Rameau's Nephew

Summary

Rameau's Nephew is a prose dialogue that Denis Diderot wrote and revised privately from about 1761 into the 1770s and never published. It records an afternoon conversation in Paris between two speakers identified only as Me (Moi) and Him (Lui). Me is a philosopher who takes his daily walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal and watches the chess players in the Café de la Régence. Him is Jean-François Rameau, the real-life nephew of the famous composer Jean-Philippe Rameau: a failed musician, music teacher and hanger-on who has just been thrown out of the household of a rich patron where he served as a kept buffoon. Diderot calls the work a satire and heads it with a line from Horace's Satires about a man born under the influence of every changeable god. The nephew fits it. He is by turns sublime and base, sharp and absurd, starving and gluttonous, and he admits it all without shame. His expulsion came, he explains, because for once he spoke sense at the wrong moment. The philosopher urges him to apologize and return; the nephew wavers between pride and hunger. The conversation ranges widely. They discuss whether genius excuses vice, and whether the world would be better off with a virtuous mediocrity than with Racine, a great poet and, so the nephew alleges, a bad man. The nephew mimics the flatterers, financiers and pimps of Paris and describes the 'positions' everyone takes in the great pantomime of begging and bowing, from the courtier to the king before his mistress; only the philosopher who wants nothing, like Diogenes, stands outside it. He performs whole operas alone, playing every instrument and voice, and argues for the new Italian comic music against the old French tragic style of Lully and his own uncle. He describes how he would raise his daughter to please men and get money. He tells, with admiration, the story of a renegade of Avignon who betrayed a trusting friend to the Inquisition, praising wickedness carried out with style. Against all this the philosopher defends virtue, friendship, honest work and the pleasures of doing good. The nephew replies that virtue is praised and not practised, that society rewards flattery, and that a man must eat. Diderot does not make the philosopher win easily, and the dialogue ends without a verdict, with the nephew leaving for the Opera. The book is a portrait of a society of patronage and appearances, and a test of whether reason and goodness can answer a clever, honest cynic. It suits only advanced senior students, since the nephew defends parasitism and vice with real wit. It rewards discussion of a question the philosopher himself cannot settle: what makes a life good when the world rewards the opposite?

Plot or Argument

• The Palais-Royal and the Café de la Régence

  The philosopher describes his habit of letting his thoughts wander in the Palais-Royal gardens and watching the chess masters Legal and Philidor at the Café de la Régence. Rameau's nephew accosts him, and the philosopher sketches his mixture of loftiness and baseness, good sense and unreason.

• Genius and goodness

  They discuss the composer Rameau, who cares for nothing but his music, and the question whether great men of genius who are bad husbands, fathers and friends are worth more to the world than decent nonentities. The philosopher defends Racine's works; the nephew would rather be a happy scoundrel than a great man.

• The expulsion

  The nephew recounts how he lived as the buffoon of a rich household, flattering, mocking the household's enemies among the philosophes and sharing its table, until a single sensible remark got him thrown out. The philosopher urges him to beg forgiveness; the nephew acts out the scene of humiliation.

• The idioms of the trades

  The nephew argues that every station has its professional dishonesty, that people praise virtue only to secure it in others, and that a poor man must take the positions that bring him bread. He mimes the gestures of flatterers, go-betweens and petitioners.

• Music and pantomime

  The nephew performs operatic scenes alone, playing orchestra, singers and dancers, and argues for the expressive Italian comic style (Pergolesi, Duni) against the older French manner. The philosopher is overwhelmed and amused by the performance.

• Education, wealth and the renegade

  The nephew explains how he would educate his daughter and son for profit rather than virtue, recalls his late wife, and tells with relish the tale of the renegade of Avignon. The philosopher is repelled and fascinated.

• The positions and the parting

  The nephew describes the universal pantomime in which everyone bows to someone; the philosopher replies that the man who needs nothing, like Diogenes, is free of it. The nephew mocks this ideal as possible only on an empty stomach, and leaves for the Opera as the bell rings.

Characters

• Me (Moi), the philosopher, narrator

  A moralist of Diderot's own circle who defends virtue, friendship and work; urbane and sympathetic, he is sometimes caught off balance by the nephew's arguments.

• Him (Lui), Rameau's nephew

  Jean-François Rameau, a gifted, shameless and self-aware parasite, brilliant mimic and musician, who argues that virtue is a pose and appetite the truth of human life.

• Jean-Philippe Rameau, the uncle (discussed)

  The great composer and music theorist, portrayed by his nephew as a man who cares for nothing outside his art.

• The patrons, the household that expels the nephew

  A rich financier and his actress mistress whose table and favour the nephew depended on; Diderot uses them to satirize the patrons of the anti-philosophe writers.

• The renegade of Avignon, figure in the nephew's tale

  A man who wins the trust of a Jewish benefactor and betrays him to the Inquisition; the nephew admires the perfection of his treachery.

Lessons

• An honest cynic

  The nephew admits every vice and accuses respectable society of the same vices hidden. His frankness is disarming, and the philosopher struggles to answer it. Students can learn that candour about sin is not repentance, and that an argument may expose pretended virtue without proving that virtue is false.

  • Is the nephew more honest than the people he flatters? Does honesty about vice make it less wrong?
  • Which of the nephew's charges against society seem fair, and which go too far?
  • What answer could the philosopher have given that he does not?

• Genius and goodness

  The dialogue asks whether a great artist who treats his family badly has done more good than a kindly man of no talent. The philosopher holds that great works outlast private faults; the nephew prefers comfort to greatness. Neither view is simply Diderot's, and the question remains alive.

  • Should we judge works of art separately from the lives of those who made them?
  • Why does the nephew envy his uncle's fame and despise his character?
  • What would a Christian account of vocation add to this debate?

• The pantomime of positions

  The nephew sees all social life as a dance of bowing and begging, in which everyone takes a position before someone more powerful. The philosopher answers that the man who needs nothing is free. Students can consider what independence requires and whether contentment is the root of freedom.

  • Who, according to the nephew, takes a position before whom? Does even the king?
  • Is the philosopher's appeal to Diogenes realistic?
  • How does Paul's word, 'I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content' (Philippians 4:11), bear on the argument?

• Music as argument

  The nephew's one-man operas are among the most famous passages in the work. Through them Diderot joins the Paris quarrel over French and Italian music and argues that art should imitate the accents of real passion. The pantomime also shows the nephew's gift squandered: he can imitate everything and create nothing lasting.

  • What is the nephew's case for the Italian style?
  • Why can the nephew perform brilliantly but not compose anything of value?
  • What does the scene suggest about talent without character?

Context

The dialogue belongs to the later Enlightenment in Paris, when Diderot was editing the Encyclopédie under official suppression and the philosophes were under attack from writers allied with the court and the Church. In 1760 Charles Palissot's comedy Les Philosophes ridiculed Diderot and his friends on stage, and the nephew's patrons and their table companions include Palissot and other anti-philosophe writers. The musical discussion recalls the Querelle des Bouffons (1752-1754) over Italian comic opera. The real Jean-François Rameau (1716-1777) was a known Paris eccentric.

Composition

Diderot appears to have begun the work around 1761 and revised it at intervals until about 1773-1774; internal references point to events of the early 1760s. He did not publish it, probably because it attacked living people. A manuscript copy reached Germany, and Goethe translated it into German in 1805 (Rameaus Neffe). A French version retranslated from Goethe appeared in 1821, a French text from a manuscript copy in 1823, and Diderot's autograph manuscript, rediscovered in 1891, was then published.

Reception

Goethe's translation brought the work immediate fame in Germany. Hegel used it in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) as the image of the self-divided consciousness of a cultured age, and Freud later cited the nephew's remark about what a child would do if left to his passions as an anticipation of the Oedipus complex. Modern critics, notably Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity, have read it as a founding text on the modern divided self. English translations include those by Jacques Barzun and Ralph Bowen (1956) and Leonard Tancock (1966).

Comparisons

• Candide: Or Optimism

  Voltaire's tale mocks optimistic philosophy through a naïve hero suffering in the world; Diderot's dialogue lets a worldly cynic mock moral philosophy face to face, and leaves the outcome more open than Voltaire's 'cultivate our garden'.

• The Praise of Folly

  Erasmus gives Folly a speech in praise of herself that exposes the follies of every estate; Diderot gives his self-confessed fool a partner who answers back, turning the declamation into a debate.

• Notes from Underground

  Dostoevsky's Underground Man, like the nephew, is a self-aware, self-mocking talker who rejects reason's account of human good; Dostoevsky presses the challenge toward a religious crisis that Diderot does not.

• The Satires of Horace and Persius

  Diderot takes his epigraph and his idea of a conversational satire from Horace; Satire II.7, in which a slave lectures his master on his vices, is a close model for the nephew's lecture to the philosopher.

• Confessions

  Rousseau, Diderot's former friend, writes a confession meant to prove his sincerity; the nephew confesses everything as a performance, and the two works pose opposite views of self-revelation.

Quotes

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a new scene in which the philosopher meets the nephew a year later, after the nephew has been readmitted to his patrons' table, and the two resume their argument.

• Essay

  Who wins the argument in Rameau's Nephew? Defend an answer by examining the philosopher's best reply and the nephew's best objection.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into Me and Him. Each side prepares three arguments from the text about whether virtue makes a person happy, then debates them in Diderot's conversational manner.

• Fiction

  Rewrite the nephew's one-man opera performance as a scene in a modern café, keeping the mixture of brilliance and absurdity.

Further Reading

• Satires, Horace

  Especially Book II, Satire 7, the source of Diderot's epigraph and a model for conversation as satire.

• Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel

  The section on self-alienated spirit draws on Rameau's Nephew.

• Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling

  Lectures that make the nephew central to an account of the modern self.

• Diderot: A Critical Biography, P. N. Furbank

  A readable life placing the dialogue in Diderot's career.