Diderot

Summary

Dominique Pagani sees Diderot as a prolific thinker who is hard to reduce to a single unity1. He often returns to his role as team leader of the Encyclopédie, especially his choice to give Rousseau the articles on music2. He also discusses their relationship: Rousseau borrows the dialogue form from him, and later Diderot, like Voltaire, comes to regard him as the most dangerous man. He reads Rameau's Nephew closely: through Goethe's translation it becomes a figure in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it is one of Marx's favourite texts3. Starting from D'Alembert's Dream and the story of the bishop who tells an orangutan "Speak and I will baptise you," he asks what separates the animal from the human4. He counts him among the first moderns, who nonetheless hate their own modernity, and notes that he takes part in the awakening of sensibility while keeping classical tastes5. Another trait he points out is the libertine who weeps before Greuze's paintings. Finally, he places him at the head of the chain of imitations at the end of Nerval's Angélique.

1. 1#1.8 Between crisis and war: philosophising?28 Jan 2016 · 34:40
2. 2#15 Plato, Rousseau, Hegel and music9 Feb 2021 · 36:12
3. 3Tribute to Jacques D'Hondt (2)2 Aug 2016 · 16:57
4. 4#9.21 Science and/or philosophy of “artificial intelligence”12 May 2021 · 5:44
5. 5#15 Nietzsche: philosophical or musical relevance? Answers to questions23 Jun 2022 · 1:39:44

Summary produced automatically from 36 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.