Jacques der Fatalist und sein Herr

»How did they meet? – By chance, like everyone else. – What were their names? – What does it matter? – Where did they come from? – From the nearest place. – Where were they going? – Do we know where we are going? – What did they say? – The master said nothing and Jacques said that his captain said that everything good or bad that happens to us down here is written, up there.«

This is how Denis Diderot, perhaps the most cheerful of the French Enlightenment writers, begins his novel, JACQUES THE FATALIST AND HIS MASTER. With a delight in storytelling, he sends the servant Jacques and his master on a nine-day journey through pre-revolutionary France. The two protagonists, reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, debate philosophical questions endlessly in a witty and entertaining fashion. They both particularly enjoy discussing the problem of free will at every available opportunity – while riding and resting, stopping off at inns, drinking wine late into the night, talking to others, hearing and experiencing all kinds of tales. Paradoxically, the urbane, dynamic and cheeky Jacques is a follower of stoic fatalism, holding that whatever happens is written in heaven’s great book of fate, while his dull and sleepy master professes to believe in free will, though without making use of it in real life.

Diderot chooses an open form of dialogue, with the two men’s conversations being repeatedly interrupted by the narrator, who interjects with comments, reflections and thoughts of his own. Instead of simply stating opinions, he turns them on their head in a dialectical game, exploring their effect and counter-effect, so that no thought can be conceived that does not also contain the possibility of its opposite. This makes the conversations between Jacques and his master into true comedies of wit, which entertain us by instructing us, and vice versa. In JACQUES THE FATALIST AND HIS MASTER, Diderot makes us a gift of the sum of his ironic understanding of philosophy and aesthetics. The novel is, in addition, a perceptive study of the question of master and servant, significant for subsequent thinkers like Hegel and Marx.