 Diderot did not publish Le Neveu de Rameau in his lifetime, but the text found its way to Germany where it was read by Schiller and Goethe. Goethe’s German translation, published in 1805, was a major influence on Hegel: the Neveu is the only modern work explicitly cited in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, its influence on the formation of Hegel’s own dialectical understanding of metaphysics and the nature of being is patent, and a line connects Diderot and the Neveu with all subsequent metaphysical understandings of the self as a singularity caught in a constant struggle with universal forces pulling the unity of being apart.