“Diderot and materialist theories of the self”

Résumé En

Early 20th-century critiques of materialism (often assimilated to ‘mechanistic materialism’) frequently emphasized that the materialist conception of the world eradicates any presence of agency, selfhood, intentionality – the features by which a human being, and indeed an animal shows signs that ‘someone is home’, as Daniel Dennett phrased it. According to this critique (which runs roughly from Husserl to Ruyer and Sartre, and onto some versions of post-war anti-naturalism) materialism is at best the facilitator of scientific practice with its quantitative, ‘third-person’ approach to personhood, and at worst a kind of ontological legitimator of dehumanization. As one commentator on Diderot put it, “Materialism as a working philosophy, used as a tool in the scientific investigation of the material universe, is appropriate and highly effective. Intended for the objective analysis and description of the world of externals, it yields disastrous results when applied to the inner, subjective world of human nature, human thought, and human emotions” (Hill 1968, 90). Here the historian of early modern materialism has a word to say, for in contrast to the above views, there were indeed various attempts to bridge the gap between selfhood/agency and the world of Nature and naturalist explanations (and additionally one can see that normative judgments with regard to what constitutes ‘inner life’ versus ‘external nature’ are present also in the ‘scholarly’ mode of writing). I will seek to reconstruct two possible responses to the “disastrous results” challenge, both of which were present in French materialism – notably in Diderot – and are compatible although independent of one another: (1) a weakly Spinozist position in which absolute privacy is denied and the self is presented as belonging to the world of external relations, such that no one fact, including supposedly private facts, is only accessible to a single person; (2) an ‘animalist’ reconstruction of selfhood as a sense of “organic unity” which could be a condition for biological individuality, but also, one which builds on the foundation of animal life. As Diderot wrote in response to a manuscript by the Dutch natural philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis, in 1774: “Grant me that the animal can feel. I will take care of the rest” (Diderot 1975,- XXIV, 299).