Art & Creativity Quote by Denis Diderot

“Good music is very close to primitive language” is Diderot doing Enlightenment work with a provocateur’s grin. He’s not praising cave paintings; he’s poking at the era’s obsession with reason by elevating what slips past reason. “Primitive” here signals origins: the pre-grammatical, pre-philosophical zone where meaning is carried by pitch, rhythm, breath, urgency. In other words, before language becomes a system for precision, it’s a medium for impact.

Diderot’s subtext is that music doesn’t merely decorate speech, it exposes speech’s buried engine. When words are young, they are nearer to the body: chant, cry, lullaby, ritual. Good music still operates with that raw efficiency. It communicates in the way a raised voice or a broken one communicates: not by making an argument, but by staging a state of mind. The “good” in “good music” matters; he’s drawing a line between mere entertainment and the kind of music that hits the nervous system with the inevitability of a shared signal.

Context sharpens the claim. Diderot edited the Encyclopedie, a monument to classification and rational order. From inside that grand project, he’s admitting the limits of taxonomy: the deepest forms of understanding aren’t always propositional. Music, like “primitive language,” is social technology - a way to synchronize feeling, create belonging, and transmit intensity without translation. It’s an Enlightenment thinker conceding that the most advanced art can be a return to the earliest human code.