When Diderot writes the novel The Nun,
he has a very clarifying sentence.
The Nun is a set of paintings he painted,
and he says in Italian: “Sono pittore anch’io”, “I am also a painter”.
In the case of Rameau’s Nephew, it’s a philosopher
who didn’t make music, but who knew music, he even had instruments
for the execution of music, to improve
this distance of the many executions, many translations of music.
But he has no symphony, no song, contrary to Rousseau.
And his passion for music was tremendous, even the interest
for Rameau’s music.
So, when you read Rameau’s Nephew,
it’s as if you see the outline of an opera
that is at the same time Buffa, it is Tragic,
it is Political, it is everything.
A complete masterpiece.
So, it is a piece you can read
according to the conjectures of thought.
You can go, for example from Plato to Diderot,
but you can also read into these connections of culture the idea of criticism.
There is a kind of mistaken perception
perception of relationship of German thought and French thought.
Casilla, for example, doesn’t hesitate in saying
Rousseau is a kind of John the Baptist of Kant.
The economic hypothesis is exactly the opposite.
Kant has read Rousseau, and he is extremely grateful to him.
And Kant has read a lot of Diderot, especially the works of esthetics.
So, when you see in the Critique of Judgment
the attempt of thinking about the critics of art, of freedom, of beauty,
you see the inspiration, and for that Kant had to fight Schiller,
fight all those people who thought Diderot’s thought is something with no greater importance.
Read it. He took the books and gave them “Read it!”.
And that’s what lead Goethe to translate Rameau’s Nephew.
I mean, there was a Diderotian presence.
And to save the appearances, it’s said that
Diderot is the Frenchest German head of the 18th Century. That’s not it.
It’s that the Lights were a broad movement,
and Diderot has learned a lot from the German thought,
above all with English thought. He was a translator of the English.
You can even say that the Lights were a huge translation of English thought
and of the idea of democracy that comes from there.
So, in the case of thought, this demand that the pause,
the silence enter and fuel this reflection, that’s important.
If you don’t have silence, you don’t have this moment
that goes beyond physics,
that goes beyond all of this human material side,
and you find this flower of culture that the thought is.
You don’t stay in the root. You reach that element that is so beautiful.
So this is something that, to me, seems vital in Diderot’s philosophy.
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