the judgement of experience: reading and seeing in diderot`s lettre

French Studies, Vol. LXII, No. 4, 404 – 416
doi:10.1093/fs/knn044
THE JUDGEMENT OF EXPERIENCE: READING AND SEEING
IN DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
KATE E. TUNSTALL
Abstract
In addition to the usual question underlying empiricist epistemology, namely how
we are to judge our sensory experience, Diderot raises the question as to how we
are to judge our reading experience, explicitly asking ‘Madame’, the reader, to
come to a view as to whether his presentation of the blind man of Puiseaux as a
real person is persuasive or not. This essay, building on an earlier article
published in French Studies Bulletin (2006) which provided original evidence as to
the historical reality of the blind man, revisits the question as to his imaginary
nature by arguing for the intertextual presence of Montaigne’s description of ‘un
gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay’ in the ‘Apologie de Raimond
Sebond’. The presence of this intertext, which has not been identified as such
before, suggests that in order accurately to judge his or her reading experience
the reader requires knowledge of the Lettre’s literary and philosophical context, a
view which is echoed in a different form in Diderot’s discussion of Molyneux’s
Question. In Diderot’s view, the woman who sees for the first time will be unable
to judge her sensory experience and unable therefore to answer Molyneux’s
Question, if she does not have knowledge of the question’s metaphysical and mathematical background. Where other readers have recently argued that the Lettre
emphasizes the importance of language in understanding experience, this essay
thus argues that the Lettre also makes a case for the importance of a literary and
philosophical education in our understanding and judgement of experience, be it
visual or textual.
In the final paragraph of the Lettre sur les aveugles, Diderot states: ‘Hélas!
Madame, quand on a mis les connaissances humaines dans la balance de
Montaigne, on n’est pas éloigné de prendre sa devise’.1 This statement has
divided readers: some, mostly historians of ideas, see it as a genuine conclusion
that the sceptical suspension of judgement is the only viable position on
knowledge gained from the senses;2 others, for the most part Diderot
scholars, read it as purely ironic, as an endorsement of atheist materialism,
‘palpably disingenuous’ as Andrew Curran has put it.3 An alternative
approach to those concluding words of the Lettre will be offered here, one
which does not involve weighing up whether Diderot is or is not a sceptic,
1
Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, in Œuvres, ed. by Laurent Versini, 5 vols (Paris, Bouquins, 1994), I, p. 184.
All subsequent references are to this edition and appear in the main text.
2
See, for example, Richard Glauser, ‘Diderot et le problème de Molyneux’, Les Études philosophiques, 3
(1999), 383 –410.
3
Curran, Sublime Disorder: Physical Monstrosity in Diderot’s Universe (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2001),
p. 77.
# The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
405
is or is not an atheist. It will be argued that they are to be understood as a
reference to Montaigne’s writing, to the Essais as a text, and to the question
of how to judge the reliability of the knowledge gained from the reading
experience, a question raised implicitly in relation to Montaigne on the very
first page of the Lettre.
In his 1966 study, Diderot and Montaigne: The ‘Essais’ and the Shaping of
Diderot’s Humanism, Jerome Schwartz suggested the existence of a relationship
between the Lettre and Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, beyond
that suggested on the final page of the Lettre in the reference to the ‘que
sais-je?’4 However, while providing a compendious repertory of textual
echoes of Montaigne in Diderot’s writings, the book makes a case for the
rather vague notion of influence and, even more problematically, ‘affinity’,5
and as such it is rather unenlightening. As Philip Knee has recently said in
an article on Le Neveu de Rameau: ‘ce qui frappe le plus dans le traitement
par les commentateurs du rapport entre Diderot et Montaigne est le
caractère allusif de leurs remarques et finalement le peu d’attention qu’ils
accordent à un rapport que la plupart jugent pourtant très significatif’.6
While the present essay is much indebted to Schwartz’s study for his systematic
uncovering of echoes of Montaigne in the Lettre sur les aveugles, its approach is
very different. It argues that the relationship between Diderot and Montaigne
in the Lettre is not about a shared humanism established through common
topoi, any more than the reference to the ‘que sais-je?’ is either an ironic
cloak for atheism or a serious statement of scepticism. It is much more interesting than that. The relationship is intertextual; it is characterised by textual
imitation. In the Lettre sur les aveugles, Diderot imitates certain stories, rhetorical figures and modes of writing from Montaigne’s Essais.
One way of accessing Diderot’s imitation is by considering another question
which the Lettre sur les aveugles raises with his readers. It concerns the identity
and existence of the characters referred to within it. As with the later Neveu de
Rameau, critics and editors have devoted some efforts to identifying who the
characters within the Lettre might be and/or to establishing whether or not
they existed. Attention has been focussed on ‘Madame’, the addressee of the
4
Schwartz, Diderot and Montaigne: The ‘Essais’ and the Shaping of Diderot’s Humanism (Geneva, Droz, 1966),
pp. 31 – 4.
5
Schwartz, Diderot and Montaigne, p. 142.
6
Knee, ‘Diderot et Montaigne: morale et scepticisme dans Le Neveu de Rameau’, Diderot Studies, 29 (2003),
35– 51 (p. 35). See also Knee, La Parole incertaine: Montaigne en dialogue (Quebec, Presses Universitaires de
Laval, 2003), pp. 161 –89. Other readers of Diderot who simply observe that there is some kind of a relationship between Diderot and Montaigne include Elizabeth de Fontenay, who states that he is ‘proche de
Montaigne’ (Diderot ou le mate´rialisme enchante´ [Paris, Grasset, 1981], p. 14) and Walter E. Rex, who,
following a comparison of Diderot’s writing with that of La Fontaine, Molière and Voltaire, merely
observes that ‘Of all French writers the one whom Diderot most resembles is Montaigne’ (Diderot’s Counterpoints: The Dynamics of Contrariety in his Major Works [Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1998], p. 308). For a
different approach to the relationship, see my ‘Diderot and Montaigne: Portraits and Afterlives’, in PreHistories and Afterlives: Studies in Critical Method, ed. by Anna Holland and Richard Scholar (Oxford:
Legenda, in press, 2008).
KATE E. TUNSTALL
406
7
Lettre, and on the figure of the blind mathematician Saunderson, who shares a
name and perhaps a heterodox world-view with the blind mathematician,
Nicholas Saunderson, who held the Lucasian Chair in Mathematics at
Cambridge University from 1710 until his death in 1738.8 Two figures in the
Lettre have been accorded virtually no critical attention, however: one is
female, the ‘aveugle-née, à qui M. de Réaumur vient de faire abattre la
cataracte’, the other male, the ‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’. This essay reveals
their importance, beginning with a study of the latter because it is in
relation to him that Diderot explicitly raises the question as to his real-life
existence, the question of truth, fiction and vraisemblance. Building on and
developing an earlier essay which presented new evidence that he was a real
person,9 I argue here that, at the same time as being a real person, the
‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’ is also an imitation of Montaigne’s ‘gentil-homme
de bonne maison, aveugle-nay’ of the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’,
himself an imitation of a ‘man who sees and hears nothing’ in Sextus
Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism.
This is not to argue that the blind man of Puiseaux signals that Diderot is
adopting a philosophically sceptical position, however. This essay demonstrates that the interest of Diderot’s and Montaigne’s blind men lies much
less in their philosophical function, in any role they might be said to play in
the elaboration of a philosophical argument in favour of the sceptical suspension of judgement, than it does in their status as stories and as textual
imitations, a central feature of which, in both cases, is the rhetorical figure
of amplificatio. As such, Diderot’s imitation of Montaigne signals a redefinition
of the philosophical question which lies at the heart of both scepticism and
empiricism, namely ‘how do we gain knowledge from the senses?’ In the
Lettre sur les aveugles, that question is redefined as: ‘how do we gain
knowledge from what we read?’ The ‘aveugle-née à qui M. de Réaumur
vient de faire abattre la cataracte’ plays a key role in alerting the reader to
such a redefinition of epistemological enquiry.
Diderot’s ‘aveugle-ne´ du Puiseaux’
This is how we are introduced to the blind man of Puiseaux on the first page of
the Lettre at the beginning of the second paragraph:
C’est un homme qui ne manque pas de bon sens; que beaucoup de personnes connaissent; qui sait
un peu de chimie, et qui a suivi, avec quelques succès, les cours de botanique au jardin du Roi. Il
7
For some scholars, Madame is Diderot’s mistress, Mme de Puisieux: see, for example, Diderot, Lettre sur
les aveugles, ed. by Robert Niklaus (Geneva, Droz, 1951), p. x. For Paul Vernière, she is the mathematician,
Mme de Prémontval: see Lettre sur les aveugles, in Diderot, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. by Paul Vernière (Paris,
Garnier, 1956), p. 8. Colas Duflo, by contrast, has rather dismissed the question: ‘Peu importe la réalité ou
non de l’auditrice, ainsi que son identité, qui semble avoir occupé des commentateurs férus de précisions historiques’: Diderot philosophe (Paris, Champion, 2003), p. 82.
8
For more information on Saunderson, see Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles. Lettre sur les sourds et muets, ed. by
Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris, Flammarion, 2000), pp. 215 –20.
9
See my ‘“Des circonstances assez peu philosophiques”: Diderot’s “aveugle-né du Puiseaux” ’, French
Studies Bulletin, lx:99 (2006), 33– 6.
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
407
est né d’un père qui a professé avec applaudissement la philosophie dans l’université de Paris. Il
jouissait d’une fortune honnête, avec laquelle il eût aisément satisfait les sens qui lui restent; mais
le goût du plaisir l’entraı̂na dans sa jeunesse: on abusa de ses penchants; ses affaires domestiques
se dérangèrent, et il s’est retiré dans une petite ville de province, d’où il fait tous les ans un
voyage à Paris. Il y apporte des liqueurs qu’il distille, et dont on est très-content. Voilà,
madame, des circonstances assez peu philosophiques; mais, par cette raison même, plus
propres à vous faire juger que le personnage dont je vous entretiens n’est point imaginaire.
(p. 140)
It is strange that readers have paid so little attention to this blind man, given
that Diderot explicitly asks us to do so, challenging us in the final lines of the
paragraph to do the kind of work that critics have done, with varying
outcomes, in relation to other characters in the text. Curran, one of the few
critics to pay this figure any independent attention, remarks simply on the
‘detached journalistic manner’ in which Diderot relates the blind man’s
biography,10 while Colas Duflo refers to what he calls Diderot’s exposure of
an ‘effet de réel’, and thus judges the ‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’ to be a
fiction.11 The only editors to engage with the possible reality and identity of
the blind man of Puiseaux are Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey, who,
whilst observing that the comment to ‘Madame’ is a ‘remarque typique des
romans de l’époque’,12 also quote Gabriel Farrell’s claim that he was a real
person by the name of Lenotre,13 a claim which is unfortunately, however,
based on a misunderstanding of the possessive pronoun in French: having
referred to the blind man of Puiseaux as ‘notre aveugle’ (p. 140), Diderot
then writes: ‘Le nôtre parle de miroir à tout moment’ (p. 141). And yet, as
I have shown in more detail elsewhere,14 evidence for his real-life existence
is to be found in the second volume of the Encyclope´die, in an article on bonnetmaking, which contains a reference to ‘un aveugle de naissance déjà connu
(dont il s’agit dans la Lettre sur les aveugles & dans l’art. AVEUGLE)’,15 and
who is described as drawing on his knowledge of chemistry and distillation
in order to give advice to Pichard, a bonnet-maker on the rue Mouffetard,
as to how he might make more efficient use of his water. While we seem to
have clear evidence here of the real-life existence of the blind man referred
to in the Lettre, and while it is possible that Diderot came across him in the
late 1740s when he was not only himself a resident of the rue Mouffetard,16
but also visiting artisans’ workshops as part of his research for the
10
Curran, Sublime Disorder, p. 66.
Duflo, Diderot philosophe, p. 87.
12
Lettre, ed. by Hobson and Harvey, p. 173, n. 8.
13
Lettre, ed. by Hobson and Harvey; see also Gabriel Farrell, The Story of Blindness (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 15.
14
See my ‘“Des circonstances assez peu philosophiques”’.
15
‘BONNETERIE’, in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, Encyclope´die, ou Dictionnaire raisonne´
des sciences, des arts et des me´tiers par une socie´te´ de gens de lettres, 17 vols (Paris, chez Briasson, David l’aı̂né,
Le Breton, Durand, 1751 – 65), II, p. 328.
16
In 1746, Diderot was living on the rue Mouffetard: ‘chez le sieur Guillotte, exempt du Prévost de l’Isle [de
France], en montant à main droite, au premier’ (Diderot, Correspondance, ed. by Georges Roth, 16 vols [Paris,
Minuit, 1955 – 70], I, p. 53).
11
KATE E. TUNSTALL
408
17
Encyclope´die, it is also possible that by referring to the blind man in the Lettre
as being from Puiseaux, Diderot is playing an onomastic game. The word
‘Puiseaux’ echoes the advice the blind man gave Pichard, namely that rather
than buying his water, he should use the water from his own well. In other
words, the blind man of Puiseaux told Pichard he should ‘puise[r de l’]eau’.
If we return to the Lettre and to the remark to Madame, armed with our
discovery that the blind man of Puiseaux was a real person, though he was
perhaps not from Puiseaux, it is impossible simply to judge him to be ‘point
imaginaire’ as Diderot calls upon us to do. In addition to the probable
onomastic play, Diderot’s use of the phrase ‘point imaginaire’ is playful and
raises a number of questions: why did Diderot not just say ‘réel’? Why does
he assume that Madame is judging the blind man of Puiseaux to be
imaginary? And why does he call attention to the possibility that he is
imaginary even as he denies it? The reason is, in my view, that Diderot
knows the reader has met a very similar blind man somewhere before. And
it was not at Pichard’s hat shop. It was in Montaigne’s ‘Apologie de
Raimond Sebond’.18
Montaigne’s ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay’
In the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, Montaigne tells us about a blind man
he once saw:
J’ay veu un gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay, aumoins aveugle de tel aage, qu’il ne
sçait que c’est que de veuë: il entend si peu ce qui luy manque, qu’il use et se sert comme nous de
paroles propres au voir, et les applique d’une mode toute sienne et particuliere. On luy presentoit
un enfant du quel il estoit parrain; l’ayant pris entre ses bras: Mon Dieu, dict-il, le bel enfant! qu’il
le faict beau voir! qu’il a le visage guay! Il dira comme l’un d’entre nous: Cette sale a une belle
veue: il faict clair, il faict beau soleil. Il y a plus: car, par ce que ce sont nos exercices que la chasse,
la paume, la bute, et qu’il l’a ouy dire, il s’y affectionne et s’y embesoigne, et croid y avoir la
mesme part que nous y avons; il s’y picque et s’y plaist, et ne les reçoit pourtant que par les
oreilles. On luy crie que voyla un liévre, quand on est en quelque belle splanade où il puisse
picquer; et puis on luy dict encore que voylà un lievre pris: le voylà aussi fier de sa prise,
comme il oit dire aux autres qu’ils le sont. L’esteuf, il le prend à la main gauche et le pousse à
tout sa raquette; de la harquebouse, il en tire à l’adventure, et se paye de ce que ses gens luy
disent qu’il est ou haut ou costié.19
It is peculiar that the critics who have been so keen to assume that Diderot’s
blind man is fictional have not pointed to this text which is echoed by Diderot
in a number of ways. Both blind men are from wealthy and cultured backgrounds: Montaigne’s is a ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison’ and Diderot’s
17
Jacques Proust states that Diderot ‘avait lui-même mené en 1748 une grande enquête dans les ateliers’:
L’Encyclope´die (Paris, A. Colin, 1965), p. 50.
18
There are other also intertextual blind men whose importance for the Lettre has been entirely overlooked
in the critical literature. For blind men in Gassendi and La Mothe le Vayer and their relationship to the Lettre,
see my ‘L’Obscurité en mouvement dans les Lumières: la figure de l’aveugle-né’, in Les Lumie`res en mouvement:
la circulation des ide´es au XVIIIe sie`cle, ed. by Isabelle Moreau (Lyon: ENS, in press, 2008).
19
Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. by Albert Thibaudet (Paris, Gallimard, 1950), p. 665. All subsequent
references are to this edition and appear in the main text.
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
409
has an education and had, at one time at least, a ‘fortune honnête’. Moreover,
as Schwartz has shown, when Diderot describes his visit to the blind man of
Puiseaux’s home, we learn that he too uses vocabulary which is more appropriate for a sighted person.20 Diderot observes how he is keen to talk about
visual phenomena such as mirrors, and remarks, exactly as Montaigne does
in relation to his blind man, on his use of the word ‘beautiful’ (pp. 140–1).
Montaigne’s interest in the blind and language is further developed by
Diderot in relation to Saunderson, whose speech is, Diderot tells us, also
full of words, the referents for which he can have no experience of (p. 161).
There is perhaps also a distant echo of Montaigne’s hunting and shooting
blind man when Diderot explains that the blind man of Puiseaux is,
contrary to expectations, a rather good shot: ‘Notre aveugle [. . .] eut dans
sa jeunesse une querelle avec un de ses frères qui s’en trouva fort mal.
Impatienté des propos désagréables qu’il en essuyait, il saisit le premier objet
qui lui tomba sous la main, le lui lança, l’atteignit au milieu du front, et
l’étendit par terre’ (p. 145).
With these similarities in mind, Diderot knows that the reader will need
some convincing as to the real-life existence of the ‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’,
that Madame will need some reassurance that he is ‘point imaginaire’, as
Diderot claims. The ‘circonstances assez peu philosophiques’ that Diderot
provides are an attempt to do this, of course, and yet to some degree, they
are also paradoxical because ‘circonstances assez peu philosophiques’ or
what might rhetorically be called amplificatio is precisely the hallmark of
Montaigne’s blind man. This comes into view when we consider the blind
man which Montaigne imitates, that of Sextus Empiricus.
Fiction and philosophy
In the Outlines of Scepticism, Sextus Empiricus employs the figure of a blind and
deaf man to illustrate his argument that, if we rely on our senses for our
knowledge, the world will simply appear to us with as many qualities as we
have senses, and we had better therefore suspend our judgement. He states:
Let us conceive of someone who from birth has touch, smell and taste, but who sees and hears
nothing. He will suppose that there is absolutely nothing visible or audible, and that there exists
only those three kinds of quality which he is able to grasp. So it is possible that we too, having
only the five senses, grasp from among the qualities of the apple only those we are capable of
grasping, although other qualities can exist, impressing other sense-organs in which we have
no share, so that we do not grasp the objects perceptible by them.21
This very brief mention of a man ‘who sees and hears nothing’ is taken up and
amplified by Montaigne, who first endows him with an additional sense, then
with a real existence, and then with a whole biography.
20
Schwartz, Diderot and Montaigne, p. 32.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. by Julia Anna and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2000), pp. 26 – 7.
21
410
KATE E. TUNSTALL
When we first encounter the theme of sensory deprivation in the ‘Apologie’,
it is in the service of the same argument as that of the ancient text. Montaigne
expresses doubt that we are in possession of ‘tous les sens naturels’, and in
order to persuade the reader who might disagree, he makes reference to a
blind man:
Il est impossible de faire concevoir à un homme naturellement aveugle qu’il n’y void pas,
impossible de luy faire desirer la veue et regretter son defaut. Parquoy nous ne devons
prendre aucune asseurance de ce que nostre ame est contente et satisfaicte de ceux que nous
avons, veu qu’elle n’a pas dequoy sentir en cela sa maladie et son imperfection, si elle y est.
(pp. 664 – 5)22
The blind man is a sign to the reader, revealing to her her own possible defectiveness. In addition to conferring on Sextus’s man the sense of hearing,
Montaigne presents him in a slightly different manner. Where Sextus had
stated ‘let us conceive of someone’, Montaigne states: ‘il est impossible de
faire concevoir à un homme naturellement aveugle’ the advantages of sight.
This shift in perspective is significant: Sextus conducts a thought experiment
among the sighted, whereas Montaigne sets up a dialogue between the
reader and a real blind man. Admittedly he presents such a dialogue as a
failure since it is impossible to make the blind man conceive of the virtues
of the sense of sight, but the possibility of an exchange between blind and
sighted is opened up here and will become significant as the text goes on.
Montaigne then introduces one particular blind man, the ‘gentil-homme de
bonne maison, aveugle nay’. Here what was in Sextus a purely hypothetical
and abstract thought experiment, becomes the concrete fact of ‘j’ai veu’, and
as Montaigne reports his direct empirical observations, his imitation of
Sextus becomes an amplification. This amplification and its possibility for
dialogue has literary and philosophical aspects which Diderot will develop
further.
As Montaigne recounts the daily life of the blind man, he creates a figure
who far exceeds the philosophical purpose of the ancient exemplum. For the
purposes of making the reader suspend her judgement on the knowledge
she gains from her senses,23 it is irrelevant that the blind man is ‘de bonne
maison’, that he likes babies and rooms with views, goes hunting and
shooting, and enjoys tennis. As Richard Scholar has observed, ‘there is no
need for us to know that he picks up tennis balls in his left hand’.24 Scholar
goes on to describe Montaigne’s details as violations of the principle of
Ockham’s razor: they are, in his view, superfluous details, surplus to
22
Schwartz (Diderot and Montaigne, p. 32) links this passage to the blind man of Puiseaux who says: ‘Si la
curiosité ne me dominait pas, dit-il, j’aimerais bien autant avoir de longs bras: il me semble que mes
mains m’instruiraient mieux de ce qui se passe dans la lune que vos yeux ou vos téléscopes; et puis les
yeux cessent plutôt de voir, que les mains de toucher. Il vaudrait donc bien autant qu’on perfectionnât en
moi, l’organe que j’ai, que de m’accorder celui qui me manque’ (Lettre, p. 145).
23
The ‘Apologie’ is addressed to a female reader, usually claimed to be Marguerite de Valois.
24
Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 246.
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
411
philosophical demand. There is some truth in Scholar’s reading, but further
attention to Montaigne’s text reveals that the excessiveness of the details
does perform a function: it is a literary rather than a philosophical function,
however, and Diderot’s imitation brings it clearly into view.
Montaigne’s use of amplificatio creates the sense that the ‘gentil-homme de
bonne maison, aveugle nay’ was a real person, confirming and underscoring
the claim to have seen him with his own eyes. Amplificatio here serves the
purpose of vraisemblance. It is this effect of the Montaignian amplificatio that
Diderot exploits in the presentation of his blind man in the Lettre. When he
refers to the excessive details as ‘des circonstances assez peu philosophiques’,
he explains to Madame that it is precisely because they are superfluous to philosophical demand that she should judge the blind man to be real. And yet
Diderot’s amplificatio is also paradoxical: while it suggests direct empirical
experience and while the very irrecuperability of the details to any philosophical purpose guarantee the blind man’s reality, because amplificatio is the
hallmark of Montaigne’s blind man, the more details Diderot provides in
order to establish the specificity of the blind man of Puiseaux, the more he
imitates Montaigne’s ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay’, and so
the less real he becomes. Diderot does this self-consciously and playfully,
and by calling him ‘notre aveugle’, he further underscores the game. At one
level, ‘notre aveugle’ is a way of insisting on his specificity, a way of distinguishing him from ‘votre aveugle’, the one he suspects Madame has in
mind as a result of her reading of Montaigne, and which is making her
pre-judge ‘our’ blind man to be imaginary. Yet by calling him ‘le nôtre’
rather than calling him by his real name — how wonderfully ironic it is that
Farrell thought Le Nôtre was his real name — Diderot keeps the existence
of ‘le vôtre’ alive in the reader’s mind, and thus keeps drawing attention to
the similarity between the ‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’ and the ‘gentil-homme
de bonne maison, aveugle nay’, even as he insists on the difference.
Diderot’s imitation of Montaigne’s amplified imitation of Sextus thus has an
internal playful contradiction, in the face of which the reader can do
nothing but suspend judgement.
If Diderot’s imitation of Montaigne’s amplification of Sextus thus serves to
make the reader reflect on the nature and reliability of the knowledge gained
from reading the Lettre, Diderot’s imitation of Montaigne’s blind man is
also revelatory of the way Diderot himself read Montaigne. He is sensitive
not only to the role Montaigne’s amplificatio plays in the creation of vraisemblance, but also to its philosophically subversive possibilities. The details
Montaigne provides are, in fact, not simply superfluous to philosophical
demand, they cannot simply be pared down or shaved away by Ockham’s
razor as Scholar’s analysis suggests. Instead they exert significant and subversive pressure on the ancient philosophical exemplum.
Following on from the reference to the ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle
nay’ being told by his servants whether to shoot higher or more to the left or the
412
KATE E. TUNSTALL
right, Montaigne observes: ‘Que sçait-on si le genre humain faict une sottise pareille,
à faute de quelque sens, et que par ce defaut la plus part du visage des choses nous
soit caché?’ (p. 665). The blind man would seem here to be returned to Sextus,
framed once again, as Montaigne assures us that he serves the purpose of
revealing to us, the sighted, that if a blind man is wrong to be content with his
four senses, we would be wrong to be content with five, and that our judgement
about the world could easily be, like the blind man’s tennis balls, shots in the
dark.25 And yet the reframing does not entirely contain the anecdote.
Certainly it is possible to see the ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle
nay’ as slightly ridiculous as he goes about shooting hares — how does he
know he’s caught a hare? His servants might be lying to him, taking
advantage of his disability, and certainly, we are to some degree invited to
laugh at this inversion of the usual master– servant relation. But the story
may also be read another way, and this is, I think, the way Diderot reads it.
Because Montaigne gives us so much information about the blind man’s life,
we move away, for the length of the anecdote, from seeing him as a blind and
silent sign to be deciphered by the sighted, as he was in Sextus, to seeing the
world through his blind eyes and also to hearing his voice. This perhaps
explains why Montaigne gave Sextus’s man the sense of hearing, since
hearing suggests speech. For all that he is ‘aveugle nay’, the ‘gentil-homme
de bonne maison’ is coping perfectly well. Indeed it is important that he is
first and foremost a ‘gentil-homme de bonne maison’ and ‘aveugle nay’
second. In Montaigne’s amplificatio, he is enjoying life, saying all the right
words at the right moments, and for practical purposes, the sense of sight is
totally unnecessary. As such, this blind man who was supposed to be demonstrating the idea that we should not be content with the senses we have and the
knowledge they give us, is starting to demonstrate quite the reverse, and
Montaigne’s reinstatement of the sceptical framework in the question ‘Que
sçait-on si [. . .]?’ is not fully effective. Ockham’s razor does not quite work
on Montaigne’s amplificatio; the quantity of detail has begun to suggest a
rival point of view. One can almost hear the ‘gentil-homme de bonne
maison, aveugle nay’ say that he does not care whether knowledge is
relative or not, and in any case can we not see that the pleasures of hunting
and tennis are universal? The thought experiment is beginning to take on a
life of its own; if it is impossible to make a blind man conceive of the advantages of sight, it is, by contrast, perfectly possible for a blind man to make us
conceive of the satisfactions and pleasures of a life without sight.
25
Evidence for the possibility that there are qualities in things of which we might have knowledge if only
we had more senses, is offered, Montaigne claims, by observing the animal kingdom. In another striking
example of amplificatio, he writes: ‘C’est à l’avanture quelque sens particulier qui descouvre aux coqs
l’heure du matin et de minuict, et (c) les esmeut à chanter; qui apprend aux poulles, avant tout usage et experience, de craindre un esparvier, et non une oye, ny un paon, plus grandes bestes; qui advertit les poulets de la
qualité hostile qui est au chat contre eux et à ne se desfier du chien, s’armer contre le mionement, voix aucunement flateuse, non contre l’abaier, voix aspre et quereleuse; aux freslons, aux formis et aux rats, de choisir
tousjours le meilleur fromage et la meilleure poire avant que d’y avoir tasté, (a) et qui achemine le cerf,
(c) l’elefant, le serpent (a) à la cognoissance de certaine herbe propre à leur guerison’ (p. 666).
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
413
The subversive possibilities of Montaigne’s amplificatio did not escape
Diderot and he develops them over the course of the Lettre sur les aveugles,
in which we are given long descriptions not only of the life but also of the
opinions of two blind men, the ‘aveugle-né du Puiseaux’ and more
famously, the blind mathematician Saunderson. The former often expresses
the view that sight is redundant, demonstrating its redundancy also as, for
example, he threads a needle:
Il dispose l’ouverture de l’aiguille transversalement entre ses lèvres, et dans la même direction
que celle de sa bouche; puis, à l’aide de sa langue et de la succion, il attire le fil qui suit son
haleine, à moins qu’il ne soit beaucoup trop gros pour l’ouverture; mais, dans ce cas, celui
qui voit n’est guère moins embarrassé que celui qui est privé de la vue. (p. 144)
And Montaigne’s suggestion of a dialogue between the blind and the sighted is
developed to the full in the Lettre as Diderot places Saunderson in dialogue
with the Anglican minister, Holmes, in which the blind mathematician
offers his famous atheist materialist description of the universe which rivals
the deist, finalist vision of the sighted Holmes. And so when we come to
Diderot’s reference to Montaigne and to the ‘que sais-je?’ in the final
paragraph of the Lettre, it can most profitably be read not as a statement
about scepticism or atheism, nor as a question about the nature and reliability
of knowledge gained from the senses, but as a reflection on how we might
judge the nature and reliability of the knowledge gained from reading, and
as a reference to the subversive possibilities of story-telling and of dialogue,
both developed by Diderot in imitation of Montaigne.
Diderot’s textual imitation is not without certain implications for the
question as to the nature of the knowledge we gain from our sensory
experience, however. Harvey and Hobson argue in the introduction to
their edition of the Lettre that, for Diderot, language is of paramount
importance in the acquisition of knowledge from sensory experience, an
argument that creates continuity between the Lettre sur les aveugles and the
Lettre sur les sourds et muets of two years later which is explicitly about
the relationship between language and the senses.26 Yet it is not only
language which enables us to acquire knowledge from our experience, it is
also a literary and philosophical education, for just as we need to have read
the ‘Apologie’ in order to be able to ‘juger que le personnage dont [Diderot
nous entretient]’ is or is not ‘imaginaire’, so Diderot explains in the Lettre
that we can only judge what we see if our judgement is informed by what
we have read.
Enlightenment operations
The Lettre begins with a reference to a surgical operation designed to give
sight to the blind, an operation performed by the Prussian surgeon, Hilmer,
26
Lettre, ed. by Hobson and Harvey, pp. 15– 16. See also Marian Hobson, ‘La Lettre sur les sourds et les muets
de Diderot: labyrinthe et langage’, Semiotica 16 (1976), 291 – 327.
414
KATE E. TUNSTALL
which would remove the cataracts from the eyes of a young woman by the
name of Mlle Simoneau.27 Cataract operations had become the focus of
much attention in the early part of the eighteenth century as a result of
Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, in the second edition of which (1693),
there appeared a thought experiment which came to be known as
Molyneux’s Question which sought to establish the nature of perception and
the role of judgement within it, by asking whether ‘a man born blind, and
now [. . .] made to see’ could recognize a cube and a sphere which he previously knew only through his sense of touch.28 This question had become
well-known in France partly as a result of Pierre Coste’s translation of the
Essay in 1700,29 but more widely through Voltaire’s reporting of it in his
Éle´ments de la philosophie de Newton (1738), in which he has also claimed that
an answer to the philosophical question had been provided by an operation
performed in London in 1728 on a fourteen-year-old blind boy by the
surgeon, William Cheselden.30 Yet if Diderot begins the Lettre by making
reference to this philosophical and medical context for blindness and seeing,
he also positions his text in critical relation to it.
Unlike Voltaire, Diderot is not of the view that the surgical operation will
provide any philosophical enlightenment. He opens the Lettre with the
statement: ‘Je me doutais bien, Madame, que l’aveugle-née à qui M. de
Réaumur vient de faire abattre la cataracte, ne nous apprendrait pas ce que
vous vouliez savoir’ (p. 139). This is not only because, as he later explains,
post-operative subjects are not in any fit state to respond,31 but also because
they need to be educated in order to be able to understand and judge their
27
Simoneau was one of the engravers of Réaumur’s works: see Lettre, ed. by Hobson and Harvey, p. 173,
n. 6.
28
For analyses of Molyneux’s Question, see G. Evans, ‘Molyneux’s Question’, in Gareth Evans: Collected
Papers, ed. by A. Phillips (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 364 – 99; William R. Paulson, The Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1987); Marjolein
Degenaar, Molyneux’s Problem: Three Centuries of Discussion, trans. by M. J. Collins (Dordrecht, Kluwer,
1996). For Diderot’s engagement with it, see Glauser, ‘Diderot’.
29
John Locke, Essai philosophique concernant l’entendement humain, où l’on montre quelle est l’etendue de nos connaissances certaines, et la manie`re dont nous y parvenons. Traduit de l’anglais de Mr. Locke, par Pierre Coste, sur la quatrie´me
edition, revue, corrige´e, et augmente´e par l’auteur (Amsterdam, Henri Schelte, 1700).
30
Voltaire, Éle´ments de la philosophie de Newton [1738], in The Completes Works Of Voltaire (Oxford, Voltaire
Foundation, 1992), XV, pp. 319 –20. Cheselden attended to Newton shortly before he died. His account first
appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: see ‘An Account of some Observations made by a
young Gentleman, who was born blind, or lost his Sight so early, that he had no Remembrance of ever
having seen, and was couched between 13 and 14 Years of Age’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society, 34 (1728), 447 –50. For Diderot’s reading of Voltaire’s Éle´ments, see Duflo, Diderot philosophe,
pp. 127 –9.
31
Such a view had also been adopted by Condillac: see Essai sur les connaissances humaines, ouvrage où l’on re´duit
à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain (Amsterdam, P. Mortier, 1746), pp. 238 – 65. Diderot is
very attuned to the physicality of the eye (p. 178) and possibly also to the pain involved in the cataract
operation: could we not read his question, ‘quelle différence y a-t-il pour un aveugle entre un homme qui
urine et un homme qui, sans se plaindre, verse son sang’ (p. 147), usually taken as evidence of the unsympathetic nature of the blind, as a critique of Réaumur’s desire to have performed a painful and philosophically
useless operation? For such a reading, see my ‘Molyneux’s Problem: Fact, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ethics
of Cataract Operations in Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles’, in Fiction at Frontiers: Law, Literature and Philosophy
in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Richard Scholar and Alexis Tadié (forthcoming, 2009).
DIDEROT’S LETTRE SUR LES AVEUGLES
415
new visual experience. He claims that the eye needs to learn to see (p. 175), and
that the subject would need to have read the works of Newton, Descartes,
Locke and Leibniz (p. 172) in order to be able to judge whether or not the
sphere he can now see is the sphere he could previously only feel. In the
absence of such reading, the subject will not judge but merely guess, and
guesswork is philosophically very unsatisfactory:
Pour moi, j’écouterais avec plus de satisfaction sur la théorie des sens un métaphysicien à qui les
principes de la métaphysique, les éléments des mathématiques et la conformation des parties
seraient familiers, qu’un homme sans éducation et sans connaissances, à qui l’on a restitué la
vue par l’opération de la cataracte. (p. 171)
Diderot thus rejects the instructive possibilities of the ‘blank slate’, figured
by Locke’s ‘man born blind and [. . .] made to see’, though not in favour of
Descartes’s theory of innate ideas, a theory which Molyneux’s Question had
been designed, among other things, to test, but in favour of education and
knowledge.
What Diderot says regarding judging what we see, is also true of judging
what we read. It has gone unremarked in previous critical readings of the
Lettre that both the implied reader and the person on whom the operation
was performed are women. Of course, this may simply be the reflection of
historical fact: Diderot wrote with a particular person in mind who was
female, as was Hilmer’s subject. However, Hilmer’s female subject is
unusual as the persons referred to in Molyneux’s Question and in Voltaire’s
Éle´ments, as well as those in numerous other accounts, are all male, and it
may be because of this that some editions of the Lettre refer to an
‘aveugle-né’.32 So even if history had a strong hand in the choice, the
common gender is striking and has the effect within the text of suggesting a
link between the female subject who is about to see the light as a result
of the operation, and the female reader who is about to see the light, metaphorically speaking, as a result of reading the Lettre. It links seeing and
reading, and as such, it also suggests that if the subject of the operation
needs to be educated and well read in order to judge what she sees, the
same is true of the reader who needs a literary education in order to judge
what she reads. Education and knowledge are necessary in order to judge all
experience, be it visual or literary.
Diderot saw no point in asking an uneducated subject like Mlle Simoneau to
judge what she was seeing, but at the end of the second paragraph of the Lettre,
he explicitly asks Madame to judge what she is reading, thereby suggesting that
she is, by contrast, in possession of the necessary literary and philosophical
culture. And as we have seen, a reader with a knowledge of Montaigne and
Sextus Empiricus, a reader able to see the web of intertextual allusions in
32
See, for example, the account of the operation performed by Roger Grant on one William Jones of
Newington Butts in 1709 in the Tatler, 55 (1709), 10– 11.
416
KATE E. TUNSTALL
the Lettre, will adopt a critical, sceptical stance on the knowledge gained from
the reading experience. She or he is the kind of subject Hilmer would have
needed for his cataract operation, and she or he is the perfect subject for
Diderot’s enlightenment operation.
WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD