Diderot lecteur d'Alexander Pope

Paolo Quintili: Diderot's Reading of Alexander Pope. Diderot's first philosophical and poetical reading, between 1736 and 1746 was of Silhouette's translation of Pope's Essay on Man. Here he develops a critical method for texts as well as theological and political facts, together with themes later integrated into his youthful works. Pope's cosmology and Newtonianism had an impact on his conception of man's moral world. He pays great attention to relations between the socially active individual and the physical cosmos: how can one make the transition, according to Leibniz's fullness principle, between the physical, ethical and political continuum? His marginalia express clearly a political paradox, grounded in morals, that can be traced in Pope's statement "Whatever is, is right". Diderot interprets notions such as God and Evil not as qualities of the physical and moral cosmos, but as categories of the subject's judgement. The tendency of Diderot's pragmatic criticism is to give the subject the possibility to become active within the cosmos and to answer the contradictions between Being (of the human world) and the Ought-to-be (of knowledge)

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