was a French philosopher and writer. He was a prominent figure during the Enlightenment, his major contribution to the Enlightenment being the Encyclopédie.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and His Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels, their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the essay, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew) upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.
Denis Diderot was born in the eastern French city of Langres and commenced his formal education in the Lycée Louis le Grand. In 1732, he earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study law. His study of law was short-lived; in 1734, Diderot decided instead to become a writer. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a rather bohemian existence.
In 1743, he further alienated his father by marrying Antoinette Champion, a devout Roman Catholic. The match was considered inappropriate due to Champion's low social status, poor education, fatherless status, lack of a dowry, and, at thirty-two, being four years his senior. The marriage produced one surviving child, a girl. Her name was Angelique, named after Diderot's mother and his dead sister. The death of his 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, his letters to Sophie Volland are amongst the most vivid of all the insights that we have of the daily life of the philosophic circle of Paris during this time period.
Though his work was broad and rigorous, it did not bring him riches. He secured none of the posts that were occasionally given to needy men of letters; he could not even obtain the 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 alternative than to sell his library. When Catherine II of Russia heard of his financial troubles she commissioned an agent in Paris to buy the library. She then requested that the philosopher retain the books in Paris until she required them, and act as her librarian with a yearly salary. In 1773 and 1774, Diderot spent some months at the empress's court in St Petersburg. Diderot died of gastro-intestinal problems in Paris on July 31, 1784, and was buried in the city's Église Saint-Roch. His heirs sent his vast library to Catherine II, who had it deposited at the Russian National Library.
Early works
Diderot's earliest works included a translation of Stanyan's History of Greece (1743); with two colleagues, François-Vincent Toussaint and Marc-Antoine Eidous, he produced a translation of Robert James's Medical Dictionary<1> (1746–1748) at about the same time he published a free rendering of Shaftesbury's Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (1745), with some original notes of his own. In 1746, he wrote his first original work: the Pensées philosophiques, and he added to this a short complementary essay on the sufficiency of natural religion. He then composed a volume of bawdy stories, Les bijoux indiscrets (1748); in later years he repented this work. In 1747, he wrote the Promenade du sceptique, an allegory pointing first at the extravagances of Catholicism; second, at the vanity of the pleasures of the world which is the rival of the church; and third, at the desperate and unfathomable uncertainty of the philosophy which professes to be so high above both church and world. Diderot's next piece introduced him to the world as an original thinker, this work was his famous Lettre sur les aveugles (1749). The immediate object of this short work was to show the dependence of men's ideas on their five senses. It considers the case of the intellect deprived of one of the senses. What makes the Lettre sur les aveugles interesting is its presentation, in a distinct, undigested form, of the theory of variation and natural selection. In a second piece, published afterwards, Diderot considered the case of a similar deprivation in the deaf and mute. This work Lettre sur les sourds et muets, is a substantially digressive examination of points in aesthetics. The philosophic significance of the two essays is the advance they make towards the principle of relativism. What interested the militant philosophers of the day was an episodic application of the principle of relativism to the concept of God. It is worth noticing as an illustration of the comprehensive freedom with which Diderot felt his way around 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 another piece Lettre sur les aveugles was too hardy for the authorities, and he was thrown into the prison of Vincennes. There he remained for three months; upon release he began a gigantic undertaking that consumed the rest of his life and came to be a literary icon.
Although the Encyclopédie was Diderot's monumental piece, he was the author of many other works that sowed nearly every field of intellectual interest with new and creative 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 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 Essais sur la peinture was described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 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."
Diderot's most intimate friend was the philologist Friedrich Melchior Grimm. They were brought together by their friend in common at that time Jean-Jacques Rousse
Jacques le fataliste (written in 1773, but not published until 1796) is similar to Tristram Shandy and The Sentimental Journey. 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; whether it is 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. Whatever its intent, it is a remarkable conversation, representing an era of that held the art of conversation in the highest regard
Quotations
? "And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, for want of a rope, to strangle kings."
? "I have been, and still am, angry at being mediocre."
? Enlightenment thinkers, as Diderot wrote, intended "to change the common way of thinking"
? "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." — sometimes attributed to Diderot, sometimes also to Jean Meslier, although neither seems to be true; what Diderot did write is: “Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, / Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.” ("And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, / For want of a rope, to strangle kings." — in the poem Les Éleuthéromanes)
? "Only passions, great passions can elevate the soul to great things."
? "The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid."
? "There are little testicles at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness." ("Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée") Letter to Damilaville 3 November 1760
? "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings." - Denis Diderot explaining the goal of the Encyclopedia
References
? Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0-679-41421-5.
? Havens, George R. The Age of Ideas. New York: Holt, 1955. ISBN 0-89197-651-5.
? Simon, Julia. Mass Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. ISBN 0-7914-2638-6.
? Hoyt, Nellie and Cassirer, Thomas.Encyclopedia, Selections:Diderot, D'Alembert, and a Society of Men of Letters. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc, 1965. LCCN 65-26535. ISBN 0-672-60479-5
