An Analysis Of Diderot’s "Beauty Exists Relation"

As the saying goes, everyone longs for beauty. Beauty is aneternal topic and from the ancient times when the concept ofbeauty was proposed to the modern civilized society, people’sconcern and demand for beauty have been increased. Since the1750s, aesthetics has gradually separated from the field ofphilosophy and tended to be an independent discipline. Thepublication of Aesthetics written by German estheticianBaumgarten made aesthetics an independent status. Since then,people have shown great interest in this new emerging field ofaesthetics and begun an arduous course of research andexploration.“What is beauty” is the core issue of aesthetic researchand estheticians in different periods have different answers to thisquestion. Diderot, a French Enlightenment aesthetician, gave hisunique insights towards this issue and put forward Beauty ExistsRelation. To some extent, the proposal of Beauty Exists Relationhas promoted the development of the studies on aesthetics and isan epoch-making and turning point in the course of the studies onaesthetics.In this thesis, the writer conducts a study on Diderot’s BeautyExists Relation and states the background, connotation, specificapplications and the values of Beauty Exists Relation on the basis of summing up the results of previous studies. This thesis iscomposed of three parts: introduction, body and conclusion. Theintroduction part is mainly the literature review about the studieson Diderot and also briefly introduces the framework of this thesis.Moreover, the purpose of this thesis, theoretical significance andinnovations are elaborated in this part as well. The body of thisthesis consists of four parts. In the first part, the writer accountsfor the background of Beauty Exists Relation from two aspects ofresearch status of aesthetics in the entire Western Europeancountries since the eighteenth century and historical studies on“What is beauty”. In the second part, the writer first explains theconnotation of “relation” and divides beauty into two typesaccording to the different divisions of “relation”. The objectivity andconcreteness of aesthetics are also explained in detail in this part.The third part is about the application of Beauty Exists Relation. Inthe theory of drama, the establishment of drama bourgeois,circumstances and plot theory and contrast theory are closelyrelated to Beauty Exists Relation. In the theory of painting, BeautyExists Relation is further internalized as an intrinsic link orcausality of things. Other theories also imply the principle of BeautyExists Relation such as architecture, sculpture, poetry and so on. Inthe fourth part, the writer summarize that Beauty Exists Relation isthe core of Diderot’s aesthetic thoughts by explaining theconnotation of it and analyzing the specific applications of it.Finally, Beauty Exists Relation is evaluated. Although it has oldmaterialistic limitations, it opens the door to studies on the modernmaterialistic aesthetics and has had a profound impact on the future aesthetics researchers. The conclusion part is a summary ofthe whole thesis.