THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
The
great collective accomplishment of the French Enlightenment philosophes
was the Encyclopedia or Rational Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and
Crafts, published in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between
1751 and 1772. It was a great project, and was carried to completion:
16,500 pages (two columns, folio), 72,000 articles, 2,569 plates. Denis
Diderot, the organizing force behind the project, stated its purpose
as follows:
...to collect all the knowledge scattered over the face of the
earth, to present its general outlines and structure to the men with whom
we live, and to transmit this to those who will come after us, so that
the work of the past centuries may be useful to the following centuries,
that our children, by becoming more educated, may at the same time become
more virtuous and happier, and that we may not die without having deserved
well of the human race.
The philosophes are generally
associated with the ideas of progress and personal liberty, faith in the
universality of reason, and the ultimate perfectability of man. They were
concerned to use their knowledge of the past and from the past to affect
the future, and so the aim of the Encyclopedia can be seen as both
polemical and practical: both to convince and to preserve. Though it is
true enough that most of the thinkers of the Enlightenment "believed in
progress", they did not believe (as many Victorians did) in its inevitability.
Rather they saw progress (where it occurred) as an achievement grounded
in human effort and intelligence,and found themselves surrounded by ignorance,
vanity, and inequality. Voltaire, in his Encyclopedia article
on "History", argues that:
The great mistakes of the past are useful in all
areas. We cannot describe too often the crimes and misfortunes caused by
absurd quarrels. It is certain that by refreshing our memory of these quarrels,
we prevent a repetition of them.
Which was not to say that things could not get worse,
instead of progressing. In another of his justifications of the Encyclopedia
(Foreward to Vol VIII, 1765), Diderot presented a vision of a degenerate
future reminiscent of dozens from our own era (viz: sci-fi):
Let us suppose that a revolution, whose seed were
to grow perhaps in some unknown region of the earth or to germinate secretly
in the very center of civilized states, should burst forth in the future,
overthrow cities, once again disperse the nations, and bring back ignorance
and darkness. If a single complete edition of this work were to be conserved,
all would not be lost.
In philosophy and in science, the
Encyclopedia
sought to popularize (and amend) the ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo,
Newton, Bayle, Locke, and the other great thinkers of the previous 150
years. Its arguments were secular and often materialist, theological views
being used only as a concession to censorship (a constant problem for the
encyclopedists) or as a polemical device. The writers of the various articles
(most of which were signed) were responsible for their own ideas, and the
editors claimed that their only function was to solicit and assemble the
articles, not to alter their contents. Thus the Encyclopedia is
not always internally consistent (also true of contemporary encyclopedias).
The following passages are
taken from the mathematician d'Alembert's lengthy "Preliminary Discourse",
which was published at the beginning of the first volume (1751). I hope
it will communicate some of the attitudes behind the whole project. It's
neither the best nor the most interesting of the pieces in the Encyclopedia,
but it was given pride of place, which means, perhaps, that it articulates
a set of shared views: its crude rapidity of argument makes it revealing.
The passages claim a great deal, but you might note especially the derivation
of ideas from sensations (not revelation) (= empiricism, really), the atomism
(wholes arise from parts, as the general from the particular), the individualism
(social atomism), the distinction of reason and passions (emotions), the
pain/pleasure principle, and the sense that there's an easy fit between
words and things (languages are not problematic ways of representing the
world). When reason finds something useful, "naturally" it's
perfected.
All knowledge can be divided
into the direct or the reflective. We receive direct knowledge immediately,
without resistence, effort, or the operation of our will, when, so to speak,
the doors of our minds are open. Reflective knowledge is acquired
when the mind combines and rearranges its storehouse of direct knowledge.
Yet all of our direct knowledge can be reduced to
what we receive through the senses; hence it follows that we owe all of
our ideas to our sensations. This principle of our early philosophers was
for a long time considered axiomatic by the Scholastics....
The first thing that our sensations teach us, and
from which they are not separate, is our own existence: hence it
follows that our first reflected ideas must come upon us, upon this thinking
matter which constitutes our very nature and is not different from ourselves.
The second bit of information that we owe to our sensations is the knowledge
of the existence of external objects, including our own body since
it is external to us before we perceive the nature of the thinking matter
within us....
Of all the objects which affect us by their presence,
our own body strikes us most since it belongs to us more intimately than
any other. But hardly do we feel its existence than we realize the attention
required in warding off the dangers which surround it....
The need to protect our bodies from pain and destruction
makes us examine those external objects which can be useful or harmful
in order to find the former and flee the latter. But just as we begin to
survey these objects we discover a great number of beings who seem to
be absolutely similar to us, whose form is completely identical with
our own, and who, as far as we can determine from a first glance, have
the same perceptions as we do. Everything leads us to believe that they
also experience the same wants and consequently the same desire to satisfy
them. Hence it follows that we should find a great deal of advantage
in uniting with them in the task of distinguishing what can preserve
and what can harm us in Nature. Communication of ideas is the primary
cause and the mainstay of this association which necessarily requires
the invention of signs. This is the origin of societies as well as languages
...the pleasures and advantages we find in such
human relationships either in sharing our ideas with others or in merging
theirs with ours, should induce us to draw the ties of the emerging society
even closer and to make it as useful to us as possible. But as each
member of society tries to derive as much profit from society as possible,
he must contend with all the others who are equally enthusiastic. The result
is that everyone is not able to share in all the advantages of society,
although everyone has the same right. Such a legitimate right is soon violated
by the barbaric right of inequality, otherwise known as might makes
right, the law whose application seems to place us on the same level as
beasts and makes it so difficult not to abuse such power. Thus force, which
is given by Nature to certain men and which they should without doubt use
only for the support and protection of the weak, is on the contrary the
origin of the state of oppression. But the more violent the oppression,
the more people bear it impatiently, for they feel that nothing reasonable
ought to bring them into subjection. As a consequence, the notion of wrong
came into being, and, by extension, good and evil in the moral sense. This
principle has been sought after by many philosophers; and the cry of Nature
which reverberates in all men makes it heard by even the most savage....
Later, d'Alembert
begins to discuss some of the categories which appear in the Detailed
System of Human Knowledge, a chart of the types and objects of human
understanding which was also printed in the Encyclopedia's first
volume, and which informed its choice of topics. The chart was adapted
from one created by Francis Bacon. Here, d'Alembert discusses language,
logic, and eloquence (rhetoric). Notice again the atomism of his developmental
arguments, all of which begin with the particular and build to the general.
And notice the easy universalism: underneath it all, we're the same, and
will
end up in the same place. You could see this as a philosophy of education.
...The art of reasoning is a
gift which Nature itself bestows upon good minds, and it can be said that
the books which deal with logic are hardly useful, except to those who
can do without them. People reasoned soundly long before the principles
of logic taught them to recognize poor reasoning or even to dress it up
with a subtle and deceptive appearance. This rather precious art of ordering
ideas in the proper sequence and consequently of facilitating a discussion
of their relationships, provided in a way for the means of reconciling
to a certain point the men who appear to have the greatest disagreement.
Indeed all our knowledge can be originally reduced to sensations that are
approximately the same in all men; and the art of combining and relating
direct ideas actually adds to these same ideas only an order that is more
or less accurate and an enumeration that can be made more or less perceptible
to others. The man who easily arranges ideas hardly differs from another
who arranges them with difficulty, in the same way that a person who immediately
judges a painting while looking at it hardly differs from someone who has
to be shown all of the various aspects before appreciating it. Both had
the same feelings while glancing at it for the first time, but they made
little impression on the second observer. It would be necessary to arrest
and fix his attention for a longer time on each feeling to lead him to
the same position in which the other person immediately found himself.
In this way the reflected ideas of the first person would have become just
as comprehensible to the second as his own direct ideas. Therefore it is
perhaps true to say that there is almost no science or art that cannot
be rigorously and logically taught to the most restricted intelligence,
because there are few fields where propositions and rules cannot be reduced
to simple notions and then arranged in such close order that the chain
of connection is never broken. The considerable slowness of the mind's
functioning often requires such a chain, and the advantage of the greatest
geniuses amounts to their having less need of it than others or rather
forming it rapidly and almost without paying any attention.
The science of the communication of ideas is not
limited to ordering these same ideas; it must teach us in addition how
to express each idea in the clearest possible manner and consequently to
perfect the signs that are intended to convey them. This is moreover what
men have little by little done. Languages, originating with societies,
were at first without a doubt only a rather bizarre collection of multifarious
signs, and the physical bodies in Nature that our senses perceived were
consequently the first objects designated by names....
[Despite the imperfect condition of the first languages]
the convenience of expressing and receiving ideas through human intercourse
had undeniable advantages, and it is not surprising that men continually
tried to expand this skill. In order to accomplish this they began by reducing
signs to words, because they are the symbols that are most readily at hand.
Moreover the order of the formation of words followed the order of the
processes of the mind: after individual objects, sensible qualities were
named, and although they do not exist by themselves, they do exist in these
individual objects and are common to several of them. Gradually people
arrived at those abstract terms, some of which are useful in connecting
ideas, others in designating the general properties of bodies, and still
others in expressing purely spiritual notions. All these terms, which children
spend so much time learning, without a doubt took even more time to discover.
Finally in reducing the use of words to precepts they created Grammar,
which can be considered one of the branches of Logic. Enlightened by a
sharp and subtle metaphysic, it teaches us to distinguish the nuances of
ideas by different signs, gives us rules for using these signs to the greatest
possible advantage, often discovers by that philosophic frame of mind that
traces everything to its source the reasons for what it cannot absolutely
forbid.
As men communicate their ideas, they also try to
communicate their passions, and in this they succeed with Eloquence. As
Logic and Grammar speak to the mind, Eloquence directs itself to men's
feelings, enjoining silence on reason itself. And the wonders that it often
effects on an entire nation when in the hands of but a single individual
constitute the most striking proof of the superiority of one man over another.
What is strange about this is that men believe they could compensate for
such a rare talent by a set of principles. It is almost as if they wished
to reduce genius to rules....
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