Content area
Full Text
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) offers those concerned with art criticism a unique and beneficial point of view regarding art, art criticism, and aesthetic experience. In particular, Diderot's flexible metaphysical position affords an arttheory and critical approach that is both Materialist and Idealist, subjective and objective, as well as concerned with aesthetic experience and perception.
Diderot was one of the major philosophers of the Enlightenment. During this period, seventeenth-century Rationalism, epitomized by Rene Descartes, was coming into conflict with a new emphasis on Empiricism led by the British. This emerging tendency to comprehend nature through an inductive method influenced the circle of French philosophers around Diderot that included Buffon, La Methie, and d'Holbach. Diderot's adoption of these new ideas was not complete; being the product of both world views, he accepted the Baconican-Newtonian experimental method but also adhered Descartes's principle of matter in motion.1
The emerging science of biology greatly influenced and directed Diderot's philosophy, especially his concept of a vitalistic nature. In medieval times, nature was considered of little importance for man or religion because it was understood as separate from God. During the Renaissance, this view began to change.2 Giordano Bruno, for example speculated that God was not an "external intelligence" but that it was "more worthy for him" to be the internal principle of motion guiding all the entities of nature.3 This emergence of the conception of Divine nature would impel and guide Italian art theory from Alberti to Bellori. Another by-product of this synthesis was a new importance being placed on the individuality and variety of the objects of nature-or matter itself.
Thus in the Renaissance period two antitheses were implicitly established: the impulse to create absolute and logically independent proofs of God's existence in nature and, coexisting with it, an impulse to understand nature through an examination of the particular and empirically experienced. Diderot seems to exemplify a synthesis of both of these aspects-what one could characterize as his hyphenating thought.4
Diderot's viewpoint toward understanding nature could be described as being in constant flux. This is not to be understood as an accidental or arbitrary position, but rather an indication of his belief that no particular viewpoint can do justice to the inner variety and dynamism of nature. Since he understood nature...