55 pages • 1 hour read
Robert DarntonThe Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of The Encyclopédie”
Unlike his other chapters, Darnton’s essay on The Encyclopédie—the groundbreaking Enlightenment text edited by Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert—reads less like anthropological history and more like a work of literary criticism. Published in 28 volumes between 1751 and 1772, The Encyclopédie is ostensibly a reference book compiling over 70,000 articles on subjects as diverse and benign as grain grinding and verb conjugation. The prefaces and knowledge diagrams at the beginning of the book, however, strongly espouse Enlightenment values like the supremacy of reason over religion and the idea that perception and reflection are the sources of all knowledge. Much of this is transmitted by the editors’ efforts to raise boundaries between the knowable and unknowable, the latter of which includes religion.
Darnton spends most of the first half of the essay comparing and contrasting The Encyclopédie’s “Figurative System of Human Knowledge” and the diagram that inspired it, a similar tree of knowledge found in English philosopher Francis Bacon’s 1605 book The Advancement of Learning. In diagramming knowledge as a tree of interconnected disciplines, The Encyclopédie seeks to depict knowledge as an integrated whole, rather than an alphabetical list. Where Diderot and d’Alembert most stray from Bacon is how they situate religion on their tree. Bacon lists religion just three branches below knowledge, alongside physics, metaphysics, and pure mathematics. Moreover, it subjugates ethics to a place under religion. This would not do for Diderot and d’Alembert. They place theology on a distant node branching out underneath philosophy. It is effectively at the same distance from the main trunk of knowledge as black magic. Where Bacon separates religion from philosophy, Diderot and d’Alembert subjugate religion to philosophy.
The latter half of the essay is devoted to d’Alembert’s Discours préiminaire, effectively the preface to The Encyclopédie. While granting that it should be considered a major text of the Age of Enlightenment, Darnton criticizes it for a lack of clarity. Its mixed messages regarding religion, the author suggests, is the result of d’Alembert’s desire to remain a good Catholic while also completely undercutting the concept of religion. He further criticizes d’Alembert’s tendency to tie a neat hereditary line of ideas from René Descartes to John Locke to Isaac Newton to, finally, the editors and contributors of The Encyclopédie itself. Not only does Darnton view this funneling of all progressive, rational thought into the Enlightenment as shamelessly arrogant, he also takes issue with the notion that a linear connection exists between Descartes—who among his many works proposed the ontological proof of God—and the atheistic tendencies of the Enlightenment.
Darnton therefore characterizes these rhetorical gambits on d’Alembert’s part as a strategy—as referenced in the essay’s title—which arguably questions the sincerity of The Encyclopédie’s efforts to formulate a new epistemological understanding of the world. Especially in d’Alembert’s preface, the text seeks not only to establish boundaries between the known and unknown—in other words, religion—but to position Enlightenment thinkers as the intellectual force responsible for policing those borders. Whether or not this was cynical or self-serving, Darnton concedes that the strategy was in many ways a success.
Chapter 5 Analysis
This essay is a significant departure from the others, given that its primary source material is a towering work of Enlightenment thought rather than a document created by a relatively ordinary individual. Yet it serves a crucial function within the collection by situating the Enlightenment establishment so Darnton can later contrast the views of Diderot and d’Alembert with Rousseau’s views in the following essay.
The author’s discussion of The Encyclopédie is notable in that in characterizes the philosophical work as a calculated strategy. According to Darnton, the strategy is epistemological in nature, meaning that it concerns questions of what is and is not knowledge. By framing The Encyclopédie in this way, he explores how philosophy can serve a much greater role than simply as a pursuit designed to entertain intellectuals. On the contrary, an effective philosophical strategy like the one employed by d’Alembert can play a part in overturning power structures. Indeed, the Enlightenment beliefs of secularism and empiricism espoused in The Encyclopédie were highly influential on the instigators of the French Revolution and their attempts to sever the ties between church and state. As Darnton points out, “The relation between information and ideology in The Encyclopédie raises some general issues about the connection between knowledge and power” (192).
In Darnton’s telling, the objective of this strategy is twofold: First, it aims to marginalize religion and theology within the broader framework of knowledge. It does so primarily through the book’s “Figurative System of Human Knowledge.” While at first glance the diagram appears to be a relatively straightforward attempt to organize systems of knowledge, Darnton sees in it a concerted effort to deemphasize religion to a point just shy of total annihilation from the spectrum of human thought. The author writes, “[The diagram] expressed an attempt to raise a boundary between the known and the unknowable in such a way as to eliminate most of what men held to be sacred from the world of learning” (194).
Having done away with religion as a significant component of human knowledge, d’Alembert carries out the second phase of the strategy. This involves elevating himself, Diderot, and other likeminded philosophers of their Enlightenment cohort as the only men capable of policing these epistemological boundaries. D’Alembert does so by framing the Enlightenment as the culmination of over a century of Western thought. This requires him to present a clear lineage from René Descartes to John Locke to Isaac Newton to, finally, Diderot and d’Alembert themselves. Darnton considers this philosophically incomprehensible, given the vast and sometimes irreconcilable differences between these thinkers. At the same time, he points out that d’Alembert is no fool. Thus, the most rational explanation for this act of philosophical malpractice is that it is as much a part of a calculated strategy as the marginalization of religion in the knowledge diagram.
In short, d’Alembert strategically situates the Enlightenment and its empirical values as the heir apparent in a long line of philosophers connected less by the compatibility of their ideas and more by the fact that they are all universally held in high regard. As Darnton puts it:
“Despite their differences, therefore, the entire population of philosophers seemed to advance in the same direction, sweeping superstition before them and carrying enlightenment in triumph, right up to the present—that is, to the Encyclopédie itself” (207).
Again, while this may seem extraordinarily academic for a book concerning the attitudes of ordinary individuals, an exploration of Diderot and d’Alembert’s self-aggrandizement is vital for understanding why Rousseau’s opposite approach—putting himself on the same level as readers—is so powerful and revolutionary.
