French Materialism
1745 – 1789
The human being is a machine, the soul is a function of the brain, and the case was made in books that had to be printed abroad.
- Active
- 1745 – 1789
- Where
- Paris, and the presses of Amsterdam
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Matter in motion is all there is. Thought is a property of organised matter, sensitivity is a property of matter as such, and no immaterial soul is required to explain anything.
What it held
La Mettrie was a physician, and his argument comes from the clinic rather than the study. Fever alters thought. Food alters mood. Injury to the brain alters the person. If the mental depends this closely on the physical, the simplest explanation is that it is physical.
His Man a Machine of 1747 extends Descartes' animal-machine to human beings, which Descartes had refused to do. The book was burned and he fled to Berlin, where Frederick the Great gave him a post and later wrote his eulogy.
D'Holbach's System of Nature is the fullest statement: a universe of matter and motion, without design, purpose or providence, with morality derived from what actually makes people flourish. It was published under a dead man's name and Voltaire, who was no friend of the church, thought it went too far.
Diderot is the most interesting of them philosophically because he is the least certain. D'Alembert's Dream imagines matter as sensitive throughout, species as unstable, and the self as a temporary swarm — speculations he did not publish, and which read remarkably well now.
How it argued
Argument from medicine and physiology, plus systematic exposition, plus dialogue and fiction where the argument was too dangerous to state directly.
What it was arguing against
Cartesian dualism, the immortality of the soul, and the political authority of the church that rested on both.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether matter is inherently sensitive or only when organised. Whether determinism leaves room for moral responsibility, which d'Holbach addressed and did not settle.
Common misconceptions
That it was crude. Diderot's speculations about sensitivity, self-organisation and species change are subtle and were far ahead of the available evidence.
How it began
The salons, the Encyclopédie project, and a generation of writers with medical or scientific training in a country where saying so openly was a criminal matter.
What became of it
Overtaken by the Revolution and then by German idealism, which regarded it as philosophically naive.
Lasting influence
Nineteenth-century scientific materialism. Marx praised it explicitly. Modern physicalism restates its central claim with better arguments.
Why it still matters
It is the first sustained argument that the mental depends wholly on the physical, and it was made from clinical observation rather than from metaphysics.
Put another way
A clock opened up by a doctor who has watched a great many of them stop.
Where to start
D'Alembert's Dream. It is a conversation, it is funny, and Diderot is thinking rather than declaring.
The surprising bit
La Mettrie died at forty-two, reportedly from eating too much pâté at a Prussian ambassador's dinner, and his enemies treated the manner of his death as a refutation of his philosophy.
In their own words
The human body is a machine which winds its own springs.
Let us not attribute to nature what belongs to our ignorance.
Connections
- Answers
- Cartesianism, British Empiricism
- Opposed by
- Cartesianism
- Influenced
- Classical Marxism
The verdict
The most dangerous books in eighteenth-century Europe, and the most straightforward.