Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Henri-Frédéric Amiel was a Swiss philosopher, poet, and professor, born on September 27, 1821, in Geneva to a French Protestant family. He faced significant personal tragedy in his youth, losing both parents by the age of thirteen, after which he was raised by relatives. Amiel studied at the Academy of Geneva and later in Berlin, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He became a professor of aesthetics and later chaired the philosophy department at the Academy of Geneva. Amiel is best known for his extensive journal, "Fragments d'un journal intime," which he kept until his death in 1881. This introspective work, published posthumously, explores the complexities of human existence, reflecting his struggle with melancholy and the contradictions inherent in life. His writings, which also include poetry and literary studies, have influenced notable writers of his time and beyond, leaving a lasting impact on philosophical and literary thought.
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Subject Terms
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Writer
- Born: September 27, 1821
- Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland
- Died: May 11, 1881
Biography
Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born on September 27, 1821, in Geneva, Switzerland, to a French family of Protestants who had immigrated to Switzerland more than one hundred years earlier. His father, Henri Amiel, was a successful businessman. Young Amiel lost his mother, Caroline Brandt Amiel, to tuberculosis when he was eleven, and his father to suicide less than two years later. An aunt and uncle subsequently raised Amiel.
Amiel studied at the Academy of Geneva before embarking on an extended tour of Europe in 1841. He studied philosophy in Berlin with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling from 1844 to 1848. During this time he began what was to become his life’s literary work, a journal he kept until his death. He was deeply influenced by both Schelling and fellow German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
In 1849, he returned to Geneva to become a professor of aesthetics at the Academy of Geneva. In 1854, he became the chair of philosophy at the Academy. He never married. Instead, he poured his thoughts and life into his journal, which grew to over sixteen thousand pages by the time of his death in 1881. During his lifetime, Amiel published several studies of literary figures, as well as four volumes of poetry and aphorisms, and several translations of contemporary German and American poets. His life’s work, Fragments d’un journal intîme was not published until a year after his death. In 1885, the journal was translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward and published as Amiel’s Journal: The “Journal Intime” of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. An intensely introspective work, Amiel’s Journal takes as its subject the day-to-day life of its writer. In its pages, Amiel reveals his sense of the universe and human existence as a series of paradoxes and contradictions. He demonstrates his vast reading and the influence of Bishop George Berkeley and American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. He posits that the material world exists within the mind of God. He also demonstrates his affinity with philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and printer William Blake in his reflections on ce mariage des contraires (the marriage of contraries). Moreover, Amiel’s fascination with the contradictory (and thus ultimately self-canceling) nature of human existence links his work to the German nihilist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Throughout the pages of Amiel’s Journal, Amiel struggles with living in “an era of mediocrity,” and with what he sees as his own indolence and melancholy.
While Amiel’s literary production was not large, his influence was far reaching. Important fin de siècle writers such as Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and Joseph Conrad, among others, read Amiel’s Journal and found that the book successfully captured the spirit of the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, Amiel’s reflections on life, written as pithy statements or aphorisms, continued to be widely circulated throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.