"We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves"
About this Quote
Diderot turns the Enlightenment’s proud machine metaphors into something intimate: not clocks, but instruments. The point isn’t to reduce humans to mechanism; it’s to describe how porous we are. “Endowed with feeling and memory” smuggles in a provocation: sensation doesn’t merely register the world, it accumulates. Memory is the resonance chamber that makes today’s stimulus ring with yesterday’s experience. That’s why the image works - it’s physics repurposed as psychology.
The sly move is in the second sentence. Our senses are “strings” struck by “surrounding objects,” a tidy bit of empiricism: the world plays us. Then Diderot adds the unsettling coda: the strings “frequently strike themselves.” He’s pointing at internal causation - imagination, association, desire, trauma - the way the mind can generate sensations, arguments, even convictions without any fresh input. The body becomes both instrument and musician, a self-exciting system. That’s the subtext: if experience is partly self-percussive, certainty is always suspect.
Context matters. Diderot, the great editor of the Encyclopedie, lived in a culture where knowledge was being reorganized into systems, categories, mechanisms. He’s borrowing that explanatory ambition while warning against its arrogance. Humans are not blank slates serenely recording reality; they’re vibrating, temperamental devices. The metaphor flatters science with its precision, then undercuts it by insisting on feedback loops - the mind’s habit of mistaking its own echoes for the world.
The sly move is in the second sentence. Our senses are “strings” struck by “surrounding objects,” a tidy bit of empiricism: the world plays us. Then Diderot adds the unsettling coda: the strings “frequently strike themselves.” He’s pointing at internal causation - imagination, association, desire, trauma - the way the mind can generate sensations, arguments, even convictions without any fresh input. The body becomes both instrument and musician, a self-exciting system. That’s the subtext: if experience is partly self-percussive, certainty is always suspect.
Context matters. Diderot, the great editor of the Encyclopedie, lived in a culture where knowledge was being reorganized into systems, categories, mechanisms. He’s borrowing that explanatory ambition while warning against its arrogance. Humans are not blank slates serenely recording reality; they’re vibrating, temperamental devices. The metaphor flatters science with its precision, then undercuts it by insisting on feedback loops - the mind’s habit of mistaking its own echoes for the world.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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