multitude of orderings nature has successively taken on." This is the first evidence of what will be a dominant theme in Diderot's cosmic conception: a dynamic universe in which catastrophism is the dramatic motor. The implication is one of a succession of orders. The unasked and unanswered question is whether each order, each universe, is part of an ultimate meta-order or a meta-disorder. To the deist, on the other hand, the world appears as a harmony — at least the physical world.
A slight progression can be noted in Diderot's thinking when, the following year, he writes La Promenade du sceptique. If he is no longer enchanted by the idea of a finalistic, beneficent deity, he still is inclined to attribute the undeniable order in biological teleology to a divine intelligence. In the sentence, "the sky darkened; a thick cloud hid nature's spectacle from us," Jacques Roger astutely sees "a curious portent of the Lettre sur les aveugles." Roger concludes that the importance of this work lies in its turning away from the whole question of the proofs of God's existence, and in its reducing "the entire metaphysical debate to the single problem of order in nature."
The complexities and confusions of the problem burst into full view in Diderot's first major work, the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). Diderot's intention is to "banish mysteries," substituting the laws of nature for them. Law implies order, at least at the operational level. Yet the very method he uses involves an explicit admission of disorder — not necessarily of a meta-disorder, but at the operational level itself. (This conflict formed the nub of the question of evil, which tormented eighteenth-century minds; but Diderot is not concerned with it for its own sake.) The problem is now approached through pathology and teratology. Only by taking the viewpoint of the disordered — here that of Saunderson, the man who was born blind (actually, he was blinded from smallpox at twelve months) — can we glimpse the true character of what we conventionally call the order of the world. Here the subjective element in our apprehension of existents as an order, with all its implications of sensory experience, intellectual need, and aesthetic satisfaction, is given full sway for the first time. Saunderson's perceptions and reactions are very different from those of the sighted.
We need recall only the pertinent ideas in Saunderson's fictitious death-bed disquisition. The dying mathematician does not deny the marvelous order of the human body, despite his infirmity, but only the unwarranted extrapolation to an intelligent and finalistic universal order. Instead, he takes an unexpected and dramatic tack. As a Newtonian, he must concede that the universe is an order. As the voice of Diderot, for whom time, becoming, and the life-sciences were opening new vistas into the problem, he goes beyond Newtonian positivism and boldly enters the realm of cosmic speculation.
The poetic vision harks back to Lucretius: a primal chaos that (for unexplained reasons) became organized into living forms, specifically into animals. If we may assume that this process was governed by laws inherent to matter (though it is not so stated), then those laws depend on a large element of what can only be called chance, and not on intelligent design. Most combinations formed in the initial upheaval were, apparently, unviable "monsters." Only a few were able to survive. We have, then, a dynamic nature, whose built-in "finalities" are its own operational laws. Time is a relatively unimportant factor in this process, as Diderot conceived of it in 1749. He emits a kind of "big-bang" hypothesis, an essentially single event of formation and subsequently a general "cleansing" ("depuration") of the newly established order. After this primal departure, process of course continues, but only within the general order. Even on this level, order frequently breaks down and monsters — such as Saunderson himself — are not uncommon.
Time is important, however, if we take an even longer view. Why should we not extend the notion of a hit-and-miss process from the products of the existing universal order to that order itself? Why assume that the creation of a universe is a unique event? The same governing factor of chance should lead us to conclude that infinite space, containing an infinite quantity of matter that is everywhere subject to inherent laws of "motion" — we now have an explanation, purely mechanistic, of universal process — is constantly forming universes, many of which are as unviable as the particular products of our own viable universe.
What is this world, monsieur Holmes? A compound subject to revolutions, all of which point to a continuous tendency to destruction; a rapid succession of beings which follow one another, push each other aside and disappear; a fleeting symmetry; a momentary order.
This statement provides the key to the process itself. All orders are not only imperfect, they are temporary. "Motion continues and will continue to combine accumulations of matter, until they have achieved some structure (arrangement) in which they can subsist." On the other hand, we also have the "revolutions" and the continual tendency to destruction. Diderot's concept of universal process consists, then, of a basic dualism, an endless struggle between two opposing dynamic forces. Energy and change are the very essence of matter, which is all that exists. But they operate in two opposite ways. There is, to use anthropomorphic terms, a constant search for structure, order, stability — and, simultaneously, a constant breakdown and increase in disorder, involving the same energy. In modern terms, all existence is a "struggle" against increasing entropy, an "effort" or tendency to persist in organized forms. This is, and will remain, Diderot's fundamental view of being. This is the eternal ontological law. It obtains on both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic levels, in the world we know and in all the other worlds about which we can only speculate. Other natural laws may change, as one order disappears and another comes into being. In this sense, what we call science is temporary and illusory. This law alone is as eternal as matter itself: the disorderly efforts to construct and to maintain an order, and the inevitable destruction of this precarious stability. It is not in itself a dialectic, at least on the general or cosmic level, since there is no solution or transformation of the endless antagonism, or of its outcome, the perpetual making and unmaking of convolutions.
These causative factors of process bring about an order which contains much disorder. The reason for this consequence is precisely the absence of design; put in another way, it is the randomness, which we call "chance," that coexists with what seems to us to be law, or causal determinism. Such randomness is not contradictory to determinism or to cause-effect on a statistical basis, and the theory of probability is the one aspect of mathematics in which Diderot continued to have faith. That which is not strictly predictable, and answers to no conceived purpose or plan, even though it is caused (as every event is in some way), may be called chance. Disorder is, then, associated both with the process itself and with its products, whether these be judged in terms of success or, on a quite different basis, in terms of human evaluation and appreciation.
The foregoing conception of universal process implies universal energy, conceived in mechanical terms as motion, and constituting a ceaseless dynamism. Diderot was to give a theoretical basis to his theory much later, in 1770, in the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement. Two postulates are involved. One is the denial of an earlier, Cartesian or Spinozist mechanistic philosophy, according to which matter is homogeneous substance, qualities or attributes not being essential to its definition. On the contrary, Diderot maintains, matter is particulate and heterogeneous, though none the less governed by mechanical laws. Each "molecule" has a different motion, or energy. This fact accounts for the heterogeneity of matter. Continuity, or the ultimate unity of nature, both synchronic and diachronic, is accounted for by development governed by law. The second postulate is (to state it in more modern terms) that motion is only a visible or kinetic form of energy (Diderot uses the words "action" and "force"). Energy is present in all matter; if it does not, as in the modern view, constitute the essence of matter (more precisely, the two are equivalent), it is at least essential to it.
By itself, by the nature of its essential qualities, a body whether it is considered as molecules or as a mass, is full of action and force. ... The molecule, endowed with the specific quality (characteristic) of its nature, is an active force by itself. ... Absolute rest is an abstract notion that does not exist in nature. ... The inner force of the molecule is inexhaustible. It is immutable, eternal. ... An atom moves the world.
These two principles make the cosmic process possible:
But I fix my eyes on the general accumulation of bodies. I see everything in action and reaction; everything becoming decomposed in one form; everything restructuring itself in another form: sublimations, dissolutions, combinations of all kinds, phenomena incompatible with the homogeneity of matter. Whence I conclude that it is heterogeneous; that an infinity of different elements exist in nature; that each of these elements, by virtue of its distinctness, has its own force, innate, immutable, eternal, indestructible; and that these forces contained in bodies exert action outside of themselves. From all this results the motions or rather the general ferment in the universe.
The last sentence recalls a formulation in the Lettre sur les aveugles, "In the beginning, when matter in ferment brought forth the universe." We must avoid the error of always taking the word "fermentation" in its chemical sense, which it sometimes has; it is often a metaphoric expression of the turbulence of matter in motion, and is more accurately rendered as "ferment." It is not opposed to mechanism, but rather to creationism.
Diderot further clarified his thought in the article "Chaos," which appeared in November 1753 in the third volume of the Encyclopédie, but was undoubtedly composed many months earlier. The article is written in a tone of transparent antiphrasis, seemingly from a Christian viewpoint, but Diderot's own opinions can be rather easily disengaged from it. The ancient philosophers, he declares, explained the formation of the universe from an original chaos of "particles of all kinds," by the motions that were essential to them. The Stoics conceived of cosmic history as a succession of such emergences from chaos, culminating in that combination which created the stability of our own universe. Diderot refers to Dr. Thomas Burnet, purposely distorting the import of his theory, to support the idea that the earth was originally formless. The water that, according to Moses, then covered the earth, was not really water, but a kind of slime, whose "fermentation" own force, innate, immutable, eternal, indestructible; and that these forces contained in bodies exert action outside of themselves. From all this results the motions or rather the general ferment in the universe. Diderot refers to Dr. Thomas Burnet, purposely distorting the import of his theory, to support the idea that the earth was originally formless. The water that, according to Moses, then covered the earth, was not really water, but a kind of slime, whose "fermentation" through time produced the earth in its present form. The same idea is enlarged, in startlingly modern terms: "movement (motion) gradually brought forth, by internal fermentation, collapses, attractions, a sun, an earth...." Ironically, Diderot pretends to prefer the physics of Moses, which stipulates constant, universal laws as an explanation of the conservation of the created universe, but not of its formation by a process of blind mechanical motion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Diderot's Chaotic Order by Lester G. Crocker. Copyright © 1974 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- I. Cosmic Order, pg. 1
- II. Aesthetics, pg. 52
- III. Morals, pg. 75
- IV. Politics, pg. 116
- Conclusion, pg. 150
- Bibliography, pg. 170
- Index, pg. 175