Rameau’s Nephew

"Rameau’s Nephew is perhaps the most immediately accessible and readable of his works, given that so many of them are entries for the encyclopedia of which he and [Jean le Rond] d’Alembert was the editor. Indeed it is. And it picks up on these themes which are central to the Enlightenment. This conversation, between what is perhaps the voice of Diderot and another individual, is the conversation of enlightenment in Kant’s sense. You remember Kant’s great essay, “What is Enlightenment?” He said we don’t live in an enlightened age, but we live in an age in which enlightenment is occurring – there is light dawning over the whole, and it comes when we accept the challenge to think for ourselves. Instead of obeying the priest, obeying the taxman, obeying the policeman, we begin to try to dare to be wise on our own account. If you wanted to be a spectator on a transaction, a thought process, an age where the dawn is coming up in the East, so to speak, here it would be. Yes, money is certainly one of the themes, and that’s because of the materialism of society that Diderot was satirising. It’s very interesting. You’re seeing, in a divagatory and fragmentary way in the conversation, a reflection of how hard it is to get a coherent perspective on things. I think that was Diderot’s point. That in order to try to understand how destructive people are, how shallow the conversation of society is, and how easy it is to become focused on things like the getting and having of wealth, you lose sight of things that are very central to what he regarded as the great Enlightenment promise – which is that you can in the end yourself, as an autonomous individual, make good choices towards a good life."