Diderot, Jonathan Edwards and Václav Havel: three births on 5 October

Three men born on 5 October, a century and a bit apart from one another, and not one of them could be called a philosopher without an argument breaking out. Denis Diderot, born in Langres in 1713, edited an encyclopaedia and wrote his best philosophy in dialogues he never published. Jonathan Edwards, born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, was a Calvinist preacher who produced the most rigorous book on the will written in eighteenth-century America. Václav Havel, born in Prague in 1936, was a playwright who went to prison, came out, and in 1989 was carried into the presidential castle.

What they share is not a doctrine but a predicament. Each lived across a gap between what he believed and what the world around him would allow him to say. Diderot lost his faith and spent twenty-five years organising a body of knowledge that would quietly outlast the faith. Edwards kept his, and defended it with a theory of freedom so tight that his enemies could not find the joint. Havel, under a regime that demanded no belief at all, only the daily repetition of its slogans, asked what happens when one man stops repeating them. The three answers do not agree with each other. That is what makes the date worth keeping.

Diderot: the net, not the tree#

Diderot was the son of a master cutler, a well-known one, and was educated by the Jesuits at Langres; he was tonsured in 1726, since a priest was what the family expected. Paris turned him into something else. He abandoned the law, lived by tutoring and translation, and in 1749 was seized and held for three months in the prison of Vincennes for his Letter on the Blind, a short work which argued that a man born without sight might reasonably be a man without God. It was to Vincennes that Jean-Jacques Rousseau walked out from Paris to visit him, and on the road, by his own account, had the illumination that became the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts.

The project that defined him had begun two years earlier, in 1747, as a translation of an English encyclopaedia. By the time the first volume appeared in 1751 it had become something else: seventeen volumes of text, the last issued in 1765, and eleven volumes of plates, completed in 1772. Jean le Rond d'Alembert, his co-editor, left halfway. The work was twice suppressed. The publisher censored articles behind Diderot's back. He finished it anyway, and the Encyclopédie became the Enlightenment's single most ambitious artefact, less for any one article than for its design. Theology and saddlery sat in the same alphabet. The cross-references, the renvois, could lead a reader from a pious entry to the one that undid it. The plates, drawn in workshops, treated the knowledge of the hand as the equal of the knowledge of the head. Knowledge in this book is a net rather than a tree, a structure one enters at any point, and every later encyclopaedia descends from it.

Diderot's philosophy proper, though, is in the works he kept in a drawer. Rameau's Nephew, written and rewritten between 1761 and 1774, sets a philosopher against a brilliant parasite who argues, with more wit than the philosopher can muster, that virtue and success have nothing to do with each other. Goethe translated it into German in 1805, before any French edition existed, and Hegel found in it his image of the 'disrupted consciousness' for the Phenomenology of Spirit. D'Alembert's Dream (1769) imagines matter as sensitive and self-organising, and lets a feverish mathematician mutter about species changing over time, ninety years before Darwin. Jacques the Fatalist, written across fifteen years and published only in the 1790s, turns the free-will problem into a road novel in which the narrator keeps interrupting himself to ask whether anything in the story could have gone otherwise.

He did not build a system, and he distrusted those who did. In 1765, to find a dowry for his daughter, he put his library up for sale; Catherine II of Russia bought it, left the books in his house and paid him a salary as their librarian. In 1773 he made the hard journey to St Petersburg and spent five months in daily conversation with her. He came back with his belief in enlightened despotism shaken, having seen how little a philosopher's talk moved an empress's policy. Diderot died in Paris on 31 July 1784 and was buried at Saint-Roch. Marx, filling in the parlour-game 'confessions' his daughters put to him, named him his favourite prose writer, and it is easy to see why: Diderot was the Enlightenment figure who most doubted the Enlightenment while refusing to give it up.

Edwards: necessity without excuse#

Jonathan Edwards was born ten years and three thousand miles away from Diderot, and the two could not have understood each other's lives. Most readers know Edwards, if they know him, as the preacher of 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' (1741) and a leading voice of the Great Awakening. The philosophers' Edwards is a different figure. He entered Yale in 1716, not yet thirteen, read Locke and Newton there, and in the notebooks he kept as a student worked out an idealism which holds that physical objects are collections of sensible ideas, that finite minds are assemblages of perceptions, and that God is the only genuine cause and substance. The arguments resemble Berkeley's, and the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that they appear to owe nothing to him.

The major work is Freedom of the Will (1754). Against the Arminians, who held that the will has a power of self-determination, Edwards argued that the notion is incoherent: a choice that is not determined by the agent's strongest motive would have to be determined by a prior choice, and so on without end. Every act of will has a cause. Freedom is the absence of external constraint on doing what one wills, not the absence of causes for willing it. Necessity, so understood, is compatible with moral responsibility, and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination can be stated without embarrassment. Philosophers now call the position compatibilism; Edwards did not use the word, and reached it independently of Hume, whose version was being published in Edinburgh in the same decade. Readers who find that lineage surprising may find the parallel with Leibniz, who had made similar moves against the idea of an uncaused choice half a century earlier, less so.

The Nature of True Virtue, published after his death in 1765, defines virtue as consisting most essentially in 'benevolence to being', and in a wider sense in taking pleasure in that benevolence's beauty. The point is a sharp one. Love of one's own family, tribe or nation is not virtue, on this view, but a larger self-interest. Only a disposition towards being in general, which for Edwards means towards God, counts. He accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, in 1757, was installed on 16 February 1758, and died on 22 March from a smallpox inoculation, less than five weeks into the post. The twentieth-century rediscovery of him, from Perry Miller onward, made him the first major philosophical mind of what became the United States.

Havel: the greengrocer's window#

Václav Havel was born in Prague on 5 October 1936 into a family of builders, restaurateurs and film people, and that was enough, after 1948, to shut him out of any university course in the humanities. He trained as a laboratory assistant, did his military service, and in 1959 took a job as a stagehand at the Theatre on the Balustrade. Within four years the theatre was staging his plays. The Garden Party (1963) and The Memorandum (1965) made him, before he was thirty, the best-known absurdist dramatist east of Ionesco. After the Soviet invasion of 1968 his work was banned. He helped found Charter 77, the human-rights initiative whose manifesto circulated in January 1977 with 243 signatures and grew to about 1,200 by the mid-1980s, and the price of that was a series of prison terms, the longest from May 1979 to February 1983.

The essay that earns him a place on this page was written in 1978, between those sentences. 'The Power of the Powerless' opens with the manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop who puts a sign reading 'Workers of the world, unite!' among the onions and carrots. He does not believe it. He does not expect anyone to read it. He put it there, Havel writes, 'simply because it has been done that way for years', and because he knows what happens to those who do not.

The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message.

The message is a declaration of obedience, and the regime Havel called post-totalitarian runs on nothing else. It does not need belief; it needs each citizen's small daily participation in a ritual everyone knows to be empty. That is what he meant by 'living within a lie', and his point was that it 'can constitute the system only if it is universal'. One greengrocer who takes the sign down has not toppled anything. But 'his revolt is an attempt to live within the truth', and he 'has shown everyone that it is possible'. The argument is deliberately modest, and its modesty is its strength: it asks for no revolution, only for a refusal to be the system's instrument in one's own window.

The second text, Letters to Olga, collects what he wrote to his wife from prison between 1979 and 1983. Here Havel is a philosopher in the stricter sense, working in the shadow of Heidegger and of Jan Patočka, the phenomenologist who had become a spokesman for Charter 77 and died in March 1977 after a long police interrogation. Havel's theme is responsibility before what he calls the absolute horizon of being, the sense, which he took to be the ground of all ethics, that one is answerable even where no one is watching. It is a long way from the greengrocer, and yet it is the same thought turned inward. Havel served as president of Czechoslovakia from 29 December 1989 to 20 July 1992 and of the Czech Republic from 2 February 1993 to 2 February 2003. He died at his country house at Hrádeček on 18 December 2011.

Three men, one gap#

Diderot organised what could be known so that belief would no longer be required. Edwards systematised belief so that its hardest claim, that nothing we do is uncaused, would no longer threaten what we owe each other. Havel asked what a person owes the truth when the regime has given up asking anyone to believe anything. It would be tidy to say they converge. They do not. Diderot would have found Edwards's God a tyrant and Havel's absolute horizon a fog; Edwards would have thought the other two had mistaken their own wills for the measure of things. What they do share is the refusal to let the gap close by itself. Each thought that the distance between conviction and conduct was where a life, and a philosophy, actually happened. The previous entry in this series, on Otto Weininger and Sputnik, is here, and the month's gatherings are in the October conference diary.