One hates to restate the obvious, but some matters require to be repeated until their dire significance really sinks in. Intellectual freedom and diversity are in danger of being expunged. Formerly respectable universities have become the province of a mentally barren professoriate indoctrinating new generations of virtuecrats, who have no room in their minds for any thoughts that might defy the latest orthodoxy. The outlook is grim, rich possibilities are being foreclosed, and the past masters who formed our civilization have become objects of loathing, not to be spoken of without scorn.
So one is grateful for small mercies, and this praiseful new intellectual biography of the French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713–1784) offers hope that serious engagement with the past is still possible in the academy. Andrew S. Curran, a professor in the humanities at Wesleyan University, honors a thinker who sought to free his fellow men from ecclesiastical and political oppression by force of mind alone, who succeeded in that project more completely than he would ever know, yet who was so thoroughly a philosopher that he subjected even his cherished utopian ideas to a probing examination and found them wanting.
One of the most notorious atheists of his time originally wanted to become a priest. Diderot attended a Jesuit school in his home town of Langres, then another in Paris, and studied for three years at the Sorbonne, the theological college in the University of Paris. He never did explain just why he rejected the religious life at 22, but Curran speculates that “this increasingly skeptical thinker would have become exasperated among a sea of aspiring ecclesiastics, all engaged in scholasticism's impenetrable debates.”
The only authority Diderot would come to accept was his own mind, which he stocked with a superabundance of knowledge and refined to a pitiless lucidity. He turned to the elucidation and propagation of a faith that all could understand and embrace: the Enlightenment cult of reason, which he believed would herald an epoch of unprecedented prosperity, equality, social harmony, and individual freedom — nothing less than universal happiness. The Encyclopédie, under his editorial direction, would be the summa of the new dispensation. It would carry on the work of discovering and publicizing the truth about the world and man's place in it that had been begun by Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. From 1749 to 1772, Diderot oversaw some 150 writers and 14 engravers and painters who contributed to the 17 volumes of text and eleven of plates, and he turned out 7,000 entries of his own, in performing the philosophe's stated duty to “trample underfoot prejudice, tradition, antiquity, shared covenants, authority — in a word, everything that controls the mind of the common herd.” The established authorities of church and crown resisted. In 1752 and again in 1759, the Encyclopédie was suppressed by order of the king; the pope for his part threatened its readers with excommunication. The liberating work continued, however, with the help of sympathetic government officials. It would be the book that defined the Age of Reason.
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