Writer and philosopher, born in Langres, NE France. Trained by the Jesuits, he became a tutor and bookseller's hack (173344), before beginning as a writer. Always controversial, his Pensées philosophiques (1746, Philosophical Thoughts) was burned by the Parliament of Paris for its anti-Christian ideas, and he was imprisoned for his Lettre sur les aveugles (1749, trans Essay on Blindness). For 20 years he worked tirelessly as editor of an expanded French version of Chambers's Cyclopaedia (175176), known as the Encyclopédie, a major work of the age of the Enlightenment. A prolific and versatile writer, he published novels, plays, satires, essays, and letters.
Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher and writer.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with his work Jacques le fataliste et son maître, which, in emulation of Laurence Sterne, challenged conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas relating to free will.
Life
Diderot was born in Langres, Champagne, France. Young Diderot quickly gained recognition as a student by his Jesuit teachers, and his family decided he should enter the clergy.
At thirteen, he left school because he became impatient with the slow pace of his studies. When Diderot was fifteen Vigneron died leaving his religious office to young Diderot. Unfortunately for Diderot, the cathedral chapter objected to such a young man taking the position and gave it to someone else. Soon after, Diderot left for Paris to resume his studies at Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand and he probably later attended the Jansenist Collège d'Harcourt.
Diderot's life in Paris began under very meager circumstances.
In 1732, he earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. In 1734, Diderot decided instead to become a writer.
In 1743, he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion, a devout Roman Catholic. She was named Angelique after Diderot's mother and his dead sister. The death of this sister, a nun, from overwork in the convent may have affected Diderot's opinion of religion.
He had affairs with the writer Madame Puisieux and with Sophie Volland, to whom he was constant for the rest of her life.
Though his work was broad and rigorous, it did not bring him riches. In 1773 and 1774, Diderot spent some months at the empress's court at St Petersburg.
He died of emphysema and dropsy in Paris on July 31, 1784, and was buried in the city's Eglise Saint-Roch.
Early works
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Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Stanyan's History of Greece (1743);
In 1747, he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first at the extravagances of Catholicism;
Diderot's next piece introduced him to the world as an original thinker, his famous Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). and in a second piece, published afterwards, Diderot considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute. What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles interesting is its presentation, in a distinct though undigested form, of the theory of variation and natural selection. It is worth noticing, too, as an illustration of the comprehensive freedom with which Diderot felt his way round any subject that he approached, that in this theoretic essay he suggests the possibility of teaching the blind to read through the sense of touch.
His speculation in the Lettre sur les aveugles was too hardy for the authorities, and he was thrown into the prison of Vincennes.
Encyclopédie
The bookseller and printer André Le Breton had applied to Diderot with a project for the publication of a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, undertaken in the first instance by the Englishman John Mills, and the German, Gottfried Sellius. Diderot accepted the proposal, but in his busy and pregnant intelligence the scheme became transformed. Instead of a mere reproduction of the Cyclopaedia, he persuaded Le Breton to enter upon a new work, which should collect under one roof all the active writers, all the new ideas, all the new knowledge, that were then moving the cultivated class of the Republic of Letters to its depths, but still were comparatively ineffectual by reason of their dispersion.
His enthusiasm infected the publishers; Jean le Rond d'Alembert was persuaded to become Diderot's colleague;
These twenty years were to Diderot not merely a time of incessant drudgery, but of harassing persecution and of injury from the desertion of friends.
It was believed that the Encyclopédie was the work of an organized band of conspirators against society, and that the dangerous ideas they held were made truly formidable by their open publication.
D'Alembert withdrew from the enterprise and other powerful colleagues, including Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, declined to contribute further to a book which had acquired a bad reputation. Diderot was left to bring the task to an end as best he could.
At the last moment, when his immense work was drawing to an end, he encountered crowning mortification: he discovered that the bookseller, fearing the government's displeasure, had struck out from the proof sheets, after they had left Diderot's hands, all passages that he considered too dangerous. The monument to which Diderot had given the labor of twenty long and oppressive years was irreparably mutilated and defaced.
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 theatrical theory and practice, including especially Les Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (Conversations on Le Fils naturel), 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 classical French stage.
His art criticism was also highly influential.
Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. Diderot helped Grimm between 1759 and 1779, by writing an account of the annual exhibitions of paintings in the Paris Salon. "Before Diderot," Anne Louise Germaine de Staël wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours;
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was Diderot's favourite contemporary artist. Greuze's most characteristic pictures were the rendering in colour of the same sentiments 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 individuals, 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. Diderot's interest expressed itself in didactic and sympathetic form.
However, in two of his most remarkable pieces, this interest is not sympathetic, but ironic. His dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew) is a "farce-tragedy" reminiscent of the Satires of Horace. A favorite classical author of Diderot's, Horace's words Vertumnis, quotquot sunt, natus iniquis are quoted at the top of the Nephew. Diderot's intention in writing the dialogue is disputed; Diderot never saw the work through to publication during his lifetime, but there is every indication it was of continual interest to him. Though the original draft was written in 1761, he made additions to it year after year until his death twenty-three years later. Goethe's translation (1805) was the first introduction of Le Neveu de Rameau to the European public.
Diderot's miscellaneous pieces range from a graceful trifle like the Regrets 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).
Quotations
"The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad.
"And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings."
"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
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