The French mathematician and encyclopedist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert was the illegitimate son of Madame de Tencin and the artillery general Destouches-Canon. He was abandoned by his mother on the steps of the baptistry of Saint-Jean-Le-Rond in Paris, from which he received his name. Shortly afterward his father returned from the provinces, claimed the child, and placed him with Madame Rousseau, a glazier's wife, with whom d'Alembert remained until a severe illness in 1765 forced him to seek new quarters. Through the Destouches family, Jean Le Rond was placed in the exclusive Jansenist Collège de Mazarin and given the name of d'Aremberg, which he later changed to d'Alembert, no doubt for phonetic reasons. At the college an effort was made to win him over to the Jansenist cause, and he went so far as to write a commentary on St. Paul. The intense Jesuit-Jansenist controversy served only to disgust him with both sides, however, and he left the college with the degree of bachelor of arts and a profound distrust of, and aversion to, metaphysical disputes.
After attending law school for two years he changed to the study of medicine, which he soon abandoned for mathematics. His talent and fascination for mathematics were such that at an early age he had independently discovered many mathematical principles, only to find later that they were already known. In 1739 he submitted a mémoire on integral calculus to the Académie des Sciences, but it was his Traité de dynamique in 1743 that won him acclaim and paved the way for his entry into the academy that same year. The introduction to his treatise is significant as the first enunciation of d'Alembert's philosophy of science. He accepted the reality of truths rationally deduced from instinctive principles insofar as they are verifiable experimentally and therefore are not simply aprioristic deductions. Although admitting unproved axioms at the base of his principles of mechanics, thus revealing his debt to René Descartes, d'Alembert rejected metaphysical affirmations and the search for universals and expressed admiration for Bacon's experimental and inductive method.
The decade of the 1740s may be considered d'Alembert's mathematical period during which he made his most outstanding and fruitful contributions to that discipline. In addition to the Traité de dynamique he wrote Mémoire sur la réfraction des corps solides (1741); Théorie de l'équilibre du mouvement des fluides (1744 and 1751); Réflexions sur la cause générale des vents, which won him the prize of the Berlin Academy in 1746 as well as membership in that body; a mémoire on vibrating strings (Recherches sur les cordes vibrantes), written in 1747 for the Berlin Academy; Recherches sur la précession des équinoxes et sur la nutation (1749); Réflexions sur la théorie de la résistance des fluides (1752); Recherches sur differents points importants du systéme du monde (1754–1756), plus eight volumes of Opuscules mathématiques (1761–1780).
D'Alembert's first philosophical work, the Discours préliminaire to the Encyclopédie, appeared in 1751. As early as 1746 he, with Denis Diderot, had been on the publisher's payroll as translator, in connection with the projected French version of Chambers's Cyclopaedia. We may suppose that, like Diderot, he had already worked for the publishers as a translator of English works for French consumption, thus exposing himself to the writings of the English empiricists and supplementing the meager pension left him by his father. In any event, d'Alembert had read Bacon as early as 1741; and his Discours préliminaire revealed not only his debt to the Descartes of the Regulae, shorn of metaphysics, but his admiration for, and indebtedness to, Bacon for his experimental method; Isaac Newton, whom he admired for proving gravitational force without trying to explain its first cause; and John Locke, whose metaphysical method he adopted. While paying lip service to the traditional religious concepts of his time, d'Alembert used Lockian sensationalist theory to arrive at a naturalistic interpretation of nature. It is not through vague and arbitrary hypotheses that nature can be known, he asserted, but through a careful study of physical phenomena. He discounted metaphysical truths as inaccessible through reason. In the Discours, d'Alembert began by affirming his faith in the reliability of the evidence for an external world derived from the senses and dismissed the Berkeleian objections as metaphysical subtleties that are contrary to good sense. Asserting that all knowledge is derived from the senses, he traced the development of knowledge from the sense impressions of primitive man to their elaboration into more complex forms of expression. Language, music, and the arts communicate emotions and concepts derived from the senses and, as such, are imitations of nature. For example, d'Alembert believed that music that is not descriptive is simply noise. Since all knowledge can be reduced to its origin in sensations, and since these are approximately the same in all men, it follows that even the most limited mind can be taught any art or science. This was the basis for d'Alembert's great faith in the power of education to spread the principles of the Enlightenment.
In his desire to examine all domains of the human intellect, d'Alembert was representative of the encyclopedic eighteenth-century mind. He believed not only that humanity's physical needs are the basis of scientific and aesthetic pursuits, but also that morality too is pragmatically evolved from social necessity. This would seem to anticipate the thought of Auguste Comte, who also placed morality on a sociological basis, but it would be a mistake to regard d'Alembert as a Positivist in the manner of Comte. If d'Alembert was a Positivist, he was so through temporary necessity, based on his conviction that since ultimate principles cannot be readily attained, one must reluctantly be limited to fragmentary truths attained through observation and experimentation. He was a rationalist, however, in that he did not doubt that these ultimate principles exist. In the Discours préliminaire he expressed the belief that everything could be reduced to one first principle, the universe being "one great truth" if we could only see it in a broader perspective. Similarly, in the realm of morality and aesthetics, he sought to reduce moral and aesthetic norms to dogmatic absolutes, and this would seem to be in conflict with the pragmatic approach of pure sensationalist theories. He was forced, in such cases, to appeal to a sort of intuition or good sense that was more Cartesian than Lockian, but he did not attempt to reconcile his inconsistencies and rather sought to remain within the basic premises of sensationalism. D'Alembert's tendency to go beyond the tenets of his own theories, as he did, for example, in admitting that mathematical realities are a creation of the human intellect and do not correspond to physical reality, has led Ernst Cassirer to conclude that d'Alembert, despite his commitment to sensationalist theory, had an insight into its limitations.
During the early 1750s d'Alembert engaged actively in the polemics of the time, particularly in the defense of the Encyclopédie and the party it represented. Many of the articles he wrote for that publication, as well as his preface to Volume III (1753), were aimed at the enemies of the Encyclopédie, notably the Jesuits, who were among the first to attack it for its antireligious and republican orientation. In addition, he took part in the controversy over French versus Italian music, which was inflamed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attack on French music in "Lettre sur la musique française" (1753). D'Alembert had already published his Éléments de musique (1752), based on Jean-Philippe Rameau's theories on harmonics, and in 1754 he published anonymously his Réflexions sur la musique en général et la musique française en particulier.
D'Alembert's chief preoccupation at this period, however, was with philosophy and literature. His Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie appeared in 1753 in two volumes (expanded to four volumes in 1759, with a fifth volume added in 1767), and it is here that his skepticism concerning metaphysical problems is delineated. Proceeding on the premise that certainty in this field cannot be reached through reason alone, he considered the arguments for and against the existence of God and cautiously concluded in the affirmative, on the grounds that intelligence cannot be the product of brute matter. Like Newton, d'Alembert viewed the universe as a clock, which necessarily implies a clockmaker, but his final attitude is that expressed by Montaigne's "Que sais-je?" Humankind's uncertainty before this enigmatic universe is the basis of d'Alembert's plea for religious tolerance. He maintained his skeptical deism as an official, public position throughout his life, but there is evidence for believing that in the late 1760s, under the influence of Diderot (whose Rêve de d'Alembert appeared in 1769), d'Alembert was converted to Diderot's materialism. In private correspondence with intimate friends, d'Alembert revealed his commitment to an atheistic interpretation of the universe. He accepted intelligence as simply the result of a complex development of matter and not as evidence for a divine intelligence.
Aside from the publication of a polemical brochure, Histoire de la destruction des Jésuites, in 1765 (with two additional Lettres on the subject in 1767), d'Alembert spent the last two decades of his life in furthering the cause of the philosophes in the Académie Française—by writing his Éloges, which were read in the Académie (and published in 1779), and by fostering the election of candidates of his own choice. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse's salon, where d'Alembert presided, became, in the words of Frédéric Masson, the "obligatory antechamber of the Académie." In this period he became influential with young aspiring men of letters, whom he recruited for his party and whose careers he fostered. The most notable of his disciples was the Marquis de Condorcet. After years of ill health, d'Alembert died of a bladder ailment and was buried as an unbeliever in a common, unmarked grave.
Oeuvres philosophiques et littéraires. Edited by J. F. Bastien. 18 vols. Paris, 1805. Not so complete as the Belin edition but contains letters to d'Alembert not included elsewhere. Nouvelle édition augmentée. Edited by A. Belin. 5 vols. Paris, 1821. The most complete edition to date.
Oeuvres et correspondance inédites de d'Alembert. Edited by Charles Henry. Paris, 1887. Contains important supplements to above editions in the fields of philosophy, literature, and music, as well as additional correspondence.
Discours préliminaire de l'Encyclopédie. Edited by P. Picavet. Paris, 1912. Standard critical edition.
For a fuller listing, see A Critical Bibliography of French Literature. Edited by D. C. Cabeen. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1947–1951. Vol. IV, pp. 136–138.
Works on D'alembert
Bertrand, Joseph. D'Alembert. Paris: Librarie Hochette, 1889. Despite shortcomings and reliance on Condorcet's Eloge de d'Alembert, the most complete biography to date.
Grimsley, Ronald. Jean d'Alembert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. A good, comprehensive treatment of d'Alembert's philosophy and ideas. Less concerned with biography.
Kunz, Ludwig. "Die Erkenntnistheorie d'Alemberts," in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. 20 (1907), 96–126. Considers relation between d'Alembert's metaphysics and English empiricists. Presents him as a link between empiricists and Comte.
Misch, Georg. Zur Entstehung des französischen Positivismus. Berlin, 1900. Influence of d'Alembert's empiricism and materialistic viewpoint on Comte's Positivism.
Muller, Maurice. Essai sur la philosophie de Jean d'Alembert. Paris, 1926. Most important and complete study of d'Alembert's general philosophy.
Pappas, John N. Voltaire and d'Alembert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. Considers d'Alembert's position and method in spreading the ideals of the Enlightenment and his influence on Voltaire.
This is the complete article, containing 1,892 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page).
