Translations of aesthetic experience: Diderot and the dilemma of writing on art (Denis Diderot, France).

摘要

This dissertation examines how the eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot's understanding of aesthetic experience shaped the strategies he employed for writing on the visual arts. For the purposes of this study, I modify the concept of translation. Translation, as used here, signifies the process by which information is taken in, cognitively processed, and communicated across different codes of representation. In its most evident form, translation involves the rendering of ideas from one language into another. In the specific case of Diderot's early art criticism, translation entails his attempts to render the representational and stylistic codes of a work of art into written discourse. Eventually, however, Diderot comes to doubt the power of words to describe the visual mimetically. It is at this point that he develops a radically new strategy for writing on the arts. Liberating his account from a strictly binding relationship to the painting, he produces autonomous pieces of literature. In the inability of words to translate the visual, these “tales,” as he calls them, were intended to stimulate a decidedly literary aesthetic experience in his reader. Diderot's new conception of his art criticism and his development of this technique derived from his understanding of artistic creation. Diderot held that all truly great works of art avoided imitation as an operative principle by adhering to what he termed “ideal model.” In opposition to Plato's ideal forms, he defined his “ideal model” as a function of artistic activity. Finally, however, sensing that his innovative techniques for writing on the arts had become too codified, Diderot shifted applications of the “ideal model” from his art criticism to his writings on the theater.; This dissertation is composed of six chapters. In chapter one, I analyze Diderot's early concepts of translation, focusing primarily on his idiosyncratic treatment of the Earl of Shaftesbury's An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, or Merit and his debate with the Journal de Trévoux over the correct way to translate a passage from the Iliad . Chapter two retraces the complex development of Diderot's own philosophical methods and foundations, with particular attention paid to his budding aesthetic theory. Chapter three focuses primarily on the final formulation of this aesthetic theory. In chapter four, I study the difficulties that Diderot encountered when writing his first pieces of art criticism; while in chapter five, I demonstrate how Diderot's confidence in his abilities to write on the arts was seriously shaken in a debate with the famed sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet. This debate forced him to develop a new anti-imitative strategy for writing on art that took into consideration the reader's experience. The sixth and final chapter continues to examine Diderot's rejection of mimetic description as a means of translating images into words, as well as his formulation of a theory of artistic creation that he called the modèle idéal .