Claude Adrien Helvétius

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The French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771) advocated political and social equality for all men and held that education and legislation were the means to attain this goal.

Claude Adrien Helvétius was born on Jan. 25, 1715, in Paris into a family of noted physicians. Taught by private tutor until 11, Claude attended France's leading school, the Jesuits' Louis-le-grand. To prepare Helvétius for the remunerative post of tax collector, his father apprenticed him to his uncle, already in such a position. At Caen, Helvétius studied more than finance: he wrote poetry; he read John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, and Sir Isaac Newton; and he indulged himself in the pleasures of the town.

Through influence of the Queen, his father procured for Helvétius a post as tax collector. This position required him to travel much in the provinces, and he became painfully aware of the state of the rural economy. From 1738 to 1751 his home was Paris. Handsome, a good dancer, with a great passion for women, he circulated vigorously in Parisian society. But by 1749 he longed for a life of repose so as to write. In 1751 he married and retired to a country estate at Voré.

By 1755 Helvétius had produced De l'esprit. On July 15, 1758, the book was offered for sale in Paris. By early August difficulties began for Helvétius and lasted until his death in 1771. He was exiled for 2 years from Paris, and the sale of his book was forbidden. Publicly burned, placed on the Index, condemned by Jansenist and Jesuit alike, the work was attacked even by other philosophes. Some of them found it narrow and empty; others thought its boldness frightening.

In 1764 Helvétius visited England and in 1765, Prussia. He was struck by the great disparity of wealth found among the "free" English. England's commercialism, he said, had "made corruption legal." Except for these tours and occasional trips to Paris, Helvétius' remaining years were spent at Voré and were for him rather melancholy ones. Harvests were poor, and attacks of gout prevented his participation in sports, which, in addition to women, were said to be his real passion.

By 1769 Helvétius had finished De l'homme and turned to reworking his early poem Du bonheur. On Dec. 4, 1771, he and his family left Voré for the winter's stay in Paris. On December 26, following severe gout attacks, Helvétius died surrounded by his family.

Helvétius taught that man depended for all his knowledge on sensation and that his motives were those of self-love. For Helvétius the truly virtuous man is he who finds his pleasure - not just his obligation - in working for the common good. Most religions, he held, were ineffectual and offered hypocritical bases for morality. Differences in men's behavior stem from differences in station and education rather than from inherent differences. So, legislation that pertains to the structure of society and education accorded to all by the state are the fit means to procure an increase in man's happiness. In economics too Helvétius' views were radical, and he traced the unhappiness of men and nations to unequal distribution of wealth.

Further Reading

A good recent work on Helvétius is David Warner Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (1965). Mordecai Grossman, The Philosophy of Helvétius, with a Special Emphasis on the Educational Implications of Sensationalism (1926), is a still useful introduction. For Helvétius as an educational theorist see Ian Cumming, Helvétius: His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought (1955). Irving Louis Horowitz, Claude Hevétius: Philosopher of Democracy and Enlightenment (1954), is a forthright appreciation of Helvétius' political and economic thought and influence.

Additional Sources

Grossman, Mordecai, The philosophy of Helvetius, with special emphasis on the educational implications of sensationalism, New York, AMS Press, 1972.

Hazlitt, William, An essay on the principles of human action, and some remarks on the systems of Hartley and Helvetius, Gainesville, Fla., Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1969.

Smith, David Warner., Helvétius: a study in persecution, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982, 1965.

(1715-71) Utilitarian thinker of French Enlightenment. Not original or profound—although a significant influence on Bentham. Reflected commonly held ideas in an extreme form. An egalitarian who believed that differences between men are the result of education. The sole human motivation is self-interest, so each family should be given a piece of land to ensure that all, working for themselves alone, contribute to the aggregate good.

— Carl Slevin

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715-71). A rich taxfarmer who attained fame as a philosopher, though he also wrote poetry. Early influenced by Voltaire, he allied himself with the philosophes; his principal work, De l'esprit (1758), was condemned by the Parlement de Paris along with the Encyclopédie. This made him cautious; his second book, De l'homme, was published posthumously in 1772. He and his wife were sociable, hospitable people, and he kept up an important correspondence.

Helvétius's ambition was to be the Newton of the moral world, to provide a scientific account of human behaviour. His system, derived in part from Locke, presents vices and virtues as the result of physical sensation, of the human desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Human beings are impelled by self-interest; the task of the legislator and the educator is, therefore, to create harmony between the individual interest and the general good. Individuals are all born with similar potential, so that genius, for instance, can be created by proper conditioning. These arguments were criticized by Diderot (who was broadly in sympathy with Helvétius's position) because of the dogmatic crudity with which they are expressed. Nevertheless, they influenced the Idéologues considerably, and Stendhal saw in Helvétius ‘the greatest of the French philosophers’.

[Peter France]

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715-71) One of the moving spirits behind the Encyclopédie, Helvétius defended a theory of human motivation founded on sensation: we are pushed to action solely by self-interested love of pleasure and desire to avoid pain. He is principally remembered for De l'esprit (1758), which was influential upon Bentham and subsequent utilitarian theory.

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–1771), French philosopher. Claude-Adrien Helvétius was one of the most audacious writers of the French Enlightenment. The uproar surrounding the publication of his first book, De l'esprit (1758), was so sensational that he was forced to recant three times. Only the conflict between the parlements and the court over control of censorship, along with his ties at court to Madame de Pompadour and the duc de Choiseul, saved him, and he decided that his second book, De l'homme (1773), would not be released until after his death.

Helvétius had an uncanny knack for taking thoughts common to all the philosophes and presenting them in a scandalous form that provoked all-out counterattacks from the Catholic Church. Philosophical empiricism and hedonism, denials of original sin, repudiations of the repressive ethics of Christianity—these were doctrines not of Helvétius alone but of almost all members of "the party of humanity." But whereas other philosophes asserted the aforesaid views without calling down upon their movement the full-blown wrath of the church, Helvétius sparked a controversy that almost led to the suppression of the Encyclopédie—the great collective enterprise in research and propaganda undertaken by Denis Diderot (1713–1784), Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783), and the "society of men of letters."

Both in his empiricism and in his hedonism, Helvétius vigorously argued for a position that the exasperated philosophes regarded as impolitic, needlessly inflammatory, and a reductio ad absurdum of their own philosophy. Virtually all the philosophes agreed with Helvétius that, under cover of the Cartesian notion of innate ideas, the church had conspired to place its dogmatic assertions above criticism. The philosophes in general borrowed John Locke's notion that our ideas are acquired rather than given, that they are the result of the interaction of the human senses with the external world, and that a supposedly innate idea is simply one whose origins in early childhood have been lost to human memory.

Helvétius went further than his comrades, however, in his dogmatic assertions that the human mind is completely passive and absolutely determined by the environment. He maintained that we are what our surroundings have made us, nothing more. The upshot of his thought was that the only difference between a genius and a fool was one of environment, which led Diderot to remark that Helvétius apparently believed his kennelman could have written De l'esprit. Equally disturbing, the doctrine of natural rights, so central to the Enlightenment, obviously could not survive Helvétius's claim that there is no such thing as human nature. The final embarrassment was that Helvétius seemed to have vindicated the church's claim that the philosophes were the champions of an uncompromising philosophical materialism.

Another charge that the church regularly lodged against the philosophes was that they were proponents of free love and enemies of the family; and here again Helvétius—to the consternation of his comrades—seemed to prove the clergy correct. It was one thing for the philosophes to contend that the search for pleasure is an inevitable and legitimate human quest; it was quite another for Helvétius to suggest that all pleasures are bodily joys, sexual in nature. An admirer of ancient Sparta, Helvétius held that Lycurgus had utilized the sexual favors of women to transform ordinary men into heroic beings. Young Spartan females danced naked in front of the soldiers, praising the brave men, and shaming the cowards. If Helvétius had not existed, the church would have had to invent him.

Diderot, too, had dreamed of a sexual paradise, but he placed it in Tahiti rather than Europe, and refrained from publishing his tantalizing thoughts. The official Diderot was the author of Le fils naturel (1757; The natural son) and Le père de famille (1758; The father of the family), two plays that praised conventional familial ideals in exclamatory language. Helvétius, by contrast, failed to understand that discretion is sometimes the better part of enlightened valor.

Although the philosophes distanced themselves from Helvétius, some among their numbers learned to take seriously his thoughts on the arts. What Helvétius added to their discussions was the recognition that the study of culture must be linked to the study of politics. Under monarchies comedy is the most flourishing genre because the public, excluded from public affairs, is frivolous and desperate for laughter. Under republics there is a genuine public, attentive to public affairs and hungry for the ennobling passions of tragedy. England, despite its monarch, is a modern republic, the one country where an author can write for an enlightened audience.

Diderot and Paul Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) were two of the most prominent of the philosophes who learned from Helvétius that "the dignity of the republic of letters" would remain an empty expression unless France, like England, evolved in a more republican direction. Helvétius played a crucial role in politicizing the Enlightenment.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien. De l'esprit. Paris, 1988.

——. De l'Homme. 2 vols. Paris, 1989. The English translations dating from the eighteenth century are unreliable.

Secondary Sources

Andlau, Beatrix. Helvétius, Seigneur de Voré. Paris, 1939. For information about his life and family.

Smith, D. W. Bibliography of the Writings of Helvétius. Ferney, 2001.

——. Helvétius, a Study in Persecution. Oxford, 1965. For the politics of censorship.

—MARK HULLIUNG

Quotes:

"By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act."

"He who has no passion has no principal or motive to act."

"Every man without passion has within him no principle of action, nor motive of act."

"Truth is a torch that shines through the fog without dispelling it."

"Harsh counsels have no effect; they are like hammers which are always repulsed by the anvil."