The
Washington Post has a compelling review of Andrew. S. Curran's
Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. I feel I must read it sometime soon although I hope I'm not just taken down a garden path by the reviewer...
An excerpt from the WaPo piece:
During a life that spanned most of the century, 1713 to 1784, Diderot wrote or edited a prodigious amount of literature, much of it published posthumously. In “Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely,” a narrative sustained with appealing clarity and energy, Curran reveals how this son of devoutly Catholic parents came to question the existence of God and how, from that radical premise, Diderot went on to question the legitimacy of the established church, the monarchy, sexual mores, aristocratic privileges, the slave trade and European colonization.
Not surprisingly, some of his writings were burned, and others were placed on the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books. Accused of heresy for his first major publication, “Pensées philosophiques” (“Philosophical Thoughts”), he spent a few months in prison. To protect himself and his manuscripts from the authorities, he often hid out in shadier sections of Paris. At times, he considered leaving France for a more tolerant haven elsewhere. The wonder is that he escaped execution and survived to die a natural death at the age of 70, while reaching across his dining table for another helping of stewed cherries.
Well all right, I admit the stewed cherries reference might have influenced me. Nonetheless the book's on my reading list now and cheating its way near top.
I still think I might first read another book in which Diderot figures, although in this one he claims perhaps only half the author's attention. It is
Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment, a dual-biography approach of Robert Zaretsky to the fascinating meetings of the then elderly, philosophically inclined Denis Diderot and a then middle-aged political and cultural activist Catherine the Great. They met forty times in private at her quarters in the Hermitage over four months as winter set in during 1773. She had much earlier offered him Russia's protection when in the course of Diderot's contribution of thousands of entries for the French
Encylopédie, he had run afoul of censors who in the 1760s had threatened to stop its publication altogether over some of its focus on sciences v. religion. It would seem the meetings of these two intellectual and cultural leaders stirred very different hopes and fears for the Enlightenment's path forward, in the respective thoughts of Voltaire and of Prussia's Frederick the Great. Even writing this note reminds me to nudge this book towards top of my list. At the very least it will shift the timeline of my interest in the clash of ideas away from those of the 21st century for a bit (and that I won't mind at all, come to think of it). What is that old saying... "a change is as good as a rest."
