| Authorship Notes |
Diderot's account of the 'Salons' (the exhibition of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture), represent a key moment in 18th-century debates on aesthetics. It was initially written for the 'Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique', edited by Friedrich Melchior Grimm and circulated in manuscript form. Within Diderot's account of the 1767 exhibition, his discussion of Hubert Robert's 'ruin' paintings open with a consideration of travel.
Diderot suggests that while travel is excellent in theory, one would have to be without any personal links and obligations to one's own country to have the necessary freedom and time. The traveller is therefore either immoral, or moved almost against his own will by a feeling of worry, which drives him forward. Diderot pursues this idea through a consideration of the parallel forces of inertia and energy which collide in man.
The idea of 'immoral' travel - already previously expressed in his letter to Sophie Volland of 1760 - reappears in several of Diderot's other texts. For example, in one of his contributions to Raynal's 'Histoire des deux indes', the traveller, rather than enjoy his stability and family, is motivated to travel by 'tyranny, crime, ambition, misery, curiosity, I don't know what disquiet of spirit, the desire to know and to see, boredom, the disgust of used happiness'. See Raynal, 'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes' (Neuchâtel-Genève, 1783), livre IX, chap. 5, p. 247.
On Diderot's evolving ideas about travel, see Eszter Kovacs, 'De la méfiance à une critique raisonnée: considérations sur les voyageurs et les voyages chez Diderot', Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie (2010), p. 45, and also her book 'La Critique du voyage dans la pensée de Diderot. De la fiction au discours philosophique et politique' (2015). |
