In delving into Diderot’s work, one finds themselves immersed in an astonishing variance of ideas, fields, and intellectual pursuits that can become almost nauseating with their diversity. The spheres of Diderot’s work range from studies in scientific reason, religious exploration, all the way to aesthetic1 theorization and his creative writings. Yet even with this variance, Diderot’s ideas assert their importance through the many intellectuals that have inherited and progressed his initial inquiries: that of Marx, Hegel, and Engels to name a few. Although Diderot has a wide dynamic to his work, there seems to be a backdrop of materialist2 ideas and French enlightenment3 style dialectics4 that frame the positions he argues for. When faced with Diderot’s extensive writings of art criticism, novels and theories on art, one wonders how his ideas on aesthetics fits into this strange, but common backdrop.
Diderot’s ideas on art point to the two main questions of aesthetics that date all the way back to Aristotle’s Poetics, and still bother many academics today: what is art, and why do we feel the need to produce it? Considering the strong magnitude of commerce that artistic endeavors produce today, it is a relevant and bedeviling question. At the time of Diderot, the popular ideas concerning these questions were, roughly, that art created sensations in a viewer that allowed them to feel emotions. This was a largely subjectivist5 view: an idea that proposed art didn’t hold great “meaning” or intellectual thought, and simply needed to produce emotion, and be interpretable by its viewers. Like many of the fields he delved into, Diderot punctured these popular aesthetic ideas with a refreshing and controversial view.
The theory of art that Diderot argued for was framed by his ideas on materialism and dialectical reasoning. Materialism, to Diderot, is roughly the idea that the human spirit has no supremacy over nature6, asserting rather that nature itself is an eternal spirit in which we reside. From materialism comes his ideas concerning dialectical reasoning: the idea that, in order to create knowledge, we must provide concrete reason for that knowledge, and must be able to place that knowledge in the larger web of nature we all perceive. But what do these big ideas about knowledge and nature have to do with art?
Diderot believed that art was an outgrowth of philosophical thought. He believed that in addition to the pleasurable sensations we have while viewing, an artist adds a certain commentary on the lives we live, that allows us to reason with and further understand the world around us. He believed that art inquires about the unknown, being a frontier for new knowledge, a discovery of unconscious thought, and a beautifully presented discussion of philosophy. From this, we can come to understand that Diderot believed that art produced both emotional sensation and intellectual reason, being something which allows us inquiry into our unconscious minds, and a new, exciting understanding of the vast interconnected nature we all live in. Within the literary criticism of Diderot’s own creative work, Rameau’s Nephew, a critic cites that the book held a “Militant and witty atheism.” We can imagine that, to Diderot, this was a stellar reception. Seeing that Diderot held these atheistic views at the time of writing the book, his ability to be “witty” yet also show the philosophical views of his own atheism shows that he was able to pull off the very ideas he had on what a work of art should produce.
But, if art is something which allows us emotional sensation, prompts us to reason with our minds, and shows us unknown facets of the nature we live in, how is it created? How do we create something which is sensational, but also intellectually stimulating? Diderot was acutely aware that aesthetic experience was a unique one. It covers the bases of emotional stimulation, excited engagement, intellectual depth, all while being relatable to real life situations. In Le Salons, Diderot suggests that art should, in order to provide the depth it needs, have object directness, detachment, active freedom, and a sense of wholeness. In a rough attempt to translate this passage further, Diderot is essentially stating that art must be directly related to real life, yet be constructed in a way which allows the art to be whole, completed, and finished. He believed that art should have the power to be identifiable to the outside world, being something which we relate to, can ponder freely with, and appreciate for its beauty, all while being something we can look at, read, put down and come back to at our own ease. Overall, Diderot’s ideas on skill and technique, and the question of how we create art boiled down to the idea that skill should be honed until unnoticeable, where a viewer “doesn’t reflect on the magic of the brush, but on the ravages of time.”
Echoed in Diderot’s theory of art is a clear relation to his ideas on dialectics and materialism. Diderot believed that art had an important place in the intellectual sphere, being something which allows us new and rational ideas, refreshed perspectives on tired ideas, and the transformation of our thoughts from the unconscious to a reasoned and conscious place in our minds. Diderot established a theory of art that would be inherited by great poets like Mallarmé and Valéry, producing the important idea in aesthetics that art is meant to hold an intellectual depth, being something which is not only for our emotional consumption, but something which veils important intellectual ideas through an intriguing and beautiful mode of expression. It would be Kant’s ideas on subjectivism and Hegel’s aesthetics that would limit this intellectual view of art. But, as skilled artists continue to point out the ignorance and intellectual fervor of our humanity, Diderot’s idea that art holds a great intellectual value remains true in many ways. Even in 19th century America we see a version of this position, with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous quote from The Poet: “For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.”
Glossary:
- Aesthetic: A branch of philosophy which aims to explain the nature of art and beauty, and the value of art across time.
- Materialism: A form of philosophical monism. It aims to show that matter is the substance of which everything is made up of, including mental states, nature, and consciousness.
- French Enlightenment: A philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th centuries which was characterized by a movement away from religion and traditional authority, towards ideas that argued humanity could progress through rational thought.
- Dialectics: Form of reasoning which promotes the idea that knowledge can come about from reasoned observation, inquiry, and argument.
- Subjectivism: The idea that knowledge is merely subjective, meaning that there are no objective truths besides the ones within our own mental states. In Aesthetic theory, this view pushed the idea that there is no objective interpretation of art, arguing that art is simply open to interpretation, holding no objective philosophical or intellectual truth.
- Nature (from Diderot): Everything, including our mental states, our beings, and the external world.