Letter on the Blind and the Outline of Diderot’s Philosophy of Materialism

Abstract

Diderot’s way of writing and treating of the themes left a unique imprint in the history of philosophical thought. Letter on the Blind, one of the masterpieces of his work, reveals a specificity of his philosophical discourse: perspicacious, unseizable, defying limitations. On the ideological level it is identifiable as an “ontology of indeterminism” which blurs the boundaries between different categories of being and calls into question any dogmatic views – including materialism – that seek to acquire a sense of world events. In difference to Holbach that derived a dogmatic position from atomistic combinatorics Diderot’s philosophy of materialism does not insist on binding conceptual categories of order and necessity; the “vast ocean of matter” spontaneously generates abundance of new and unpredictable forms. Concepts of species and individuals are only artificial designations with which our thought draws a silhouette on the otherwise non-differentiated field of matter.