PDF Ebook Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream (Penguin Classics), by Denis Diderot
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Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream (Penguin Classics), by Denis Diderot
PDF Ebook Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream (Penguin Classics), by Denis Diderot
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Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)
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About the Author
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in eastern France in 1713, the son of a master cutler. He was originally destined for the Church but rebelled and persuaded his father to allow him to complete his education in Paris, where he graduated in 1732. For ten years Diderot was nominally a law student, but actually led a precarious bohemian but studious existence, eked out with tutoring, hack-writing and translating. His original writing began in 1746 with a number of scientific works setting out the materialist philosophy which he was to hold throughout his life. Along with his editorship of the Encyclopédie (1747-73), he wrote works on mathematics, medicine, the life sciences, economics, drama and painting, two plays and a novel, as well as his Salons (1759-81). His political writings were mainly composed around 1774 for Catherine II, at whose invitation he went to St. Petersburg. Diderot's astonishingly wide range of interests, together with his growing prediliction for the dialogue form, led to the production of his most famous works: D'Alembert's Dream, The Paradox of the Actor, Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau's Nephew. During the latter part of his life Diderot received a generous pension from Catherine II, in return for which he bequeathed her his library and manuscripts. He died in 1784.
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Product details
Series: Penguin Classics
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (October 28, 1976)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780140441734
ISBN-13: 978-0140441734
ASIN: 0140441735
Product Dimensions:
5.1 x 0.6 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.7 out of 5 stars
13 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#234,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
First time reading this classic - seems like it will require another pass. There is so much going on with the convoluted and self-referential ethics of the main subject. Fascinating, though, and I can see why it is one of the key texts on authenticity (along with Rousseau).The translation seemed pretty good, there were some typos though not a large number.
Starting with a quote from Horace about the changeability of man, this book presents a quite mercurial character - Rameau's Nephew. This nephew is a professional sponge and sycophant who when kicked out of one house simply finds a new rich Parisian to leach off of. The narrator of the book seems to both like and hate him. It is a great picture of Enlightenment France by one of the great fathers of the enlightenment, Denis Diderot.Although music is discussed at some points there is hardly anything in the book about Rameau himself, so French Baroque Opera lovers will have to look elsewhere for that story.
This is probably Diderot's most widely read work in English translation. There is good reason for it. Rather than strict philosophical treatises, Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream are a series of comic dilogues which serve as vehicles to attack conventional 18th century social mores and theology. In the first book, Rameau, who is an actual historical figure, the nephew of the famed composer, runs into the narrator (Diderot) in a parisian cafe where games of chess are going on around them. Rameau is one of the great comic creations of 18th century French literature. He is a cross between Lear's fool and Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Like the fool, he gets away (until recently) with saying outrageous things to his benefactor's faces, because they tend to regard him as a buffoon. Like the underground man, he is constantly vacillating in terms of his self-image. For the most part he excoriates himself and even seems to revel in the fact that he has brought his misery upon himself. This is in fact a rather ennobling trait, and probably part of the reason that Diderot doesn't dismiss him out of hand. Rameau really doesn't blame others. He accepts resposibility for getting himself kicked out of his rich sponsor's household. He also blames himself for the loss of his attractive young wife. Diderot's descriptions of Rameau's japery is hilarious. Rameau is an accomplished mimic. He performs an entire opera there in the cafe, singing all the parts and providing his own unorthodox instrumental accompaniment. Diderot writes: "What didn't he do? He wept, laughed, sighed, his gaze was tender, soft or furious: a woman swooning with grief, a poor wretch abandoned in the depth of despair, a temple rising into view, birds falling silent at eventide, waters murmuring in a cool, solitary place or tumbling in torrents down the mountainside, a thunderstorm, a hurricane, the shrieks of the dying mingled with the howling of the tempest and the crash of thunder; night with its shadows, darkness and silence, for even silence itself can be depicted in sound. By now he was quite beside himself. Knocked up with fatigue, like a man coming out of a deep sleep or a long trance, he stood there motionless, dazed, astonished, looking about him and trying to recognize his surroundings." Yet, as Diderot the narrator acknowledges, there is method to Rameau's madness. Again like Lear's fool, truth is to be mined beneath the jester's antics. Within the context of the flippant diologue, Diderot addresses many of the philophical concerns that were coming to the fore at the time of the enlightenment. There is a groping towards a definition of evolution that predates Darwin in some respects. There is even a brief discussion of social, vs. gentetic engineering (sustitute "gene: for Diderot's "molecule"). On man's natural state, which was so integral to Rousseu's optimistic philosophy, here is what Diderot has to say: "If the little brute were left to himself and kept in his native ignorance, combining the undeveloped mind with the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would wring his father's neck and sleep with his mother." Remind you of any 20th century father of psychology? D'Alembert's Dream , the companion-piece in this edition, is less entertaining than Rameau's Nephew, but still worth reading. The conceit doesn't work quite as well and the diologue tends to get bogged down at times. For students of the history of philosophy it makes for a lot less dry reading than Hobbes or Descartes however. I was surprised at what a big influence Lucretius must have had on Diderot (something I missed when I first read this work 20 years ago - but then I hadn't read Lucretius "On the Nature of the Universe" at that point). I would definitely recommend reading Leonard Tancock's introduction to both these works, not only for an overview of the subjects that Diderot is tackling, but for the intersting family backgrounds of D'Alembert (who was a revered mathematician and a contributor, along with Diderot and Voltaire to the monumental "Encyclopedie")and Mademoiselle L'Espinasse.
Although the translation is readable there are no page numbers in this digital edition, which made class discussion very difficult.
This was very challenging, having a little bit of ADHD did not help. I never got the point, I think it's just over my head.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was a French philosopher who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment, and was co-founder (along with d'Alembert), chief editor and contributor to the Encyclopédie.In the first (where philosopher Marivaux is constantly interrupted by the “nephew of the famous musicianâ€), the nephew says, “If [my uncle] ever did anything for anybody it was without realizing it. He is a philosopher in his way. He thinks of nothing but himself, and the rest of the universe is not worth a pin to him. His wife and daughter can just die when they like, and so long as the parish bells tolling their knell go on sounding intervals of a twelfth and a seventeenth everything will be all right. He’s quite happy. That is what I particularly value in men of genius. They are only good for one thing, and apart from that, nothing. They don’t know what it means to be citizens, fathers, mothers, brothers, relations, friends.†(Pg. 37-38)The philosopher observes, “there are two kinds of laws: some absolutely equitable and universal, others capricious and only owing their authority to blindness or force of circumstances. These last bestow only a momentary disgrace upon the man who infringes them, a disgrace which times turns against judges and nations for ever. Who is disgraced today, Socrates or the judge who made him drink the hemlock?†(Pg. 39)The nephew says, “But if nature were as powerful as she is wise why, when she made [Voltaire and Greuze] great, didn’t she make them equally great?†The narrator replies, “But don’t you see that with such a line of argument you overthrow the universal order of things, and that if everything were excellent here below nothing would stand out as excellent?†(Pg. 42)The nephew observes, “Let’s get this clear: there is arse-kissing literally and arse-kissing metaphorically… I should find both equally unpleasant.†The philosopher replies, “If the way I’m suggesting doesn’t appeal to you then have the courage to be a pauper.†The nephew rejoins, “But it is hard to be a pauper while there are so many rich idiots you can live on.†(Pg. 49)The nephew asserts, “what is the model for a musician or a tune? Speech, if the model is alive and thinking; noise, if the model is inanimate. Speech should be thought of as a line, and the tune as another line winding in and out of the first. The more vigorous and true the speech, which is the basis of the tune, and the more closely the tune fits it and the more points of contact it has with it, the truer that tune will be and the more beautiful. And that is what our younger musicians have seen so clearly.†(Pg. 98)“D’Alembert’s Dream†is a fictional dialogue between Diderot and d’Alembert. After Diderot admits to his friend that “you don’t believe in pre-existent germs,†Diderot says, “It is contrary to experience and reason: contrary to experience which would search in vain for such germs in the egg and in most animals under a certain age, and to reason which teaches us that in nature there is a limit to the divisibility of matter---even if there is none in our theoretical reasoning---and which jibs at imagining a fully formed elephant inside an atom, and within that another fully formed elephant, and so on ad infinitum.†(Pg. 153)Not nearly as witty as Voltaire, and of far less philosophical value than The Encyclopedia Selections, this book is still of considerable interest to anyone studying Diderot or the Enlightenment.
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