Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer. Born in Langres, Champagne, France in 1713, he was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and was the editor-in-chief of the famous Encyclopédie.

Other works

Although the Encyclopédie was Diderot's monumental work, he was the author of many pieces that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and fruitful ideas. He wrote sentimental plays, Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758), accompanying them with essays on dramatic poetry, including especially the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he announced the principles of a new drama, the serious, domestic, bourgeois drama of real life, in opposition to the stilted conventions of the classic French stage.

Related Topics:
Play - Dramatic poetry - Drama

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

His art criticism was also highly influential. His Essai sur la peinture was described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who thought it worth translating, as "a magnificent work, which speaks even more helpfully to the poet than to the painter, though to the painter too it is as a blazing torch."

Related Topics:
Art criticism - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Grimm wrote newsletters to various high personages in Germany, reporting what was going on in the world of art and literature in Paris, then the intellectual capital of Europe. Diderot helped Grimm between 1759 and 1779, by writing for him an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings in the Paris Salon. These reports are highly readable pieces of art criticism. According to Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, they initiated the French into a new sentiment, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot," Anne Louise Germaine de Staël wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius."

Related Topics:
Philologist - Friedrich Melchior Grimm - Paris Salon - Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve - Anne Louise Germaine de Staël

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was Diderot's favourite among contemporary artists. Greuze's most characteristic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same sentiment of domestic virtue and the pathos of common life, which Diderot had attempted to represent upon the stage. For Diderot was above all things interested in the life of men, not the abstract life of the race, but the incidents of individual character, the fortunes of a particular family, the relations of real and concrete motives in this or that special case. He delighted with the enthusiasm of a born casuist in curious puzzles of right and wrong, and in devising a conflict between the generalities of ethics and the conditions of an ingeniously contrived practical dilemma. Diderot's interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form; in two, however, of the most remarkable of all his pieces, it is not sympathetic, but ironical. Jacques le fataliste (written in. 1773, but not published until 1796) is in manner an imitation of Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey. Le Neveu de Rameau is a "farce-tragedy." Its intention has been matter of dispute; whether it was designed to be merely a satire on contemporary manners, or a reduction of the theory of self-interest to an absurdity, or the application of irony to the ethics of ordinary convention, or a mere setting for a discussion about music, or a vigorous dramatic sketch of a parasite and a human original. Goethe's translation (1805) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public. After executing it, he gave back the original French manuscript to Friedrich Schiller, from whom he had it. No authentic French copy of it appeared until the writer had been dead forty years (1823).

Related Topics:
Jean-Baptiste Greuze - Casuist - Tristram Shandy - Satire - Friedrich Schiller

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Diderot's miscellaneous pieces range from a graceful trifle like the Règrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre up to Le rêve de D'Alembert, where he plunges into the depths of the controversy as to the ultimate constitution of matter and the meaning of life. Diderot was not a coherent and systematic thinker, but rather "a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another" (Rosenkranz). He did not develop a system of materialism, but he contributed many of the most declamatory pages of the Système de la nature of his friend Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach, styled by some "the very Bible of atheism".

Related Topics:
Rosenkranz - Materialism - Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Varied and incessant as was Diderot's mental activity, it was not of a kind to bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain that bare official recognition of merit which was implied by being chosen a member of the Académie française. When the time came for him to provide a dowry for his daughter, he saw no other alternative than to sell his library. When the Catherine II of Russia heard of his straits, she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library, and then requested the philosopher to retain the books in Paris until she required them, and to constitute himself her librarian, with a yearly salary. In 1773 and 1774 Diderot spent some months at the empress's court at St Petersburg.

Related Topics:
Académie française - Dowry - Catherine II of Russia - St Petersburg

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He died of emphysema and dropsy in Paris on July 31, 1784, and was buried in the city's Eglise Saint-Roch. His heirs sold his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the Russian National Library.

Related Topics:
Emphysema - Dropsy - Paris - July 31 - 1784 - Eglise Saint-Roch - Russian National Library

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~