Diderot's Great Legacy:

...No matter how different cultures may be, technology is the bridge between their latent rationality...

...His stature both as a human being and as a thinker grows with time...

...Implicit in Diderot's outlook, however, was the view that the validity of ends could be tested, in part at least, by the consequences of the means used to achieve them...

...Actually it was the sustained and clarifying account of the state of technology in France prior to the Industrial Revolution which had a more cumulative effect than any direct preachment...

...For one thing, as Gillespie points out, it accorded to human labor a dignity which was in strong contrast to the Greek tradition and, we may add, to the religious conception of labor as punishment for primal disobedience...

...It implied that knowledge embodied in skills and artifacts which transformed man's primary environment was no less noble and more convincing evidence of his civilized estate than knowledge conceived as abstract theory or pure vision which left the world as it found it...

...It made the skilled artisan and mechanic, before the era of mass production, appear as an unselfconscious artist...

...Man is a rational animal, but in what does his rationality consist...

...The entire spirit of the Enlightenment was expressed in the hope that the method of reasonableness, the test of consequences in the light of our ideal aims and objectives, would be applied to the traditions, laws and customs of society...

...One of the great merits of this remarkable collection of almost 500 copperplate engravings concerned with manufacturing and technical arts from the original Encyclopedia is that it throws some light on these questions...

...The publisher's title, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, calls attention to some neglected aspects of the original publication as an intellectual event...

...The Encyclopedia has been superseded by many others more inclusive and factually more accurate, but none has succeeded in capturing its spirit —its unique combination of unfanatical crusading zeal, its playfulness and wit, dedication to scientific truth and humanistic values...

...Diderot built better than he knew...

...How could the glorification of technology aid in dissemination of a liberal ideology...

...What has unified the world so far is not ideology but technology...

...Not so widely known is how it succeeded in doing so and why its philosophic outlook had continuing effects which survived the excesses of the French Revolution...

...It suggested that the catalogue of common things and everyday activities has an esthestic dimension, whether it be the curve of an ax handle or the rhythms of casting metal, not separate from but intrinsic to use—which intensifies the qualities of immediate enjoyment...

...To its enemies it meant applying the ax of reason to the tree of life because ends —so they alleged—are beyond reason...

...The definitions are many but the most comprehensive seems to be the effective use of means to achieve ends...

...Most people, even scholars and intellectuals, know the Encyclopedia only by reputation...

...In the long run it carried the infection of liberal ideology into the minds of the middleclass intellectuals who were more numerous and more serious than the disaffected nobility...

...Third, the treatment of the manufacturing arts and crafts, illustrated by thousands of copperplate engravings with their simple, severe yet graceful and intimate lines, also broke down the conventional separation between fine and useful arts...

...It is true that thinkers of the Enlightenment assumed too simply that ends were common and that the only problem was the social engineering of means...

...Whether or not one has seen or held a copy of any of its many volumes in his hands, he knows, or rather has learned, that its liberal philosophy helped change the climate of opinion first in France and then in the Western world...

...Author, "Political Power and Personal Freedom" If one were to make a list of the great intellectual events in human history, an uncontested place on it would be held by the publication of L'Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers (Encyclopedia or Analytical Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Crafts) whose chief editor, architect, writer, draftsman and scapegoat was Denis Diderot...

...It amused and delighted those who were already skeptical and who needed no further education in the hypocrisies of the status quo...

...All this is true but overlooks the chief respect in which stress on technology pleads the cause of ideology: In every culture technology is the paradigm of rationality...

...The ideology of necessity was masked, subtle and expressed in a cultivated ambiguity that would arouse raging fires of suspicion in the clerical breast but not immediate conviction of subversive design in the mind of the lay powers...

...Second, it reinforced the utilitarian notion that knowledge was power which could and should be used in the service of mankind...

...The Encyclopedia became synonymous with the Enlightenment and the beacons it lit still burn, sometimes only fitfully, in the free world...

...In his masterly introduction, blending broad historical perspective with detailed insights, Professor Charles C. Gillespie of Princeton University correctly asserts that "Diderot's brilliant and original conception was to make the technology carry the ideology...

...For it emphasizes what is not sufficiently appreciated by those who know the Encyclopedia second hand: the importance of the métiers, or crafts, in its title, and the revolutionary signficance of stressing the key role of technology in the philosophy of a secular, rational and humane society...

...Both Benjamin Franklin and Karl Marx defined man as a tool-making animal who, pre-eminently in his technological activity, achieves that functional adaptation of means to ends which is the unfailing sign of intelligence...

...This socialized the rationale of technology...