Rameau's Nephew and First Satire (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free

elusive references to people and events, and despite the heroic efforts of editors (in particular Fabre, whose pioneering edition has 334 notes), we will never understand fully all the allusions. But does this matter? The very fact that we cannot grasp every last detail of the gossip powerfully conveys to us the confined atmosphere of the literary underworld that Diderot is describing. But Fabre’s view that this is a private work should not encourage us to read it only as some sort of autobiographical or confessional text, concerned simply with Diderot’s recollections of the opponents of Enlightenment.
    Rameau’s Nephew
also, more importantly, addresses and questions some of the fundamental values of the Enlightenment. That it does so with such a light touch and so elusively makes its enquiry more, not less, complex. Two men sit in a café and talk; they discuss morals and music, and they tell stories. The whole exchange is deceptively casual, notwithstanding the extraordinary physical outbursts of ‘Him’ when he finds himself, literally, at a loss for words. At the heart of these seemingly aimless discussions is a preoccupation with man as a creature of society. ‘Man is said to be a Sociable Animal …’: so begins one of Addison’s
Spectator
essays (no. 9, 1711). The expression is borrowed from Aristotle’s
Politics
, but Addison develops the idea in a way characteristic of his century: ‘… and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that wetake all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of
Clubs
.’ 1 We think of the Enlightenment as an era of empirical enquiry, in which long-standing beliefs in science and religion were subjected to rational scrutiny. This emphasis on the triumph of reason over superstition can make the period seem a dry one—that at least was the caricature that would be fostered by the Romantic generation. But beyond this fresh emphasis on the power of reason, the ideas of the Enlightenment give to the men and women of the eighteenth century a reinvigorated sense of what it means to be ‘human’. Addison’s whimsical excursus on the nature of clubs recognizes an important form of sociability, and sets the tone for much of the rest of the century: works like Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767) or Adam Smith’s
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776) signal the beginnings of study of what we would now call the ‘human’ sciences, the study of man’s social relationships with his fellow man (and so, by implication, a shift away from theology, and the study of man’s metaphysical relationship with God).
    The questions of how we ‘act’ in society, how we influence and interact with one another, are at the heart of this dialogue. Behind the humour of the music lesson, for example, or the hilarious scene at Bertin’s dinner table, lie serious questions about human conduct. Philosophical questions: to what extent are a man’s actions materially, even mechanistically, determined? Thus, if the Nephew is reluctant to educate his son, that is because if he is ‘destined’ to make good, it will happen anyway. In the early 1770s, following the publication in 1770 of D’Holbach’s hard-line determinist manifesto
The System of Nature (Système de la nature
), Diderot became increasingly concerned (for example, in
Jacques the Fatalist
and the
Refutation of Helvétius
) to argue against hard and simplistic determinism. Ethical questions: what are the moral bases for our actions? If the new empirical spirit ofenquiry entitles us to question the assumptions of religious faith, why should we not also question the sense of terms like ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’? And aesthetic questions: is ‘genius’ the most exalted form of human expression? Or the most disruptive? Diderot in the 1760s and 1770s was concerned to bring together ethical and aesthetic