Diderot's Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature: A Materialist Aesthetics for Science

Denis Diderot's most notable contribution to Enlightenment philosophy was undoubtedly the Encyclopedia.¹ Devoting more than twenty years of his life to this work—beginning in 1748 when he signed the contract with its publishers for what was initially intended as a translation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) and ending with the publication of the seventeenth and final volume in 1772—Diderot's enormous project brought together seventy-four thousand articles written by more than 130 collaborators and soon became a leading reference work for Enlightenment era scientists and philosophers, competing with both the Royal Academy and the Jesuit's dictionaries.²

While working on the Encyclopedia, Diderot also published the lesser-known Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, which first appeared in 1753 and then again in a second edition in 1754 (with minor corrections).³ Thoughts was drafted sometime in 1752 when the king had issued a ban on further publication of the Encyclopedia after its first two volumes had appeared. Often read as a charge against rationalist philosophy and mathematics, which are accused of being a new form of "general metaphysics" for science, Thoughts instead embraces an experimental philosophy stemming from the practical sciences, which are celebrated as having a closer proximity with nature, life, and matter (for example, chemistry, physiology, and later electricity).⁴ In reflecting on its form of presentation in a series of aphorisms (a reflection on form that has gone largely unnoticed), Thoughts also proposed a new materialist aesthetics for experimental science and philosophy. While some recent critics have argued that the fragmentary and aphoristic form might be attributed to the fact that Thoughts was merely "a work of reflection in the margins of the Encyclopedia,"⁵ I read this text as instead offering a substantive critical reflection on the form of the Encyclopedia itself, which both illuminates and counters the dangers Diderot foresaw in the drive for a "systematic mind" laid out in Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, published in 1751.⁶ Thoughts, which has a reputation of being quite obscure, aims at presenting the principles of experimental philosophy and can be understood as Henri Lefebvre suggested, after Jean Luc, as a "discourse on method" of the eighteenth-century materialism.⁷ Moreover, I argue that this "marginal" text offers a "discourse on method" focused on the art of fragmentary writing. As such, Thoughts proposes a new form and theory for presenting a materialist philosophy—which is to say, a materialist aesthetics that significantly contributed to the "popularization" of the experimental method. Diderot's reflections on the aesthetics of materialist philosophy in Thoughts cannot be separated from the sociopolitical dimension of its creation insofar as it responds and gives shape to a radically democratic impulse to unleash a contagion of critical knowledge, philosophical production, and horizontal dissemination from below.

THE FORMAL DIMENSION OF THOUGHTS ON THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE

Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature is composed of fifty-eight numbered aphorisms presented as detached "thoughts" of uneven length and without any apparent overarching organization. Diderot's writing in the form of numbered "thoughts" is not new here. Initially used in Diderot's Philosophical Thoughts (1746), the same form resurfaced later in his Detached Thoughts or Political Fragments Escaped from a Philosophers Portfolio (1772) and his Detached Thoughts on Painting (1776–81). The implicit echoes of Blaise Pascal's Thoughts (1670), as well as Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1580), are obvious in Diderot's borrowing of this writing form but, as many critics have noted, the preponderant influence for Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature is to be found in Francis Bacon's The New Organon or Directions for the Interpretation of Nature (1620).⁸ We know Diderot was reading Bacon in the early 1750s, and in addition to the fragmentary strategy, Diderot's title clearly borrows from the subtitle of Bacon's Novum Organum as projected in his ambitious " Great Renewal."⁹ While the aphorism is usually defined as a saying expressed in a laconic form, for Bacon the aphorism was not necessarily a...