Rameau’s Nephew

A satirical dialogue, written over many years and never published in Diderot's lifetime. One afternoon at the Café de la Régence in Paris, where people come to watch chess, the narrator, called Me, meets Him, the nephew of the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau: a gifted, penniless musician who lives as a flatterer and buffoon at the tables of the wealthy. Their conversation ranges over genius and whether it excuses bad character, the education of children, the hypocrisy of Parisian society, and the quarrel between Italian and French music. Him acts out whole operas and the bowing and scraping of hangers-on in wild pantomimes. Me defends virtue and philosophy; Him replies that everyone is playing a role for money or advantage, and that the honest are simply worse at it. The text refuses to settle who wins. Goethe translated it into German in 1805, and Hegel used it in the Phenomenology of Spirit as an image of divided, self-alienated consciousness.

It is the liveliest Enlightenment work on morality and self-interest, and its portrait of a man who sees through every pretence anticipates modern cynicism and the divided self.