Diderot’s unsent letter allowed the philosophe to express his fury without breaking off his friendship with Grimm entirely. Perhaps as important, it also gave him the opportunity to clarify what he believed was the moral responsibility of the philosophe: being honest, resolute, and audacious in the pursuit of truth, whether one trumpets one’s name, as Raynal had done, or whether one writes in the shadows, as he himself often chose to do.
