Rameau’s Nephew. Dialogue as Gesamtkunstwerk for Enlightenment

Abstract

The idea that Enlightenment could have anything whatsoever to do with art, not to mention humor, strikes us today, at the end of the twentieth century, as wholly implausible. What could Woody Allen have to do with emancipation? we ask. Thus Diderot’s “dialogue of language and gesture” seems at first glance to have precious little to do with Enlightenment. This fictional account of an imaginary encounter between a philosophe and a parasite, who calls all that is nearest and dearest to the heart of the conventionally ‘enlightened’ idealist into question, therefore strikes us today as a scurrilously delightful, debunking dramatization of how boringly pompous morality usually is and how much more exciting it is to be naughty than to ‘behave ourselves’: “imagine a world wise and philosophical, admit that it would be devilishly sad. Behave, long live philosophy, long live the wisdom of Solomon: drink some good wine, gorge yourself with delicious morsels, roll on pretty women, lay down on soft beds. That apart the rest is only vanity” (456–457).¹ Yet, Rameau’s Nephew hardly impresses us at first glance as an important philosophical statement about the complexities of Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the reasons why we tend to miss the point have more to do with our typically one-sided understanding, not only of Enlightenment, but of the relationship between art and philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, i.e., in a period that must rediscover what was once called practical philosophy, than they do with Rameau’s Nephew itself.