La Mettrie, Julien Offroy De (1709–1751)

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LA METTRIE, JULIEN OFFROY DE (1709–1751)

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.