Diderot: The Danger of Setting Oneself Against the Law

At Half Price Books the other day I picked up a copy of five short pieces by Denis Diderot, the 18th Century French philosopher: This is Not a Story and other stories, a new translation by P.N. Furbank. (Oxford University Press, 1991) The last delightful little piece is "A Conversation of a Father With his Children, or The Danger of Setting Oneself Against the Law," (Entretien d'un père avec ses enfants) (1772).

Diderot's father gathers Denis, his brother and sister 'round and tells of the time he was an executor to an estate. Diderot père stumbles across a yellowed will, apparently forgotten, that disinherits the deceased's deserving and needy relatives and favors a rich family in far-off Paris. He was tempted to toss the will into the fire; who would know? Aren't compassion and justice more important than the law? A priest whom he consults advises him that it is indeed the compassionate course, but if he were to do so he has a moral obligation to reimburse the cheated heirs with his own funds. Diderot emphatically endorses burning the unjust will, but his brother, an abbé, defends the supremacy of the law, claiming that to evade or defy it in any given case is to open the door to the sophistries of "all the knaves in the universe." A lively discussion ensues about this and other cases.

This piece, only 33 short pages, would make an interesting companion to Thoreau's essay, "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," discussed in Lesson Seven of The Class of Nonviolence. Diderot is less polemic, more open-ended than Thoreau: he aims to provoke discussion rather than convert to his point of view. Diderot's ending is characteristically ambivalent. Denis whispers to his father, " . . the truth is, there are no laws for the wise man." His father replies, "I should not be sorry if there were one or two in the town like you; but I should not want to live there if they all thought the same."

Alas, there does not appear to be an English translation available online, but it is well worth finding, reading and sharing.

Images of War

The New York Times had an intriguing "idea of the day," The Morality of Web War Footage. It leads us to an online magazine that is new to me: Guernica - a Magazine of Art & Politics and specifically to an article by Nicholas Sautin, The Pleasure of Flinching.

Sautin cites Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2002), her look at the representation of atrocity--from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.

Sautin writes:

For Sontag, there is always a moral need to question our right to witness atrocity: “Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it… or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

The problem with voyeurism and the Internet, though, is that the idea of “the right to look” may have become obsolete. Atrocity footage has been taken out of the hands of those who would previously have held such moral responsibility—governments, journalists, censors, teachers, etc. The images are simply there for anyone who wishes to look. We imagine their existence, haunted by glimpses of what we have actually seen, and often choose not to look further.

 We look at images of war in Lesson Seven of the Class of Nonviolence. In our Facilitator's Manual we include a selection of nine classic images, which can also be downloaded as a slideshow on our Web site. (note: this link will open Powerpoint.)  Sautin article, which also includes links to the videos he discusses, is an important update.

Also recommended for those who wish to pursue this track is Virginia Woolf's first essay in her book Three Guineas (1938) which can be read online. Woolf writes:

This morning’s collection contains the photograph of what might be a man’s body, or a woman’s; it is so mutilated that it might, on the other hand, be the body of a pig. But those certainly are dead children, and that undoubtedly is the section of a house. A bomb has torn open the side; there is still a birdcage hanging in what was presumably the sitting-room, but the rest of the house looks like nothing so much as a bunch of spillikins suspended in mid air.

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Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are the same; and they are violent.

 What resources do you use to teach the art of war?