Ep. 390: Diderot Debates a Cynic (Part One)

0:00 Mark: Foreign. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 390 is something like, how can one be moral in a decadent society? We read Denis Diderot's dialogue Rameau's Nephew, written in the 1760s, but unpublished until after his death. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, who has composed songs that no one plays, but which may be the only works of today posterity will like.

0:39 Wes: This is Wes Alwan hoping to have the last laugh in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:44 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey gulping down the flattering lie and sipping the bitter truth in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:51 Mark: Do you think that he who laughs laugh like that's from this? Or was that a really old he who laughs last, last, best. What is the.

0:58 Wes: I think it is from this.

1:00 Mark: So Diderot has long been on our pile of, you know, famous philosophers that we would have liked to cover and people periodically request we had not gotten around to it. And this Rameau's nephew was referred to quite a lot, you know, maybe provided the underlying concrete narrative in the last chunk of Hegel's phenomenology that we just read. So hopefully we can elucidate a little more of that. But you know, mostly it's. It's a self contained thing. It just. Even though it was again, written in the 1760s, but unpublished, right. He was known for doing the encyclopedie, this massive thing with Voltaire and other folks, but also wrote some fiction. And so this is a dialogue, sort of like a Platonic dialogue. And it was discovered by the German idealists, right? Goethe translated it, Schiller sort of brought it to his attention.

1:54 Dylan: You can't forget the fact that the reason that happened was because his library was bought by Catherine the Great and she put him on a pension, so that that's how he lived out the end of his life. And that his whole library included all of his books that he worked with, which he's continued to study with. But also his library were there and it was through Prussia that Goethe got a hold of it. And the Catherine the Great connection's pretty funny.

2:20 Mark: Sort of like the whole, you know, half the Aristotle texts we only know because were taken off to the Islamic world and then brought back. And so in the Renaissance they were all new and shiny. So this text was new and shiny, even though it was at least 50 years before. But, yeah, it was all the rage. Yeah. What do you guys think? This very different format than we've had recently.

2:41 Wes: I really liked it, by the way. I just looked it up and. No, yeah, Diderot did not invent that idiom. Dates back to 1546 to an English dramatist. But I really love this. So I think. I don't know if it's right to say that Diderot is underrated because of course, he's. Everyone knows who he is. I think it's just that I don't think we. You know, he wasn't a part of my high school or college education. He's overshadowed by other figures, right. Like Rousseau and Voltaire. So I had no idea that I was missing out on something this amazing because it's a really great literary feat in many ways, but it is full of really interesting thinking as well.

Diderot, as people know, as a philosophe and sort of part of a group of people who are emblems of the Enlightenment and the cultural trends in the Enlightenment that would ultimately lead to the French Revolution. He himself got in trouble for his encyclopedia, right. Publishing entries which were considered subversive by the Church. So what you get in this is you get a mix of someone who's got very well honed literary sensibilities and very well honed philosophical sensibilities, which is rare. And it's about topic that has recently come up for us in Hegel and is taken up by more recent philosophers like Nietzsche.

And that's the extent to which hypocrisy is a condition of social life. And this dialogue, even of education, is in sense, in which one of the drawbacks of education, and including not just formal education, but cultural refinement in general, the formative forces that make us who we are, from parental training to cultural norms, that stuff tends to turn us into hypocrites because we have all these natural impulses that run against those norms. And then the question. So the question is, is there a place for the more cynical person who's open and honest about those darker impulses, or is he a corrupting element?

So you can see here the kind of dialectical tension that interested Hegel. There's something unresolved in just having a set of norms that everyone implicitly accepts, as in the Greek right, ethical substance, if we're only nominally accepting them, if we're unreflectively accepting them, if we're maybe even unaware of the fact that much of our behavior and our impulses runs against them, and violates them. So there's got to be another stage beyond this where the self aware cynicism of someone like Rameau's nephew and the more upright earnestness of Diderot is somehow synthesized.

5:36 Mark: What'd you think, Dylan?

5:38 Dylan: So I found it kind of difficult. It is very literary. It helped me in terms of just getting the pace of it and even the humor of it. I started listening to it being read aloud, and that actually helped a lot in terms of even finding it funny. I mean, when I was reading it, I had a hard time latching on to the pace of it and the voice of it, Particularly in these sections where Rameau's nephew is doing these performances, going back and forth to himself. He's like, you know, talking in one voice and another voice. I just found it hard to follow. And so in that way, it was just challenging. The writing itself, I found to be good, but again, it was just hard to do for me.

6:22 Mark: So you were listening to that Librivox that I pointed you at is that

6:25 Dylan: I ended up listening to Librivox with the guy with the crazy voice for Rameau's nephew.

6:29 Mark: Yes. It's a little. It's actually, I found it toward. I mean, God's work. Like, I'm so glad that it exists and it's free and whatever. But, yeah, he would talk like Diderot here, and then he would talk like this for Rameau's nephew, and then he would try and it's. That's a very good impression, Mark.

6:45 Dylan: It was pretty annoying reading this.

6:47 Wes: I tried to find a performance of this, and I didn't find one in English and I found one in French I couldn't get access to and couldn't figure out. But it's kind of thing. It made me think, wow, Robin Williams. This is like the part that would have been made for Robin Williams.

7:03 Mark: It is.

7:04 Wes: It is jumping around and all these different characters with different facial expressions, lightning fast. It is, yeah. This is Robin Williams before Robin Williams.

7:13 Dylan: And so that character comes through. And so once I kind of latched on to that, even reading it became a lot easier to just to consume. That's just. That's probably as much me as anything else. I was struck by, for lack of a better term, sort of how contemporary or modern it reads and the way in which they talk. You know, putting aside all the French contemporary names, it reminded me a lot of the kinds of ways in which, like, existentialists would talk and stuff. So that was interesting. I found it provocative, you know, in the way in which west described, you know, trying to situate this character, Rameau's nephew, is he portrays himself basically as a quintessential fool and praises fools and made me think a lot about, like, the history of fools as being lovers for truth telling about who we are in their foolishness and that role of comedy in that and that Rameau's nephew sort of embraces that and he has this kind of self awareness that, again, feels kind of modern about him.

I'd be interested just to talk more about the challenge that Diderot's character Lui, is effectively presenting to him, and the challenge that moi, the remote. Actually, it's the other way around. Right.

8:43 Mark: Diderot is Moi.

8:45 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, Diderot is moi. And Rameau's nephew is Lui. The way in which he presents a kind of conundrum for Diderot. And that also made me think of the kind of conundrum that someone like Alcibiades presents to Socrates, or that someone like Thrasymachus presents to Socrates. People who have opinions that are clearly not aligned with the good and lead to actions that they would commit, but you don't really know what to do with them. And so that's where I think the question sort of lies for, like, you know, the ultimate judgment that Diderot has as the author of it. He's presenting something that I think his own character is trying to resolve. But as a whole, the dialogue presents something that you just end up with a question mark about what to do in this kind of situation with this person.

9:38 Wes: The positive thing we end up finding out. The positive judgment that Diderot gives us of Rameau's nephew at the end of the dialogue is, well, he's not a hypocrite like the rest of us. And he says out loud the things that we are sometimes thinking, and even if we're not thinking, we're often just acting on them.

9:54 Mark: Yeah, actually, in. In French, it's Allard Stern.

10:00 Wes: Exactly. So then we have to ask the question about the value of that and whether we can give up hypocrisy. Right. Do we give up our norms altogether if we give up hypocrisy? Maybe hypocrisy is necessary. At the beginning of the dialogue, he suggests to us that maybe bad people are like yeast in a group. Hegel kind of references this in various ways. There's a. About the kind of. The necessity, the possible necessity of badness on the one hand, is a kind of ontological ground of goodness, but in this case, we get it as sort of a social thing, right?

So it acts as yeast in a group, he says on page 10, because it restores individuality in the face of social convention. Let's see how he puts it, because this is a good section. Once a year I stop and fall in with them. These eccentrics, he means largely because their character stands out from the rest and breaks that tedious uniformity which our education, our social convention and our customary good manners have brought about. If such a character makes his appearance in some circle, he. He is like a grain of yeast that ferments and restores to each of us part of his native individuality.

He shakes and stirs us, makes us praise or blame, smokes out the truth. This starts out as a talk about eccentrics, but once he gets into the conversation with Rameau's nephew, it becomes a question about whether geniuses who are morally compromised are a good thing or a bad thing. Right. They're bad people on a personal level, but maybe they're good for society in the long run.

11:42 Mark: So just to clarify, for folks, yeah, we should just refer to the discursant as Rameau. So the uncle is an actual famous musician, Jean-Philippe Rameau. And so, right. This is given as your uncle is a genius among other genius, you know, oh, I don't even like my uncle, right, because geniuses are good at the thing that they do and they just ignore everybody else. They're. They're bastards. The nephew is Jean Francois Rameau. The Internet tells me he was a real life person, though, you know, this seems to be an imagined dialogue. And I think Plato's Republic is a very good thing to compare it to.

A lot of what is being discussed here is the very things, right, that in Plato's Republic, can you be happy, right. Diderot himself is representing sort of what was at this point the establishment philosophical view of like, yeah, you know, virtue is happiness. But this Rameau, he lives in the real world with other people and the things that you have to do to get by, given economic incentives, given his character and the character of most people, well, you know, maybe you can be happy being poor and virtuous all the time and working hard and you'll.

And industrious, but most of us are not set out for that. So having that sort of model there or, you know, trying to teach your kids that way. Rameau says it's like teaching your kids to live in ancient Sparta when they actually have to live in modern day Paris. You would make them very ill equipped. So it's. Whereas Socrates was using the be Virtuous and the virtuous person will be happy even if they don't look happy. That was sort of the rebels position in the Republic. Here the rebels position is against all that, you know, be real.

13:33 Dylan: Yeah, but isn't that part of that in the context of hypocrisy that Wes was talking about? So that that be real is a parallel to sort of as a kind of be truthful. Right. So you have, you know, this, you know, I imagine, you know, the court or other kinds of society where you are putting on a face or on some kind of errors and that what you're saying to other people and the way you're presenting yourself is not. Is totally separate interaction from what you're thinking about them or the way you think of yourself. And your ambition in fact is hidden.

And so it's all kind of under the big veil. And the fool, Rameau's nephew, in displaying his hypocrisy is in fact explicitly claiming that he's displaying the truth. He claims to be a great truth teller, aligns himself with fools as being great truth tellers. Even though he is. Wes uses the word hypocrite. He's not self consistent. He will go back and forth between how he feels in a given situation and he acknowledges that. So there's a way in which his hypocrisy about that isn't exactly. To me, it's not genuine hypocrisy.

14:42 Wes: Well, I was saying he's not a hypocrite. Yeah, that's his one virtue.

14:45 Mark: Well, at least when he's talking to Diderot here. So I should have said not be real because to be in society you have to play all these tricks. That's not being real in terms of authentic. But he is in this conversation. You know, it's sort of like when I'm laying out what you have to do, like I'm not going to give lip service to morality.

15:07 Wes: Well, no, he would, he would give

15:09 Mark: to Diderot in this situation.

15:11 Wes: Yes, but he's self aware about his hypocrisy. Most of us believe our own. He does it as he says, in a systematic way. He does what most of us do by instinct, which is to lie in a self conscious and systematic way where he knows that he's doing it purely for gain and he is doing a lot of truth telling. This is a weird thing about this dialogue is that any characterization you can give of Rameau, you can give the opposite in a way. These contradictions. You can see why Hegel loves This come out everywhere. Right. So on the one hand, he's a flatterer at the house of his patrons, the people who take care of him, basically, and feed him and give him pocket money and all these things, and in exchange for him being witty and fun and making everyone laugh and razzing people like the fool in a king's court and all of that stuff.

16:06 Mark: Playing the piano, presumably.

16:08 Wes: Yeah, right. Although we don't actually hear about that. But he's often. Because he's razzing people, he's often telling the truth in the way that a fool and a Shakespeare play might be, telling a harsh truth to someone and then just making people laugh that way. So he does a lot of flattery and cringing and crawling, as he'll put it later. And the way that we all do, Diderot concludes, right, we all have to play these roles, these positions in society. But in another way, he transcends them because, A, because he's conscious of what he's doing, and B, because he can use his wit and humor to deliver the contradictory truths underlying all the hypocritical surface stuff.

16:54 Mark: Yeah, even the king. So this is something Hegel certainly picked up on, where the king is the only one that gets to be the real individual and not just be putting his whole selfhood into something else. But strangely, that's not Diderot's final verdict on the King. It's Rameau says, only the king, you know, is immune from that. And Diderot's like, you know, the king has his wife, you know, he. Everybody has somebody that they have to go through the motions for, that they have to please and debase themselves in front of. And that's just, you know, that's society.

17:27 Wes: So another example of one of the contradictions with Rameau is just the beginning, the argument, the little debate. And they have a bunch of little ethical debates, I suppose, is what you would call them throughout the. Throughout the dialogue. And the first one begins with the role of genius in society at page 11. And in the beginning, we learn from Rameau that genius is a bad. Is a bad thing in many ways. They're often bad people at a personal level. They tell these harmful truths that are disruptive to society. It sounds a bit like him, and it's in tension with things that he's going to say later about genius, which is that actually being a genius is quite useful, because the other thing he'll say there here is that genius is not useful for getting wealth and pleasure, so it has a lot of Drawbacks.

And he praises the ordinary person and good sense. And the good sense is the very thing that got him thrown out of his patron's house when he apparently told a little bit too much of the truth. It's the sort of thing that he's praising here in the ordinary person as opposed to the genius. So it's odd, in the beginning, you know, Diderot is defending geniuses who are maybe not the nicest people to be around, maybe they have a lot of moral transgressions because they improve society in the long run, and that includes morally improving people because of the quality of their literary works, causing tears, right?

And then sympathy, expanding their capacity for sympathy. So in a way, it's not what you would expect the way you wouldn't expect it necessarily to begin this way with Diderot, the philosopher, defending the artist who has these personal defects for the sake of the greater good, because in

19:09 Dylan: that case, he's actually acknowledging that the artist is somehow intrinsically hypocrite because of the work that they're creating, is somehow calling out for goodness, but they themselves aren't. It's a twist on what Socrates complaint about poetry in the Republic, right? That it's still. It's sort of the flip. Socrates is complaining about poetry being not a reflection of the good, and therefore it's not educating people properly. And in this section, it seems like Diderot is basically saying, you have people who are writing great works that are educating people well, but they themselves are intolerable, immoral people.

19:50 Wes: Yeah, I left out, actually, I kind of cut out the beginning of the conversation where Rameau starts out by saying mediocrity is useless. And then Diderot is going to say, actually, mediocrity is a kind of medium in which you can, here and there, a genius will emerge because so we need it as a cultivating agent in a way. Right? Rameau is actually criticizing all the bad chess players around. And you could say the same thing for many of the artists in the society in which he lives, which I think he is critical of. But then it switches, right? So it's mediocrity is useless, but then genius becomes a bad thing, and then later on we'll find out again the opposite. Genius is the thing that Rameau aspired to but couldn't have.

20:33 Mark: So Rameau admits, he says, look, I'm just talking, I'm saying whatever is off the top of my head. So in that sense, he's being honest to his thought of the moment, but he's not being Honest in the sense of, hmm, what do I actually think? Let me stop and really pause here, because he throws out this thing of like, oh, yeah, all geniuses should be killed. But then he admits, like, look, anybody who resents genius, they think deep inside that they have some. And this ends up being. This comes back at the end of the dialogue where he, you know, it's sort of the shame of his life.

He was raised to be musical, and he thought as soon as he was old enough to consider such things, I should write my masterpiece. And he just found that he just couldn't do it. It was too hard. Everything was derivative. Oh, and now I live the kind of life where, you know, I have to beg for my supper and do all this stuff. Like, it's not very conducive to now that I'm older and maybe could, like, unlike when I was 15 or whatever, maybe I could settle down with the great capacities that I've demonstrated to you in my. In this dialogue and do something.

But, you know, it's too late for that. So I think he just has a very ambivalent relationship to genius. And I feel like I share that. And then we've talked about that on here before. On the one hand, these people that we're reading, they're just people. They're doing a craft, they're smart, but we don't have to bow before them and scrape and say, oh, they were so wise. If there's anything wrong, it must be my misunderstanding. Like, that's just not the format of the podcast. But at the same time, yeah, this is a pretty amazing work, so I can admire that.

22:07 Dylan: But isn't that the tension itself? Right. Because the first version where, you know, you characterize it like, that's not the only disposition you can have to have respect for the work or the author, the genius. Right. You don't have to worship them or consider them, you know, whoever you. I myself witness or use the word genius. But to have that disposition with respect to it, there's something that tension is. Well, what do you do with it? How do you act on the fact that there's something to be gotten out of it without taking the whole thing?

22:43 Wes: Right. So I want to stick with the genius argument for a little bit, but as it evolves over quite a few pages. But. So, I mean, he starts out by saying, genius is bad, genius is harmful because it disrupts the status quo. This is Rameau. So it's disruptive in that sense, but it doesn't really change things deep down. And so it leaves a kind of, he calls it a parti-colored world, kind of motley world, combination of good and bad. Doesn't perfect everything. So evil, you know, as Mark mentioned, evil comes to the world through men of genius. And then he says, lies are more useful to the nations than the truth.

Right? Men of genius are poisonous. And Diderot's response is they point to common errors, establish general truths and truth. I'm looking on page 13. Truth necessarily is best in the long run, even though it may do harm in the moment from which I incline to think that the man of genius who denounces a common error, who establishes a general truth, always deserves a veneration. Such a man may fall victim to prejudice or existing law, but there are two kinds of laws, those based on equity, which are universally true, and those based on whim, which owe their force only to blindness and local necessity.

These last cast odium on their violator for only a brief moment, an odium which time cast back upon the judges and the peoples who carried out the law. Basically he's responding to Rameau's talk about Socrates violating the law, I think, being transgressive. And he's saying, if it's a bad law, it's the, you know, that stood the dishonor of the norm, not to the one who violated it.

24:25 Mark: And let me read Rameau's response, a great comfort to Socrates. Was he any less convicted, any less put to death? Was he less of an agitator in violating a bad law? Did he not encourage fools to despise the good ones? Wasn't he in any case a queer and troublesome citizen? So yeah, that, that's, you might say, that sort of bargain of insisting on letting himself be executed and all that stuff, that it presents an ethical ideal that is so high that as to be useless to us normal people.

24:56 Wes: Diderot goes on to say, right, without vanity there is no talent. Vanity is a condition for the possibility of there being talent. And then he, he says the other thing which I think Hegel makes a pretty direct reference to, which is that if everything were excellent, then nothing would be excellent. This is the ontological kind of version of this, right? Or the, you know, you could might call it semantic, but and I call an ontological, where that somehow goodness presupposes the existence of badness. We see the same type of argument in St. Augustine, right, where the goodness of the whole depends upon the privation, right?

It's a form of theodicy. It's not like God creates particular evils, the things that we think of as Evil serve the greater good. And then the Hegelian version, where nothing being as we know it as becoming requires nothing. It requires privation inserted into pure being, which might as well be nothing until. Until we get that synthesis, until we get that combination. So we need badness in some sense, we need vanity in order for the world to be good as a whole,

26:02 Dylan: to be good as a whole, or there to be a distinction between good and bad. And the question of the entire goodness is a different question.

26:11 Wes: Well, for there to be a men of talent, we need vanity. For there to be excellence, we need something that's less than that. We would sure there would be no distinction if everything were on the same level.

26:23 Dylan: That kind of distinction has always struck me as well, you know, in order to have any distinction between any gradation, you need to have both kinds, otherwise you have no distinction to, you know, to talk about a. Listen to that. You have to have both of them. In order to talk about up and down, you have to have something that's higher and something that's lower. So if, as you said, if you're going to talk about anything as being good in the sense of qualitatively different than other things, you have to have a qualitative difference. If you don't have a qualitative difference, then there's nothing to talk about in terms of that quality.

26:57 Wes: The other thing of philosophical significance I wanted to point out here on page 16 is just that Rameau makes this argument that if you were to perfect the moral order, if you were to perfect society, you would cease to exist as you are, right? If you created a perfect world, it would undo your identity. So at the bottom of page 16, outside that, let everything carry on as it may. The best order for me is that in which I had to exist and a fig for the most perfect world, if I am not of it, I'd rather be and even be a silly logic chopper than not be at all.

And Diderot agrees in a way. He says there's nobody who thinks otherwise. And yet who fails to attack the scheme of blind to the fact that in doing so he repudiates his own existence. So there's always a tension in trying to reform society. And the same thing goes for reforming ourselves. It's what part of what makes it so hard is because we get rid of ourselves in our current iteration, or if we reform society too much, we make it unrecognizable to us as we are in our current iteration. So we could perfect society to the point where in A way it's incompatible with us.

And I think Diderot kind of agrees with that. But Rameau and Diderot agree for different reasons. I think Diderot is more concerned. Right. About leaving a place for badness on the individual level. Right. Because it allows for individual geniuses who then can improve society as a whole in the long run. And Rameau wants to leave badness alone at the global level, at the social level, for the sake of individual freedom and individual identity and toleration of wicked people like him. So it's a really subtle point, because in a way, it's a point of agreement, but they're coming at it from different directions.

28:49 Mark: I don't know if we skipped over this as. Or this is coming up. Yeah. On 19. Do people hide their vices from themselves?

28:56 Dylan: Right.

28:56 Mark: I found this a little confusing, that Ramo talks about people who are not honest with themselves, but when they get in the company of another rogue, then that's actually part of the sort of cynical thing that Hegel was discussing in, you know, that of course, we don't take the morality seriously. So the question is, are people. You would think that people give lip service to morality, but then they themselves are cynical about it inside, or is it, you know, they're honest about their own faults? Or is it the case that we lie to ourselves about our own faults, but we're willing to admit it seems like all four combinations of things happen.

And the fact that Rameau himself, it's like, you know, first he's like, yeah, I'm a rascal, I'm a scaly. So what of it? But then he certainly has a sense of pride and thinks he's a superior moral philosopher. So again, he's ambivalent, just as he was about genius, about his own moral character, that he knows he fails. He falls short of the philosopher's morality, which says, don't care about riches and things like that, but he has a very definite sense of what happiness is. If he's going to teach his son how to be happy, it's a matter of prudence, I think.

And so that becomes its own sort of virtue. I think this is, you know, where Hegel, I think, very confusingly referred to the good becoming the bad and the bad becoming the good. And so at some point, Ramo says, yes, I'm a scoundrel, but I'm just using your language, right. You would identify me as a scoundrel. Really, Those terms are sort of meaningless. I mean, there's just getting along in the world.

30:37 Wes: Yeah. The Prudential really comes up right here. I think that's a good word for Mark, because this is again the point where he waivers on whether there's any prudential value to being a genius. And he's said above that there isn't. And now around 17 and then leading up to the part that you're talking about, he says that actually he'd love to be a genius because it would bring him wine, women and wealth and all the. The rest of the good things in life. But as it is, he can do that by being a jester, basically by being a fool, by being a genius at being a fool. It turns out. Right as we go on, we'll learn that his talent for being the fool and the jester are incredible.

31:18 Mark: And.

31:18 Wes: And it includes acting and improvising and impressions and music. And so we get a. We get a sense that his ability to flatter and play the fool are intimately linked to. Also to his talent for music, which he thinks he's failed to be a genius at. But in a way, it's the way he applies it to his performances with people, perhaps is a kind of genius. So maybe he's a genius, maybe he's not. But whatever he is, he's very talented at being a fool. And he can get the good things of life out of that just as much as he could out of being some sort of respectable, earnest, you know, grave seeming important person in society.

And then Mark, I think, Right, so he's willing to call himself a fool and lazy and impudent and all these things. And I think the part you were pointing to was on page 19 where he. Where Diderot is really surprised by Rameau's self awareness. And Rameau in turn is kind of surprised to hear Diderot say that. I think he says something like, what can you hide from yourself?

32:21 Mark: Yeah, right in the middle of 19, it reminded me of Sartre, you know, that self deception is not really possible.

32:27 Wes: Yeah.

32:28 Dylan: Which seems to be wrong.

32:30 Mark: I mean, people.

32:31 Wes: Right.

32:31 Mark: For Sartre, people are in bad faith, but that's different than self deception because you are doing it to yourself. You can't lie to yourself in the way that you could lie to someone else because you have the information and they don't know it. And so you're telling. You're misrepresenting it. You can't actually do that to yourself.

32:47 Wes: Well, it's a special kind of lying. Right.

32:49 Dylan: Yeah. I was just going to say it seems to be categorizing self deception as bad faith. I mean, Maybe. Maybe you're right that in the end, Sartre doesn't believe that you actually don't know that you are deceiving yourself or lying to yourself. I don't know if that's always true.

33:04 Wes: So. Right. In a rare moment of good sense, as he calls it, he got himself cut off by his patron. Well, we won't learn about what. That. What he did. Exactly. Until much later on in the. In the dialogue. It sort of becomes like a little bit of a cliffhanger for the. For the rest of it, what happened exactly? What was this common sense that he engaged in? But it's, you know, here it's suggesting that it's a form of error. And in a way, it's the sort of thing that we. All, right, so you can call Rameau the fool and the jester and this and that, but as we get through the dialogue, we come to understand, well, we're all really like him.

We're all putting on these parts and we're lying and we're not saying everything to others that we might. That we believe we're telling little white lies to spare people's feelings. We're engaging essentially in flattery in the broad sense. And if we screw up and we tell the truth at a critical moment when we shouldn't tell the truth, we might get fired or we might create a big problem in a relationship, or the list goes on.

34:12 Mark: Yeah, we might want to stop here to sort of think about what it is to be a fool for another person. Right. He says on 18, Diderot says, you've always taken interest in me because I'm a good fellow whom you despise at bottom, but who amuses you. And, you know, Rameau is saying, I'm acting the fool for other people. You know, fools are necessary. Kings have fools. Kings don't have designated sages, which I don't think is actually true. I think there are plenty of the Grand Vizier, you know, here's my royal sage. But whatever. If you were actually a sage, if you're actually a wise person, you wouldn't need someone to be a fool for you.

So at some point he talks about being the fool for someone is just because what we want out of life is stories, is entertainment. We want to be distracted. We want to be amused to death. And so being the fool for someone is just presenting that fun time, the party planner, the good TV show, whatever it is that is amusing you. But on the other hand, we have this, you know, this idea of the fool is the one who tells the truth. And so it's like being a Socratic midwife that I'm presenting you, you know. So this whole Rameau's whole role for the reader, for Diderot, as expressing standard platonic ideas of philosophical virtue is giving you, hey, well, let's consider this other side, which at least some source that I looked at was saying, of course, these are both, you know, Diderot's ideas.

Diderot is challenging himself. He's having a conversation with himself. So is it appropriate, given the world that I live in, to go around with this platonic slash stoic, traditional set of values?

35:49 Wes: So Rameau, he does have to be a flatterer too, right? He has a few different tasks in this household. Later on, we'll learn that he has to take care of the animals. He has to put up with the disgusting habits of his patrons, including the wife farting. And there's a story about him, her, who's. She's a beast and has to be hauled off her husband while they're having sex because she's crushing him to death. He has to pretend that the patroness of the household is a good actress. He has to get her parts, you know, he has to stand up and clap while the rest of the audience is hissing.

So there's a lot of what he does where he is trying to boost people's egos, but the fool part, he's doing exactly the opposite. He, the truth telling is all in sending up people's pretenses, razzing them, just like the king's jester, right? Saying, oh, you're full of yourself, you're a hypocrite, you're a liar, you're this, you're that. So he really does have contradictory assignments in a way.

36:49 Mark: Well, so that's interesting. So I don't really care about the story of how he gets kicked out of this house, but. But it's that he's being insulting in just the way that he's been insulting so many times before. But the master of the house was in a bad mood and did not take it well. You know, basically he's pointing out, what he then points out in the dialogue at great length, that, like, you know, you're the one that invited assholes like me to leech off you and have dinner with you. If you were a virtuous person. And you, I wrote down Aristotle on friendship, right?

If you had only virtuous people around you that would nourish you in the way Aristotle advises, then you would not have them Insulting you. And so all I'm doing is just pointing out, and, man, you know, I have to live my life sucking up to you to live, to get food, to get a place to sleep, to get clothes. At least allow me the dignity of being contemptuous of you and being contemptuous of the situation. But if you just state that as the fool stating the truth. So again, was he actually out of his remit? Was he being sensible for once or was he just.

So. Yeah, again, this is the question. What is it to be the fool? And is being the fool in this philosophical sense that he's doing in this dialogue and being the flatterer, acting the fool? It seems those are different things.

38:08 Wes: Yeah. In the story, he. I mean, I didn't fully understand it, but it seems like there's a guest who is in the seat of honor and he basically disrespects by saying, you should move down one seat per day or something until you're sitting next to me. Something to suggest that he's really on the same level as Rameau. And I think as a guest, and I think the guest ultimately is able to laugh at it, but it's the master of the house who somehow feels offended, like Rameau has gone too far and you don't, you know, found out why. Who is this person to the master of the house? What is it exactly that Rameau said that's different from any other time?

38:48 Dylan: But it.

38:48 Wes: It shows you the limits of this type of, you know, quote unquote, truth telling. For the sake of comedy. People are ready for a certain amount of ego deflation, let's say. But you're walking a fine line. You can hit a nerve, right. And then suddenly you're canceled.

39:05 Mark: Yeah.

39:06 Dylan: That section that we're talking about right now, also, Rameau's nephew expands it right. To the people who are complaining about these things all know better. And it's a version of anybody who claims to be a victim of something actually is wholly responsible for whatever happened to them. And he goes pretty far with that. So basically, anything bad that happens to you is your own damn fault because, you know, you should know better.

39:35 Wes: Yeah. So if. What are some examples? If someone sleeps with your wife. Do you remember the specific.

39:42 Dylan: Yeah. If you have somebody who's, you know, basically, if you had your lover, go get educated by somebody who's super charming and gorgeous, don't be surprised.

39:52 Wes: Yeah. The victim is always to blame. So he really does. Yeah. I think this is an important point you're making, which is that it's not just saying he's really making principles, quasi ethical principles out of these. This, his amoralism.

40:05 Mark: Yeah, it's.

40:06 Wes: He is a serving providence. He is punishing people's wicked. Wickedness. That's what his role is. And that's what people like him or scoundrels are there for. So if you get taken advantage of by a scoundrel, it's really your own fault.

40:22 Dylan: Yeah. Which is there's a way in which you can kind of see the context in it, context of all these people of privilege and all these people who are, you know, running the show, that they can and ought to know better. It's different than saying anybody who was tricked, like, it basically denies the ability to have somebody be tricked, that there's no such thing as somebody being preyed upon.

40:46 Mark: So maybe a big. Just to kind of wrap up part one here, a difference between this and, say, Plato's Republic is that Plato's Republic starts with, hey, we're just thinking about justice. We think about justice, you know, as a topic. Whereas this starts more like, hey, what you been up to? And so he is telling about his life and, you know, how he has to suck up to people and how he got tossed out of his house. But the clear parts are the general. You know, often it's a story of something he heard. The general ethical points. His actual. It's very confusing to me.

And it's not just because of the French names, but even just, like, getting straight. Like, wait, who are the other characters? Who are Wes? You even. You disambiguated. You were like, oh, yeah, there's the master of the house and the woman of the house. And he makes it clear, like, yeah, he's very stern and curmudgeonly and she's very, very fat. But then, like, the having to get a role for somebody, I wasn't even clear that that was for the mistress of the house or just some other people that he's sucking up to. Like, he's. There's a whole coterie of people, guests and things like sucking up.

It's not just to those people. It's like a common mutual suck fest throughout this. And there's nothing modern. I was trying to think of a modern, like, entourage, if you've ever watched that show. Occurred to me. But that was like, oh, these are my boys that I brought from the. So even though they leech off me and, you know, have to flatter me and, like, they're not just, like, comers to my court.

42:14 Wes: No. Rich people have this, right. It's not just they have their entourages, but it's more. Yeah, I imagine it probably resembles this, right? People leeching off them, taking them, being yes men, taking advantage of them, entertaining them.

42:28 Dylan: I think the closest thing to this kind of court thing is society in like the capital S kind of version.

42:36 Mark: The Epstein class.

42:37 Dylan: Yeah, seriously, there's smaller versions of it in the way in which lots of different kinds of communities interact. I mean, west was pointing this out from the beginning. The insights that there are roles that we play in everyday social engagements that involve a certain amount of. Wes usually puts it as it involves a certain amount of lying. You're just lying about certain things in the form of not saying everything that's on your mind or you're presenting a particular face. And so therefore, because you're not revealing everything, you're. Therefore there's a certain amount of hypocrisy. And that I think Wes is right that that just goes on as part of social interactions. There are things you can say with in certain environments that you can't say in other environments.

43:24 Wes: And if you think lying is too strong a word, just take note of all these moments during the day and try to be honest with yourself. What's going on?

43:33 Dylan: Stop lying to yourself, Casey.

43:34 Mark: All right, well, let's let people think about that for the next week. Or if they're Partially Examined Life supporters. Part two is probably in your feed right now. Just look ahead a little bit. Otherwise, yes, you can go to partially.com sport and sign up for one of those things. Or if you push that wonderful subscribe button on the Apple podcast app. Yes, that's still going to get you the ad free feed, but you're going to get according to the normal schedule. So next week. Thanks.

44:00 Dylan: Thanks a lot.

44:01 Wes: Thank you.