You know, I was looking through the source stack
for today, and this one image just kept jumping
out at me. Oh, yeah. What was it? Okay, so picture
this. It's 1773. You have the Empress of Russia,
Catherine the Great, I mean, arguably the most
powerful woman on the planet at that point. Right.
And she's sitting in her private chambers. And
across from her, like knee to knee, is this 60
-year -old French philosopher. And he's not just
sitting there quietly, is he? No. That's the
thing. He's practically climbing on top of her.
He's shouting. He's waving his arms around. And
every single time he makes a point about liberty
or law, he slaps her on the thigh. Hard. Yeah,
hard. To the point where she apparently complained
she was black and blue and had to put a table
between them just for, like, self -preservation.
Exactly. And that specific image, this frantic,
unbelievably enthusiastic philosopher just physically
assaulting an autocrat with his ideas, that to
me is Dennis Diderot in a nutshell. It really
is. Because we tend to file this guy away, you
know, in history classes, the encyclopedia guy.
Right. The dusty librarian who put all of human
knowledge in alphabetical order. Which is, I
mean, it's technically true, but it's sort of
like calling the Beatles a garage band from Liverpool.
It just completely misses the sheer chaotic scare
of what he was actually doing. And that's exactly
what we're digging into today. Because when you
actually get into the sources, the letters, the
secret manuscripts he hid, the actual police
reports on him, you realize Diderot wasn't just
compiling a dictionary. No. He was building a
bomb. A slow motion bomb, maybe, but definitely
one that you could argue did more to dismantle
the old regime than, you know, any single riot
ever did. So for this deep dive, we're really
going to look at two different versions of this
man. First, there's a public Diderot. That's
the editor, the hustler, the guy who's trying
to change the way people think without getting
himself executed. And then there's the other
one, the secret Diderot. This is the part that
I find fascinating. Me too. This is the guy who's
writing absolute masterpieces. I mean, books
that predict evolution, that deconstruct how
novels even work, that analyze human corruption
with this brutal honesty. And then what does
he do? He shoves them in a drawer. Literally
hides them away. Yes. He knew the world wasn't
ready for them. He knew the censors would burn
him or worse. So he just... He skipped his own
century. He decided he was writing for us. Which
is just a hell of a gamble, isn't it? To bet
your entire legacy on an audience that won't
even be born for another, what, 200 years? It's
an incredible act of faith in the future. So
to really understand how a Cutler's son from
Champagne ends up making that kind of bet, we
have to start at the beginning. He wasn't born
into the Parisian elite or anything like that,
was he? Oh, far from it. He was born in 1713
in Langres, in the Champagne region, and his
background is actually... super important for
understanding his later philosophy. He wasn't
aristocracy. He wasn't part of the academic establishment.
His father, Didier Diderot, was a master cutler.
A knife maker. Exactly. A highly skilled craftsman.
He made surgical instruments, lances, all sorts
of fine knives. And this gave Diderot a lifelong
respect for trade, for tools, for the physical
reality of how things are actually made. So he
had this real world, hands -on perspective from
the very beginning. He did. In an era where a
lot of philosophers sort of looked down on manual
labor as something, you know, servile or base,
Ghidorah had this almost blue -collar appreciation
for the mechanical arts. He understood that the
world is made of matter, and you can shape that
matter with skill and with your hands. It feels
like that tangible connection to the physical
world really grounded him. He wasn't just thinking
in abstract forms. He was thinking about, you
know, steel and edges and function. But the family
dynamic itself, it wasn't exactly smooth. Not
at all. It's a classic rebellion story, really.
His father wanted him to become a respectable
professional. He had a sister, Denise, who did
her absolutely adore. He called her female Socrates,
which I love. Wow. But the family had very specific
plans for Dennis. They wanted him to be a priest,
maybe a lawyer. The safe, steady path. The respectable
career. Right. And he went along with it for
a while. He studied with the Jesuits. He actually
did consider the clergy. And then he pivoted
to law school for a bit. In 1734, he makes the
decision that, you know, terrifies parents in
any century. He decides he's just going to be
a writer in Paris with no money. And his father,
the master knife maker who values... practical,
tangible things. I'm guessing he didn't love
the idea of his son becoming a scribbler. He
disowned him. Just cut him off completely. No
more money, no more support. You're on your own.
There he is. We have a 20 -something Diderot,
totally disowned, and he's loose in Paris in
the 1740s. Yeah. It really strikes me that he's
essentially living the gig economy life just
300 years early. He's translating, he's hustling
for any work he can find. It is absolutely the
starving artist phase. The sources call it his
bohemian existence. He's living in a garret,
you know, a tiny attic room wearing old worn
out clothes. He's doing any translation work
he can get just to pay for food. He's translating
a history of Greece, a medicinal dictionary,
just pure grunt work. But this is also where
he starts building his network, finding his people.
And he meets Jean -Jacques Rousseau. He does.
Another future heavy hitter of the Enlightenment.
How did they meet? They meet at the Café de la...
which was the spot for chess and coffee in Paris.
You can just picture it, right? Two broke, brilliant
young guys watching these intense chess games,
drinking coffee they can barely afford, and just
complaining about the state of the world. The
start of a beautiful and very tumultuous friendship.
They were thick as thieves back then, and it's
in the middle of all this... Poverty and intellectual
ferment that Diderot, of course, falls in love.
With Antoinette Champion. Right. And on paper,
from his family's perspective, this was a complete
disaster. She was a very devout Catholic, which
he was already moving away from. She had no money,
no dowry, and very low social standing. She was
a linen draper's daughter. So not exactly a strategic
match for moving up in the world. Not at all.
And his father absolutely hated it. He hated
the match so much, he actually tried to get Diderot
imprisoned. to prevent the marriage from happening.
He tried to have his own son locked up. Yes,
but... Diderot, being Diderot stubborn and rebellious,
he just went and married her anyway, in secret,
in 1743. I feel like there's a but coming. The
romantic rebel marries for love against his father's
wishes. Usually that story either ends with,
and they lived happily ever after, or it goes
completely off a cliff. Yeah, it went off a cliff
pretty quickly. The marriage was not a happy
one. The sources paint Antoinette as pious and,
well, maybe a bit of a nag, but you also have
to admit Diderot was probably impossible. to
live with I so he was restless he was always
working always out and he wasn't faithful he
had a whole series of affairs but the most significant
one the one that really mattered intellectually
and emotionally was with a woman named Sophie
Voland and we know so much about this because
of the letters right I've seen them described
as literature in their own right Yes. His correspondence
with Sophie Voland is just, it's incredible.
Historians consider it one of the absolute literary
treasures of the 18th century. They're not just
love letters. They are a direct feed from his
brain to the page. A window into his mind. A
completely unfiltered window. He writes to her
about philosophy, about court gossip, about new
scientific discoveries, about his digestion,
about the plays he saw last night. It's the most
candid, honest look we have into his mind. He
didn't have to fill So, okay. He's broke. He's
unhappily married. He's pouring his soul out
in letters to his mistress. He needs cash. And
this leads to one of the absolute weirdest origin
stories for a philosophical work I have ever
heard. We have to talk about the talking jewelry.
Ah, yes. Les bijoux indiscrets, or the indiscreet
jewels, published in 1748. Tell us the story
behind this because it's wild. It is. So the
story goes that his mistress at the time, a woman
named Madeleine de Prézieux, this is before Sophie
Voland, was demanding money. He was broke. At
some point, Diderot made a comment that writing
a novel was trivial, that it was easy. She basically
dared him to do it. So he writes a novel on a
dare. On a dare and to make some quick money.
He supposedly churned it out in about two weeks.
And the result is... Well, it's basically erotica.
But it's Diderot, so it has to have a twist.
It can't just be smut. It has a very, very strange
twist. The plot involves a sultan who gets a
magic ring from a genie. When he points this
ring at any woman, her, well, the book uses the
slang term bijou or jewels, but it's a euphemism
for her vagina. Her jewels begin to speak. It
talks. It talks. And it confesses all of its
sexual experiences out loud for everyone to hear.
I mean, that is, that's certainly a premise.
It sounds like something from a bad B movie.
It absolutely is. And on the surface, it's just
bawdy and scandalous. But because Diderot can't
help himself, he just stuffs the book with these
long digressions on philosophy, music theory
and literature. It's actually a pretty sharp
satire of the French court and the gossip culture
of Versailles. But there's one specific chapter
that really hints at where his mind is going.
The dream sequence. Yes. There's this bizarre
dream sequence where a child named Experiment
grows into a giant and systematically destroys
a huge ancient temple named Hypothesis. That's
actually really profound. It's the scientific
method literally destroying old dogma and received
wisdom. And he's hidden it inside this dirty
joke about a magic ring. Exactly. It shows that
even when he was, you know, slumming it for cash,
his mind was already attacking the established
order. He was making this argument that we can't
just guess how the world works based on old books
or theories. That's Hypothesis. We have to go
out and test it. We have to experiment. And did
it work? Did he make his money? Oh, yeah. The
book was sold clandestinely, of course, but it
was a massive hit. It actually ended up being
the most published and widely read work of his
entire career during his own lifetime. He later
called it a debauchery of the mind, but it paid
the bills. So he pays the bills with talking
jewels, but he's clearly gearing up for something
much more serious. We start to see a shift in
the late 1740s. He starts writing things that
are genuinely... This is where we meet the dangerous
philosopher. In 1746, he publishes his first
really original work, Philosophical Thoughts.
Now, he's still a deist at this point. He believes
in a god, but a distant one, like a watchmaker
who wound up the universe and then just walked
away. But he's already pushing boundaries. He
is. He's arguing for the importance of feeling
and passion alongside pure reason, which was
a bit radical. And he's already leveling some
pretty sharp critiques at institutional Christianity.
And the police are starting to pay attention
to this guy. They definitely are. A year later,
in 1747, he writes another piece called The Skeptic's
Walk. It's a dialogue between a deist, an atheist,
and a pantheist. The police actually seized the
manuscript before it could even be published.
They were onto him. But the real turning point,
the thing that really lands him in hot water,
is the letter on the blind in 1749. Yes. This
is the pivot point. This is where he stops being
just a literary nuisance and starts being a genuine
threat to the state. The title sounds so clinical,
though. It sounds like a medical case study you'd
find in a dusty archive somewhere. And that was
the whole trick. The Enlightenment was obsessed
with this thought experiment posed by a scientist
named Molina. The question was, if a man born
blind who knows shapes only by touching them...
A cube, a sphere, suddenly gains his sight. Would
he be able to tell the difference between the
cube and the sphere just by looking at them?
So it's a question about hardware versus software,
almost. Is our brain preloaded with an understanding
of geometry, or do we have to learn it all through
our eyes? Precisely. The empiricists, like John
Locke, said no. We are blank slates. We learn
everything through our senses. Diderot takes
this idea and just sprints with it. He interviews
a real blind man to understand how he structures
his world. But then he introduces a character
based on a real person. Nicholas Saunderson,
a brilliant blind English mathematician. And
this is where the trouble starts. This is it.
Because in the book, Saunderson is on his deathbed.
A priest is there trying to get him to repent,
to accept God. And the priest uses the classic
argument. Let me guess. Look at the beauty of
the world. Look at the stars. Look at the complexity
of the human eye. Surely only a divine designer
could have made all this. That's it. Exactly.
It's the argument from design. The watchmaker
analogy. The world is so complex and ordered,
someone must have built it. And Saunders and
the blind man just destroys it. Completely. He
says to the priest, if you want me to believe
in God, you have to let me touch him. He says,
you look at the world around you and see perfection
and order. I touch my own body. I feel my own
blindness and I see a mistake. I see a world
that is not perfect. Wow. That is chilling. He's
basically arguing that the existence of God is
relative to your senses. If you can't see the
glory of creation, does that glory even exist
for you? And it gets even worse for the priest.
Sanderson then goes on to argue that if there
is a God, he's a distinct underachiever. And
he introduces this concept that is... Just. It's
shockingly Darwinian. A century before Darwin.
A century before Darwin. He imagines the universe
not as a perfect static clock, but as this chaotic
soup of matter constantly mixing and matching
over millions and millions of years. A relentless
churning of atoms. Right. And he says that in
this process, monsters are created constantly.
Creatures with no heads or three legs or no stomachs.
They can't survive, so they die immediately.
We never see them. The only things that we do
see are the ones that, by sheer chance, chance
worked. So what we call design is just survivorship
bias. It's just the stuff that didn't immediately
fall apart. Exactly. In 1749, he is describing
in principle the theory of natural selection.
He is stripping the divine magic out of the act
of creation and replacing it with trial, error,
and deep time. The historian Conway Zirkle noted
that this passage is so accurate, it almost forces
you to accept evolution even without all the
evidence we have today. So talking vaginas was
one thing. The authorities could sort of ignore
that as smut. denying the divine order of the
entire universe, that's another level. That they
could not let slide. In July of 1749, the police
come for him. They had been watching him. They
raid his house. He's arrested. And he's thrown
into the dungeon at the Chateau de Vincennes.
Solitary confinement. Complete solitary confinement.
And this is where we get that incredible MacGyver
moment. It really is. He has no paper, no pen,
no ink. But Diderot cannot not write. His mind
is just racing constantly. The only book they
let him keep was a copy of Milton's Paradise
Lost. So he scraped the slate from the dungeon
walls, crushed it into a fine dust, mixed it
with some wine they gave him with his meals to
make a kind of ink. And used a toothpick as a
pen. And used a sharpened toothpick as a pen
to write notes in the margins of Paradise Lost.
Writing notes with wine slate ink. I mean, that
is just incredible dedication, but it also speaks
to a kind of desperation, doesn't it? it does
he was terrified he had no idea if or when he
would ever get out he was completely cut off
from his friends his family his work eventually
after about three months he cracked He signed
a humiliating letter of submission promising
not to write any more debaucheries of that kind.
And they let him go. They let him go. But he
was released for a very specific reason. Not
out of mercy, but because a group of powerful
publishers desperately needed him for a massive
new project. The encyclopedia. The project that
would consume the next 20 years of his life.
Right. So he gets out of Vincent, but he's on
a very short leash. He knows he's being watched.
He needs a project that's big enough to pay the
bills, but... theoretically, at least safe enough
to keep him out of the dungeon, enter the encyclopedia.
The project that basically ate his life. And
we really need to frame the scale of this thing.
This wasn't just a book. This was a 20 -year
war of attrition. By the time it was finished,
it was 28 volumes, 71 ,818 articles, over 3 ,000
distinct custom -made illustrations. And it didn't
start that way, did it? Initially, it was just
supposed to be a straightforward translation
of an English dictionary, right? A quick cash
grab for the publishers. That was the original
plan, yes. Just translate Ephraim Chambers' encyclopedia.
But Diderot, being Diderot, he couldn't just
translate. He saw a bigger opportunity. He realized
that knowledge in 18th century France was completely
gatekept. What do you mean by that? Well, if
you wanted to know about theology, you had to
ask a priest. If you wanted to know about law,
you had to consult a nobleman. If you wanted
to know how to make glass or weave silk, well,
you actually couldn't find out. Those were trade
secrets guarded by the guilds. So knowledge was
siloed. It was kept separate and controlled by
different groups. Exactly. And Diderot wanted
to smash the silos. His grand vision was to consolidate
all human knowledge, not just academic knowledge,
but the practical knowledge of trades and crafts,
the mechanical arts, and make it accessible to
everyone. This goes right back to his dad, the
knife maker. It absolutely does. Diderot held
this really radical belief that the man who weaves
the silk for the bishop's robe is just as intellectually
valuable as the bishop who wears it. So he and
his team went into the workshops. He didn't just
read a book about weaving. He went to the factories.
He spent days learning how to strip a quill,
how to cast a cannon, how to properly tan leather.
There's a story in the notes that he would actually
have craftsmen bring their machines to his office,
disassemble them piece by piece, and then reassemble
them in front of him so he could... could commission
accurate illustrations. The plates. The illustrations
are the secret weapon of the encyclopedia. Before
this, if you looked at a diagram of a machine,
it was usually kind of artistic and not very
clear. Diderot pioneered the use of exploded
views, literally showing the screw, the lever,
the gear, all separated and floating in space.
It was an instruction manual for civilization
itself. Okay, that all sounds great. It sounds
progressive. And useful. But why was it so dangerous?
Why would the Pope ban a book about how to tan
leather? Because of the cross references. This
is where Diderot was an absolute genius of subversion.
He knew the royal censors were reading the big,
obvious articles, you know, Christ, King, Soul.
So in those articles, he kept the definitions
relatively orthodox. He played nice in the headlines.
Exactly. But then at the end of the article,
he'd add a little distinct symbol, a renvoy,
a cross reference. Like a hyperlink in a modern
web page. Precisely. It was a paper hyperlink.
So, for instance, you're reading the article
on cannibalism. It describes, you know, people
eating human flesh, gross, barbaric, something
only savages do. But then at the bottom of the
article, there's a little link. See, also, Eucharist.
Oh, wow. No, he didn't. He linked the Catholic
ritual of consuming the body and blood of Christ
directly to cannibalism. Very subtly, yes. He
never says it out loud. He just puts the link
there and lets you connect the dots yourself.
Or you'd read an article on the Cordelier, a
specific order of Franciscan monks. And the cross
-reference at the bottom would guide you to the
entry for Capuchon, which is a monk's hood, but
it's also a plant known for putting people to
sleep. The shade. He's calling the monks boring
and useless. He's calling them a useless narcotic.
The whole encyclopedia was a treasure hunt like
this. If you followed the links, you found the
real radical philosophy hidden beneath the surface.
He was teaching an entire generation of readers
how to think critically, not just telling them
what to know. It's the ultimate Trojan horse.
You buy it for the diagrams of windmills and
plows. But you end up becoming an atheist who
questions the monarchy. And the government absolutely
knew it. They revoked the project's printing
license in 1759. They threatened the printers
with being sent to the galleys, which was basically
being chained to an oar on a ship until you die.
The Pope officially put it on the index of forbidden
books and threatened to excommunicate any Catholic
who read it. The pressure was immense. And his
co -editor, D 'Alembert. He quits. Dillenberg
quit. He was a brilliant mathematician, but he
was also cautious. He saw the writing on the
wall and said, I'm done. This is suicide. I'm
out. But Diderot stayed. Diderot stayed. For
10 more years alone, he personally wrote nearly
7000 of the articles himself. He ruined his eyesight
proofreading pages by candlelight. He basically
became a ghost working in secret, constantly
looking over his shoulder, never knowing when
the police might knock on his door again. It
becomes a spy story at this point, doesn't it?
There was a mole inside the government helping
him. Yes. And this is one of the most amazing
parts of the story. His secret protector was
a man named Mel Gerbs, who was the official government
director of the book trade. He was the chief
censor. The guy who literally signed the orders
to raid Diderot's house and confiscate his papers
was secretly a pro -Enlightenment official. So
the chief censor was on their side. He was. There's
this incredible moment where Mel Gerbs has to,
for political reasons, order a raid on Diderot's
house to confiscate the encyclopedia manuscripts.
He sends a secret message to Diderot the day
before, saying, they're coming for you tomorrow.
Diderot panics and says, but I have thousands
of pages. I have nowhere to hide them. Yeah,
and what does Malgerbe say? Malgerbe says, send
them all to my house. Nobody will ever think
to look for them there. That is just incredible.
The banned books were being hidden in the home
of a government official responsible for banning
them. It really shows you how pervasive these
Enlightenment ideas were becoming. Even the people
running the system knew this system was broken.
But the personal cost for Diderot was immense.
And there's a final tragic irony to this 20 -year
struggle. He's sacrificing his freedom, his health,
his personal safety, all to publish this monument
to human knowledge and truth. And then the great
betrayal. Le Brayton, his publisher, the man
who was getting rich off of Diderot's incredible
risk. Walk us through what Le Brayton did. Because
this is the kind of corporate sabotage that would
make a modern CEO just blush. It was 1764. The
project is almost done. The final volumes are
at the printer. Diderot thinks he's finally crossed
the finish line after two decades of hell. He
goes to consult a printed volume for a cross
-reference and realizes the text. It doesn't
look right. It feels shorter than he remembered.
He checks another article. It's wrong, too. What
has happened? He discovers that his publisher,
LeBreton, was so terrified of being arrested
that after Diderot finished his meticulous editing
and went home for the night, LeBreton and his
foreman were going into the print shop, taking
the typesetting, and physically cutting out entire
paragraphs and sentences they thought were too
dangerous. They were censoring the encyclopedia
after the editor in chief had signed off on the
proofs. Yes. And the worst part, they burned
Diderot's original corrected manuscripts to cover
their tracks. So Diderot didn't just lose the
printed text. He lost the only record of what
he had actually written. He discovered that the
work he had spent 25 years of his life on had
been, in his words, mutilated and defaced. Oh,
I can't even imagine. You spend two decades building
this monument to truth, and your own boss secretly
defaces it right before the unveiling. Diderot
was devastated. He wept. He confronted Le Brayton
and said, You have massacred the work of 20 good
men and wasted 25 years of my life. He felt that
his great contribution to the world, his legacy,
had been ruined. But looking back now, from our
perspective, was it a waste? Absolutely not.
Even in its mutilated form, the encyclopedia
was a revolutionary document. It completely changed
the intellectual landscape of Europe. It democratized
knowledge. It absolutely laid the intellectual
groundwork for the French Revolution. But for
Diderot personally, it was the final straw. He
realized that if he wanted to write the pure
truth, the unmutilated truth, he couldn't publish
it. Not in France, not in the 18th century. And
that's what drives him underground. That's what
gives us the secret Diderot. Yeah. Because while
all of this encyclopedia nightmare was going
on, he was writing these other even more radical
books and just putting them away in a drawer.
Writing for the drawer. It's a fascinating psychological
state to be in. In a way, he was freed from censorship
because he wasn't even trying to please a censor
anymore. He was writing for an ideal reader,
a future audience that didn't exist yet. Let's
talk about some of these secret masterpieces.
Let's start with The Nun, La Religios. Because
the origin of this story is, again, kind of a
practical joke, right? Diderot loved a good prank.
So he had a friend, the Marquis de Cromas, who
had moved away from Paris to the countryside.
Diderot and his circle of friends missed him
and wanted him to come back. So they hatched
this plan. They started writing these fake letters
to the Marquis, pretending to be a young nun
named Suzanne, who is begging for his help to
escape her convent. They were catfishing the
Marquis. Essentially, yes. They were inventing
this tragic damsel in distress figure to lure
their friend back to the city. But Diderot got
so invested in the character of Suzanne and her
voice and her suffering that he ended up turning
the whole elaborate prank into a full -blown
novel. His friends would find him at his desk
weeping over his own writing, and he'd say, I
can't help it. Poor Suzanne is suffering so much.
And the nun is not a lighthearted romp. It's
not the sound of music. No, it is a gothic horror
story. Suzanne is an illegitimate child who is
forced into a convent by her parents to hide
their sin and avoid paying a dowry. But she doesn't
have a religious vocation. She just wants to
be free. And the book details, in excruciating
detail, the psychological and physical abuse
she suffers. The other nuns, the mother superiors,
some are just cruel and sadistic. Others are
sexually predatory. So he depicts the convent
not as a sanctuary of faith, but as a kind of
prison that drives people mad. Exactly. His main
point wasn't necessarily to attack Christianity
itself, but to attack the institution of forced
cloistering. He believed that if you lock people
up and deny their basic human nature, their need
for freedom, for sex, for society, for intellectual
stimulation, that nature will warp. It will become
toxic and monstrous. He was using fiction to
make a very powerful psychological argument about
fundamental human needs. And he never even tried
to publish this in his lifetime. Absolutely not.
It finally came out in 1796, well after he and
the French monarchy were both dead. If he had
published that in the 1760s, he would have been
back in the dungeon at Vincennes and they probably
would have thrown away the key. Then there's
Rameau's nephew. This is considered by many,
especially later philosophers, to be his true
masterpiece. What is going on in this book? It
sounds very strange. It is strange. It's the
dialogue, which was Diderot's favorite format
because it allowed him to argue with himself
and explore all sides of an issue. It's a long,
rambling conversation between two characters.
Moi, which means me, who is a stand -in for Diderot
the philosopher, and Louis, which means him.
And him is the dissolute ne 'er -do -well nephew
of the famous composer Jean -Philippe Rameau.
The nephew is quite a character. He is one of
the great characters in literature. He's a failed
musician, a moocher, a parasite, a brilliant
cynic. He is completely amoral. He believes that
the world is a brutal jungle where everyone is
eating everyone else, so you might as well grab
whatever pleasure you can. He has this great
line, hurrah for wisdom, to drink good wines,
gorge on choice foods, tumble pretty women. Outside
of that, all is vanity. He sounds like a modern
antihero. The Joker to Diderot's Batman? Or maybe
a character out of a Dostoevsky novel? That's
a great analogy. The philosopher character, Moy,
tries to argue for virtue, for morality, for
the greater good. And the nephew just tears every
single argument to shreds. He exposes the hypocrisy
of so -called polite society. He points out that
the virtuous people are often boring or secretly
corrupt, while the scoundrels are at least honest
about their appetites and are having all the
fun. So why is this book so important philosophically?
Because Diderot doesn't let the good guy win.
The dialogue ends in a stalemate. The Nephew
makes genuinely compelling points about how society
forces people to debase themselves just to survive.
The German philosopher Hegel, years later, fell
in love with this book. He saw it as a brilliant
anticipation of his master -slave dialectic.
It's a critique of the enlightenment from inside
the enlightenment. It admits that reason alone
might not be enough to make people happy or truly
good. And the journey of this manuscript is just
as wild as the content, right? It's like a literary
thriller. It was found among his papers after
his death. A copy was smuggled to Russia, then
to Germany. It was given to the poet Schiller,
who then gave it to Goethe, the author of Faust.
Goethe was so blown away he translated it into
German himself and published it in 1805. For
a long time, the French only knew about this
French masterpiece by translating it back from
Goethe's German. That is completely absurd. The
French had to read one of their own greatest
philosophers via a German translation because
he had hidden his work so well. It just shows
you how effectively Diderot had sealed his best
work away from his own time. We also have to
touch on Jacques the Fatalist. This sounds like
another metafictional mind -bender. It is. It's
a novel about a servant, Jacques, and his unnamed
master who are traveling somewhere. We never
find out where. And Jacques is a fatalist. He
believes that everything that happens, good or
bad, is written on a great scroll in the sky.
So the book is a long exploration of free will
versus determinism. But it's the style that's
so revolutionary. Diderot constantly breaks the
fourth wall. So, like... Deadpool or Fleabag
does today. Exactly like that. But 200 years
earlier, the narrator directly argues with the
reader. He'll stop the story and say things like,
you want me to tell you where they're going?
Why should I? This is my story. I can send them
wherever I want. He interrupts the plot to tell
you that all stories are fake and that he is
in control. It sounds like something written
in the 1960s or 70s, like Tristram Shandy or
a Kurt Vonnegut novel. It was unbelievably avant
-garde. He was deconstructing the conventions
of the novel before the novel was even fully
established as a form. He was playing with the
whole idea of narrative, asking, who is really
in control here? The author, the characters,
the reader, or is it all just fate written on
that great scroll? So we have the rebel, the
encyclopedia editor, the secret writer, but we
can't ignore Diderot the art critic. Yeah. You
mentioned in the intro that he basically invented
the genre. Yeah. How do you... How do you invent
art criticism? Well, before Diderot, people wrote
about art, but it was usually very academic or
technical. It was all about composition and color
theory and classical illusions. Diderot wrote
for a private handwritten newsletter called the
Correspondus Literare, which was circulated to
a few dozen VIP subscribers across Europe. Princes,
kings, Catherine the Great. The crucial thing
is most of his readers would never actually see
the paintings he was writing about at the Paris
Salons. So he had to paint a picture with words.
Yeah. He had to make them see it. Exactly. He
had to translate the visual experience into a
verbal one. And he did it with this incredible,
emotional, vivid language that one of his friends
said was. Almost a new sense. He wouldn't just
describe the painting, he would walk into it.
He'd start talking to the figures in the scene.
He'd criticize the painter for bad lighting or
stick postures, as if he were a theater director
giving notes to an actor. So he wasn't just describing
what was on the canvas. He was describing the
feeling it produced in him. And he was so opinionated.
He loved the painter Jean -Baptiste Cruz, who
did these sentimental, moralizing scenes of family
life. And he absolutely hated François Boucher,
who painted these fluffy pink rococo nudes and
flying cupids. He thought Boucher's work was
frivolous. Diderot believed art had to have a
moral purpose. It had to move you. He famously
wrote, First, touch me, astonish me, tear me
apart, make me weep. And then, if you can, delight
my eyes. Exactly. For him, the emotional impact
came first. The aesthetics were secondary. He
wanted art to be a profound experience, not just
pretty wallpaper for aristocrats. And speaking
of profound experiences, he also gave us a very
famous phrase from his theater writings, which
is that universal feeling of thinking of the
perfect witty comeback only after you've left
the party and you're already walking down the
stairs. We have all been there. And Diderot,
who was by all accounts a brilliant and energetic
conversationalist, felt that acutely. He wrote
that he was very sensitive, and when he was in
a heated argument or felt overwhelmed, his mind
would just go blank. It was only later in the
quiet that the perfect zinger would strike him.
It really humanizes him. Even the smartest man
in France sometimes couldn't think of a good
record until he was in the cab on the way home.
Now, for all this genius, Diderot was perpetually
broke. He had a daughter. Angelique that he adored
and he needed to provide a dowry for her. He
had no pension, no savings. And who steps in
to save the day? None other than his fan, Catherine
the Great of Russia. It's one of history's oddest
and most interesting friendships. In 1765, Catherine
hears that Diderot is being forced to sell his
massive library to pay for his daughter's dowry.
She wants to cultivate this image of herself
as an enlightened monarch, so she makes this
grand gesture. She says, I will buy your library,
and she pays him a huge sum for it. But then
she adds a condition. What's the condition? She
says, you will keep the books in Paris. You are
now my librarian, employed by me, and here is
a generous salary to take care of them. She even
paid him 50 years' salary up front. So she buys
his library but leaves it at his house and pays
him to be its caretaker. That is a brilliant
power move. It was the ultimate form of patronage.
It gave him financial security for the rest of
his life. And eventually, Diderot felt a deep
obligation to go and thank her in person. So
in 1773, at the age of 60, he undertakes this
incredibly arduous journey to St. Petersburg.
The 60 -year -old philosopher who hated traveling,
dragging himself across a frozen Europe in a
horse -drawn carriage. He was miserable on the
journey. He got colic. He hated the food. But
he finally arrives and he and Catherine just
hit it off. They met almost daily for months.
And this brings us right back to the thigh slapping.
He spoke to her in his words, man to man. He
completely forgot she was an all -powerful autocrat.
He treated her like one of the guys back at the
Café de la Régence in Paris. And he tried to
give her serious political advice, right? He
tried to turn Russia into a constitutional monarchy.
He did. He spent his time there drafting these
vast, elaborate plans for reforming the entire
Russian state. He told her she should abdicate
her absolute power. He told her to establish
a legal code where the nation is sovereign, not
the monarch. He basically told the Empress of
Russia you should fire her. yourself for the
good of the people. I can't imagine an empress
taking that particularly well. She was very polite
to his face. She enjoyed his intellect and his
energy. But later she dismissed his plans as
incoherent gibberish. And she wrote this famous,
devastating letter about him. She said, Monsieur
Diderot, in your plans for reform, you forget
the difference between our two positions. You
work only on paper, which accepts anything. It
is smooth and flexible and offers no resistance
to your imagination or your pen. But I... a poor
empress, I work on human skin, which is altogether
more irritable and ticklish. Wow. You write on
paper. I write on skin. That is such a crushing
critique of the gap between theory and practice.
It is. It's the ultimate collision of the idealist
philosopher and the realist politician. Diderot
was dreaming of a perfect, rational society.
Catherine was trying to manage a massive, feudal,
unruly empire without getting overthrown or assassinated.
But they did remain on good terms. And when he
died, his library did eventually make its way
to Russia. Let's talk about the end of his life
and the final evolution of his philosophy. We
mentioned the letter on the blind hinted at evolution.
But as he got older, his private writings got
even wilder. D 'Alembert's dream. This is maybe
his most radical scientific and philosophical
work, written in 1769. And of course, written
only for the drawer. It's another dialogue where
the philosopher d 'Alembert is dreaming, and
Diderot, or a character representing him, interprets
the strange, feverish things he says in his sleep.
In it, he explores a pure, uncompromising materialism.
What does that mean in this context? Because
today, materialism just means, you know, buying
expensive cars and watches. In philosophy, materialism
is the belief that nothing exists except matter
and its movements. There is no soul, no spirit
that is separate from the physical body. Everything,
life, consciousness, emotion, thought, it's all
just the product of atoms arranging and rearranging
themselves. It's all just vibrating strings or
fermenting molecules. So when we die, we just
disassemble. The collection of molecules that
is you just comes apart and gets recycled back
into the universe. He writes, everything changes.
Everything passes. Nothing remains but the whole.
He sees the universe as this one giant interconnected
system, a perpetual recycling plant. The atoms
that are you today might be grass tomorrow or
a worm or part of a distant star. It's a very
modern, scientific, ecological view of the universe.
No gods, no souls, just matter in motion. And
because he didn't believe in a soul or an afterlife,
he had to grapple with a huge question. If there's
no heaven or hell. What's the point? Why be good?
Why bother writing books that no one will read
until you're long dead? And this is where his
beautiful, poignant concept of posterity comes
in. This is really the emotional core of his
atheism. He famously wrote, posterity is for
the philosopher what the other world is for the
man of religion. He believed that since there
was no divine judgment, the only judgment that
mattered was that of future generations, of us.
He believed that if he wrote the truth honestly
and fearlessly, then one day we would find his
work and vindicate him. That was his heaven,
being read and understood by you right now in
this moment. That actually gives me chills. He
was projecting all of his hope, his entire legacy,
250 years into the future. He was counting on
us to get it. He died in 1784, just five years
before the French Revolution he helped to inspire.
He died while eating an apricot compote, actually.
His wife tried to stop him, saying it would make
him sick. His last words were reportedly, what
the devil harm do you think that will do to me
now? He ate it, leaned back in his chair, and
died of a pulmonary thrombosis. A final act of
defiance against bodily decay right up until
the very last second. But his afterlife, his
physical afterlife, was messy. He was buried
in the Church of St. Roche in Paris. But during
the most radical phase of the revolution, in
1793, the mood changed. The revolutionary government
needed lead to make bullets to fight the monarchies
of Europe, so grave robbers raided the church.
They stripped the lead from the coffins, and
they just dumped the bodies. Diderot's remains
were most likely thrown into a common, unmarked
mass grave. That is just a tragic, terrible irony.
The man who laid so much of the intellectual
groundwork for the revolution gets his grave
desecrated and his body tossed in a pit by the
revolutionaries themselves. It is. And for a
while, the revolutionaries actually turned on
him. Robespierre, with his cult of the supreme
being, didn't like Diderot's atheism. Some even
blamed Diderot's anti -clerical writings for
persecuting the clergy. It took a very long time
for his reputation to recover and for those secret
books to finally come to light. So as we wrap
this deep dive up, how do we synthesize this
man, Denis Diderot? He's the encyclopedia guy,
but he's also the pornographer, the prisoner,
the art critic, the proto -evolutionist, the
secret novelist. I think Diderot is the ultimate
figure of the Enlightenment precisely because
he is so human. Voltaire can be witty, but also
feel a bit cold and superior. Rousseau is incredibly
passionate, but was also arguably paranoid and
narcissistic. Diderot is just... messy he's contradictory
he wants to be a virtuous man but he's unfaithful
to his wife he loves the truth but he pulls elaborate
pranks on his friends he is certified genius
but he's also deeply insecure and feels staircase
wit he feels like a person you could actually
have a beer with or you know A coffee at the
Café de la Régence. Absolutely. He was this incredible
combination of forces. He democratized knowledge
for the public with the encyclopedia, but he
reserved his deepest, most challenging, most
dangerous truth for the future. He trusted us
to be able to handle what his own century couldn't.
He made a bet that one day we would be free enough
to really hear what he had to say. And that really
brings us to our final provocative thought for
you, the listener. Gitterow placed all his chips
on this idea of posterity. He bet his entire
legacy on the idea that future humans, that's
us, would be enlightened enough to understand
him, to appreciate his radical questioning of
all authority, all religion, and all social norms.
When he was sitting across from Catherine the
Great, slapping her knee, he was trying to bridge
that huge gap between the philosophical ideal
and the political real. He failed with her, but
he left all the blueprints, all the secret writings
for us. So the question is this. Are we the audience
he was expecting? In a world of misinformation
and social media bubbles and political polarization,
have we actually lived up to the trust he placed
in posterity? Or would he look at our world today
and just start slapping our knees in frustration?
That is the question. Something to think about.
That's it for this deep dive into the chaotic
and brilliant mind of Dennis Diderot. Thanks
for listening.