The Idea of Character in the Encyclopedie

Abstract

MOST STUDIES of the Encyclopedie have, quite naturally, emphasized those aspects of the work that express either bold criticism of the ancien regime or the even bolder attempt to establish new modes of philosophic and scientific thought. Taking their cue, perhaps, from Diderot's own admission of the relative weakness of the semantic, lexicological, and literary parts of the text, critics have neglected them and it is only recently that attention has been drawn to what might be called the discourse of the Encyclopedie.1 That there is a verbal as well as a conceptual ordering of its subject matter is suggested by Diderot in his article Encyclopedie,2 where he tries to distinguish among the various levels of order in the work. The article, is of course, mostly programmatic in nature, but it does reflect, as the Discours preliminaire does not, the actual process of compilation and composition. It is this experience that leads Diderot to acknowledge the lack of explicit treatment of linguistic problems in the volumes already published; this failing is, however, compensated by a greater feeling for what is actually involved in the writing as opposed to the planning of the work. Diderot sees five levels of order in an encyclopedia. Of these, four touch on familiar themes. That the most general plan of the work should conform to the division of the mind into its component faculties; that the