Diderot and the Technology of Life

Diderot and the Technology of Life ARAM V A R TA N IA N gfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA A machine can be modified or reconstructed at will so as to fulfill more efficiently the purpose it is expected to serve. Ordinarily, this cannot be done with an organism, whose "life" depends on a basic structure that must not be tampered with. I say "ordinarily" because we know that it is possible, by means of genetic engineering, organ transplants, and even the replacement of organs by man-made "spareparts ," to treat organisms in ways that were once suited only to me­ chanical artifacts. Biomedical technology has tended in recent times to invalidate the usual divorce made between machines and orga­ nisms, and to promote between them instead a sort of common-law marriage. My intention at present is to show how this development, of which the moral implications are often disquieting, had an early— perhaps the earliest—anticipation in the writings of Diderot, partic­ ularly in his RQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA L e R e v e d e d ' A le m b e r t . The idea that animate beings might be reconstructable and modi­ fiable appears to have first occurred to Diderot, although as yet some­ what dimly, in the P e n s e e s s u r I ' in t e r p r e t a t io n d e la n a t u r e (1753), where it figured suppositionally as part of a sketch of organic evolution. The following portion of a longer passage is relevant here: "11 semble que la nature se soit plu a varier le meme mecanisme d'une infinite de manieres differentes. Elie n'abandonne un genre de productions qu'apres en avoir multiplie les individus sous toutes les faces pos­ sibles. . . . Ne croirait-on pas volontiers qu'il n'y a jamais eu qu'un premier animal, prototype de tous les animaux, dont la nature n'a fait qu'allonger, raccourcir, transformer, multiplier, obliterer certains organes?"1 By its curious turn of phrase, this statement points to a 11 12 / VARTANIANgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA veiled meaning, especially if at the same time one compares it with the main textual source from which Diderot borrowed its scientific content. He had come across the transformist hypothesis, worded straightforwardly and without mention of any active role played by "nature," in Maupertuis' inspired guess that the phenomenon of ge­ netic mutation might be the general cause behind the diversification of organic species: "Ne pourrait-on pas expliquer par la comment de deux seuls individus la multiplication des especes les plus dissemblables aurait pu s'ensuivre? Elies n'auraient du leur premiere origine qu'a quelques productions fortuites, dans lesquelles les parties elementaires n'auraient pas tenu l'ordre qu'elles tenaient dans les animaux pere et mere. Chaque degre d'erreur aurait fait une nouvelle espece; et a force d'ecarts repetes serait venue la diversity infinie des animaux que nous voyons aujourd'hui."2 Diderot's version of Mau­ pertuis' theory introduced into it his own characterization of the pro­ cess of continual mutation from which evolution had resulted. First, he "mechanized" the process ("la nature se soit plu a varier le meme mecanisme"), as if the changes wrought by nature in the prototypic organism were like the redesigning of a machine into all its structural variants. Secondly, he personified nature, as if, like some demiurgic artisan, it had set deliberately to work reshaping its own substance ("la nature n'a fait qu'allonger, raccourcir, transformer, multiplier, obliterer certains organes"). While the fact may not yet be apparent in the RQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA I n t e r p r e t a t io n d e la n a t u r e , this creative nature which, having usurped the prerogative of God, fabricates life in new forms to "please itself" is the metaphorical mask worn by its own "literary" creator, the atheist and materialist Diderot. That fact, however, became much more apparent, some fifteen years later, in the R e v e d e d ' A le m b e r t , where the central problem was to ex­ pound the purely natural origin of organic...