Consoling les vrais athées: Diderot and the Problem of the Afterlife

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of Denis Diderot’s attitude towards mortality. Diderot’s work displays significant unease regarding the prospect of dying in a godless universe, and features various strategies for helping the existentially worried atheist cope with eventual annihilation. Most notably, throughout the course of his literary career Diderot developed two distinct schemes that might allow for a meaningful transcendence of death compatible with atheism. A comparison of these two apparently complementary schemes, which I call material and historical transcendence, reveals many parallels, but on further consideration it becomes clear that they are incompatible in a number of important ways.