L’erreur vitale : antimathématisme et monstruosité chez Diderot

Diderot’s fascination with monsters, in both biological and ‘cosmic’ contexts, is well known. On the one hand, he inverts the Aristotelian standpoint in which the existence of monsters simply indicates the existence of cases when Nature has ‘missed’ her target: on the contrary, monsters and their expression of the basic randomness of the natural world becomes a constitutive trait of materialist ontology. Now, as George Canguilhem put it, «there are no monstrous machines», i.e., if we turn the formulation around, monsters, errors, contra naturam forms only exist in the living world. This vision of a living and monstrous Nature (or rather, monstrous-thus-living), is also present in Diderot’s ‘antimathematicism’, i.e., his view that mathematical truths are not easily transposable «on earth» (Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, § ii, iii). Thus randomness, error and monstrosity are constitutive traits of living being for Diderot, a modern Lucretian. He is neither content to ‘comment on’ the life sciences of his time, nor to assert a priori principles that would help us decipher empirical life. Rather, Diderot projects these traits onto matter itself, thereby articulating a ‘protovitalism’ (it is not an actual vitalist doctrine, and remains quite programmatic). Error is also present there because, unlike nearly all the rest of the materialist tradition, Diderot emphasizes the fictional character of our relation to Nature, which he describes as «a woman who likes to disguise herself» (§ xii)