D’Alembert’s Dream and Rameau’s Nephew by Denis Diderot
Translated by Ian Johnston
Denis Diderot (1713-1784), one of the major writers in
eighteenth-century French culture, was a leading figure among those
criticizing established traditional order and promoting radical reforms
in French culture. Of his numerous works in a wide variety of styles,
his best known today is Rameau’s Nephew a fictional dialogue between a
mature narrator, often identified with Diderot himself, and a younger
casual acquaintance, an intelligent, indigent social parasite and pimp.
Their conversation ranges over a many subjects—the hypocrisy of French
bourgeois society, developments in music, middle-class morality, the
foolishness of those hostile to the Enlightenment, among others—and
raises many provocative questions in a brilliantly ironic and amusing
style.
In the other controversial work included here—
D’Alembert’s
Dream, a sequence of three short dialogues—Diderot sets out
his uncompromisingly materialistic and, in places, startlingly modern
view of human life.