Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
Rameau’s Nephew
A dialogue with a brilliant, shameless parasite who mocks the morality of his society; written c. 1761–1774, first published in Goethe’s German translation in 1805.
Introduction
Diderot never published the dialogue. Its speakers are “Moi”, a philosopher close to Diderot himself, and “Lui”, Jean-François Rameau, nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, who meet at the Café de la Régence in Paris. Lui is a gifted musician, mimic and hanger-on who performs whole operas in pantomime and argues that in a corrupt society the only sensible morality is flattery and self-interest; the philosopher does not clearly win the argument. Goethe translated it from a manuscript copy; a reliable French text was printed only in 1891, after Diderot’s own manuscript had been found. Hegel took up the work in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as a picture of the self-alienated, “disrupted” consciousness of culture.
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