@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

So was Diderot arrested? Yes, he was.

But first it has to be said that the main French intellectual enterprise of the eighteenth century was the “Encyclopédie”, that came into existence under the supervision of Diderot.

The French “Encyclopédie”, as it stands today on the shelves of library treasure rooms is an enormous work consisting of seventeen volumes of letterpress and eleven of engravings, plus four volumes of supplement, two of index and one of supplementary plates.

Yet at the start the “Encyclopédie” was planned to be no more than a translation in four volumes of Ephraim Chambers’ “Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences”, a very successful work first published in 1728. Diderot was principally responsible for the expansion from the smaller project to the larger one. Together with the mathematician d’Alembert he was asked by a group of publishers to take the lead in the project as chief editor. The job involved not only the translation of a host of articles from Chambers’ “Cyclopaedia”, combined with much planning for a greatly extended project, but carried with it concomitant necessities of looking for collaborators and directing them in their assignments.  

So at the moment of his arrest, Diderot was a very busy man…

In the early morning when the policemen knocked at his door, Diderot had no choice but to let them in. They searched his apartment, but all they found were two printed copies of “Letter on the Blind” – not the handwritten manuscript that they needed to prove that Diderot was the author. Nonetheless, they arrested Diderot and brought him in for questioning.

Diderot was locked in a tower in the grim castle at Vincennes, six miles east of Paris. Under interrogation he denied that he was the anonymous author of  “Letter on the Blind” and “Philosophic Thoughts”. The police also questioned his publishers, who told a different story. It was decided to hold Diderot in the tower until he confessed…

The publishers addressed a petition to the head of police in which they declared that ‘the detention of M. Diderot, the only man of letters we know of capable of so vast an enterprise and who alone possesses the key of the whole operation, can bring about our ruin…’

Still, nothing happened. The days passed, in which Diderot wrote a great number of letters to the authorities, all in vain. Although they let him out of his tiny room in the tower and allowed him to receive visits from his wife and others, he did not know what would happen to him next. Perhaps he would be left to meditate infinitely longer than he desired. Every day the jailer brought Diderot two candles. But he, who got up and went to bed with the sun, had no use for them and tried to return them. ‘Keep them, monsieur’, cried the jailer; ‘you have too many of them now but they’ll come in very handy in the winter!’

Then after three disturbing weeks, Diderot confessed. He wrote: ‘I therefore avow to you, as my worthy protector, what the tediousness of a prison and all the imaginable penalties would never have made me say to my judge, that the “Philosophic thoughts”, the “Indiscreet Jewels” and the “Letter on the Blind” are excesses that slipped out of me; but that I can on the other hand pledge my honour (and I have some) that they will be the last, and that they are the only one.”

This confession got results: after three months of imprisonment, on 3 November 1749, Diderot was released.

So, did Diderot’s confession make him a coward or is it only human…What would you have done, in his shoes, at that time…

continues from here

It is almost impossible to live life in touch with what is really happening, to be fully aware of the context of your own impact on the world and everything that impacts you. Mostly we just react to events or act out desires or those ridiculous fantasies that are our plans. The space we select for our habitation, essentially, is a private space, not a oneness with it all, probably because the very notion of identity depends on restricting consciousness to avoid a fear of dissolving insignificance, the state we fear the very most. In their own soap opera, everyone is a significant player.

That’s a lot of ideas for one paragraph but it’s the end of the first building block of whatever thesis I am groping for here and so I must pause to expand on it instead of skipping along as a I usually do, from one challenging statement to another. No, it isn’t your fault that you only half get what I’ve been talking about so far; it’s like that because I am taking us to the barriers of the box that retains us, using touch as a symbol and a doorway because it is a word that cannot be thought, spoken or experienced without the all-important two-way osmosis with the environment without which it means nothing. You touch the world; the world touches you. The world is to all extents and purposes real and largely incapable of being changed by you. It doesn’t care what you think and the tree in the forest does not cease to exist because no glorified ape happens to be stumbling out of his sauna into the snow. What exists is what exists; you have to accept that before you stop crawling and begin to toddle, long before you begin to twaddle and start the long decline into pretence, bitterness, self-centredness and bitter irony that is human adulthood so far.

By the way, I know that this doesn’t refer to you and you find my tone somewhat abusive. You have all told me, over again and thousands times, that you are happy with life or that your range of vision is so sophisticated and you are contented or challenged but winning or whatever twaddle you like to say. But I have seen your works and your structures, your relationships and your touch and I try to believe you, oh yes I do, so this bitter and disrespectful stuff written here is for some other people not as gifted, successful, popular, mature, wise and lovable as you are… I know you think your shit is together; you told me, as I say, in almost every single conversation of my life… And yet I have not ceased and am not corrected.

But anyway, for that other person who is not you, if you want to know what you hate about this, here is a recap of the first stumbling steps I have taken so far in the investigation called Touch.

Step one: the world is real, very real, and completely indifferent to your opinion of it, largely indifferent to your desires, actions and quest for happiness, totally unaffected by what you think, utterly despoiled by the way we as a species have so far touched it with our greedy, exploitative, cruel, violent, cunning, enslaving, arrogant and as far as possible smug, complacent, lazy and unaware little consciousness, deliberately restricting the view so we may centre all outcomes on Me. That’s how people currently are, though let’s hope it’s not immutable or we really are doomed.

And, actually, all of that stuff we think is the illusion. The real reality is that we are completely vulnerable to incoming reality from a world beyond our capture by understanding and that for us it is a matter of personal, spiritual and species life and death how our reciprocal touch on life responds to that. We must do better, much better, starting soon.

And so, despite all the pretty baubles of bourgeois art, eastern mysticism, Native American oneness with nature, the marvels of technology and science, the steady progress from brutal slavery to control by meme and advertising – despite psychoanalysis and the sixties and feminism and environmentalism and management training, yoga, massage, Desiderata and Bob Dylan – we have so far failed in spectacular fashion.