Okay, so if I asked you to picture the ultimate
intellectual from the 18th century, the absolute
peak of the French Enlightenment, what comes
to mind? You're probably thinking of some very
serious man, right? Powdered wig, big mahogany
library. Totally. Writing these incredibly dense
books on geometry or something. And to be fair,
there were a lot of those guys. There were. But
the man we're talking about today, he breaks
that mold so completely, it's almost disorienting.
It really is. I mean, we are talking about the
man who basically tried to back up the Internet
onto paper in 1700. Exactly. And he's often remembered,
you know, in history class is this dry, stuffy
encyclopedist. But in reality, he was a bohemian
rebel, a prisoner. And this is the best part.
He wrote a bestselling novel about talking jewelry.
We are 100 percent going to get to the talking
jewelry, because when I first read that in the
sources, I was sure it was a typo. We're talking,
of course, about Dennis Diderot. And I think
for a lot of people, and I'll include myself
here before this dive, Diderot is just another
name on the list. You know, you get Voltaire,
you get Rousseau, and Diderot's just kind of
stuck in the middle. Right. But the more you
look into it, the more you realize he wasn't
just on the list. He was the guy who built the
list. He was the engine room. That's a great
way to put it, the engine room. It's the perfect
analogy, I think. If you imagine the Enlightenment
as a band, Voltaire is the lead singer. He's
charismatic. He's famous. He's playing to the
crowd. And Rousseau is the moody songwriter.
The tortured artist, exactly. But Diderot, Diderot
was the producer. He was the one in the studio
connecting the instruments, mixing the sound,
making sure the entire thing didn't just fall
apart. He was connecting art and science and
philosophy and industry in a way that... Well,
it had never been done before. But his life was
so volatile, it wasn't like a quiet, behind -the
-scenes job. This is a guy who was disowned by
his own father, who was putting together this
massive encyclopedia while basically dodging
the 18th century version of the FBI. And he had
to hide his best work, just shove it in a drawer
for his entire life. Which is really our mission
for this deep dive, isn't it? We want to figure
out how one man tried to compile all of human
knowledge. and why he had to live this strange
double life as a public intellectual and uh a
secret radical and and this is the part that
just blew my mind how he somehow predicted evolutionary
theory a full century before charles darwin it's
an incredible story so let's set the scene a
little bit we're in 18th century france the age
of enlightenment the age of reason but i want
to kind of push back on that reason label was
it really that reasonable what was the actual
vibe the vibe was more like a battlefield honestly
it was less a vibe and more just Extreme tension.
You've got these two massive tectonic plates
grinding against each other. On one side, you
have the absolute unquestionable authority of
the king and the Catholic Church. They control
everything, the press, the schools, the prisons,
everything. And on the other side. You have this
new rising tide of scientific skepticism. People
are starting to say, hey, don't just tell me
what the Bible says about the stars. Let me,
you know, actually look through this telescope
and see for myself. So it's a conflict between
dogma and direct observation. Exactly. And Denise
Diderot is born right into the middle of this
friction. And he didn't start out as some fancy
philosopher. He's born in a town called Langres,
and his dad was a master cutler. He made knives.
He made knives. Which feels really important,
right? It does. He wasn't born into the aristocracy.
He was born in a workshop. He came from a world
of making things. Of tools and sharp edges. It's
crucial to who he becomes. He was brilliant,
though. He was educated by the Jesuits, got his
Master of Arts from the University of Paris in
1732. But then he hits this classic crossroads.
The family expectations. Exactly. His father,
the knife maker, wants him to have a stable life.
Go be a lawyer. or a priest. The classic get
a real job speech. And I take it Diderot wasn't
interested. He said no thank you. In 1734, he
tells his dad he wants to be a writer. His father
is absolutely furious, disowns him. Just like
that, cuts him off. Cuts him off completely.
So for the next 10 years, Diderot is living this.
Well, the sources call it a bohemian existence
in Paris. Which sounds romantic, but I'm guessing
it was mostly just being poor. It was. The images
of him wandering around, broke, wearing a worn
-out coat, drinking coffee at the Café de la
Régence, watching other people play chess because
he couldn't afford to play. And this is when
he meets Jean -Jacques Rousseau. It is. They're
these two young, hungry outsiders together, the
bad boys of the intellectual scene. But Diderot
has a problem that philosophy can't really solve.
Rent. Rent. And he's complicated his life in
a big way. In 1743, he marries a woman named
Antoinette Champion. And his father hated her
too, right? Oh, passionately. She was a devout
Catholic, she was uneducated, and she had no
dowry. From his father's perspective, it was
a disaster of a match. So the marriage was strained
from the start. Let's just say Diderot wasn't
exactly a faithful husband. The sources are pretty
clear on that. So he's got a wife, a child, and
as the reading points out, a very demanding mistress,
Madeleine de Pouzieux. The pressure must have
been immense. Massive financial pressure. Yep.
Which brings us to probably the weirdest origin
story for a major philosophical work I have ever
heard. He didn't write his first hit to enlighten
the world. He wrote it for the money. He did.
The story goes, he told his mistress that writing
a novel was trivial, that it was easy. And she
basically said, oh yeah, prove it. So he does.
In 1748, he cranks out this book, Les Bijoux
Indiscrets. The Indiscreet Jewels. Okay, we have
to unpack this plot. Yeah. Because the title
sounds like a mystery about a diamond heist or
something. It is not. Jewels here is a very specific
euphemism. A very specific one. Discreet Jewel
was 18th century slang for the vagina. Right.
So the plot is, a sultan gets a magic ring, and
when he points this ring at any woman... Jewel.
Starts talking. It starts talking. It speaks.
And it confesses all of the woman's sexual experiences,
all her secrets. So on the surface, this is just
straight up 18th century smut. It's scandalous.
It's bawdy. Is that all it is? Is this just Diderot
selling out to pay his bills? Or is there something
deeper going on? That is the classic Diderot
move. He can't help himself. Yes, it's a satire
of the French court. The sultan is pretty clearly
King Louis VIII. But underneath all the smut,
he's sneaking in his real philosophy. Which is
what? Materialism. He's arguing that people aren't
driven by these lofty morals or some immaterial
soul. They're driven by their biology. by their
physical urges. The sources mention a specific
scene, a dream sequence. The Sultan sees a giant
child named Experiment. Yes. This child, Experiment,
is growing bigger and stronger, and eventually
he just smashes this huge temple called Hypothesis.
It's such a brilliant metaphor to hide in a sex
comedy. Isn't it? He's saying that the scientific
method... Actual experimentation, real observation,
is going to crush the old dogmatic ways of thinking.
The hypothesis, he's basically shouting, look
at the real world, look at real bodies, don't
just trust these abstract theories you've been
fed. So he sells the scandal, but he's hiding
the medicine inside it. And it worked, didn't
it? It made him a lot of money. It was a huge
underground bestseller. Yeah. But the authorities
were watching. And they could, you know, tolerate
a bit of smut. But they could not tolerate what
he did next. The next year, 1749, he writes Letter
on the Blind. This feels like such a hard pivot.
He goes from talking vaginas to this really serious
philosophical treatise on blindness. Is there
a connection? It looks like a pivot, but it's
the same argument in a different costume. In
the dirty novel, he argues that our bodies drive
our behavior. In Letter on the Blind, he just
takes the concept of the soul completely out
of the equation. How does he do that? He centers
it on a real person. a blind English mathematician
named Nicholas Sanderson. And Diderot asks a
very, very dangerous question. How does a blind
man perceive God? And the standard answer at
the time would have been the argument from design.
Right, the watchmaker argument. You look at a
flower, you look at a sunset, it's so complex,
so beautiful, it must have had a divine creator.
But Sanderson can't see the sunset. Exactly.
Diderot has Sanderson say, Basically, I can't
see this glorious sunset you're talking about.
I can't see the glory of God written in the stars.
I only know the world through what I can touch.
So he rejects the idea of a designed universe.
Instead, he argues for something he calls thinking
matter. And this is where it gets really radical.
This is where the source material says he starts
predicting evolution. How specific does he get
here? It's 1749. It is startlingly specific.
Saunderson argues that nature isn't some perfect
finished creation. He suggests that nature just
turns out variations blindly. It just makes stuff.
And most of it doesn't work. Most of it is what
he calls monsters, biological failures that just
die out immediately. And only the viable ones,
the ones that are functional, survive and go
on to reproduce. Wait a minute. So he's describing
natural selection. He's effectively describing
natural selection, yes. He's suggesting that
order arises from chaos over vast stretches of
time, not from a divine blueprint. And in 1749,
France... That is not a scientific theory. That's
atheism. It's atheism. And atheism is sedition.
It's a crime against the state. So, okay, let
me push back on the heroic rebel thing for a
second. Diderot has to know what he's doing here.
He is publishing atheist arguments in a Catholic
absolute monarchy. He's directly attacking the
foundation of the state's power. Did he really
think he was going to get away with it? That's
a great question. I don't think he was naive.
But he might have been a bit arrogant. I mean,
you have to remember, Paris was flooded with
underground literature. It was everywhere. Diderot
probably thought he was just one more voice in
a huge, noisy crowd. He didn't realize he'd become
the loudest voice. He'd become the loudest voice.
And the crackdown was swift. Very swift. July
1749, the police just kick down his door. They
search his place, they confiscate his manuscripts,
and they haul him off to the dungeon at Vincennes.
And this is not house arrest. We're talking solitary
confinement. Yeah, it's brutal. Total isolation.
But this is where you get a real sense of his
character. He was so desperate to write, to think,
that he starts improvising. Right. He only had
one book with him, Paradise Lost. And he scrapes
sleet from the walls, mixes it with the wine
they gave him to make ink, and uses a sharpened
toothpick as a pen. That's incredible dedication.
But the experience, it did break him, didn't
it? It did. After months in there, he realized
that being a stubborn martyr wasn't going to
work. He had to sign a submission. He had to
confess that he wrote the jewels and the letter
on the blind and promise he wouldn't write any
more debaucheries of the mind. And they let him
out. They let him out in November 1749. And this
is such a pivotal moment. He walks out of that
prison with a choice. He can go back to being
a quiet translator, keep his head down. Or he
can fight back. But he knows now he can't fight
openly. He has to be cunning. He realizes that
if he really wants to change the world, he can't
just write these little pamphlets that the government
is just going to burn. He needs to build something
bigger, something that looks official, but secretly
contains the seeds of revolution. And this is
where the encyclopedia comes in. This is the
encyclopedia. Now, when we hear encyclopedia
today, we think of Wikipedia or maybe those old
dusty books in the school library. It just seems
so harmless. Why was a dictionary a revolutionary
weapon in the 18th century? Well, context is
everything. Because originally, it wasn't supposed
to be revolutionary at all. It was just a business
venture. A publisher, André Le Breton, wanted
to translate an English dictionary, Chamber Cyclopedia,
into French, just to make a quick buck. But Diderot
gets involved, and he has bigger ideas? He basically
hijacks the entire project. He doesn't just want
to define words. He brings in the mathematician
Jean -Laurent d 'Alembert as his co -editor.
And their goal, in Diderot's own words, was to
change the common way of thinking. Okay, but
how do you do that in practice? If you're writing
an encyclopedia that has to be approved by the
king's censors, you can't just write an entry
for God that says doesn't exist. So how do you
sneak the radical ideas in? This is the absolute
genius of it. They created a system of cross
-references. Envois, they called them. It was
like a paper version of a hyperlink. So you would
look up a very safe, standard article. Let's
say Christianity. And the text of that article
would be completely orthodox, very respectful.
The censor reads it, nods, stamps it, approved.
But that's not the whole story. No, because at
the bottom of the page, there's a tiny note.
It says, see also, cannibalism. You're kidding
me. Not at all. Or an entry on a group of monks
might have a cross -reference that just says,
see also, insects. They created this whole subversive
web where the real argument, the real critique,
was hidden in the connections between the articles.
Diderot didn't just write a book. He designed
an information architecture that forced you to
think. That's so modern. It's like hiding the
important code in the comment section where nobody
looks. But beyond just the subversion, the scale
of this thing is mind -boggling. Diderot wrote
something like 7 ,000 articles himself. 7 ,000.
And remember where he came from. He's the son
of a knife maker. He didn't just sit in a library
and write about philosophy. He went out into
the workshops. He spent days with weavers, with
glassblowers, with tanners. He learned how to
make gunpowder just so he could write about it
accurately. And I think that's a point we often
miss. You know, in the 18th century, there was
this massive class divide. Thinking was for the
rich people and making things was for the poor
people. And Diderot just smashes that wall down.
He believes the mechanical arts, the trades,
were just as noble and important as theology
or philosophy. By putting a detailed diagram
of a stocking loom right next to an article on
the nature of the soul, he was leveling the playing
field of knowledge. He was secularizing it. He
was saying that human progress comes from industry
and science, not just from prayer and kings.
Which, of course, the establishment absolutely
hated. It must have been a magnet for controversy.
Constantly. It was banned by the king in 1752.
Then it was reinstated because it was making
too much money. Then it was banned by the pope
in 1758. Then the government suppressed it completely
in 1759. Just imagine working on a project for
20 years and the government's constantly trying
to shut you down, to burn your work. It's insane.
And his partner, D 'Alembert. He eventually quits.
He can't take the pressure. But Diderot stays.
He calls himself the captain of the ship, trying
to steer this massive illegal project through
hostile waters. He just keeps going, writing,
editing, managing hundreds of contributors. But
there is a really heartbreaking twist at the
very end of the story. This part of the source
material just made me so angry on his behalf.
So it's 1764. He's been at this for almost two
decades. He's finally finishing the proof sheets
for the last volumes. And he finds something
wrong. He discovers that his own publisher, LeBrayton,
the guy who started the whole thing, who was
making a fortune from it, had panicked. LeBrayton
was terrified of getting thrown in the best deal.
So secretly, after Diderot had done the final
edits for the day, LeBrayton and his foreman
went through the proofs and just... cut out anything
they thought was too dangerous they censored
him behind his back and they didn't just cross
things out they burned the original manuscripts
oh so diderot discovers that his life's work
has been in his words irreparably mutilated he
felt the entire project was a waste 20 years
of his life and he felt like he'd failed because
the final version was this neutered censored
thing which is so tragic because even in its
censored form The encyclopedia was a bombshell.
It helped pave the way for the French Revolution.
But for him, personally, it was a betrayal. A
huge betrayal. Yeah. And I think that experience,
the prison, the constant censorship, his own
publisher gutting his work, that's what pushes
him into this double life. Right. He realizes
that if he wants to write what he really thinks,
his pure, unfiltered ideas, he can't publish
them. Not while he's alive. It's just too dangerous.
So he starts writing for The Drawer. I love that
concept. He basically gives up on his own time
and decides to place a bet on the future. On
us. He had that amazing quote, posterity is for
the philosopher what the other world is for the
man of religion. He stopped caring about reviews
in Paris and started writing for an audience
in 2026. And... The works he hid in that drawer,
they are his absolute masterpieces. Let's get
into a few of them because they are just wild.
The first one is The Nun, La Rue Jus. And this
started out as a prank. A very elaborate practical
joke, yes. In 1760... Diderot and some friends
wanted to lure a buddy of theirs, the Marquis
de Coimere, back to Paris from his country estate.
So they invented a fake nun. They started sending
the Marquis these desperate letters from a nun
who claimed she was being held in a convent against
her will and needed his help to get out. That
is just so manipulative and so extra. It's very
extra. But as Diderot is writing these letters,
creating this voice for this young woman, he
gets completely sucked into this story. It stops
being a joke and it starts becoming a novel.
And the novel's protagonist, Suzanne, she's forced
into the convent by her parents. Right, because
she's illegitimate. Her mother is trying to pay
for her own sin of adultery by sacrificing her
daughter to the church. And the stuff she goes
through in the convent is not just, you know,
I'm bored. It's dark. It's about abuse, psychological
torture, sexual repression. It's a blistering
critique of the whole system. Diderot is arguing
that when you lock people away from society,
you violate their nature. And that isolation
creates this toxic, abusive hierarchy. Suzanne
has one mother superior who abuses her physically,
and then another one at a different convent who's
a lesbian and tries to seduce her, eventually
going mad from her own repressed desires. It's
an argument that cloistered life is dehumanizing.
And of course, that stayed in the drawer. If
he had published that, he would have been straight
back in Vincent's. Immediately, without a doubt.
And then you have what many people think is his
greatest work, Rameau's Nephew. This one is a
dialogue, right? A conversation between a character
named Diderot and this real -life guy, the nephew
of a famous composer. Jean -Francois Rameau.
And this character, the nephew, he's fascinating.
He's basically the anti -Diderot. How so? He's
a mooch. He's a parasite. A total cynic. He's
brilliant and talented, but completely lazy.
He believes in absolutely nothing except satisfying
his own appetites. His philosophy is, why be
good? It doesn't pay. I'd rather have a full
belly. So he's a direct challenge to that whole
enlightenment idea that nature is fundamentally
good, the way Rousseau saw it. A complete challenge.
The nephew basically argues that in nature, species
eat each other. And in society, men eat each
other using laws and money. He's a pure hedonist.
He says, hurrah for wisdom, to drink good wines,
gorge on choice foods, tumble pretty women. And
what's so compelling is that the Diderot character
in the book doesn't really win the argument.
He doesn't. Diderot, the author, allows this
awful, cynical character to make incredibly good
points. It shows that he was willing to debate
himself, to seriously question his own most cherished
values. And the journey of this manuscript is
just as crazy as the content. It's a miracle
we even have it. The original manuscript was
lost. It was found smuggled to Russia, given
to the German poet Schiller, who gave it to Goethe.
Goethe loved it so much he translated it into
German in 1805. And the French had to retranslate
it back from German? Years later, they had to
retranslate the German version back into French
because the original was still lost. It just
shows you how precarious this entire legacy was.
And then, quickly, there's Jacques the Fatalist.
The plot is complex, but the style feels incredibly
modern. He's breaking the fourth wall constantly.
Long before it was cool. Yeah. It's a novel that
knows it's a novel. Diderot just stops the story
to talk directly to you, the reader. He makes
fun of the cliches of novels. He'll say something
like, I could make the characters get into a
sword fight right now, but that seems boring,
so I won't. He's playing with the idea of determinism.
Are our lives written in advance like a book?
Exactly. And he's exploring that idea by constantly
reminding you that he is literally writing the
book you're reading. It anticipates postmodernism
by 200 years. It's incredible. So you've got
the smutty satirist, the encyclopedist, the secret
radical novelist. But we can't talk about Diderot
without talking about his patron, because for
a guy who hated authority, he got very, very
close to one of the most powerful autocrats in
the world. Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.
This relationship is just so bizarre. So Diderot
is famous, but he's still broke. He needs to
come up with a dowry for his daughter. And Catherine
hears about this. Well, Catherine was kind of
collecting European intellectuals like they were
trading cards. She wanted to be seen as an enlightened
despot. She wanted the credibility that came
from hanging out with the French philosophers.
So she makes him an offer. An incredible offer.
She offers to buy his entire personal library
for a huge sum, 15 ,000 lever. Which is a fortune
back then. A life -changing amount of money.
But here's the kicker. She tells him he can keep
all the books. She then appoints him as the salaried
caretaker of his own library. That's the greatest
arts grant of all time. Here's a ton of money
and you can keep all your stuff. It completely
saved him financially. But there was a catch.
Eventually she wanted to meet the man she was
bankrolling. So in 1773, Diderot, who hates to
travel and is getting older, has to make this
long, miserable trek. all the way to St. Petersburg.
And the meetings they had, they weren't these
formal court things. They met almost every day,
just the two of them. Man to man, as he put it.
And Diderot. Well, Diderot didn't really have
a courtly filter. He was an enthusiastic talker.
There's that famous anecdote. Yes. Catherine
wrote that in his excitement, he would get so
animated in their conversations that he would
keep slapping her on the thighs. He's slapping
the Empress of Russia on the leg. Repeatedly.
She said she had to put a small table between
them just to protect her legs from bruising.
That's amazing. But beyond the comedy, there
was a real political clash happening there. A
massive one. Diderot... being Diderot, drafted
these grand plans for Russia. He told her she
should abdicate the throne, give power to the
people, create a legal system that applied to
everyone equally. He basically pitched a full
-blown democracy to an absolute monarch. And
I can imagine how the autocrat of all the Russians
responded to that. She listened politely, smiled,
and then completely dismissed it. She had this
famous line where she told him his theories were
fine for writing on paper, which endures anything,
but you had to write on human skin, which is
far more ticklish. Wow. That is a devastatingly
effective put down. It is. It's basically, that's
nice, philosopher, but I have to deal with the
real world. It really shows the limits of the
Enlightenment when it came face to face with
real power. He didn't change Russia. But he did
pretty much invent modern art criticism. We should
touch on his salons. Yes, quickly. Before Diderot,
art criticism as a genre didn't really exist.
He would go to the big art exhibitions at the
Louvre and then write these long, incredibly
vivid descriptions for a private newsletter that
went out to European royalty. And since there
was no photography, his words had to do all the
work. He had to make you see the painting. He
would use his imagination to bring the canvas
to life. He'd talk about the composition, the
emotion, the lighting. He treated painting like
it was a piece of drama. And speaking of drama,
he also came up with the idea of the fourth wall
in theater. He did. He argued that actors should
stop playing to the audience, winking and gesturing.
He said they should act as if there's an invisible
wall between the stage and the seats and just
be completely absorbed in the reality of the
scene. Which is now the standard for realistic
acting. It's the standard. But it was a new idea
then. It seems like everywhere you look in the
18th century, Diderot is there planting some
seed that's going to grow into something huge
100 years later. Evolution, postmodern novels,
art criticism, democracy. But he never got to
see any of those trees grow. He died in July
1784, just five years before the storming of
the Bastille. And his end was just as chaotic
as his life. It was. Fittingly so. He died of
pulmonary thrombosis. The story is his last meal
was an apricot, and his last words were, the
first step towards philosophy is incredulity.
Sectical right to the very end. But the real
chaos came after his death. He was buried in
a church. But during the revolution in 1793,
grave robbers broke into the crypts looking for
lead to melt down for bullets. And they just
tossed his remains. His remains were unearthed
and most likely just thrown into a mass grave,
lost forever. So the ultimate materialist, the
man who believed we are just matter in motion,
literally dissolved back into the earth completely
anonymously. It's an incredible irony, but in
a way it fits his own philosophy perfectly. Everything
changes. Everything passes. Nothing remains but
the whole. So let's bring it all together. Why
does Diderot matter to us today, to you, listening
to this deep dive? I think Diderot is the patron
saint of the deep dive itself. He wasn't a specialist.
He wasn't a guy who just stayed in his lane.
He was interested in everything. He validated
the idea that you can be deeply curious about
how stockings are woven and how the universe
began and the right way to act in a play. He
just represents the pure joy of learning and
connecting things. And he also represents the
resilience of knowledge, right? He fought to
keep ideas alive when the most powerful forces
in his world wanted to burn them. Exactly. He
worked to democratize knowledge, to take it out
of the hands of just the elites and the priests
and try to give it to everyone. It brings us
back to his whole idea of immortality. He didn't
believe in a soul or an afterlife. But he did
believe in the scattering of ideas. He basically
put his consciousness into a drawer, hoping that
250 years later would open it up and reassemble
him just by reading his words. And in a way,
that's what we've done. Every time you use a
cross -reference to check a fact, or you question
a piece of dogma, or you look for the connection
between art and science, you're kind of putting
Diderot back together. So here's the final thought.
Diderot will bet that posterity would be his
Evan. Have we, by reading his secret works and
by using this vast, interconnected world of knowledge
he fought for, have we actually given him the
afterlife he wanted? Or, in our modern age of
just information overload, have we lost that
unity of nature he was trying so hard to find
in the first place?