Jacques The Fatalist: And His Master - Plot & Excerpts
Many critics have assumed that Jacques is about fatalism, that it is an exploration in fictional terms of philosophical issues raised by Diderot’s materialist view of the world – a view which requires the universe to be explained exclusively in terms of matter, its properties and activity. Diderot was led from this position to a commitment to determinism which propounded that if the universe is explicable exclusively in terms of the organization and activity of matter, then there is no room for any ‘play’ in the system. Nothing is chance: all is determined. At the same time, Diderot was intensely preoccupied by ethical problems and concerns. Resolutely hostile to what he saw as the unnatural and stultifying effects of Christian ethical teaching, he remained equally resolute in seeking some alternative foundation to ethics. But this was where Diderot’s problems began, because the philosophical position he held seemed to deny any possibility of establishing a secure basis for ethics except as a form of utilitarian social engineering: if everything is determined, the argument will run, free will is a nonsense and, if this is the case, although we may attempt by means of an appropriate system of incentives and deterrents to make man what is socially desirable, we cannot make him a moral being.
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