Julien Offray de La Mettrie

The French physician and philosopher Julien Offrayde La Mettrie (1709-1751) is best known for his "Man a Machine," an incisive and witty exposition of his theory of the dependence of mind on body.

The son of a tradesman, Julien de La Mettrie was born in Saint-Malo in Brittany on Dec. 25, 1709. Intended for the priesthood, he studied humanities at Coutances, rhetoric at Caen, and logic at the College of Plessis in Paris. At 15 he wrote an apologetic work on Jansenism. But this theological interest was short-lived, and in 1725 La Mettrie began 2 years of natural philosophy at the College of Harcourt. He received his degree in medicine at Rheims in 1728 and for the next 5 years practiced medicine in his native city.

In 1733 La Mettrie went to Leiden to study with the reknowned philosopher and physician Hermann Boerhaave. Soon La Mettrie was translating Boerhaave's works and adding his own observations - including treatises on venereal disease, vertigo, smallpox, and practical medicine and a six-volume commentary on Boerhaave's writings. La Mettrie's absorption with medicine persisted after his return to Saint-Malo.

La Mettrie's Parisian sojourn in 1742 secured for him a commission as physician to the troops of the Duc de Gramont. On the battlefield at Freiberg, La Mettrie himself became sick with fever. During his illness he was struck with how much a disturbance in the body affects the thought of man. This thesis was elaborated in his Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), a work that was violently denounced because of its atheistic materialism. La Mettrie was required by the regiment chaplain to relinquish his post with the army and then made to leave France.

In 1746 La Mettrie fled to Leiden. There in 1747 he published anonymously his infamous work, L'Homme machine (Man a Machine), audaciously and impishly dedicating that radical work to the pious scholar Albrecht von Haller. By 1748 his works were burned even in Holland, and he was forced to flee.

La Mettrie accepted Frederick the Great's offer of sanctuary in Prussia and lived there from February 1748, an intimate and witty companion of Frederick, a practicing physician for his friends, and a productive writer. L'Homme plante appeared in 1748. Placing man in the scale of beings, that work suggested the evolution and interrelation of beings. There too La Mettrie proposed - as did étienne Bonnot de Condillac - that the the degree of a creature's intelligence depends on the variety and number of needs experienced by that being. Three works detailing the social and ethical consequences of La Mettrie's view of man followed: L'Anti-Sénèque, ou Discours sur le bonheur (1748), Le Système d'épicure (1750), and L'Art de jouir (1751). La Mettrie held that "Nature has destined all of us solely to be happy. Yes, all, from the worm that crawls to the eagle that disappears into the night."

With an irony La Mettrie would have enjoyed, his death was early and unexpected. He was at the home of a friend in Berlin, asked there as a physician. Having eaten abundantly from an elaborate but spoiled pâté, he died of food poisoning on Nov. 11, 1751.

Further Reading

In English, the best approach to La Mettrie is the reading of LaMettrie himself in translation. The Open Court edition of Man a Machine, translated by Gertrude Bussey and M. W. Calkins, has a translation of Frederick the Great's eulogy of La Mettrie. The other source in English is a more general work by G. V. Plekhanov, Essays in the History of Materialism (1934). See also Aram Vartanian's critical edition of L'Homme machine: A Study of the Origins of an Idea (1960), especially the introductory monograph.

Additional Sources

Wellman, Kathleen Anne, La Mettrie: medicine, philosophy, and enlightenment, Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709-51). Doctor and materialist philosopher. Born in Saint-Malo, the son of a rich merchant, he studied with the Dutch physician Boerhaave, several of whose works he translated. In Paris he frequented the society of aristocratic free-thinkers, but after the publication of highly unorthodox books, and of a series of satirical pamphlets directed against his fellow doctors, he had to take refuge in Leiden. Here too his works raised a storm; in 1748 he accepted an invitation from Frederick II of Prussia to settle in Berlin, where he died of food-poisoning, to the satisfaction of those who detested his views.

In his Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), L'Hommemachine (1748), and L'Homme-plante (1748), La Mettrie sets out in a brisk and uncompromising way arguments, based on his medical experience, to the effect that human actions, thoughts, and feelings are all part of the material world. He was not embarrassed by the moral implications of this view, proclaiming the supreme value of happiness and pleasure, rejoicing in free-thinking, and seeing no incompatibility between atheism and virtue. His vigorous, crude, and often entertaining writing made him few friends, and even those, such as Diderot, whose ideas were close to his, spoke disparagingly of him.

[Peter France]

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709-51) French materialist. La Mettrie's first career was as a doctor, and he served from 1743 to 1745 as surgeon in the army during the War of the Austrian Succession. In 1745 he published Histoire naturelle de l’âme (‘The Natural History of the Soul’) whose materialistic tendencies caused enough uproar for La Mettrie to retreat to Holland. Unabashed however, in 1748 he produced his most influential work, L'Homme machine (trs. as Man a machine, 1749), whose atheism and materialism outraged even the Dutch. Frederick the Great of Prussia invited La Mettrie to Berlin, where he continued to offend pious and dualistic orthodoxy with L'Homme plante (1748), Le Système d'Epicure (1750), and Discours sur le bonheur (1750). Although his opinions were scandalous, when La Mettrie died prematurely (according to his enemies, because of hedonistic over-indulgence), Frederick composed his eulogy. La Mettrie's materialism is firmly based on the physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology of his time. But his forceful advocacy of the dependence of mental function on the state of the central nervous system and brain, and his resolutely scientific approach to the dynamics of motion and motivation, make him the earliest committed example of what is now the dominant functionalist and physicalist bio-medical approach to the nature of human beings. In ethics La Mettrie saw happiness as the natural aim of each organism (akin to health), and a century before Nietzsche drew the corollary that the bad conscience, as a prime enemy of happiness, is merely a disease that needs a cure.

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy De (1709–1751), French physician and philosopher. Julien Offroy de La Mettrie is best known for his work of materialist philosophy, L'homme-machine (1747). His philosophical works were written early in the French Enlightenment but are among some of the most radical works of that period.

La Mettrie was born in Saint-Malo in Brittany on 19 December 1751, the son of a textile merchant wealthy enough to give him a good education. He attended several provincial colleges, where he was influenced by Jansenism. In 1725 he enrolled in the College d'Harcourt, the first academic institution to make Cartesianism central to the curriculum. La Mettrie then spent five years at the University of Paris studying medicine. To avoid graduation fees at Paris, he took his degree at the University of Reims. He found his education insufficient preparation for the actual practice of medicine and went to the University of Leiden to study with Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738), a renowned teacher of physiology and chemistry and an innovative practitioner of clinical medicine. La Mettrie translated many of Boerhaave's most significant works, and in his commentaries on those works, he emphasized the materialistic strand he found in them that provided the foundation for his own medical philosophy. La Mettrie also wrote five medical treatises on specific diseases and public health. His medical experiences led him to lampoon the ignorance and venality of Parisian medical practitioners in thinly veiled medical satires. From these satirical counterexamples, La Mettrie developed his notion of the médecin-philosophe who incorporated the astute empirical observation of a surgeon, the thorough training in physiology of an idealistic physician, and the zeal of the reform-minded philosophe. The médecin-philosophe could be an agent for reform based on scientific knowledge.

The critical perspective of the médecin-philosophe was gleaned from an understanding of the human being based in medicine and physiology. La Mettrie's philosophical works all approached philosophical issues from this perspective. L'histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), his first philosophical work, was a rather conventional discussion of the philosophical treatment of the vegetative and animal souls combined with a materialist view of the human, rational soul, using a materialist reading of John Locke's (1632–1704) An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) as its source. La Mettrie argued that the human soul could be completely identified with the physical functions of the body and that any claims about the existence of the soul must be substantiated by physiology. Consequently his books were banned, and he was exiled to Holland in 1745. In L'homme-machine, La Mettrie not only adopted the engaging style of Enlightenment philosophes, he also applied a thoroughgoing materialism to human beings. Using evidence drawn from anatomy, physiology, and psychology, he demonstrated the effects of the body on the soul and the comparability between humans and animals. His man-machine was active, organic, and self-moving; his materialism did not distinguish between conscious, voluntary movement and unconscious, instinctive movement. This work was deemed so radical that the tolerant Dutch exiled La Mettrie. He sought refuge at the court of Frederick the Great (1712–1786) of Prussia, where he remained until his early death in 1751.

Several other philosophical works, including L'homme plante (1747) and Le système d'epicure (1751), compared humans to lower creatures and placed all creatures in the context of the unfolding of matter and motion in an evolutionary process. La Mettrie insisted that the physician's approach to questions, usually treated by theologians and metaphysicians, would be more productive, even on ethical issues. In Le discours sur le bonheur (1748) La Mettrie examined the implications of materialism for moral values. He questioned whether moral systems corresponded to human nature as corroborated by his physiological understanding of human beings. Vice and virtue, he concluded, were arbitrarily constructed by society to serve its interests, but those interests were often at odds with the physiological constitution of the individual. He hoped that, by recognizing the arbitrary nature of its moral notions, society would reward a greater array of human behaviors and so alleviate the sufferings of those who were ill disposed to seek happiness in what society deemed virtuous. La Mettrie was particularly critical of both stoicism and Christianity as moral systems, which, he claimed, were based on a distorted understanding of human nature.

La Mettrie saw the médecin-philosophe as an agent of rational analysis and social progress and identified with the goals of the early Enlightenment. The philosophes, however, found his materialism, moral relativism, hedonistic ethics, and atheism much too dangerous to espouse. Even other materialists, such as the Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) and Denis Diderot (1713–1784), did not acknowledge their debt to such a radical thinker. La Mettrie's medical materialism, grounded in the scientific issues of his day, is his most significant contribution to the French Enlightenment and the history of philosophy.

Bibliography

Thomson, Ann. Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie's "Discours Préliminaire." Geneva, Switzerland, 1981.

Vartanian, Aram. La Mettrie's "L'homme machine": A Study in the Origins of an Idea. Princeton, 1960.

Wellman, Kathleen. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham, N.C., 1992.

—KATHLEEN WELLMAN

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Western Philosophy 18th-century philosophy
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Full name	Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Born	19 December 1709 Saint-Malo, France
Died	11 November 1751 (aged 41) Berlin, Prussia
School/tradition	French materialism
Main interests	Mind-body problem

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (December 25, 1709 - November 11, 1751) was a French physician and philosopher, and one of the earliest of the French materialists of the Enlightenment. He is best known for his work L'homme machine ("Machine man"^[1]), wherein he rejected the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and proposed the metaphor of the human being as machine.

Contents 1 Life and work 1.1 Early years 1.2 Medical career 1.3 Flight to Prussia 1.4 Death 2 References 3 Selected works 4 Collected works 5 Critical editions of his major works 6 Selected bibliography 7 External links

Life and work

Early years

La Mettrie was born at Saint-Malo in Brittany on December 25 1709 and was the son of a prosperous textile merchant. His initial schooling took place in the colleges of Coutances and Caen. After attending the College du Plessis in Paris, he seems to have acquired a vocational interest in becoming a clergyman, but after studying theology in the Jansenist schools for some years, his interests turned away from the Church. In 1725, La Mettrie entered the College d'Harcourt to study philosophy and natural science, probably graduating around 1727. At this time, d'Harcourt was pioneering the teaching of Cartesianism in France.^[2]

Medical career

After his studies at d'Harcourt, La Mettrie decided to take up the profession of medicine. A friend of the La Mettrie family, François-Joseph Hunauld, who was about to take the chair of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi, seems to have influenced him in this decision. For five years, La Mettrie studied at faculty of medicine in Paris, and enjoyed the mentorship of Hunauld.^[3]

In Leiden, La Mettrie studied under the famous physician Herman Boerhaave (pictured above)

In 1733, however, he departed for Leiden to study under the famous Herman Boerhaave. His stay in Holland proved to be short but influential. In the following years, La Mettrie settled down to professional medical practice in his home region of Saint-Malo, disseminating the works and theories of Boerhaave through the publication and translation of several works. He married in 1739 but the marriage, which produced two children, proved an unhappy one. In 1742, La Mettrie left his family and travelled to Paris, where he obtained the appointment of surgeon to the Gardes Francaises regiment, taking part in several battles during the War of the Austrian Succession. This experience would instill in him a deep aversion to violence which is evident in his philosophical writings. Much of his time, however, was spent in Paris, and it is likely that during this time he made the acquaintance of Maupertuis and the Marquise de Chatelet.^[4]

It was in these years, during an attack of fever, that he made observations on himself with reference to the action of quickened blood circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that physical phenomena were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. This conclusion he worked out in his earliest philosophical work, the Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745). So great was the outcry caused by its publication that La Mettrie was forced to quit his position with the French Guards, taking refuge in Leiden, where he developed his doctrines still more boldly and completely in L'Homme machine a hastily-written treatise based upon consistently materialistic and quasi-atheistic principles.^[5] La Mettrie's materialism was in many ways the product of his medical concerns, drawing on the work of 17th-century predecessors such as the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy.^[6]

Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, also a native of Saint-Malo, helped La Mettrie find refuge in Prussia.

The ethical implications of these principles would later be worked out in his Discours sur le bonheur, that book La Mettrie considered his Magnum opus.^[7] Here he developed his theory of remorse, i.e. his view about the inauspicious effects of the feelings of guilt acquired at early age during the process of enculturation. This was the idea which brought him the enmity of virtually all thinkers of the French enlightenment, and a Damnatio memoriae^[8] which was lifted only a century later by Friedrich Albert Lange in his Geschichte des Materialismus.

Flight to Prussia

The court of Frederick the Great provided La Mettrie with a refuge in which to write and publish his works

La Mettrie's hedonistic and materialistic principles caused outrage even in the relatively tolerant Netherlands. So strong was the feeling against him that in 1748 he was compelled to leave for Berlin, where, thanks in part to the offices of Maupertuis, the Prussian king Frederick the Great not only allowed him to practise as a physician, but appointed him court reader. There La Mettrie wrote the Discours sur le bonheur (1748), which appalled leading Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot and D'Holbach due to its explicitly hedonistic sensualist principles which prioritised the unbridled pursuit of pleasure above all other things. ^[9]

Death

La Mettrie's celebration of sensual pleasure was said to have resulted in his early death. The French ambassador to Prussia, Tirconnel, grateful to La Mettrie for curing him of an illness, held a feast in his honour. It was claimed that La Mettrie wanted to show either his power of gluttony or his strong constitution by devouring a large quantity of pâte de faisan aux truffes. As a result, he developed a gastronomic illness of some sort, became delirious, and died.^[10]

Frederick the Great gave the funeral oration, which remains the major biographical source on La Mettrie's life. He declared, "La Mettrie died in the house of Milord Tirconnel, the French plenipotentiary, whom he had restored to life. It seems that the disease, knowing with whom it had to deal, was cunning enough to attack him first by the brain, in order to destroy him the more surely. A violent fever with fierce delirium came on. The invalid was obliged to have recourse to the science of his colleagues, but he failed to find the succor that his own skill had so often afforded as well to himself as to the public."[1] However, in a confidential letter to the Markgräfin von Bayreuth, Frederick wrote "He was merry, a good devil, a good doctor, and a very bad author. By not reading his books, one can be very content."^{[citation needed]} He then mentioned that La Mettrie had indigestion from pheasant paste. The reason of his early death has never been disclosed. He was survived by a 5 year old daughter and his wife.

La Mettrie's collected Oeuvres philosophiques appeared after his death in several editions, published in London, Berlin and Amsterdam respectively.

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

References

1. ^ The 1748 English translation bore the title Man a machine but Ann Thomson, in her recent translation, chooses the title Machine man (Thomson 1996)
2. ^ Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie's L'Homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 1960), p.2
3. ^ Ibid.
4. ^ Ibid, p. 5
5. ^ Ibid, p. 6-7
6. ^ Ann Thomson (ed.): Machine man and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xi
7. ^ Julien Offray de La Mettrie: Discours sur le bonheur. Critical edition by John Falvey. Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation 1975. Introduction by John Falvey, p. 12: "central and culminating part of his thinking."
8. ^ Kathleen Wellman: La Mettrie – Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press 1992, chap. 8, pp. 213-245, part. pp. 213, 220
9. ^ Ann Thomson (ed.): Machine man and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. x.
10. ^ Vartanian 1960, p. 12.

Selected works

• Histoire Naturelle de l'Âme. 1745 (anon.)
• École de la Volupté. 1746, 1747 (anon.)
• Politique du Médecin de Machiavel. 1746 (anon.)
• L'Homme Machine. 1748 (anon.)
• L'Homme Plante. 1748 (anon.)
• Ouvrage de Pénélope ou Machiavel en Médecine. 1748 (pseudonym: Aletheius Demetrius)
• Discours sur le bonheur ou Anti-Sénèque [Traité de la vie heureuse, par Sénèque, avec un Discours du traducteur sur le même sujet]. 1748 (anon.)
• L'Homme plus que Machine. 1748 (anon.)
• Système d'Épicure. 1750 (anon.)
• L'Art de Jouir. 1751 (anon.)

Collected works

• Œuvres philosophiques, 2 vols., Paris: Fayard 1984, 1987 ISBN 2-213-01839-1; ISBN 2-213-01953-5
• [vol. 3] Ouvrage de Pénélope ou Machiavel en Médecine, Paris: Fayard 2002 ISBN 2-213-61448-2
• Œuvres philosophiques, 1 vol., Paris: Coda 2004 ISBN 2-84967-002-2

Critical editions of his major works

• Aram Vartanian (ed.): La Mettrie's L'homme machine. A Study in the Origins of an Idea, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)
• John F. Falvey (ed.): La Mettrie. Discours sur le bonheur in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. cxxxiv (Banbury, Oxfordshire: The Voltaire Foundation, 1975)
• Ann Thomson (ed.): La Mettrie's Discours préliminaire. in Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1981)
• Ann Thomson (ed.): Machine man and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
• Théo Verbeek (Ed.): Le Traité de l'Ame de La Mettrie, 2 vols. (Utrecht: OMI-Grafisch Bedrijf, 1988)

Selected bibliography

• F. A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, 1866 (Eng. trans. The History of Materialism by E. C. Thomas, ii. 1880)
• J. E. Poritzky, J.O. de Lamettrie. Sein Leben und seine Werke, (1900, repr. 1970)
• Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie. Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment, Durham and London, Duke University Press 1992 ISBN 0-8223-1204-2
• Birgit Christensen, Ironie und Skepsis. Das offene Wissenschafts- und Weltverständnis bei Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1996 ISBN 3-8260-1271-2

External links

• Man a Machine - 1748 English translation of L'homme machine
• Frederic the Great's Eulogy on Julien Offray de la Mettrie

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