Diderot's Part
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Diderot's Part

Andrew H. Clark

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eBook - ePub

Diderot's Part

Andrew H. Clark

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Drawing upon the rich heterogeneity of Denis Diderot's texts-whether scientific, aesthetic, philosophic or literary-Andrew Clark locates and examines an important epistemological shift both in Diderot's oeuvre and in the eighteenth century more generally. In Western Europe during the 1750s, the human body was reconceptualized as physiologists began to emphasize the connections, communication, and relationships among relatively autonomous somatic parts and an animated whole. This new conceptualization was part of a larger philosophical and epistemological shift in the relationship of part to whole, as discovered in that of bee to swarm; organ to body; word to phrase; dissonant chord to harmonic progression; article to encyclopedia; and individual citizen to body politic. Starting from Diderot's concept of the body as elaborated from the physiological research and speculation of contemporaries such as Haller and Bordeu, the author investigates how the logic of an unstable relationship of part to whole animates much of Diderot's writing in genres ranging from art criticism to theatre to philosophy of science. In particular, Clark examines the musical figure of dissonance, a figure used by Diderot himself, as a useful theoretical model to give insight into these complex relations. This study brings a fresh approach to the classic question of whether Diderot's work represents a consistent point of view or a series of ruptures and changes of position.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351944298

Chapter 1
Autonomous Fibers and Secreting Organs

We judge the life of Elements by the life of crude masses. Maybe they are entirely different entities. One believes that there is only one single polyp; why shouldn’t all of nature be of the same kind? When the polyp is divided into a hundred thousand parts, the primitive, generative animal is no longer, but all of its principles are still alive.
Diderot to Sophie de Volland. Grandval, 14 October 1759
Soranus, following the example of Hippocrates, could tell if a woman was barren or fertile. Their secret was the following: to put a clove of peeled garlic wrapped in wool, in the vagina, at night, when the woman went to bed. If in the morning when she awoke, her mouth tasted of garlic, he considered that she was able to conceive.
Denis Diderot, “Conception,” Eléments de physiologie
On 23 April 1744, Le Breton, Briasson, David l’aîné, and Durand, the four future booksellers/publishers of Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s (1717-83) Encyclopédie (1751-72), obtained the royal privilege to translate Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary, Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chemistry and Botany (3 vols, London, 1743-45). The translation—Dictionnaire universel de Médecine et de Chirurgie, published between 1746-48—was Diderot’s first major literary employment.1 It was also his introduction to the study of medicine beyond the little he had learned about anatomy, physiology, and the ancients “au college.”2 While working on the Dictionnaire, Diderot studied anatomy with the surgeon Cesar Verier, author of Abrégé de l’anatomie du corps humain (1743), and later with his eclectic neighbor from the rue de l’Estrapade, Marie Marguerite Biheron (1719-95), who had an impressive collection of colored wax bodies and body parts that she used in her eight-day-long intensive anatomy course. These courses and the dictionary project, however, gave Diderot only cursory knowledge of medicine and science (Diderot, homme de science, p. 30).3
Nonetheless, either from a growing curiosity sparked by this introduction to the study of the body or from the requisite needs of the massive encyclopedia project, which he and D’Alembert undertook as chief editors beginning on 16 october 1747, Diderot spent the rest of his life avidly studying anatomy, chemistry, medicine, the natural sciences, physics, and physiology. It is also rumored that he worked on the Elements de physiologie (1778 [1765-84])4 up until a few months before his death (Jean Mayer, “Introduction,” Eléments de physiologie, p. xvi).5 He conversed frequently with medical and scientific scholars (Tronchin, Petit, Buffon, and others) and participated in the important medical debates of his time. The largest single profession represented by the collaborators of the Encyclopédie was medicine. Of the 125 contributors, 22 were medical doctors and surgeons (Proust, p. 35).6 And, as Diderot humorously stated himself, “There are no books I read more readily than medical treatises; no one whose conversation interests me more than physicians; but this is when I am feeling well” (Elements, DPV, XVII:510).7
In all of his texts, Diderot questions the body’s role in the production, reception, experience, control, and questioning of knowledge. He is equally fascinated by the question of life, for him, synonymous with activity and movement, from its most simple to complex forms. He examines the opened body and all of nature to reveal the heterogeneity of living things, their origins, and their various forms and levels of connectivity. Nature, he posits, is an oversized version of the tiny freshwater Hydra that the Swiss Abraham Trembley (1710-84) rediscovered in 1737 and that was at the center of the debates on the origin of life in the eighteenth century—a vital regenerative mass made of autonomous parts.8
By the early 1750s, Diderot had already begun to acquire a formidable scientific knowledge that would dramatically inform his texts and philosophical positions.9 In particular, early scientific and philosophical inquiries such as Promenade du sceptique, Mémoires sur différents sujets de mathématiques (1748), Lettre sur les aveugles, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, and Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature are texts in which Diderot uses contemporary scientific discoveries, studies, and questions as well as aesthetic debates to formulate an alternative to past and current scientific methods, epistemologies, and cosmologies. Embracing neither the reigning esprit du système of Cartesian logic nor the nominalism of Baconian empiricism, neither the regularity of Newtonian physics nor the tenuous psychologism of Lockean sensualism and Berkeley’s idealism, Diderot looked increasingly to experimental science, art, and fiction to interpret as well as express his notions of vitality, materialism, and the chaotic universe.10
During the 1740s and 1750s, when Diderot was working on the aforesaid texts, several scientists conducted physiological experiments that challenged existing theories of the body’s structure, function, and organization and its organs as well as the scientific methods used to substantiate these theories and experiments. Two scientists who participated in the writing of the Eneyelopédie conducted significant experiments: Albrecht von Haller on sensibility and irritability or contractility and Theophile de Bordeu (1722-76) on gland secretion. In this chapter, I focus principally on the changing relation between part and whole engendered by these experiments and others in the second half of the eighteenth century. I also examine Diderot’s adaptation of these experiments to his physiological and aesthetic concerns. I argue that Bordeu’s and Haller’s experiments helped Diderot to articulate scientifically a conception of the part as relatively autonomous with respect to a whole.
When Diderot speculates in the Elements de physiologie on medicine and physiology, in addition to emphasizing the autonomy of each gland, muscle fiber, and organ by building on the work of Haller and Bordeu, he also describes medical experimentation in a language that positions it paradigmatically, not hierarchically, within discourses of knowledge. Moreover, his medical and physiological description itself shifts among disparate modes of inquiry: Competing scientific positions, myths, anecdotes, experiments, and speculations all inhabit the same syntactical space. This accumulative parataxis accords the part a status above that of a mere proof of the static whole. Meaning is produced by the continual collaboration, reformulation, and expression of the various notes, clauses, and words “that all beings have an infinite number of relations with each other through the qualities they share; and that it is a certain assemblage of qualities that characterizes and distinguishes them” (Indiscreet Jewels, p. 184-6 [DPV, III:183], translation modified). In emphasizing the multiplicity, movement, horizontality, and animated topologies present in the formation of everything from organisms and bodies to ideas, artworks, theatrical performances, and texts, Diderot envisions a new somatic, dramatic, artistic, and textual practice. The relative autonomy that he accords to the part requires, however, that the whole be rethought as well. In the Elements de physiologie, Diderot reflects on the impossibility both of defining a whole as the sum of its parts and of using parts to define a whole: “There is only one way to know the truth, which is to proceed by parts, and conclude only after a full, exact enumeration. Even then, this method is not infallible; truth can belong so profoundly to the whole image that one is unable to assert or deny anything based on the rigorous details of the parts” (DPV, XVII:464). Gillispie also places emphasis on an idea of the whole in Diderot that is not a sum of its parts: “For nature [for Diderot] is the combination of its elements and not just an aggregate” (The Edge of Objectivity, p. 190).11 while Bordeu and Haller’s various experiments encourage an understanding of the autonomy of the part, the works of the Scottish physicians John Brown (1735-88) and Robert Whytt (1714– 66) play an instrumental role in the conception of a dynamic whole not vitiated by its decomposition into parts. Diderot embraces both positions in rethinking the relation of part to whole.
To address the changing economy of part and whole and its place in Diderot’s scientific thought and writing, I examine a number of scientific theories, experiments, and debates with which Diderot was engaged. In the first section, I analyze François Boucher’s Triomphe de Vénus (1740) in order to consider the connections between the underlying questions that motivate aesthetics and scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century and to situate Diderot’s work in the context of these questions. In the second section, “Sensibility and Irritability,” I contextualize these two physiological properties in the scientific discourse of the eighteenth century and examine their contribution to Diderot’s understanding of the relation between part and whole and, in particular, the relative autonomy of the part. The third section examines Whytt’s and Brown’s conceptions of a dynamic whole. The fourth section explores the idea of continuity in art and the universe and the possibility for difference in a continuous spectrum, all questions raised by Boucher’s painting. This section also examines Diderot’s interpretation of these questions in the context of biological missing links (the “Chain of Being”), normativity, sympathy, and sexual generation. The autonomy of irritable muscle fibers visible in Haller’s experiments plays a vital role in eighteenth-century theories of organicism. In the fifth section, I consider these theories of organicism, in particular, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s (1707–88) molecules organiques, Bordeu’s experiments on secretion, and his theory of organicism and sensibility, which Diderot appropriates, to address the formation of physiological and artistic assemblages. Having established the theoretical and physiological framework within which Diderot explores the relation of part and whole, in the final sections I provide close readings of the sections on the fiber and the nerve in Diderot’s Elements de physiologie. I argue that Diderot extends the idea of the relative autonomy of the part and the dynamic whole visible in various life forms to the construction, organization, and interpretation of texts and works of art.
images
Figure 1 François Boucher: Le Triomphe de Venus, 1740

Difference in a Continuous Spectrum

Many works of the Rococo painter François Boucher (1703-70) exemplify and signal aesthetically a profound conceptual change that took place in the eighteenth century. Boucher’s paintings bring the eighteenth-century discourse of continuity, in all of its ambiguity, to the realm of flesh, sensation, and the body. Although Boucher’s work reflects the very changes that interested Diderot, Diderot loathed Boucher for his artificiality, commercialism, and lack of precision—“I defy you to find a single blade of grass in any of his landscapes”—hypocrisy, and moral depravity—“I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression, and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. […] Out of the Salon, out of the Salon” (Diderot on Art I, pp. 22-3, 26 [DPV, XIV:54, 61]) (See Figure 1).
In Le Triomphe de Venus, completed in 1740, bodies and graceful erotic nudes intermingle with dolphins, putti, water, and mist.12 No object is clearly delineated: The water, clouds, floating fabric, and rocks in the right-hand corner of the painting fuse together as mere variances in gradation of color that give the bodies and landscape a certain vibrancy and interconnectivity. All the forms and colors in the painting are continuous. Even sexual identity is breached or made ambiguous by the effeminate rendering of the males and the erotic positioning of animals common in Rococo painting
It is precisely this mingling of forms and colors that Diderot keenly dislikes in Boucher’s paintings when he begins to criticize Boucher in his correspondence and
Salons:
And then there’s such a confusion of objects piled one on top of the other, so poorly disposed, so motley, that we’re dealing not so much with the pictures of a rational being as with the dreams of a madman. It’s of him that it was written:
… velut œgri somnia, varnœ
Fingentur species: ut net pes, nec caput… (DOA, I:23 [DPV, XIV:54])13
He criticizes Boucher’s clouds, saying they resemble a woman’s toilette or painted face more than they do nature; he questions the loose moral atmosphere in which goddesses and prostitutes look the same; he thinks Boucher’s compositions are garrulous, confused, and blurred; finally, Diderot asks the same question Fontenelle asked of the sonata, which was to be a centerpiece of the Querelle des Bouffons: “Sonata, what do you want from me? Painting, what do you want from me?” (DOA, I:24 [DPV, XIV:56]).14 To Diderot, Boucher’s paintings are muddled by too many harmonies, their lack of virtue.
Diderot insists on continuity in both his aesthetic and scientific writings: “In art, as in nature, nothing happens by leaps; nihil per saltum; or else one is punished by making either holes of darkness or circles of light, and cutting out the image from the picture” (PD, p. 805). This continuity, he insists, should not leave confusion between forms in the medium of painting or in the body. Each form must show its subordination to a unity and its difference; each form must be distinguished from the other elements in the painting. While continuity is essential to an aesthetic composition, according to Diderot, the connections must be so fine as to be invisible. Moreover, we can never know or see more than an infinitesimal part of this universal continuity.15 What he dislikes in Boucher is the representation of a continuity in which transitions are highly...

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