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Reason, Fools and Rameau's Nephew

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Lash
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In the autumn of 1993, I found myself called upon to give the concluding address to a conference in Stockholm—jointly sponsored by the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, the Royal Institute of Technology, and the Swedish Center for Working Life—entitled: “Skill and Technology: on Diderot, Education and the Third Culture”. One focus of the conference was Diderot’s Dialogue, Rameau’s Nephew, my appreciation of which has, I hope, been properly enhanced as a result of having sat through not only a dramatisation of it in German but also an operatic version, by a Finnish composer, with a Swedish libretto.

Nobody knows for sure whether or not Denis Diderot had a conversation with Jean-Francois Rameau, nephew of the composer, in the Café de la Régence in Paris, in April 1761. Nor does it matter. Diderot certainly wrote the first draft of the Dialogue in that year, reworking it in 1773, 1778 and 1782, the year before he died. The history of this short text (less than seventy pages in the Flammarion edition) is so extraordinary that one almost suspects Diderot himself of having somehow arranged it.

Although it has been described as “the very centre of his writing” and has provoked a still burgeoning library of commentary and interpretation, the Dialogue was never published or referred to by Diderot in his lifetime, and it first saw the light of day in a German translation, done by an admiring Goethe from a French manuscript which he had been lent by Schiller, who seems to have obtained it from a German officer in St Petersburg. Goethe’s translation appeared in 1805.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 76 , Issue 896 , September 1995 , pp. 368 - 377
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 France, Peter, Diderot (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 75Google Scholar.

2 See Furbank, P. N., Diderot. A Critical Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), p. 467Google Scholar.

3 I tried to keep this principle in mind, some years ago, when writing a book about Karl Marx. See Lash, Nicholas, A Matter of Hope. A Theologian's Reflections on the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981).Google Scholar

4 Francis Bacon, “First Part of the Great Instauration. The Dignity and Advancement of Learning, in Nine Books”, Bk II, Chapter I, in Devey, Joseph, ed., The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864), p. 78Google Scholar.

5 See Furbank, Diderot, p. 37. I have greatly simplified Diderot's scheme, which is reproduced in full on Furbank, p. 77.

6 See Bonnet, Jean–Claude, ed., Diderot. Le Neveu de Rameau (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), p. 163Google Scholar.

7 Loc. cit.

8 I have risked my own translation of the passage, because Leonard Tancock's, in the Penguin Classics edition, has “jester” for “fool”, which loses the implicit contrast between folly and reason. See Diderot, Denis, Rameau’s Nephew and d'Alembert's Dream, trans. Tancock, Leonard (London: Penguin, 1966), p.83Google Scholar.

LU1: II n'y a point de meilleur role aupres des grands que celui de fou. Longlemps il y a eu le fou du roi en titre; en aucun, il n'y a eu en litre le sage du roi. Moi je suis le fou de Berlin et de beaucoup d'autres, le voire peut–être dans ce moment; ou peut–etre vous, le mien. Celui qui serait sage n'aurait point de fou. Celui done qui a un fou n'est pas sage; s'il n'est pas sage, il est fou; et peut–etre, fut–il roi, le fou de son fou” (Bonnet, op. cit., p. 91).

9 Tancock, p. 33.

10 Ibid., p. 45.

11 Foucault, Michel, Folie et Deraison. Histoire de la Folie à l'Age Classique (Paris: Plon, 1961), p. 417Google Scholar.

12 Marx, Karl, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”,Early Writings, introd. Colletti, Lucio, trans. Livingstone, Rodney and Benton, Gregor (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 351Google Scholar. See Lash, A Matter of Hope, p. 89.

13 Rameau's Nephew, p. 40.I have rendered “I'homme de bon sens” (Bonnet, p. 47) as “man of good sense” in preference to Tancock's “wise man” (p. 35).

14 Rameau’s Nephew, p. 40. “Si nous disons quelque chose de bien, e'est comme des fous, ou des inspires; par hasard” (Bonnet, p. 52). The text used by Foucault, interestingly, has “philosophes” for “inspires” (see Foucault, Folie et Déraison, p. 419).

15 Rameau’s Nephew, pp. 103–104. The literary quality of the passage is so central to the argument that I give the French text of the closing lines: “Que ne lui vis–je pas faire? II pleurait, il riait, il soupirait; il regardait, ou attendri, ou tranquille, ou furieux; e‘était une femme qui se pâme de douleur, c’était un malheureux livré a tout son désespoir; un temple qui s‘élève; des oiseaux qui se laisent au soleil couchant; des eaux ou qui murmurent dans un lieu solitaire et frais, ou qui descendent en torrent du haut des montagnes; un orage; une tempêie, la plainte de ceux qui vont périr, mêlée au sifflement des vents, au fracas du tonnerre; e’était la nuit, avec ses ténèbres; e'était l'ombre et le silence; car le silence même se peint par des sons” (Bonnet, p. 110).

16 According to Foucault, Rameau's Nephew offers us, “au milieu du xviiie siècle, et bien avant que ne soit totalemenl entendue la parole de Descartes, une lecon bien plus anticartésienne que tout Locke, tout Voltaire ou tout Hume” (op. cit., p. 421).

17 “Ce vertige, où la vérité du monde ne se mainlienl qu'à l'intérieur d'un vide absolu” (Ibid., p. 423).

18 Rameau’s Nephew, p. 125; “Rira bien qui rira le dernier” (Bonnet, p. 130).

19 “Le délire reste ironiquement seul: la souffrance de la faim reste insondable douleur” (Foucault, op. cit., p. 424).