The randomness of life: a philosophical approach inspired by the Enlightenment

Did the Enlightenment anticipate modern reflections about the role of chance within cells or in living beings? No, especially if one pays attention to the very different scientific context of that periods and takes care to distrust the concept of "precursors". Nonetheless, several thinkers of the Enlightenment, scientists or philosophers, have constructed an opposition between the random and order that shares some links with modern concerns. More precisely, philosophers like Diderot and some physicians, chemists or naturalists, have articulated the necessity and contingency in opposition to the idea of an absolute natural order and to any preformed "germ" explaining the development of animals. But I will argue that this subtle concept also diverges from the idea of a universal determinism developed by Laplace. There is a way to deal with natural necessity and the universal interdependence of phenomena without excluding the random, going beyond the classical - though posterior to the eighteenth century - opposition between determinism and indeterminism. Particularly with Diderot, the Enlightenment presents an epistemology of the random loosely attached to the natural sciences, producing a philosophical reflection that can be linked with some modern issues of biology. I examine two examples: the criticism of the explanation of order by order, and the thesis that probability can tell us something about natural productions through the idea of randomized "expression," e.g., stochastic expression of genes for modern molecular biology and expressions of natural forms for Diderot.