The Atheist's Bible E-Book

Caroline Warman

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human in the absence of a soul.

The Atheist’s Bible challenges prevailing scholarly views on Diderot’s Éléments, asserting its contemporary philosophical importance, and prompting its readers to inspect more closely this little-known and little-studied work. In this timely volume, Warman establishes the place of Diderot’s Éléments in the trajectory of materialist theories of nature and the mind stretching back to Epicurus and Lucretius, and explores the fascinating reasons behind scholarly neglect of this seminal work. In turn, Warman outlines the hitherto unacknowledged dissemination and reception of Diderot’s Éléments, demonstrating how Diderot’s Éléments was circulated in manuscript-form as early as the 1790s, thus showing how the text came to influence the next generations of materialist thinkers.

This book is accompanied by a digital edition of Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (1823), a work which, Warman argues, represents the first publication of Diderot’s Éléments, long before its official publication date of 1875.


The Atheist’s Bible constitutes a major contribution to the field of Diderot studies, and will be of further interest to scholars and students of materialist natural philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment and beyond.

Leseprobe

THE ATHEIST’S BIBLE

The Atheist’s Bible

Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie

Caroline Warman

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2020 Caroline Warman

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Caroline Warman, The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot’s ‘Éléments de physiologie’. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0199

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ISBN Paperback: 9781783748969

ISBN Hardback: 9781783748976

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0199

Cover image and design by Cressida Bell, all rights reserved.

Contents

Dedication

vii

Preface

ix

PART ONE: The Éléments de physiologie Generally, Philosophically, and Physiologically

1. Introduction: The Curious Materialist

3

2. ‘Toutes les imperfections de l’inachèvement’: The Mystification about the Manuscript Fragments

17

3. Material World and Embodied Mind

61

4. Diderot the Physiologist

137

PART TWO: The Éléments de physiologie,1790–1823

5. 1790: Naigeon and the Adresse à l’Assemblée nationale

179

6. 1792: Naigeon’s Article on ‘Diderot’ in the Encyclopédie méthodique: Philosophie ancienne et moderne

207

7. 1794: ‘Le citoyen Garron’, the Comité d’instruction publique, and the Lost Manuscript of the Éléments de physiologie

213

8. 1794–95: Garat and the École normale

231

9. 1796–97: Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy at the Institut national

271

10. 1798, 1802: Naigeon, the Œuvres de Diderot, and the Censored Preface to Montaigne‘s Essais

319

11.1820: Garat’s Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur ses écrits, et sur le XVIIIe siècle

335

12. 1823: Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot

355

13. Conclusion

393

Acknowledgements

399

Bibliography

403

Index

421

For Leo and Viola

Preface

This book is about Denis Diderot’s late work, the Éléments de physiologie. It argues, against the prevailing view, that this treatise made a substantial contribution to materialist thought, offering ways of explaining a human being without recourse to the divine and also without reducing human complexity or doing away with awe and wonder. These ways were physiological. The prevailing view accepts that Diderot planned to do something like this, but considers that unfortunately he did not complete his project. I argue that he did, and I explain not only why I think this, but also what led to the prevailing view that he did not, and why that particular story is illuminating in itself. Another aspect of the prevailing view is that it is accepted that even in its unfinished form, this work would have been of importance and interest to readers of the time, if only it had circulated and been read instead of being hidden away in two copies in the inaccessible private archives of Diderot’s daughter and Catherine II of Russia, his patron. I argue that it did circulate, was read, and did have a decisive influence as early as the 1790s, and also that it was published, in an admittedly slightly odd form, in 1823. To help this rather argumentative study make its case, I offer a connected digital edition of this first publication, Jacques-André Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot, which can be accessed here: https://naigeons-diderot.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.htm.

A quick word on the translations: every quoted text is followed by an English translation, with both languages equal on the page. This is to make it as accessible as possible to any interested reader, whether francophone or anglophone or somewhere in between. The translations are drawn from published works where possible, but in the many cases where there is none, I keep the translated text as close to the original as possible (while hopefully still making sense), specifically to facilitate access to the French for those who wish to toggle between the two.

PART ONE

THE ÉLÉMENTS DE PHYSIOLOGIE GENERALLY, PHILOSOPHICALLY, AND PHYSIOLOGICALLY

1. Introduction: The Curious Materialist

© Caroline Warman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0199.01

L’amour est plus difficile à expliquer que la faim: car le fruit n’éprouve pas le désir d’être mangé.1

Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten.

Love is more difficult to explain than hunger, or so says the eighteenth-century philosophe and explainer of difficult things, Denis Diderot. How could we disagree? Hunger is probably a more fundamental physiological need than the complex set of feelings called love. Even if the comparison nudges us to see love in terms of another physiological need, lust and the drive to procreate, we would probably still agree that it is harder to explain than hunger. And that is where we suppose Diderot is taking us, towards an analysis of hunger and love as appetites of different but recognisable sorts. But that is not where the sentence goes! The reason he gives for love being harder to explain than hunger is that a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten. What? We suddenly halt.

The perspective has switched, from the person who feels appetites to the object of their appetite, be that a piece of fruit or, implicitly, the desired person. Does a piece of fruit feel anything at all? By stating that the fruit has no desire to be eaten, Diderot raises the possibility that it might indeed have feelings of some sort, even desires, even if this particular one, not to be eaten, is negative. Furthermore, in saying that the piece of fruit does not want to be eaten, the proposed self-protective position of the piece of fruit sounds perfectly reasonable. So here we are, in agreement with the imaginary point of view of a piece of fruit. Look what he has reduced us to! We are obliged to pause and take stock; and although we do not really think that a piece of fruit has sensation or feeling, we are wondering about the relationship between an eater and an eaten thing, and seeing that it raises questions about reciprocity that might need further thought. These same questions about reciprocity return us to the other factor in this equation: love, or rather, those feeling the love, the lovers. Does a lover pulsate with the desire to be eaten? We appear to be bordering on the sexually explicit. Certainly, Diderot is presenting us with a complex knot that brings together and literally equates not only bodily urges, emotions, and feelings, but also fruitly feelings. And this all feels rather challenging, to put it no more strongly than that.

The Éléments de physiologie quite frequently exerts a sort of Alice in Wonderland pressure on the reader, inverting proportions, shaking assumptions, making bizarre comparisons, asserting relationships between phenomena we would never have thought of associating. For instance, we read that blood flows round the body faster than the fastest river.2 That is not just an analogy to make us understand the point more quickly, not just an image that evokes coursing water only to project an internal picture of our rivery arteries, it’s also an exact statement about the relative speeds of fluids in nature which requires us to think about them comparatively. Or, as we find on another page, ‘un œil se fait comme une anémone’ [an eye grows like an anemone] and ‘un homme se fait comme un œil’ [a man grows like an eye].3 Here, rather than moving progressively from simple to complex and thus from an anemone to an eye and thence to a human being, Diderot criss-crosses the different organisms so that we never settle into some complacent supremacist hierarchy. In fact, he is more likely to do the exact opposite, as here:

Les animaux carnassiers sont plus sujets au vomissement que les frugivores.

Les ruminants ne vomissent point.

L’huître n’a point de bouche.4

Carnivorous animals are more subject to vomiting than herbivores.

Ruminants don’t vomit at all.

The oyster has no mouth.

There is a visible sequence to the order in which Diderot presents digestion here: he moves from the top of the food chain to the bottom; from complex meat-eater to simple oyster (oysters are the typical example of a crude life form in writing of the period).5 And yet the bodily function he chooses, the ability to vomit, might not be the normal way of establishing a top-down hierarchy. Furthermore, the mouthless oyster somehow seems seriously incapacitated in this series: it is not that the oyster does not vomit because it never needs to, but that it has no mouth so it cannot.

Diderot’s human being is not a supreme life form, but a composite of life forms in all their stages: ‘l’homme a toutes les sortes d’existence: l’inertie, la sensibilité, la vie végétale, la vie polypeuse, la vie humaine’ [man has every kind of existence: inertia, feeling, vegetable life, polypous life, human life].6 Thus, analogies whereby the nervous system is like ‘une écrevisse’ [a crayfish],7 or the blood vessels around the heart are like its ‘pattes’ [paws],8 are not just imaginative comparisons that draw the reader in by giving them a rapid and vivid visualisation, but also genuine investigations into the cohabitation of different life systems within one complex organism. The Éléments de physiologie is as much about the elements as it is about the physiology: it looks at the shifting forms and patterns of matter and it considers humans in their material embodiment, as an expression thereof. It asks how the being and behaviour of any given person express that material identity, in sickness and in health. Bodily sensation, emotion, and perception are thus directly connected, as Diderot shows, using himself as an example:

Je suis heureux, tout ce qui m’entoure s’embellit. Je souffre, tout ce qui m’entoure s’obscurcit.9

I am happy, and everything around me grows beautiful. I am in pain, and everything around me is plunged in gloom.

And he asks what, in a context whereby physiological embodiment is all-determining, selfhood might be? The answer is that self is memory:

La mémoire constitue le soi. La conscience du soi et la conscience de son existence sont différentes. Des sensations continues sans mémoire donneraient la conscience ininterrompue de son existence: elles ne produiraient nulle conscience de soi.10

Memory constitutes the self. The consciousness of self and the consciousness of one’s existence are different. What continuous sensation without any memory would impart would be the uninterrupted sense of existence, not any consciousness of self.

Selfhood is not a given, and its lack or loss have to be envisaged. It may exist for only part of life, between childhood and old age. The processes of growth and decline cannot be controlled, but are impelled forward naturally, passively. Change and flux are constant:

Nul état fixe dans le corps animal: il décroît quand il ne croît plus.11

There is no fixed state in the animal body: it starts shrinking once it stops growing.

There is always movement and variation: this is a premise of materialist thought. In the context of human physiology, that means growth, age, illness, and also, inevitably, malformation. The curious materialist will be fascinated by all these variations in bodily condition, and will want to know what effect they have on perception, experience, and happiness. Diderot is this curious materialist, and while one could no doubt argue that all of his works explore aspects of human embodiment and experience in some way, it is in the Éléments de physiologie that he focuses on it most directly, thoroughly and systematically. Furthermore, written at the end of his life, it contains and distills aspects of everything he has hitherto engaged with; it has great range and depth of allusion, and great writerly control, such that images, phrases, stories, and subjects work their way into the reading mind and stick there. As Diderot comments with a witty and virtuoso command of rhythm and onomatopeia, ‘un plat ouvrage nous endort comme le murmure monotone d’un ruisseau’ [a flat piece of work sends us to sleep like the monotonous murmur of a stream].12 This work is one long series of jolts. The chapter opened with one such, and indeed it is woven through with bizarre one-liners that specialise in startling juxtapositions.

Diderot probably started working on the Éléments soon after he completed the first draft of his experimental poetico-materialist dialogue Le Rêve de d’Alembert [D’Alembert’s Dream]in 1769, with its quartet of truly existing but fictionalised speakers, philosophe Diderot, mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, doctor Théophile de Bordeu, female Julie de Lespinasse. D’Alembert’s Dream in fact serves as an imaginative introduction to the substantial materialist treatise that is the Éléments de physiologie, which Diderot probably continued to work on until relatively close to his death in 1784.13 In terms of genre it is quite unlike his earlier writings in this area, be they the allusive Lettres (on the blind or on the deaf and dumb), the aphoristic Pensées or indeed the audacious dialogues that form Le Rêve de d’Alembert.14 It advertises its claim to seriousness overtly. This is obvious from the title itself, whether that title is indeed the Éléments de physiologie or simply Physiologie (there is some dispute about this).15 And despite the many startling one-liners, cunningly designed to jolt the sleepy and passive reader into wakefulness, its attentive approach to the thorough but succinct description of the human body aligns it more with the knowledge-disseminating Encyclopédie he edited for more than twenty years than with the rest of his generally elliptical writings, with the crucial difference that here he presents his highly contentious theories about matter, life, thought, and the human mind unmasked, and step by censorable step. As Diderot puts it, while nonetheless admitting that this method is not infallible, ‘il n’y a qu’un moyen de connaître la vérité, c’est de ne procéder que par partie et de ne conclure qu’après une énumération exacte et entière’ [there’s only one way of getting to the truth, to proceed from one part to the next and to conclude only after an exact and total enumeration].16 His earlier text, the Rêve de d’Alembert, for all its playful profundity and exploratory discussion, was not ‘an exact and total enumeration’, and nor does it proceed systematically, but the Éléments de physiologie is and does. In the Rêve, Diderot hasthe fictionalised Bordeu offer the thought that ‘la fibre est un animal simple; l’homme est un animal composé. Mais gardons ce texte pour une autre fois’ [the fibre is a simple animal; man is a composite animal. But let’s keep that thought for another time], and in so doing, he plants an allusion to a more systematic treatment of this idea. That more systematic treatment is to be found in the Éléments de physiologie.17 We have already quoted the passage proposing that ‘l’homme a toutes les sortes d’existence’;18 this is a recurrent theme which is repeatedly revisited, and later we read that ‘l’homme est un assemblage d’animaux où chacun garde sa fonction’ [man is an assemblage of animals, each one with its own function].19

The Éléments de physiologie is organised into three parts, each of which is subdivided into numerous chapters. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in the most traditional way possible, and let it be said, in a more traditional way than we normally find in Diderot’s works. The first part, simply entitled ‘Des Etres’ [On Beings], opens with a tableau of nature in general, looking at the links in a chain of being organised according to complexity of organism. It is divided into three chapters on, in order of increasing complexity, the ‘végéto-animal’, the ‘animal’ and ‘homme’. In these, he rapidly sketches the classification of living beings according to their differences and similarities, repeatedly enquiring about the ability to feel sensation across nature. What is original about this part is perhaps more than anything the way in which it fuses philosophy and natural history so totally, that it does it so briefly, and that it is so explicit in its views. Others such as the famous and successful author of the Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749–89) in 36 volumes, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, or the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet might be diffusely, ever so cautiously, hovering on the point of suggesting similar sorts of points, but apart from needing to penetrate their actual meaning, first of all you’d have to find the passage, buried somewhere in volume 12. This is not even a joke: that is where Buffon first gets round to defining Nature, in volume 12 of 36.20 In the Éléments de physiologie, it’s line 1.

The second part, entitled the ‘Éléments et parties du corps humain’ [Elements and parts of the human body], focuses on human physiology. It displays a remarkable synthesis of disciplinary erudition, this time very specifically from the field of physiology and much bolstered by the work of the pre-eminent Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller, and made comprehensible and meaningful thanks to Diderot’s extraordinary style, consisting at once in concise lucidity of description and in the ability to know when to puncture the description, pause, and start asking questions or drawing strange and destabilising analogies which breathe new meaning into the text. This second part does not attempt a complete synthesis of existing accounts of the workings of the human body and of its elements. There is nothing about the skeleton, for example. Instead, it focuses its attention on the basic material of the human body (fibres, cellular tissues) and on how it functions (blood, muscles, reproduction, the separate organs). Diderot repeatedly returns to two groups of questions: firstly, what is the difference between organised beings and an animal or what we’d now call an organism (can an organ be considered an animal in itself, for example?), and secondly, how is sensation communicated from one part of the body to another, what happens when that communication is interrupted, and what is the significance of that interruption?

The third and final part contains a detailed discussion of the senses and the mind, memory, imagination, thought, what it terms ‘les phénomènes du cerveau’ [the phenomena of the brain]. It proposes that human experience of self and other is first and last the product of relational material organisation in time and space, entirely determined by it, yet no less conscious and lived for all that it is determined. Thus there is no soul, no supernatural element, and also no place for the faculty supposedly exclusive to man, ‘reason’. Reason is replaced with ‘instinct’ on the one hand, and ‘understanding’ on the other. Diderot rounds off the Éléments de physiologie with an extraordinary meditation on death in the Stoic tradition—in Montaigne’s version, ‘que philosopher c’est apprendre à mourir’ [to philosophise is to learn to die] and in Diderot’s chiastic mirroring: ‘un autre apprentissage de la mort est la philosophie’ [another apprenticeship of death is what philosophy is].21

In sum, the Éléments de physiologie is overtly atheist and materialist. Materialism refers to the view that the universe and everything in it is made entirely from matter in different shapes and forms; in this eighteenth-century context, it is also automatically understood to be an atheist position, and therefore dangerous, both for the person who holds it and might be imprisoned because of it (as Diderot was in 1749, for the suspect views about the existence of God expressed in his Letter on the Blind), and for the general population, who, the (ecclesiastical) authorities considered, would be at risk of contamination.

It is a substantial materialist treatise and there is nothing else of its time like it (and nor would there be for at least another century), nothing else that places a detailed physiological account of humans and human consciousness within an overtly materialist presentation of nature. It draws on the work of physiologists like Haller and others, and on the work of naturalists like Buffon or Bonnet. It dialogues with philosophers like the polemical Julien Offray de La Mettrie and the more mainstream Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and re-visits many of the same examples and topoi that we find across all these writers, and which Diderot had also treated in earlier works, examples such as the man plunged in thought and perfectly unaware of his surroundings who nonetheless unhesitatingly navigates obstacles as he paces along, or the abilities of the imbecile or the mad, or the surprising strength ill men discover in themselves when rescuing possessions from fire, and so on. It extends all this into an open investigation of conscious and unconscious states in all their bizarre variety. In 1759, Théophile de Bordeu (the real one, and Diderot’s friend, not the loquacious fictionalised version we meet in the Rêve de d’Alembert) had implored some great philosopher to come forward and help make sense of what he called the ‘animal economy’, that is to say, the human being in both physical and moral aspects.22

Il faudroit enfin un Descartes ou un Leibniz, pour débrouiller ce qui concerne les causes, l’ordre, le rapport, les variations, l’harmonie, et les lois des fonctions de l’économie animale.23

Ultimately what is needed is a Descartes or a Leibniz to disentangle everything concerning the causes, the order, the relationship, the variations, the harmony, and the laws governing the functions of the animal economy.

It seems that the Éléments de physiologie is Diderot’s answer to that challenge.

And yet, for all its manifest stature, both within Diderot’s own œuvre and beyond it, as a bravely explicit exploration of what it is to be human in the absence of the soul, and also as a response to the need expressed by vitalist doctors like Bordeu for some new ways of understanding how the body, in its physical and emotional aspects, connects up, the Éléments de physiologie is little known and little studied. It is really only the third part, with its discussions of thought and memory, its bravura set pieces about sensation and recall which prefigure the writings of Henri Bergson or Marcel Proust, that have interested Diderot scholars. Indeed two mainstream editions of Diderot’s philosophical works do not consider it worth including the first two parts, and only print the last one; they abridge no other work by so much as a paragraph, let alone two thirds of the whole text.24 The current book is, for all its faults, the only monograph devoted to it thus far.25 How could this be?

There seem to be a number of rather fascinating reasons for this bizarre neglect, as we will see. This book falls into two parts: the first looks at how Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie makes an intervention in the philosophy and physiology of his time (part of the intervention in the former, having been misunderstood, is part of the reason for the neglect), deepening our understanding of what is at stake beyond what has been sketched out thus far. The second part looks at what would normally be called its dissemination and reception, but cannot yet be, seeing as scholarship as it currently stands does not think that it was disseminated in the first place. Perhaps we can say instead that the second part presents its reasons for supposing that the Éléments de physiologie was being read at least to some extent in the 1790s, those turbulent and unstable years of frequent régime change, and furthermore, its reasons for thinking that it exerted influence almost immediately. The book ends with a study of what I will argue is the first publication of the Éléments de physiologie in 1823, in a form which is almost but not quite unrecognisable, thanks to a substantial reorganisation operation carried out on it by Diderot’s intellectual disciple and literary executor, the industrious Jacques-André Naigeon.26

Perhaps this is the moment therefore to mention that the Éléments de physiologie was not published during Diderot’s lifetime. Those who already frequent the works of Diderot know that this puts it in good company, and indeed in the same camp as most of his work. In order to secure his release from prison in 1749, he had had to promise never to publish anything that might disturb or undermine the authorities ever again, and nor did he. The Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, on which he was already in 1749 hard at work (and which his imprisonment interrupted), which he co-edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert until its publication was banned in 1759 and d’Alembert gave up on it, and which Diderot carried on preparing in secret, bringing out the remaining volumes of text in 1765 (there were 17 in all), and 11 volumes of plates in 1772, bringing the grand total to 28 volumes, was too massive an enterprise to endanger, and in itself exposed him to a good deal of risk anyway. Instead, from then on, he only published a couple of philosophical works (Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 1751; Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, 1753), a few plays (Le Fils naturel, 1757; Le Père de famille, 1758), and various other short texts, including the Additions aux pensées philosophiques (1770) and the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre (1772).27And of this, only the Lettre de M. Diderot à MM. Briasson et Le Breton,Diderot’s intervention in the case brought by Luneau de Boisjermain against the publishers of the Encyclopédie, actually carried his name in black and white.28 Indeed, the plays caused a scandal anyway, as he was accused of plagiarism, while he himself was mercilessly satirised in Palissot’s play Les philosophes of 1760 as part of a large-scale anti-Encyclopédie campaign; in sum, he was already a target, and already at risk. Thus, many of the works for which he is now most famous—his novels Jacques le fataliste or La Religieuse, or his dialogues, the scientifically exploratory Rêve de d’Alembertand the morally outrageous Neveu de Rameau, went unpublished during his lifetime. However, all of these works, with the exception of the then completely unknown Neveu de Rameau and also the Éléments de physiologie,had been circulated in a manuscript periodical, the Correspondance littéraire, sent only to a very restricted number of very elevated personnages, including Catherine II, across Europe and in Russia. Manuscripts were not subject to the same censorship laws, and in any case this manuscript magazine’s royal readers extended their protection to it; Catherine indeed extended her protection directly to Diderot, buying his books and manuscripts and making him the salaried-librarian of his own books. Diderot died in 1784, and his books and a set of his manuscripts were sent off to Catherine; the books are now lost but the manuscripts are still in St Petersburg.

His novels and various short stories started leaking into print from copies of the Correspondance littéraire in the 1790s, and at this point, his literary executor, Naigeon, as we will hear, was galvanized into action, bringing out his edition of Diderot’s Œuvres in fifteen volumes in 1798; he still omitted the Rêve de d’Alembert, the Éléments de physiologie, and the Neveu de Rameau, judging them too dangerous. In 1805, the Neveu de Rameaucame out as Rameaus Neffe, in German, translated by none other than that titan of German letters, Goethe. So it was out of the bag. That left the Rêve de d’Alembert and the Éléments de physiologie, which Naigeon meshed into a new work, taking up one quarter of the Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot, and which, as mentioned, would be published in 1823, thirteen years after Naigeon’s death, and which therefore constitutes the first sort-of publication of both of those works. The Rêve de d’Alembert itself would be published entire in 1830, and from that moment it has had its own separate life. I say ‘sort-of publication’: we will see exactly what I mean in the chapter devoted to it, and in the connected digital edition of Naigeon’s Mémoires that I offer as part of this study.29 Suffice it to say that in the published version of the Mémoires, the discussion of these two texts take up 100 pages, and that of those 100 pages, 80 are woven from verbatim but unacknowledged and massively reorganised passages from these two works, with about 30 pages from the Rêve and about 50 from the Éléments. So this means that there are 80 pages of Diderot’s writing in the Mémoires, and they are all about physiology.

So this is the extent to which we can and cannot say that the Mémoires constitute the first publication of both the Rêve de d’Alembert and the Éléments de physiologie. It is the first time that lines written by Diderot from both works appeared in print, but they did not appear as he wrote them, it wasn’t clear that they were quotation—it looks like a paraphrase of what Diderot thought—and they are in a book whose author is not Diderot but Naigeon. The sheer extent of his reworking, as well, perhaps, as the relative unpopularity of the Mémoires—they have been plundered for anecdotes about Diderot but not taken seriously otherwise, and not been the object of any research in themselves—along with the availability from 1830 of the engaging and quirky Rêve de d’Alembert, has meant that it has never been contemplated that the Mémoires might constitute their first publication.30 The Éléments de physiologie, unlike every other one of his works, did not come out separately and acquire its own identity in those crucial first fifty years after Diderot’s death when his œuvre was being pieced together. It would not come out until 1875, in the critical edition in 20 volumes by scholars Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux. However, this was another bad moment for the Éléments de physiologie: Assézat and Tourneux published the early draft they had found in the St Petersburg archive of Diderot manuscripts. And so the reputation of the Éléments de physiologie was fixed: insofar as it existed at all, it was as an unfinished project. Not even the publication of the complete draft in 1964, subsequent to the emergence in 1948 of the complete set of Diderot’s manuscripts which had gone to his daughter (a thrilling story),31 has shifted that view. This book, however, attempts to overturn it.

The next chapter maps current scholarship on the Éléments de physiologie, andexplores why it has stuck with the view of the Éléments de physiologie as an incomplete text; there is a perfect storm of reasons.

1 Throughout this book, I will give page references to the three current critical editions, in order of publication, in part to facilitate ease of reference for readers with access to only one of them, and in part because the most recent edition massively expands our understanding of the sources Diderot used when composing this work, and is therefore immediately a crucial referent. First, Jean Mayer’s 1987 edition: Denis Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, ed. by Jean Mayer, vol. 17 (Paris: Hermann, 1987). This constitutes volume 17 of the ongoing Œuvres complètes of Diderot, known as DPV, after three of its founding editors, Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot. Second, Paolo Quintili’s stand-alone edition: Denis Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, ed. by Paolo Quintili (Paris: Champion, 2004). Third, Motoichi Terada’s edition: Denis Diderot, Éléments de physiologie, ed. by Motoichi Terada (Paris: Éditions Matériologiques, 2019). This makes available Terada’s immense work on Diderot’s sources, which very helpfully appeared as I was revising this manuscript. I will always signal when his indication of a source should be taken into account in our understanding of any given passage. Thus: DPV 494/PQ 328/MT 307.

2 DPV 376/PQ 195/MT 196.

3 DPV 432/PQ 253/MT 250.

4 DPV 402/PQ 202/MT 220.

5 See Caroline Jacot-Grapa, ‘Des huîtres aux grands animaux’, Dix-huitième siècle, 42.1 (2010), 99–117 (pp. 107–08), https://doi.org/10.3917/dhs.042.0099. 

6 DPV 337/PQ 154/MT 157.

7 DPV 355/PQ 175/MT 174.

8 DPV 373/PQ 192/MT 192.

9 DPV 461/PQ 287/MT 277.

10 DPV 471/PQ 298/MT 286.

11 DPV 312/PQ 127/MT 135.

12 DPV 506/PQ 345/MT 320.

13We know this because there are references to it in his Réfutation d’Helvétius and Observations sur Hemsterhuis, from 1773–74, and within the Éléments itself he remarks that he was more than 66 years old when he working on a particular section, which would date that part to after October 1779 [DPV 313/PQ 129/MT 136], and finally, the most developed manuscript version we have, from his daughter’s archive the Fonds Vandeul, has additions that could not have been made before 1782. So, this gives us periodic reference points that suggest that he was working on it across the final fifteen years of his life.

14Pensées philosophiques, published in 1746, Lettre sur les aveugles, published in 1749 and the Lettre sur les sourds et muets, published in 1751, the Principes sur l’interprétation de la nature published in 1753, and the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement, written but not published, in 1770.

15 The (early draft) St Petersburg manuscript is entitled Élémen[t]s de physiologie; the (mature draft) Fonds Vandeul manuscript also has Élémens dephysiologie on the title page; Hippolyte Walferdin, describing a lost manuscript copy in 1837, gives its title as Physiologie (see DPV 270–71, discussed below, in the chapter entitled ‘1823: Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot’); Gerhardt Stenger considers that ‘l’ouvrage fini devait s’intituler “Physiologie” tout court’ [the finished work was supposed simply to be called Physiology] (Diderot, le combattant de la liberté (Paris: Perrin, 2013), p. 740, n. 144); Naigeon confuses matters by alluding to it as Diderot’s ‘système particulier de physiologie’ [his particular system of physiology] and also as ‘une nouvelle théorie, ou plutôt une histoire naturelle et expérimentale de l’homme’ [a new theory, or rather, a natural and experimental history of man] (Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot (Paris: J. L. L. Brière, ‘1821’ [1823]; repr. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), p. 291); Terada, presumably on the basis of Naigeon’s description, also calls it by the name Histoire naturelle et expérimentale de l’homme (MT 54, 57). It seems most probable, given that both manuscript versions carry the full title of Éléments de physiologie and that the ‘Avertissement’ of the Vandeul version explicitly names the title ‘Éléments de physiologie’, that this was indeed the proposed title.

16 DPV 464/PQ 290/MT 280.

17 Denis Diderot, LeRêve de d’Alembert, ed. by Colas Duflo (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2002), p. 138; or DPV 17, p. 166. Duflo supplies a footnote reference to a slightly different passage of the Éléments, ‘Il y a certainement dans un même animal trois vies distinctes [etc]’ [there are certainly three distinct life forms in a single animal], although his reference is in fact to a very early draft of the Éléments de physiologie, called the Fragments dont on n’a pu trouver la véritable place, DPV 17, p. 226. In the Éléments de physiologie proper, this passage is DPV 310/PQ 126/MT 134. I discuss the relationship of these drafts to each other below, see the section in Chapter 2 titled ‘From Elements to Fragments’.

18 DPV 337/PQ 154/MT 157.

19 DPV 501/PQ 338/MT 314. Terada points out that Diderot’s source here is Bordeu’s Recherches sur les maladies chroniques (1775), in which he variously writes that ‘le corps vivant’ [the living body] is an ‘assemblage de divers organes’ [assemblage of different organs] and an ‘assemblage de plusieurs organes’ [assemblage of many organs]. Éléments, ed. by Terada, p. 496, Source XI.

20 Buffon, ‘De la nature. Première vue’ [On Nature. First view], in Œuvres, ed. by Stéphane Schmitt and Cédric Crémière (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 2007), p. 985, https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.53421.

21 DPV 516/PQ 361/MT 328.

22 For a discussion of the term ‘animal economy’, see Philippe Huneman, ‘Les théories de l’économie animale et l’émergence de la psychiatrie de l’Éncyclopédie à l’aliénisme’, Psychiatrie Sciences Humaines Neurosciences, 2.2 (2004), 47–60 (p. 47), https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03006001.

23 Théophile de Bordeu, ‘Recherches sur les glandes’ (1759), in Œuvres complètes deBordeu: précédées d’une notice sur sa vie et sur ses ouvrages, ed. by Anthelme Richerand (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1818), vol. 1, p. 208. We discuss this claim and its implications below, in the section titled ‘Major Debates in Physiology: Mechanism and Vitalism’, in Chapter 4.

24 Laurent Versini’s five-volume edition of Diderot’s work only contains this last part: Denis Diderot, Œuvres, ed. by Laurent Versini, 5 vols (Paris: R. Laffont, 1994–97). More recently, Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni’s edition of Diderot’s Œuvres philosophiques reproduces very short extracts from parts 1 and 2, and slightly longer extracts (although also cut) from part 3, and downgrades it to an Appendix to the Rêve. Denis Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. by Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 411–44. We discuss this further below, see Chapter 2.

25 Monographs on Diderot which do substantially engage with or quote from the Éléments de physiologie are: Kurt Ballstadt, Diderot: Natural Philosopher, SVEC 2008:09 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008); Andrew Clark, Diderot’s Part (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315257853; Colas Duflo, Diderot Philosophe (Paris: Champion, 2003); Caroline Jacot-Grapa, Dans le vif du sujet: Diderot, corps et âme (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2009); Jean Mayer, Diderot, homme de science (Rennes: Imprimerie Bretonne, 1959).

26 Naigeon’s Mémoires came out as the twenty-second volume of the Brière edition of Diderot’s Œuvres; all are date-stamped as having been published in 1821, but in fact they came out gradually between 1821–23. See David Adams, Bibliographie des œuvres de Diderot, 1739–1900, 2 vols (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2000), vol. 2, p. 141. Naigeon’s Mémoires therefore came out in 1823, and I will consistently refer to them in that way, despite the prevailing dating to 1821. See below for further information about the precise circumstances of their publication.

27 For the complete list, see Adams, ‘Liste chronologique des éditions’, in his Bibliographie des œuvres de Diderot, 1739–1900 (Ferney-Voltaire: Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 53–76.

28 See Kate E. Tunstall, ‘La fabrique du Diderot-philosophe, 1765–1782’, Les Dossiers du Grihl, 2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/dossiersgrihl.6793, especially paragraphs 25–26; J. Lough, ‘Luneau de Boisjermain v. the Publishers of the Encyclopédie’, SVEC,23 (1963), 115–77; Adams, Bibliographie des œuvres, vol. 2, pp. 211–12.

29 See https://naigeons-diderot.mml.ox.ac.uk/index.htm.

30 I should add though that Motoichi Terada’s 2019 edition gives the relevant pages from Naigeon in an appendix, fully referenced to the Rêve de d’Alembert and to the Éléments de physiologie in its early draft form. This is a question we will return to in Chapter 12.

31 Herbert Dieckmann, ‘L’épopée du Fonds Vandeul’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 85.6 (1985), 963–77.

2. ‘Toutes les imperfections de l’inachèvement’1: The Mystification about the Manuscript Fragments

© Caroline Warman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0199.02

The general view about the Éléments de physiologie, as those who have an overview of Denis Diderot’s production will know, is that they are a fragmentary series of reading notes and scattered thoughts scribbled by the ageing philosopher, and which have some form of undefined but underpinning relation to the Rêve de d’Alembert. This chapter will look closely at these views and try to understand where they come from, given that, as has been suggested and hopefully also demonstrated, at least to some extent, the Éléments de physiologie are not a fragmentary series of reading notes. However, many influential and important voices do maintain that this is the case.

Jean Mayer, authority on Diderot and science, and twice editor (1964, 1987) of the mature version of the Éléments brought to light in the Vandeul archive by Herbert Dieckmann in 1948, states in his book Diderot, homme de science (1959) that the Éléments de physiologie display ‘toutes les imperfections de l’inachèvement’ [all the flaws of incompletion].2 His 1987 edition would implicitly disagree with that earlier statement, stating that ‘Diderot avait poussé le travail jusqu’à l’achèvement’ [Diderot’s work on it had got to the point of completion], although he continued to maintain that the Éléments ‘souffrent visiblement d’une documentation scientifique encombrante et mal dominée’ [visibly suffer from a cumbersome and poorly mastered amount of scientific documentation]3 and that we should not be unduly concerned if Diderot contradicts himself as these are only his reading notes.4The preeminent historian of the eighteenth-century life sciences, Jacques Roger, did not consider this work a work at all, but rather, ‘[des] notes de travail rassemblées sous le titre d’Éléments de physiologie’ [working notes brought together under the title of Elements of physiology].5 Roger goes so far as to say that he prefers to use the earlier incomplete draft which we call the Saint-Petersburg version after the archive where it is held. The reason? Because the more mature version ‘tend à masquer, sinon les grandes influences subies, du moins les chapitres où chacune d’entre elles s’est plus précisément exercée’ [tends to mask, if not its major influences, at least the areas where they have been most specifically influential].6 His judgement—that the Éléments is a bundle of working notes and not a finished work—becomes the reason that he cannot use the final version, precisely because it is not just a bundle of working notes. He thereby reveals—consciously or not—that what he really values is what makes his job as a source-tracing historian of science easier, that is, early drafts in their magpie state. The issue is not that he should prefer the early draft but that he should define the completed work in relation to that preference, and thereby considerably deform it. And it would not matter that he was biased and wrong in his judgement if he and Mayer hadn’t had considerable and persisting influence.

In the Pléiade volume of Diderot’s Œuvres philosophiques (2010),the Éléments de physiologie do not appear in their own right but are subordinated as an appendix of thirty pages of cherry-picked extracts connected to the Rêve de d’Alembert. Eminent Diderot scholars Michel Delon and Barbara de Negroni justify this decision by calling the Éléments de physiologie a ‘texte technique’ [technical text], and by explaining that it provides information about what medical sources Diderot was using when composing the Rêve de d’Alembert.7 And indeed, the thirty pages of extracts we find in the Pléiade volume of the Œuvres philosophiques hardly contribute to making the Éléments seem like a completed work in its own right; on the contrary, they sustain the myth of the Éléments’ fragmentary character by producing a newly fragmented version. The editors are not without precedent in only publishing extracts: Laurent Versini did the same thing in his 1994 volume of Diderot’s philosophical works. Versini’s fragments are explicitly chosen according to criteria of omission: he omits what he considers to be tiresome descriptions and lists of anatomy and physiology, which are, he says, out of place in ‘une collection d’œuvres philosophiques ou littéraires’ [a collection of philosophical or literary works].8 When Delon and Negroni call it a ‘texte technique’, therefore, they are simply confirming Versini’s view that it just does not suit our taste (or come up to our standards) as scholars of literature and thought.

Between, on the one hand, the historians of science who declare that the Éléments are incomplete and/or nothing more than a bundle of working notes, dismissing the completed version because it gets in the way of source-hunting, and, on the other, literary scholars who accept and relay these opinions while also adding to the general rejection of this work with further damning judgements about its tiresome technical descriptions and implied lack of literary quality, the Éléments de physiologie has not recently stood much chance of establishing a reputation on its own terms. In the case of this text more than any of Diderot’s others, the disciplinary specialisations and identities of the modern university system have meant that it falls between stools, failing to conform to our various expectations of style or content. The story about its fragmentary nature, however, has nothing to do with modern institutional specificities: it is a much older one.

The story about the fragments is generally traced to and substantiated by the account given by Diderot’s literary executor, Jacques-André Naigeon. In his Mémoires historiques et philosophiques sur la vie et les ouvrages de Denis Diderot, published posthumously in 1823 (although dated to 1821, like the rest of the Brière edition, of which this was the last volume), Naigeon wrote that Diderot never completed his work on physiology and only left ‘quelques matériaux épars et sans aucun ordre entre eux’ [a few scattered materials with no internal order], further alleging that these scattered materials would only make sense ‘aux yeux du philosophe assez instruit pour couver les idées neuves et fécondes dont Diderot a semé ses recherches’ [to the philosopher who is sufficiently knowledgeable to appreciate the new and fertile ideas that Diderot planted in his work].9 He also emphasised Diderot’s debt to the great physiologist Albrecht von Haller, saying he had read Haller’s work on Physiologie twice through ‘la plume à la main’ [pen in hand]: this has always been understood to tell us that Diderot’s pen was ready to note down whatever he found useful in the ‘source’ text, and therefore that he is in someway subservient to it.10 This is despite the fact that it could just as easily be read as meaning that he considerably corrected or responded to or amplified the source text, as he famously did in the case of the Observations surHemsterhuis, the Réfutation d’Helvétius or just generally.

The ninth volume of the great and first Œuvres complètes edition of the 1870s, undertaken by Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux and based on the archive of Diderot manuscripts which had been sent to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg after his death in 1784, contains the first print-published version of the Éléments de physiologie in its entirety, although as scholars would later discover, the so-called St Petersburg manuscript was a copy of a relatively early draft which Diderot would subsequently substantially reorganise and add to. In his introduction to the St Petersburg version, Jules Assézat closely paraphrases Naigeon’s description of the Éléments, although he does not say so. Diderot, he wrote, ‘lisait la plume à la main tous les livres qui lui parvenaient, et il en tirait ce qui pouvait l’éclairer dans ses recherches. Ce sont ces notes, intitulées Éléments de physiologie, qui forment un volume in-4° de la collection des manuscrits de la bibliothèque de l’Ermitage, que nous publions [...]’ [read all the books that he could get hold of, pen in hand, and took from them anything that helped advance his work. It is these notes, entitled Elements of physiology, forming a quarto volume in the manuscript collection of the Hermitage library, which we are publishing here].11 The fact that Assézat, without knowing it, only had access to an inferior version, adds a further complicating layer to the story, in that Naigeon’s account would have seemed more accurately to describe the manuscript he worked from, although even that is hardly fragmentary, producing a substantial 190 printed pages. The most complete version we now know of, and the one which current editions use, was rediscovered by the great Diderot scholar Herbert Dieckmann in 1948 in the collection of manuscripts which passed to Diderot’s daughter, Angélique Vandeul, at his death in 1784, and thereafter down through her family. Dieckmann himself had written an important article in 1938 examining Naigeon’s treatment of the Rêve de d’Alembert and the Physiologie in his Mémoires historiques et philosophiques: he was the first scholar to bring to light that those Mémoires in fact quote verbatim from both these works.12 His preference was clearly for the Rêve, which, given that he, like Assézat, was at that point working with the earlier version, is perhaps not surprising.13 Dieckmann’s consistent assumption is that the Éléments de Physiologie was, or was planned to be, part of a longer version of the Rêve. Naigeon’s story of, on the one hand, the disordered manuscript fragments, and, on the other, the reading notes, persist in assessments of the Éléments today, as we have seen in the influential accounts of Jean Mayer and Jacques Roger quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Naigeon’s assertions about fragments and reading notes therefore come full circle, not only being repeated as authoritative evidence in every introductory presentation of the Physiologie that exists, and by every one of the critics mentioned thus far, but to some extent also used to define what the Physiologie is, and therefore what it is not, thereby dismissing the actual evidence of the text itself.

It’s an odd situation, and one in which Naigeon’s account has been decisive. Even Paolo Quintili’s and Motoichi Terada’s editions of the Éléments de physiologie (2004 and 2019 respectively), both of which forcefully argue for the importance of this late text, continue to plough the same furrow, quoting Naigeon, adding further information about Diderot’s medical sources.14 There are very few scholarly pages which look at this text on its own terms, as opposed to as some sort of basket containing a mish-mash of Diderot’s medical interests. This is because of what Naigeon said in his Mémoires historiques et philosophiques in 1823, and which every critic since has quoted as the gospel truth, compounded with this issue of the two very different stages of manuscript completion, their staggered publication dates, and the fact that Assézat’s confirmation of Naigeon’s story, although based on an incomplete draft, has nonetheless influenced later scholars from Dieckmann to the present, all of whom continue to relay this same account. The result is a sort of received wisdom about the Physiologie which means that when it is mentioned—if it is mentioned in non-Diderot-specific literature at all—it is as an incomplete text, a pipe dream of Diderot’s. That’s what Jean Starobinski called it in passing in his otherwise inspiring study of the intellectual history of the twinned concept of Action et Réaction.15

So if this story started with Naigeon, did he simply get it wrong? If he is the source for this story, and if the story appears to be starkly out of tune with the textual evidence, then we need to look again at his Mémoires historiques et philosophiques to see exactly what he says. He devotes 100 pages out of 416—that is, just about a quarter of the whole—to discussing Diderot’s views on physiology. Of these 100 pages, 83—presented as a description or paraphrase—are almost entirely verbatim quotation from the Rêve and the Physiologie, extremely carefully assembled and sewn together. It’s about a third Rêve, and two thirds Physiologie.16 The more substantial borrowing is from the Physiologie not the Rêve, and there are fifty pages of quotation from it, which is obviously only a small part of the whole, but nonetheless, not merely a few scattered fragments. Just to be clear, in his Mémoires historiques et philosophiques, Naigeon describes Diderot’s entire production, from the texts that were print-published and known during Diderot’s lifetime such as the Lettre sur les aveugles, the Encyclopédie articles or the plays, to those with a limited manuscript circulation through the journal Correspondance littéraire such as the art criticism of the Salons, the fictional travelogue the Supplément au voyage de Bougainville or the novels La Religieuseand Jacques le fataliste, or only in uncirculated manuscript, such as the searing social satire of the Neveu de Rameau. Yet there are only two texts from which he quotes substantially, the Rêve and the Physiologie, and of those two, the Physiologie takes up twice as much space as the Rêve. Of all Diderot’s production, therefore, it is the one to which Naigeon gives most visibility, and which he must consider to be the most important. There is a stark difference therefore between the story he tells about the scattered fragments and reading notes and the way in which he prioritises this text for quotation above all others. It looks as if he’s being deliberately misleading. Why?

We only begin to get an answer to this question when we look at some of the paratexts and also at the different versions of the Physiologie.

From Elements to Fragments

Before returning to Paris from St Petersburg in 1774, Diderot had a new version of the Rêve de d’Alembert copied for Catherine II. It gave new names to the interlocutors—instead of Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Julie de Lespinasse and Théophile de Bordeu, we have the playwright Nicolas Boindin, the grammarian César Chesneau Dumarsais, Mlle Boucher (daughter of painter François Boucher), and the philosophe Julien Offray de La Mettrie. The manuscript, entitled Les deux Dialogues, is fairly substantial (113 folios) and presents an intermediary version of the text we now know—more developed than the first drafts of the Rêve de d’Alembert but not yet in its final form.17 It was preceded by an ‘Avertissement’ [Foreword] in the form of a letter directly addressing Her Imperial Majesty which explained that the original Dialogues had had to be destroyed because the original players insisted on having their fictional counterparts eradicated. This is the first instantiation of the myth of the destruction of the Rêve in response to d’Alembert and Lespinasse’s supposed deep displeasure at featuring in the text.18 The ‘avertissement’ explains that the reassembled version ‘n’est qu’une statue brisée, mais si brisée, qu’il fut presque impossible, même à l’artiste de la réparer’ [nothing but a shattered statue, so very shattered that not even the artist could put it back together] and further that there remained ‘un grand nombre de pièces dont il [l’artiste] ne put reconnaître la véritable place’ [a large number of pieces whose proper place not even [the artist] could find again]. These pieces were all gathered at the end of the Deux dialogues and presented as ready for reintegration, despite not being from the original Rêve at all.19 There are thirty pages of them, in the form of aphoristic remarks about physiology and sensation, gathered under thematic headings and entitled, in explicit echo of the ‘avertissement’, ‘Fragments dont on ne put reconnaître la véritable place’ [Fragments whose proper place could not be recognised].20 This is a recognisable early draft of the Éléments de physiologie.21

So the first instance of the Éléments de physiologie being claimed to be fragmentary comes from Diderot himself, here, in 1774. Insofar as it introduces a masked version of the Rêve, masked not least because of the fears he expresses in the ‘Avertissement’ for his peace, fortune, life, honour, and reputation should it ever be leaked or published, we can see why Diderot might want to call them ‘fragments’: it’s part of the disguise. Insofar also as these supposed Fragments are indeed a very early draft, we can see that it makes sense: they are incomplete, although the time sequence is back to front: they are not relics of what has been but seeds of what will be. But there is another game going on here too, of which we begin to catch a glimpse when we discover that this specific ‘Avertissement’ exists in two further manuscript versions and is clearly therefore not an incidental but a crucial part of the text. The second version of the ‘Avertissement’, now in the Fonds Vandeul, again introduces the Rêve de d’Alembert, again alleging that ‘Ce n’est qu’une statue brisée, mais si brisée qu’il fut presque impossible à l’artiste de la réparer. Il est resté autour de lui nombre de fragments dont il n’a pu retrouver la véritable place’ [this is nothing but a shattered statue, so very shattered that not even the artist could put it back together. Around it there remain a number of fragments whose proper place not even (the artist) could find again].22A subsequent, and third, version was, like the first, sent to Catherine, this time after Diderot’s death, along with a complete set of his manuscripts, but this one did not introduce the Rêve. Instead, it directly preceded the first complete draft of the Éléments de physiologie, now known as the St Petersburg version, and first printed in the Assézat-Tourneux edition of Diderot’s complete works, as we have mentioned.23 By this point, these supposed fragments were 190 pages long. So there is a conscious repeated connection on the part of Diderot between this introduction with its invocation of the shattered sculpture and the ‘fragments dont [l’artiste] n’a pu reconnaîtrela véritable place’.24 We see this conscious connection underlined even more explicitly when we set the ‘Avertissement’ alongside the opening pages of the Éléments de physiologie (in both the St Petersburg and Vandeul versions).25

La chaîne des êtres n’est pas interrompue par la diversité des formes. La forme n’est souvent qu’un masque qui trompe, et le chaînon qui paraît manquer réside peut-être dans un être connu, à qui les progrès de l’anatomie comparée n’ont encore pu assigner sa véritable place.26

The chain of being is not interrupted by the diversity of its forms. Form is often nothing other than a deceptive mask, and the link which seems to be missing may perhaps be found in a known being, which the advances in comparative anatomy have not yet managed to assign to its proper place.

The textual echo between the ‘Avertissement’’s ‘fragments dont on n’a pu reconnaître la véritable place’ and the ‘chaînons’ whose place in the ‘chaîne des êtres’ the progress of research in comparative anatomy ‘n’[a] pas encore pu assigner sa véritable place’ is glaring, the repetition drawing attention to the phrasing. What is Diderot’s point?27 Might he be suggesting an implicit parallel between text and content, and emphasising replicating structures of seeming fragmentation in a context of incomplete knowledge?

In the Vandeul manuscript, the ‘Avertissement’we have been considering in its three iterations is removed and replaced with a new one which retains the claim about the fragments but sets it within a completely different framing narrative:

Éléments de Physiologie ١٧٧٨

AVERTISSEMENT

En lisant les ouvrages du Baron de Haller Mr ***conçut le projet de rédiger des Éléments de physiologie. Pendant plusieurs mois il recueillit ce qui lui parut propre ou essentiel à entrer dans ces Éléments. Les notes et extraits étaient sur des feuillets épars et isolés. La mort ayant empêché Mr*** d’exécuter le projet, dont il n’avait fait que préparer les matériaux, on a cru devoir les réunir en une seule copie. Quelque incomplets qu’ils soient, et malgré le défaut d’ordre qu’on n’a pu y mettre, on pense que le public recevra avec plaisir ces fragments, et qu’un jour quelque personne entreprendra d’après le plan et les idées de Mr *** l’ouvrage qu’il n’a fait qu’ébaucher.28