Diderot on Nature and Pantomime

Abstract

The article examines Diderot’s view of the inconstancy of nature and its corollaries, the most obvious of which is the recognition of the impossibility of philosophy and natural history. For, if everything in nature is in a state of flux, no theory can keep up with its changes, reflect on them and capture anything more than an isolated moment. Diderot’s conception of nature has important consequences for his aesthetic theory. If the goal of the fine arts is to imitate nature, and if everything in nature undergoes constant change, does it not mean that art—no less than philosophy and natural history—is also impossible? By focusing on Diderot’s novel Rameau’s Nephew (1805), I argue that the lesson of the numerous mimes its eponymous hero performs in the novel is that the dynamics of nature can perhaps only be captured by mime rather than on canvas or in stone, both of which, as Diderot puts it, can represent only a fleeting moment.

Keywords:

• Diderot
• body
• mind
• materialism
• arts
• 18th century

Notes

1. See Cherni, Diderot, 15.

2. Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” in Diderot, Interpreter of Nature, 78–79.

3. Diderot, “Philosophic Principles on Matter and Motion,” in ibid., 131, 128.

4. Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 77; Diderot, “Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature,” in Interpretation of Nature, 75.

5. Diderot, “Modification,” in Œuvres, 1:479; Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 72–73.

6. Bourdin, Diderot: Le matérialisme, 61–62; Leibniz, “Correspondence with Clarke,” in Philosophical Writings, 216.

7. Diderot, “Le Neveu de Rameau,” in Œuvres, 2:624.

8. Diderot, “Rameau’s Nephew,” in Diderot, Interpreter of Nature, 323; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

9. Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 160.

10. Jean-Yves Pouilloux, “Contribution à l’étude des pantomimes du ‘Neveu de Rameau,’” in Duchet and Launay, Entretiens sur “Le Neveu de Rameau,” 93. Comprehensive and highly insightful, this is, to my mind, still the best overall treatment of Rameau’s pantomimes. There are many excellent discussions on this topic, including, among others, Spitzer, “The Style of Diderot,” in Linguistics and Literary History, 135–91; Hobson, “Pantomime, spasme et parataxe,” 197–213; and Josephs, Diderot’s Dialogue , 135–39, 170–77, and 186–89. Spitzer considers Rameau’s mimetic skills against the background of Diderot’s own theory of acting expounded in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien and emphasizes Diderot’s linguistic and stylistic prowess in his descriptions of Rameau’s pantomimes; Hobson closely examines Rameau’s pantomimes in the context of eighteenth-century medical science and theory of spasms; Josephs innovatively considers Rameau the mime as someone who experiences “language within his body,” and examines his various aspects: parasite, moralist, musician, and so forth. It is interesting to note that Foucault in his discussion of Rameau’s “madness” in Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 363–72, barely mentions Rameau’s pantomimes, although it is in these that Rameau most reminds Diderot of a “madman.” To my knowledge, Rameau’s pantomimes have so far not been connected with Diderot’s theory of molecules or considered against the background of his conception of art as an imitation of an apparently inimitable nature, as I shall try to do in what follows.

11. Spinoza, Ethics, 84, 84–85.

12. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 114, 91, 114.

13. Ibid., 114, 115–16, 117.

14. See Howell and Ford, Elephant Man, 182.

15. For a classic account of the mirror neurons theory, see Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain.

16. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 114.

17. Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain, 124, 125.

18. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 113.

19. Spinoza, Ethics, 71–72.

20. Diderot, “La Promenade du sceptique,” in Œuvres, 1:105.

21. Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream, 61, 57.

22. Sturges, The Lady Eve, 467.

23. Cf. Barson, Flywheel, Shyster, 5.

24. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 88.

25. Diderot, “Jacques le Fataliste,” in Œuvres, 2:758.

26. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 72.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 90.

29. Diderot, “Jacques le Fataliste,” in Œuvres, 2:773.

30. Leibniz to Bourguet, December 1714, in Philosophical Papers and Letters, 662.

31. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, 214.

32. Diderot, “Essais sur la peinture,” in Œuvres, 4:478.

33. Diderot, “Interpretation of Nature,” 75.

34. Diderot, “Conversations on The Natural Son,” in Art and Literature, 67, 66.

35. Diderot, “The Salons,” in ibid., 290.

36. Diderot, “Beautiful.”

37. Diderot, “Letter on the Blind,” in Diderot’s Selected Writings, 23.

38. Diderot, “Beautiful.”

39. Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” 72.

40. Duflo makes the same point—that “nature is always like nature”—following the opening sentence of Diderot’s Essai sur la peinture in the Œuvres: “Nature makes nothing incorrect” (4:467). See Duflo, “Forme artistique et forme naturelle,” 78.