Diderot's Dream by Wilda Anderson (review)

Book Reviews85 WILDA ANDERSON. Diderot's Dream. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 259 p. 1 he years of work Wilda Anderson has devoted to Diderot have resulted in an admirable and persuasive study that attempts to explain the profound coherence ofDiderot's thought. Diderot's Dream is divided into two parts: the first half reviews Diderot's materialist philosophy or knowledge about the natural world and how he expresses and applies this philosophy through what Anderson calls an "operational poetics." The second half shifts from the theoretical to the practical where Diderot's materialist philosophy meets up with social, esthetic, and ethical institutions and problems. Anderson's study provides her readers with an accessible yet nuanced introduction to several ofDiderot's most important works while also illustrating the privileged position Diderot holds in Enlightenment studies, uniquely situated between the Enlightenment positivism represented by D'Alembert on the one hand, and Rousseauist utopism on the other. As Anderson states, "Diderot grounded all of his writing, even his most literary, in a materialist theory ofphysical matter in motion" (11). In chapter one, Anderson provides an overview of Diderot's materialism as outlined in the difficult Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature, emphasizing the major distinctions between his system and those of Cartesian and Newtonian materialists. The radicalism of Diderot's materialism relies on his theory of matter conceived as an event rather than an object passively subjected to universal law. For Diderot the philosopher's work is to decipher the complexification of the natural world, to capture nature's presence as event, as a dynamic and constantly changing organism on a grand scale. In the Interprétation, Diderot's model of tâtonnement specifically addresses this linkage: "A form of vibratory touching, simultaneously mental and physical, it sets up a symbiotic resonance between body and mind of the natural philosopher and his subject of study, nature" (36). However, for Diderot the philosophical enterprise itself also participates in this tâtonnement: reflection being a touching of minds, expressing and reenacting the phenomena studied rather than describing them. It is here that Anderson speaks of Diderot's operational poetics; for the form and style ofDiderot's writing, in an analogous manner, attempts to imitate the dynamics ofthe natural order, the shock and oscillation of elastic bodies, and the resonance or tâtonnement between matter and mind. In chapters two and three, Anderson shows how Diderot positions his characters and readers in the "active-and-reactive" state in Le Rêve de D'Alembert and his article "Encyclopédie." Like the swarm ofbees in the Rêve, the conversation between Bordeu and Mlle, de l'Espinasse, the intermittent interruptions ofthe dreaming D'Alembert who reiterates earlier conversations with "Diderot," join together to produce one larger mind or as Anderson declares: "Each point in the discussion changes the structure ofthe knowledge that each character had previously had and brings these minds into congruence . . . sensibilities have been brought into synchrony, have been 'compounded' " (66). Diderot's writing becomes an empirical experiment where the "weaving together of material communication with verbal (mental) 86Rocky Mountain Review communication" (73) extends his model of the world as "event" and our understanding of that world participates in its ongoing dynamics through reading. In the second half of Diderot's Dream, Anderson traces the author's materialism and poetics in three "non-scientific" texts: the Supplément, the Salon de 1767, and the Neveu de Rameau. Reading Diderot's dynamic materialism through the Supplément, Anderson shows how Diderot presents Tahitian society as conceptually "flawed" since it refuses to accept the reality ofsocial and physical complexification, that is, that "a culture is not a particular structure but an entire group's ability to function as one complex physical and cultural organism to absorb and accommodate physicocultural shocks" (158). In the Salon de 1767, Diderot applies a materialist reading to describe the economic forces that gave rise to art and esthetic enterprises in general. Here, the nonmaterial or human is again integrated within the material, and Diderot is able to theorize the feeling for the esthetic in terms ofa harmony the beholder feels between the art object and the "harmonious...