Henri Frédéric Amiel (; 27 September 1821 – 11 May 1881) was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.

Biography

Born in

Geneva , neighboring_municipalities= Carouge, Chêne-Bougeries, Cologny, Lancy, Grand-Saconnex, Pregny-Chambésy, Vernier, Veyrier , website = https://www.geneve.ch/ Geneva ( ; french: Genève ) frp, Genèva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevr ...

in 1821, Amiel was descended from a

Huguenot The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Be ...

family that moved to Switzerland following the revocation of the

Edict of Nantes The Edict of Nantes () was signed in April 1598 by King Henry IV and granted the Calvinist Protestants of France, also known as Huguenots, substantial rights in the nation, which was in essence completely Catholic. In the edict, Henry aimed pr ...

. After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

, and made a special study of

German philosophy German philosophy, here taken to mean either (1) philosophy in the German language or (2) philosophy by Germans, has been extremely diverse, and central to both the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy for centuries, from Gottfried ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy. These appointments, conferred by the democratic party, deprived him of the support of the aristocratic party, whose patronage dominated all the culture of the city. This isolation inspired the one book by which Amiel is still known, the ''Journal Intime'' ("Private Journal"), which, published after his death, obtained a European reputation. It was translated into English by British writer

Mary Augusta Ward Mary Augusta Ward (''née'' Arnold; 11 June 1851 – 24 March 1920) was a British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward. She worked to improve education for the poor and she became the founding President of the Women' ...

at the suggestion of academic Mark Pattison. Although modest in volume of output, Amiel's ''Journal'' gained a sympathy that the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the ''Journal'', he produced several volumes of

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

and wrote studies on

Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' w ...

, Madame de Stael and other writers. His extensive correspondence with Égérie, his muse name for Louise Wyder, was preserved and published in 2004. He died in Geneva on 11 May 1881, at the age of 59. The French philosopher Ludovic Dugas, in trying to describe a new psychological phenomenon, took the word

depersonalization Depersonalization can consist of a detachment within the self, regarding one's mind or body, or being a detached observer of oneself. Subjects feel they have changed and that the world has become vague, dreamlike, less real, lacking in significa ...

from an entry in his ''Journal intime'', "Everything is strange to me, I can be outside of my body, of me as an individual, I am depersonalized, detached, away". Dugas took this as a literal description, but a few paragraphs later Amiel clarifies: "it seems to me that these mental experiences (transformations mentales) are no more than philosophical experiences. I am not committed to any one in particular".

Works

* ''Berlin au printemps de l’année 1848'' (1849) * ''Du mouvement littéraire dans la Suisse romane et de son avenir'' (1849) * ''Grains de mil'' (1854) * ''Il penseroso'' (1858) * ''La Cloche'' (1860) * ''La Part du rêve'' (1863) * ''L’Escalade de MDCII'' (1875) * ''Charles le Téméraire'' (1876) * ''Les Étrangères'' (1876) * ''L’Enseignement supérieur à Genève depuis la fondation de l’Académie depuis le 5 juin 1559'' (1878) * ''Jean-Jacques Rousseau jugé par les Genevois d’aujourd’hui'' (1879) * ''Jour à jour'' (1880) * ''Fragments d’un journal intime'' (1884), 2nd ed. * ''Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel'' (1885), trans. by

Mrs. Humphry Ward Mary Augusta Ward (''née'' Arnold; 11 June 1851 – 24 March 1920) was a British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward. She worked to improve education for the poor and she became the founding President of the Women' ...

Description
an
preview.
Macmillan. * ''Philine'' (1927) * ''Lettres de jeunesse'' (1904) * ''Essais, critiques'' (1931)

References

External links

* *
Works by Henry Frédéric Amiel
at

Hathi Trust HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally ...

*
www.amiel.org/atelier/
website in French dedicated to Henri-Frédéric Amiel {{DEFAULTSORT:Amiel, Henri-Frederic 1821 births 1881 deaths Writers from Geneva Swiss Protestants Swiss writers in French 19th-century Swiss philosophers 19th-century Christian mystics Protestant mystics Christian poets Moral philosophers Philosophers of art Protestant philosophers Swiss diarists Swiss people of French descent Swiss poets in French Swiss male poets Swiss male writers 19th-century Swiss poets 19th-century male writers 19th-century diarists

Biography

Works

See also

References

Further reading

External links