The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot and the ‘Éléments de physiologie’. By Caroline Warman

Abstract

In this groundbreaking study, Caroline Warman offers a new assessment of Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie and its legacy. Observing in the opening pages that editors have neglected whole sections of the Éléments, Warman identifies a ‘general view’ of the text as ‘a fragmentary series of reading notes and scattered thoughts scribbled by the ageing philosopher’ (p. 17). One explanation for this is that critics have accepted Jacques-André Naigeon’s description of the text as ‘quelques matériaux épars’, in his 1823 Mémoires devoted to Diderot (cited p. 20); another is that, since the Assézat–Tourneux edition of the Éléments was published in 1875 (some three-quarters of a century before the Fonds Vandeul came to light), the editors had to rely on an early draft. However, Warman also emphasizes that the prefaces which Diderot himself wrote for successive versions of the text already presented it as fragmentary. Particularly telling is the Vandeul avertissement, in which Diderot describes the mature version of the Éléments — not remotely accurately — as though it were indeed a hodgepodge of scribblings, ripe for posthumous ordering and completion. This, together with the fact that the 1770s saw two new editions of Pascal’s Pensées, may suggest that Diderot’s final avertissement is in fact a ‘mystification’ designed to invite comparison with the earlier thinker. After all, the Pensées had famously reached posterity as bundles of fragments, in which Pascal defies atheists to provide a response to the kind of Christian apology he seems to be working towards. This fascinating hypothesis is supported by a careful comparison of relevant passages by both writers (pp. 39–60). In the remainder of Part One, Warman shows how Diderot manages the improbable feat of rendering the physiology of his era clear, succinct, and vivid, and that he presents his ideas within an overtly materialist framework. At the same time, she notes that he draws on theories advanced by predecessors over the course of more than a century, in addition to the writings of contemporaries such as Albrecht von Haller, Charles Bonnet, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. In Part Two, Warman investigates the dissemination of Diderot’s Éléments after his death. Here, she reviews a series of key publications in which the text ‘was being mentioned, quoted, or drawn on’ (p. 395), but in largely veiled terms. After all, those inclined to propagate Diderot’s specifically materialist, atheistic ideas were constrained by ‘the pressures operating on the public sphere during the French Revolution and in the subsequent years of reaction, first Napoleonic and then monarchical’ (p. 397). One major player on this scene was Naigeon, in the Mémoires and elsewhere; others were Dominique-Joseph Garat and the Idéologues, who channelled Diderot’s physiology into their lectures at the École normale. Thus, in a tour de force of genetic criticism, close reading, and attention to historical and political context, Warman does justice to the dissemination of Diderot’s materialism in all its complexity. Overall, this is a truly impressive study that works extremely diverse and challenging materials into an engaging, coherent account.