Artifacts for Diderot's Elements of Physiology: An Expanded, Hybrid Translation and Commentary

By Gregory Bringman and Denis Diderot

Artifacts for Diderot's Elements of Physiology is a translation of Denis Diderot's rare 18th Century work, Éléments de physiologie, situating it in light of New Materialism and other current debates in continental philosophy. It takes one of many possible theoretical tours through this oeuvre of Diderot, as well as incorporates

• Language: English
• Publisher: Les Ontoeuvres
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986035826

Gregory Bringman

Gregory Bringman is an independent scholar and theorist with dual careers in the humanities and technology. He's been a contributor/editor-at-large for the University of Michigan Collaborative Encyclopedia Translation Project and has translated La Font de Saint Yenne's Réflexions. His interests range from 18th Century philosophy to contemporary French thought, science studies and software studies.

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Artifacts for Diderot’s

Elements of Physiology

Translation and commentary, Denis Diderot’s

Éléments de physiologie

Artifacts for Diderot’s

Elements of Physiology

An expanded, hybrid translation and commentary,

Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie

Translated, with an Introduction,

Notes, and Appendices by

Gregory Bringman

Copyright

ISBN (Paper) 979-8-9860358-0-2

ISBN (PDF) 979-8-9860358-1-9

ISBN (EBook) 979-8-9860358-2-6

Les OntŒuvres, © Copyright Gregory Bringman, 2022

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)

Details: https://lesontoeuvres.com/

Minneapolis, MN

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank readers in the early stages of this project: John Ogren, Christopher Burnett and Robert Brown Jr., as well as helpful later readers at Open Book Publishers and Brill. I’m indebted to colleagues, mentors and professors with whom I’ve worked over the years, especially my professors of French: Virginie Sanchez, Alain Perez, and Jacques Samy. Thanks for the helpful advice of Daniel Brewer, who looked at early translation work when I was just getting started with Diderot over a decade and a half ago. Additionally, I’m indebted to parallel disciplinary communities like science, code and software studies, which provided perspectives that found their way back into this labor on Diderot’s Éléments.

This labor goes back several years: the project has gone through various reworkings and insightful developments. It is time now to put it before general readers, whom I hope will receive this work with pleasure.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Table of Contents

Introduction

Elements of Physiology

Preface

PART I – Beings

Vegeto–animal

Animal

Man

PART II – Elements and Parts of The Human Body

Fiber

Cellular Tissue

Membranes

Fat

Brain

Nerves

Nervous Fluid

Muscles

Heart

Blood

Veins, arteries, lymphatic vessels

Chyle, lymph

Humors, secretion, glands

Chest

Voice, speech

Stomach

Intestines

Liver

Pancreas

Spleen

Membranes of viscera of the lower abdomen

Kidneys, bladder

Womb, and organs of generation

Generation

Fetus

PART III – Phenomena of the Brain

Sensation

Understanding

Memory

Imagination

Sleep

Will

Passions

Organs

Diseases

Conclusion

Appendix I – The Elements of Web Schemas

Appendix II – Phil. Principles As Speculative Theory

Appendix III – Literary Transformism

Bibliography

Index Nominum

Index Rerum

_____________________

* Translator footnotes marked with [B]. Footnotes from the three critical editions noted:

Jean Mayer, 1964, 1987, [M].

Paolo Quintili, 2004, [Q].

Motoichi Terada, 2019, [T].

Introduction

Éléments de physiologie is a rare work by the Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot, published only posthumously in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Despite the scholarly acceptance of this important work as a materialist tractate or as a manifesto for a new science of humans left to posterity by the philosophe, the unique history of its two major versions had made issues of textual provenance a hurdle to overcome, very prominent in the work of scholars since the discovery of the Vandeul manuscript in the 1950s. Even in the late 1980s, when Jean Mayer attempted to correlate the two very different versions by producing several tables of passage-by-passage correspondences, he found himself lamenting the difficulty of such a task for the establishment of the provenance of Diderot’s work:

The differences between the two texts... become impossible to discern in the case of transpositions... reduplication... elimination of a double... For all these problems, one cannot find a satisfying solution. Some examples, given hereafter, will demonstrate our puzzlement. [B¹]

With a new critical edition in French just published in 2019, and a recent critical monograph on Éléments as an Atheist’s Bible[B²], the interest in Diderot’s text is strong and continues to grow; many of the hurdles of Mayer are slightly less important to scholars of materialism and New Materialism who have the transparent impression of Diderot’s work as speaking directly to their projects. This is not to mention that contemporary readers are more greatly attuned to the succinct nature of Éléments as an aphoristic style of Diderot easy to consider as a kind of variation on prose writing, similar to how the numbered axioms of Ludwig Wittgenstein came to have their own specific flavor and literary logic in the 20th Century. This prose style is nascent in the earlier Saint Petersburg copy left by the skilled hand of the Girbal copyist. [B³] Given that the Vandeul copy is considered by many scholars to be more of a finished work and is the version used in all modern French editions, it also conveys many writerly strategies that pay off in how they poetically communicate the scientific topic of physiology and its 18th Century materialist underpinnings.

Both the poetics and the relevance to materialist theory is communicated moreover, in rendering Diderot’s text into English, a task on which I have labored over a number of years. Éléments has remained for too long untranslated, as it has been thought to require the most specialized if not technical readers and scholars. This seems to be changing now with many readers who encounter Diderot’s text, understanding it skipping from Baron d’Holbach all the way to Deleuze, Bergson, Simondon and Deligny—as a philosophical argument different in degree rather than kind. The communication of Diderot’s prose poetics and project in English justifies an edition rendered from the French in order to frame its materialist insights for a new audience of English readers. Éléments, with its ever-growing interest, can metonymically represent Diderot studies, even if, unlike most of Diderot’s other works, it has not been fully translated until now.

The Éléments de physiologie is a unique and mysterious text or set of texts: since Maurice Tourneux, the French editions of Éléments have related how a copy had been presented by a French citizen named Garron [B⁴] to the Committee of Public Instruction of the Convention of the French Revolution as a model philosophy of ideal humans distanced from metaphysics and religion in the spirit of Diderot’s materialism.[B⁵] In relating this anecdote, Mayer [B⁶] remarks that this presentation had no effect on the convention, but it is compelling nevertheless because of the subsequent Reign of Terror and the way in which the French Revolution causes the disappearance of much then present in French society, even cultural artifacts subscribing to the human ideals of a post-religious state like that following in its wake. Other unique histories of the text have been formulated from new discoveries of partial copies of Éléments, such as Notes autographes [B⁷] and the Manuscrit de Pétersbourg, the latter a presentation of Diderot of a version to Catherine the Great, prefaced by literary allusion to the dialogues of Diderot’s Rêve de d’Alembert. [B⁸] Georges Dulac has understood this prefacing as a way of indicating to posterity that the Éléments was intended to substitute the ontological project of the Rêve with a hard science of physiology removed from a larger Western metaphysical tradition. [B⁹] More recently, Motoichi Terada both questions whether the version given to Garron is in fact distinct from the Vandeul redaction, and he demonstrates, after the work of Caroline Warman, the way in which Diderot’s disciple Jacques-André Naigeon more significantly inserted his dually historiographic and philosophic hand into the presentation of Diderot’s works for their posterity. In a recent monograph, Warman presents evidence that Éléments began to circulate among fellow materialists much earlier than originally thought, and considers its first distinct publication to be Naigeon’s Mémoires historiques et philosophiques (1821).

Coupled to these unique histories is the manner in which Éléments problematizes the incorporation of works of other writers, even if attitudes towards what contemporary readers might consider plagiarism were much different during the 18th Century. For instance, many articles in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert were gratuitously borrowed from Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia and the writings of Samuel Formey and Claude Buffier, among others, because the project for hendiadic if not universal knowledge could only be accomplished to some degree by a vast corpus of writing. This background effect of vast knowledge could then contextualize the action of a reader looking at any one entry in particular, knowing that it was theoretically part of a larger fabric of interconnected ideas. It is also the case that the earlier version of the Éléments had likely started out as Diderot’s collection of notes made through all of the prominent physiologists of his day, principally Albrecht von Haller, to whom the Vandeul avertissement or preface makes mention. [B¹⁰]

Terada relates how the manuscript of fragments (MD, discovered in 1977) was probably the earliest document of Diderot’s project of physiology, a sketch of what eventually becomes the Saint Petersburg copy. It was heavily supplemented by the texts of the Scottish physiologist Robert Whytt until being redacted into the Notes autographes, at which time Diderot began to introduce the works of Haller.[B¹¹] It is this Notes autographes that contains a summary bibliographic list of authors and works to read, made by Diderot in 1778.

The authors included are: William Cullen, author of Institutions of medicine, Charles Bonnet (Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme), Paul Joseph Barthez (Nouveaux Élémens de la science de l’homme), Johann Georg Zimmerman (Traité de l’expérience), Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller (translation of Primæ lineæ physiologiæ), Felice Fontana, Antoine Le Camus (Médecine de l’esprit), Marin Cureau de la Chambre (Les Caractères des passions), Théophile de Bordeu (all works), Lorenz Heister, Georg-Ernst Stahl, Pierre Roussel (La Femme), Jean Paul Marat (De l’homme), Claude Adrien Helvétius (De l’esprit, De l’homme), Julien Offray de La Mettrie (L’Homme–machine, L’Homme–plante) and Adriaan van den Spiegel.[B¹²]

As previously mentioned, the author from whom Diderot borrows the most is Albrecht von Haller. Part II of Éléments showcases many passages pulled straight from Haller’s Primæ lineæ, some with little or no redaction, so much so that Paolo Quintili has decided in his critical edition to annotate only those places in the second part where Diderot significantly deviates from Haller (See Quintili, note 2.1). In addition, Motoichi Terada’s critical edition, partially based on the contemporary scholar’s ability to find source texts through extensive intertextual searches on the Internet, has resulted in a new list of probable titles of Diderot’s reading material during the writing of Éléments.

Without embarking on an exhaustive digital reconstruction of Diderot’s sources, there are several key intertextual appropriations of Diderot worthy of highlighting. The intent is not to prove Diderot’s sources, but to speculate on the intertextual and social milieu forming the writerly base of modernity at the time of Diderot, in the least to show how distributed human authorship has always been—and specifically in relation to materialist ideas. As the summary bibliographic list above includes not only Théophile de Bordeu but Diderot’s self-directive to read all of the Montpellier physician’s works, the family resemblances of Bordeu to Diderot are not surprising. After all, Bordeu had been a quasi-protagonist of Diderot’s Rêve de d’Alembert, progressing its dialogues and foregrounding a novel system of circulation in the human body along with that of nerve pathways, brains, and collections of nerves, an intertextual connection to the physician that Naigeon will also reinforce in his Mémoires. Working with the ideas of Bordeu, Diderot seems to have also intuited a modus operandi for approaching experimental specimens. The following passage from the Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et sur leur action of Bordeu is concerned with the organ of the mouth, saliva and cranial glandular system:

Look in the area of the buccinator for the excretory tube of the parotid. Poke through it and inject water in the gland with a decent syringe. It swells and is much fuller than in any natural state with less than an ounce of water. Strongly agitate the lower jaw, and you will see that no drop of water leaves by the excretory tube. [B¹³]

And yet it is analogically reduplicated by Diderot’s altogether different discussion of ergot in the first chapter of Part I of the Éléments, in turn a gloss of Fontana:

Open small tumors, or galls of ergot, green and not ripe; open them with a sharp and bent needle, without penetrating their interior cavity. Drop some water there, and you will see eels inside, but large, living or dead, full of eggs or of much smaller eels.

It is fitting that Diderot unconsciously absorbs—via writing conventions—the experimental orientation of Fontana and Bordeu, as the Montpellerian physician notes in the preface to Recherches anatomiques that his fellow scientists are not studying physiology carefully enough. [B¹⁴] In keeping with this imperative for observation, Bordeu’s emphasis on treating individual organs as beings in their own right informs the entire chapter on organs in part three of the Éléments. The notion of organs as individuals also richly characterizes Bordeu as the controversial clinician who dismisses the misinformation related by the patient herself, upon which Diderot also touches in Part III. Like the doctor in the marginal notes of the Éléments detailing an anonymous husband and his hysterical wife, at least as imagined in the Rêve de d’Alembert, Bordeu would not have shied away from prescribing cures that might be completely surprising to patients as well as to a number of more conservative physicians. [B¹⁵] This paints him as the radical physician or the source of a doctor archetype that continually reappears in Diderot’s work, precisely at those moments when Diderot wishes to emphasize how radically different is a philosophy founded on medicine rather than a certain kind of metaphysics. [B¹⁶]

Even the vitalist Paul Joseph Barthez is imprinted on Diderot, despite the fact that he positions himself in contrast to solidists [B¹⁷] who understand living phenomena in terms of sensibility, irritability, and contractility, factors included by Diderot in his picture of the emergent organized being. Barthez appears on the side of materialists to a certain degree, if we accept Elizabeth Williams’ claims that Jacques Lordat unfairly characterizes him as a spiritualist despite aspects of Montpellerian materialism. [B¹⁸] Even though he champions the notion of vital force, he claims that throughout philosophical history, humans have tended to make une abstraction générale de tous les attributs sensibles de la matière and to finally former le concept de substance immatérielle. [B¹⁹] That metaphysical abstraction is the means of this invention of immaterial substance links Diderot to Barthez by way of Georges Buffon, who also provided an ideological context in which Diderot’s De l’interprétation de la nature would call out Enlightenment and Newtonian mathematicians for weaving abstract mathematical fictions. Moreover, one passage in particular in the Nouveaux Éléments of Barthez can be directly juxtaposed to Diderot’s statement in the Éléments, part I, chapter 3: Is there something more absurd than the contact of two beings, of which one has no parts, and occupies no space?. Barthez notes, François Hoffman and other prominent authors have said that the principle of life that animates man is of a median nature between the soul and the body. But this middle being is a being of reason. For we cannot go from gradations of the body to the immaterial soul.[B²⁰] While Barthez sees a reasoning, vital force delegating between a material body and an immaterial soul, because what is material cannot connect with the immaterial in his statement, it in effect overlaps Diderot’s critique of the fiction of immaterial substances. Diderot goes further though, arguing that reason is a product only of a material organization that provides no conceivable way in which an entity without matter can be physically connected to animal bodies very definitely comprised of matter, and verifiably composed of matter alone.

It is clear that Diderot is intertextually bound to a another key 18th Century philosopher, La Mettrie, paralleling his ontological monism and sharing his belief in the importance of sensibility as an organizing principle of matter. The similarities and differences of the two philosophers have been much debated [B²¹], with evidence to support both Diderot’s critique and endorsement of the philosopher. Ann Thomson demonstrates how the identities of Diderot and La Mettrie were wholly conflated when both L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme of La Mettrie and the Pensées philosophiques of Diderot were condemned to be burned by the Paris Parliament in 1746. [B²²] According to Timo Kaitaro, because Diderot strongly criticizes the philosopher in his Commentaire sur Hemsterhuis and Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, yet has La Mettrie take the place of Théophile de Bordeu in one manuscript of Rêve de d’Alembert preserved in Moscow, this suggests Diderot’s support overall. Much common ground with Diderot can be found in La Mettrie’s Discours préliminaire (1751) remarks Kaitaro, and it is in comparing La Mettrie’s L’Homme–machine / L’Homme–plante to Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie that much of the impression of similarity arises. There is a sense in which both bodies of work seem to be polemics against final causes and the notion of an immaterial soul—strongly rooted in 18th century medical science.

Interestingly, Diderot appropriates another philosopher he strongly publicly critiqued, the ridiculous author [B²³], Jean-Paul Marat. This reputation of Marat in the eyes of Diderot hinges, in the discourse surrounding the Éléments de physiologie, upon a passage within which Diderot relates how he was compelled to stop reading Marat due to the latter’s claim to only write for those who subscribe to a dualist view of the human organism: 

A crafty man has begun his work with these words: ‘Man, like every animal, is composed of two distinct substances, the Soul, and the Body: if someone denies this proposition, it is not for him that I write.’ I thought: close the book, because if I admit once these two distinct substances, the author has nothing more to teach me.

It is true that this passage documents well the displeasure of Diderot for the spiritualist Marat, and this displeasure is intensified in the chapter on nervous fluid in the 2nd part of the Éléments, in which Diderot seemingly gives a direct response to Marat’s claim that the nerves transmit such a fluid:

Where is the nervous fluid in animals who have neither blood, nor brain, nor organs of digestion?  Where is it in the freshwater polyp, which has neither heart nor internal organs? All liquors of these animals, they respond, are only nervous lymphs. What proof of this do we have?

In contrast to Marat, Diderot here invalidates any human spiritualism for the reason that so-called inferior beings, simpler organisms, do not possess nervous systems that will permit the existence of a nervous fluid. This fits Marat’s insistence on a nervous fluid directly onto his claim that humans have innate properties and souls which distinguish them from animals. Especially in relation to Barthez, who had vitalist underpinnings without spiritualist or animist leanings, it is easy to see why Diderot rejects Marat’s claims.

Even so, several passages in De l’homme are the literal textual precursors to passages appearing in Diderot. For instance, Marat says in volume I: Prick the heart of a living animal and you will see it contract. Cut out this heart, prick it again, and it contracts in the same way. Cut it in pieces, prick each piece, and the phenomenon still occurs. [B²⁴] This passage is nearly reproduced in the first part of Diderot’s Éléments, chapter 2, on animal being: Prick the heart of a living animal, it moves; cut out this heart, prick it, movement; cut it in pieces, prick these pieces, same phenomenon.

Having this congruence to Marat is significant: if amputated organs of animals still move when detached from living organisms, this makes the case for the three properties of sensibility, irritability, and contractility. It also begins to articulate a modern biological understanding of organisms that emerge bottoms–up from smaller constituent parts. This modern framework is dependent upon giving matter movement or life within itself, or self-organization, a position that is reflected in the Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement of Diderot. [B²⁵] In that text, matter never has motion solely because of an external force acting on atoms, only because atoms themselves originate this force ever since the beginning of the universe. Diderot architects his notion of sensibility in the context of this passage on the amputated heart as well, a passage that similarly reflects the first volume of De l’homme:  Sensibility seems to thus belong to matter as a property attached to its organization. [B²⁶]

Another way in which Diderot seems to have Marat as a reference point is in his structuring of the Éléments to first lay out the argument for a conception of humans using a more direct physiological science, and then to dive into the philosophical implications of a medical understanding of the body in the 3rd part, Phenomena of the Brain. In De l’homme, Marat begins his work with a discussion of animal being analogous to the earlier parts of Éléments, and then turns the second part of volume I of De l’homme into a much more ideological or even polemical exploration of human emotion or psychological states in the same way Diderot touches on human sensation, imagination, memory and passion in the 3rd part of Éléments. At one point, Marat relates the flow of sensation to memory and understanding that pins sensation to perception and mental life just as in Locke and Condillac, philosophers from whom Diderot also seeks to establish a point of reference: 

In the remembrance, memory is therefore combined with the understanding and with current sensations. In reminiscence, it is combined with understanding and will and without intervention of these sensations. So it is that these varied powers produce by their convergence, reminiscence and remembrance. [B²⁷]

That Diderot was following the transformation of physiology into polemical philosophy in the work of Marat is most strikingly shown by Marat’s conclusion to the 2nd part of volume I. There, Marat traces a similar imperative in Diderot’s own conclusion to the Éléments, to cast off the hand of moral tyrant who oppresses:

Yet what is more surprising is that sages, these so-called robust souls thus renamed, are the weakest of men. Whenever they think themselves vanquishers of the passions, and sing their victory, they obey the most imperial of masters. This is because reason can never counterbalance one feeling except by an opposite feeling, nor repress a passion except by a stronger passion, that is to say, to hand over the soul to the proudest tyrants in wanting to break free of slavery. [B²⁸]

Granted, in Diderot, no spiritualist definition of man can follow from this imperative, only the Epicurean moral claim that the main purpose in life is to be happy: There is only one virtue, justice; only one duty, to become happy; only one corollary, to not overvalue life, and to not fear death. With this line, Diderot concludes Éléments.

While the resemblance of Éléments to Diderot’s reading material is uncannily interwoven in some instances, Diderot’s larger intellectual trajectory, more so than reading sessions in the physiology texts of his day, explains how his nuanced position, different from so many physiologists, in fact evolved. This position, in part stemming from the study of chemistry under Guillaume-François Rouelle, allowed him to pose the process of chemical fermentation in contrast to Newtonian gravity, to fully reject iatromechanical and chimiatric notions of the human body, and to formulate a radical project of transformism, blurring the distinction between animate and inanimate and preceding (but not precursing) the evolutionary theory of Lamarck and Darwin. As Paolo Quintili notes in his Introduction (2004), the earlier project of the Encyclopédie shaped Diderot’s inquiries, so that they were fully formed at the creation of Rêve de d’Alembert, written largely close to the completion of the Encyclopédie. In particular, two entries from this encyclopedia were key texts in his development away from iatromechanism towards transformism: Chemistry and Animal. [B²⁹]

In Chemistry (Chymie) , the encyclopedist Gabriel François Venel demarcates science done without Newton: "Corpuscles can be pushed aside, all of them that is, by heat, a cause with which we no longer have need of the repulsion of Newton. Masses don’t extend themselves, any of them, by heat." [B³⁰] Ever present are the reasons why this disposal of mechanics for chemistry is a template for Diderotian literary action: since heat is not directly visible to the human eye, it is to be experienced like sound and aural language. The skill of Diderot is in his poetics, the way in which a few linguistic ingredients can be evocative, just as a laboratory can be constructed within a literary text. Chemistry is therefore closer to the magic of language. At the same time its science can be characterized in technical terms. According to the author, within the subject area of chemistry, the study of aggregate compounds is called syncresis, the study of the decomposition of aggregates is called diacresis [B³¹], terms which also describe the composition and decomposition of the components of language. And yet chemistry here shows how humans appropriate language and recombine its parts, rather than truly create its components. In this way, chemistry supports the project of Diderot in how it attempts to understand Nature, but not however to place it under Baconian control, but rather within a highly aleatory dialogic contract. [B³²] In the sense that chemists listen to nature minus a hand of empire, so the metaphor of nature changes, from static and hard bodies to living organisms, even organs that totally counter Newtonian attraction, repulsion, and action at a distance:

That all chemical movement is an intestinal movement, a movement of digestion, fermentation, effervescence, etc., that the air with which Chemists are concerned is one of the principles of the composition of the body, above all solid bodies, uniting with different principles according to laws of affinity, in detaching by chemical means, heat and precipitation. [B³³]

The anti-Newtonian image that results is universal fermentation, as if Nature were the organ of the stomach, a laboratory that incorporates the realm of living matter but in turn blurs organic and inorganic realms. Both types of matter can be placed within the metaphorical chemical energy machine: pebbles, vegetables, salts and texts in the Papin steam machine, a stomach of sorts. [B³⁴]

Through the article, Animal, Diderot investigates the philosophical and ethical implications of extending the chemical laboratory to Nature and constructing a proto-evolutionary [B³⁵] transformism in which, just as in non-mechanical language, the components of nature are mutable, transformable. Chemistry under the model of fermentation applies an alchemy of substances to the inter-species trajectory of the animal kingdom. As in Diderot’s De l’interprétation de la nature, the ox hoof becomes a hominid hand, so in Animal Diderot makes a conscious point not to exclude humans from Nature. In fact, in the following passage at the beginning of the article, the sense is that there are no species:

And anyway, if it is true, and as we can hardly doubt, the universe is a single, unique machine, in which everything is linked and in which beings are lifted up or lowered, all of them, by imperceptible degrees, so that there is no void in the chain and so that the colored ribbon of the famous Jesuit Father Castel, in which from nuance to nuance we pass from white to black without perceiving it, would be a true image of the progress of nature. It shall be quite difficult to fix the two limits between which animality, if it is so permitted to be thus expressed, begins and ends. [B³⁶]

In mentioning the colored ribbon of the Jesuit Father Castel, an early synesthetic contraption compelling to Diderot, inorganic machines that dramatize both the chemical transformation of colors and the recombination of the musical sounds these colors represent connect the transformism of the inorganic and the transformism of the organic, with the ethical implication that humans not only straddle demarcations between species, but also between the human and the inorganic. So that, in Animal, there is no fixity of species and no chemical compound of the human body that cannot be converted to inorganic matter and back. In this moment, the single and unique machine that is nature is now no longer iatromechanical nor chimiatric, since its mechanics is fully changed into non-Newtonian agency and action. It is entirely migrated to the unique properties of living beings and the study of physiology. Here enters Diderot’s Éléments.

The demonstrative notion that Diderot’s Éléments represents a trajectory from inorganic chemistry to a proto-theory of organism or organized beings in which a first-principle metaphysics is replaced by speculative physiology is a central imperative seemingly handed to the reader by Diderot.[B³⁷] The different critical editions of Éléments alter our perspective on what readers might do with the text and this imperative. Éléments was published first in the 19th century in some form by Jacques-André Naigeon [B³⁸] and then by Jules Assézat (1875). In the late 20th century Jean Mayer established a version of Éléments and in the early 21st century, Paolo Quintili and Motoichi Terada. Mayer first established a critical edition in 1964, working from the newly discovered materials of the Vandeul collection. This edition was updated for the Hermann release of the complete works of Diderot edited by Herbert Dieckmann, Jacques Proust, and Jean Varloot (DPV), published in over twenty volumes beginning in the mid 1970s. In 2004, Paolo Quintili published a new edition with an entirely new introduction and commentary, followed by Motoichi Terada in 2019.

Readers note the different perspectives of each edition: Mayer belongs to a cultural field in the 1960s that included many new theorists of both cybernetics and genetics; Quintili and Terada are contemporary theorists or historians. Terada’s edition makes extensive use of informatics to discover seemingly hidden sources. In terms of their presentation of the text, whereas Mayer concludes his 1964 introduction in reference to Claude Bernard’s view that determinism is inescapable, Quintili emphasizes a lay anthropology [B³⁹], a lay science of humans that addresses what humans might do as a consequence of any materialism that could suggest inescapable determinism. Terada, then, outlines an intriguing case for Diderot’s disciple Naigeon reformulating Éléments and the Rêve de d’Alembert as fragments after Diderot’s death in a way that fundamentally alters Éléments.

Given these different perspectives, Mayer’s, Quintili’s and Terada’s critical editions understand the Vandeul Éléments as more of a finished work [B⁴⁰], despite the evolution of the text from the Saint Petersburg manuscript that started out as notes or fragments. Even though they establish their text upon the Vandeul manuscript, Mayer and Quintili additionally seek to prevent a vandeulization of the Éléments, with Mayer claiming in his "Composition Fragmentaire des Éléments de physiologie that the Vandeul copy, ... while less careful, less elegant (than the Saint Petersburg copy)... represents a more finished state of the work," and is therefore the appropriate edition to critically present. [B⁴¹] Readers of Mayer’s statement are, by implication, free however to do things with the Saint Petersburg version.

Analysis of Key Sections and Themes

The structure of the Vandeul Éléments easily sets the reader on her own journey towards a central epiphany of the work, which may be that Diderot presents a purer physiology after the respected model of Haller, and from either end of his appropriation of Primæ lineæ he tells us why the clinical study of the human body is important to philosophy. [B⁴²] Preceding the appropriation of Haller is part I, which gazes into the historical moment of the intimation in the eighteenth century of a heterogeneous matter that is neither exclusively animate nor inanimate, but both. Beccari and the discovery of gluten having properties of animal matter figure in this move, as well as does the image of a Rouellian chemical laboratory in which experiments have products, elements synthesized from the parameterized conditions and ingredients of empirical science. [B⁴³] As in Rêve de d’Alembert, matter that appears inanimate can undergo a conversion into animate matter and vice versa, a model that will allow Diderot to argue that humans are not, in fact, superior to animals or minerals. From the other end of the appropriation of Haller, part III, Diderot looks at how humans could be distinguished by their mental phenomena, given that we can say they experience psychological properties stemming from sense perception in dialogue with body and environment. An effect remaining mysterious and paradoxical to Diderot, he does not see a clear demarcation between an emergent mental life and the physical body with which it is interwoven. [B⁴⁴] The question of what the connection of human psychology is to the facts of physiology arises from this juxtaposition with Part II (the appropriation of Haller) as well as from its ordering as the final part in which a materialist, atheist conclusion becomes possible.

Part I: Life vis-à-vis Laboratory

Éléments Part I begins with a précis on beings from a macro, proto-evolutionary perspective; its first ten paragraphs transfer the agency of change and evolution away from final causes and supreme beings: nature can extinguish beings and can alter their form given larger collective developmental intensifications that humans know entirely from the observation of nature. [B⁴⁵] Additionally, matter at rest is actually minutely in motion, its potential energy or effort / endeavor is nisus, a notion taken by Diderot from Leibniz. We wait for species transformation, notes Diderot, without rushing to judge. Ironically, Diderot asks that we wait for a period of geological time far longer than the human lifespan, were it possible to orchestrate a simulation of sorts. So a textual, readerly simulation then begins, the image of geological time acting on species evolution becomes homologous to the chemical laboratory of modernity. [B⁴⁶] From this, come several experiments as we move into chapter I.

Some laboratory components and ingredients are actually historical actors on the stage of scientific progression and intensification. Diderot remarks:

In Italy Mr. Beccari, and in Strasbourg, Kessel and Mayer wanted to understand the constituent parts of farina. They washed it with several liquids, separated it from starch, and withdrew a substance very much resembling an animal substance. Soon after, Mr. Rouelle in Paris, Mr. Macquer and the most skilled of our chemists resumed these experiments, and took them as far as they could go. They found that starch only contained, to put it nicely, the vegetable parts of the farina; that in removing the starch, it remained a gluten that they will call vegeto–animal... If this gluten is burned, it crumbles like flesh and spreads an odor of animal matter.

Whereas in Rêve de d’Alembert, the conversion of mineral to animal proceeds from creating rich soil from ground-up works of famous sculpture by Falconet, planting vegetables in this soil, and then adding the matter of these vegetables to human bodies through ingestion and digestion [B⁴⁷], here vegetable is converted to animal by washing farina with water to separate its starch. When starch is removed it contains only vegetable. However, there is another product of the experiment, a gluten with animal properties. Not only does it crumble like flesh, it smells like an animal when burned, as if only in destroying this vegeto–animal does the empiricist learn that it is living or has the potential for life. And burning an element in a laboratory is, after all, only another chemical process. In the way that Diderot has geological time filled with animal evolution become, through the Éléments, an experimental site, so too, contrary to theological explanations, life follows from the destruction of objects of the laboratory. These objects can undergo conversion because matter is, on the other hand eternal, immutable, as we know as well from Diderot’s Principes philosophiques sur la matière et le mouvement (1770). Because matter is recycled, unilateral conversions of mineral, vegetable, and animal beings become totally possible.

This conception of nature and culture remains in distinction to the production of life from inanimate matter in spontaneous generation. Diderot all throughout Éléments positions himself in contrast to John Turberville Needham, the author of Nouvelles Observations microscopiques [B⁴⁸] and of the famous chemical experiment with gravy, hoping to establish the fact that microbes arise from a limpid liquid that has been heated to first kill all life. In addition to that famous experiment, later thrown into doubt by Lazzaro Spallanzani [B⁴⁹], Needham tries to put forth how life can arise from matter sans vie throughout his microscopical discoveries. A central site for this to occur is Needham’s discussion of farina fecundus, or the pollinating powder that gives birth—when added to seed—to vegetable life. Having even called spermatic animalcules machines in order to stress their non-living nature, so with farina fecundus, Needham deciphers the effect of hydration on seed and on that which is to be pollinated, remarking:

One day, in observing an infusion of this powder in common water, I thought I noticed some change in the grains from which it was composed, as if each of these grains had made, through a small opening in its shell or case a trail of tiny globules, which, seen by microscope, only appeared as points, enveloped within a membranous substance almost like the eggs of some aquatic insects to which they were effectively related. [B⁵⁰]

There is thus a reciprocity between non-living matter and living matter when the former is somehow activated, either through pollination or hydration. Moreover, Needham embraces this disjunction between the living and the non-living by proceeding to further claim that graine sans vie grows epigenetically, without any miniature plant being incorporated within the seed:

Fifthly, the seed does not contain, prior to being fertilized, the miniature plant, as have believed some Authors, but it is the powder of the flower that encloses the initial germ or bud of a new plant. This germ, in order to develop and grow needs only the juice it finds, totally prepared within the ovary. For, if we consider the consequences of an observation already made by various Naturalists, with the best microscopes, we discover nothing in the grain of the plant, until the crests of the stamens are discharged of their powder. Until this time, this grain is everywhere empty, and we see only its skin or external envelope, although at the time it has been impregnated by powder, we perceive a true germ, or small, greenish mark swimming in a limpid liquid. [B⁵¹]

That Needham is precisely claiming that life is not needed to generate life is conveyed by the queries that follow this report on his observations: Without going against what we know of the wisdom of the Creator, are we not as authorized to say that the fetus draws its origin from a point of matter devoid of life than to assert that it should come from an animalcule? [B⁵²] Similar to how he dismisses spermatozoon animal being, here machines of generation are these points of matter without life. In contrast, Diderot only telescopes us into Needham’s empirical work in Part I: Beings, without leaping to spontaneous generation from the observation of life from non–life. In the aforementioned passage in which ergot is hydrated and small eels are seen to emerge, it is clear that Diderot calls them eels in direct reference to Needham. For, in the Rêve de d’Alembert, an oneiric d’Alembert speaks forth a pejorative reference to Needham along with a vision of these ubiquitous eels. [B⁵³] Diderot attributes to spermatozoa of Needham more attributes of life, but the problem that treating spermatozoa as machines solves, is how to understand life and generation from the perspective of a complexity that principally proceeds from the organization of beings and life, even if Diderot takes a different approach.

In Éléments, Diderot recognizes that empirical truths about the origin of life can only come from a difference that is a product of the organization of beings and matter (but not by Needham’s spermatozoon machines). Despite the preformationist views of Charles Bonnet, Diderot shares several points of understanding of Bonnet’s Considérations sur les corps organisés.[B⁵⁴] Diderot distinctly builds a model of the organized being that leaves complexity within animal beings. The turn away from a simple notion of the animal as machine into recognizing animals as dynamic entities is built upon the evaluation in Bonnet of the complexity of living beings as compared to machines and artificial beings. The mechanical duck of Vaucanson, an eighteenth century ingenious automaton, is contrasted specifically with the living being:

A dinghy is incomparably less distant from a first-class vessel than the most perfect time piece is from the most simple organic machine. Whereas Vaucanson constructs, from a learned craft, his artificial duck, and seized by surprise and astonishment, we admire this bold imitation of the works of the Creator. Heavenly beings smile, and see only a child who has made a cut-out of a bird. [B⁵⁵]

And yet elsewhere, beings such as the freshwater polyp, despite its position on the lower end of the scale of nature, Bonnet bestows with souls, souls that even bifurcate into two, two of me—or the same number as however many pieces into which the polyp is sliced. [B⁵⁶] Similarly, so-called germs that produce the crayfish are lined all throughout its body so that it has the ability to form an entirely new crayfish if sliced into parts. Because the outer shell of the being that is regenerated constitutes a complete being behaviorally, its monad must be divided into multiple monads. This therefore means that a division of human souls into distinct, complete souls is hindered by the fact that a limb or member of the human being, when removed, does not behaviorally constitute a double of its source. The context dependent behavior of cells and matter is a defining factor of emergent complexity, and it is played out in the middle of a lacuna of human understanding, remarks Bonnet. Cells act differently, depending on context: there are distinct targets towards which cells gravitate when combined in different combinations, and behavioral emergence dependent upon context remains, for Bonnet, inescapably tied to complex, dynamic organization:

Following after the places and circumstances in which this force exerts its action, it produces different beings. In the womb, it is an embryo. In the intestines it is taenia. In the skin of a polyp, it is a polyp. In the bark of a tree, it is a branch or a miniature tree. [B⁵⁷]

Such complexity can only result in an impasse in the theory of generation of all types of beings. Given the various theories of how organized beings develop, Diderot embraces their complexity and introduces us, at the end of Part II of Éléments, to the various models of the embryo, birth, and organic development.

Part II: From Scientific facts of Haller to a Theory of Generation, Prolegomena to Mental Phenomena

If Part I of Éléments simulates a chemical laboratory in which we synthesize, not necessarily animate matter from inanimate matter, but a more flexible view of the confluence of what is human and nonhuman, then Part II offers a liaison with Albrecht von Haller and an appropriation of his science—to make possible an anthropology rooted in a set of facts about somatic operation. Given that Diderot mirrors the Primæ lineæ of Haller (in some places word for word) his use of Haller is appropriative—at least until the final two chapters in which Diderot tackles the theory of generation and speculates on the philosophical importance of both fetus and monster within a proto-evolutionary paradigm. That said, there are numerous treasures all throughout part II arising from Diderot’s reworking of Haller, of which the differences between the original Latin and Diderot will be highlighted in the footnotes of part II. But here, after having taken an écart into the Hallerian details of a science of the body, Diderot shows how the debate about the boundaries of the non-human and human of Part I is even manifest in the distinctly human process of conception and generation, as much a staple of bodily process as the operation of the muscles, stomach, heart, liver, spleen, and all the other organs upon which he touches in Part II.

Notably, the breakdown of the highly factual into a theory of generation is tweaked already by Diderot in chapter 23, Womb, and organs of generation. This chapter in fact parallels one within Haller’s Primæ, yet Diderot treats the female organs of generation first, before the male, a subtle but important variation (as noted by Quintili). The womb, among the female organs, becomes homologous to a chemical laboratory. [B⁵⁸] It becomes a site for origins of life and Diderot greatly esteems it as valid human physiology, in contrast to the opinions of Haller and Soranus. According to the anecdote of Diderot, Soranus appeared invested in finding a way in which the womb might be disassociated from the vagina, and worked out a rule for when it might be amputated from the female body:

Doctor Soranus did not want the womb to be classified with a number of principal organs of the human body, and the reason that he gives is that not only is it displaced into and falls within the vagina, but it is also extirpated without causing death. He was even so persuaded that the womb is not essential to life that he created a rule for its extirpation when the pendant portion is ulcerated or putrefied.

Female sexual organs represent female pleasure tied to the act of sexual intercourse, and so males in the patriarchal position of Western science were likely biased against any physiological basis for female pleasure. So Diderot, bringing female organs of generation into