LA METTRIE, JULIEN OFFRAY DE

(b. Saint-Malo, France, 19 December 1709; d. Berlin, Germany, 11 November 1751),

medicine, physiology, psychology, philosophy of science.

For the original article on La Mettrie see DSB, vol. 7.

Since the publication of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, the scholarly understanding of La Mettrie has undergone slight shifts of emphasis rather than dramatic reconsiderations or revisions. La Mettrie’s philosophy is no longer appreciated simply or even primarily as a thoroughgoing application of Cartesian mechanics to human beings, despite the title of his best-known work, L’homme machine (1747). Appraisals of his philosophy have been amplified through critical studies of a number of his works, which have not only deepened appreciation of the content and impact of his philosophical writings but also placed these works in a richer scientific and philosophical context. The importance of medicine to La Mettrie’s entire corpus and to his contribution to the Enlightenment is also widely acknowledged, although his relationship to the broader movement is usually considered problematic or peripheral.

Historians of science have increasingly explored the social context of the development of science and the careers of scientists. La Mettrie, who left no correspondence or memoirs and whose career took place too early and on the periphery of Parisian culture and the emerging Enlightenment movement, has largely proved difficult to place culturally or to integrate into the social history of science. However, several additional features of his biography warrant mention. His initial education took place at the provincial colleges of Coutances and Caen, where he was influenced by Jansenism and is reputed to have written a Jansenist text, although it has never been found. In 1725, La Mettrie went to Paris to study philosophy and natural science at the Collège d’Harcourt, which was the first to make Cartesianism central to its curriculum. These early exposures to Jansenism and Cartesianism offer tantalizing insights into La Mettrie’s intellectual development.

It is also worth noting that La Mettrie, like most young men from the French provinces seeking to make their way in professional society, benefited from hometown contacts. His fellow citizen of Saint-Malo, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, was president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and crucial in gaining a position for La Mettrie as a court physician to Frederick II of Prussia when his radical ideas led to his expulsion from Holland after the publication of L’homme machine. In La Mettrie’s case, his provincial roots may have heightened his outsider status, although his radical ideas were the most significant cause of his alienation from most of his contemporaries.

Recent scholarship not only has emphasized the medical roots of La Mettrie’s science and philosophy but also continues to refine that appreciation. After completing his studies at the Collège d’Harcourt, La Mettrie studied medicine at the University of Paris for the next five years but (to avoid high graduation fees) took his degree from the University of Reims. It is important to note, in light of his subsequent vociferous critique of the medical profession, that it was his dissatisfaction with his medical education, specifically as a foundation for medical practice, that took him to the University of Leiden to study with Hermann Boerhaave, a renowned teacher of physiology and chemistry and an innovative clinical practitioner.

La Mettrie was the French translator of a number of specific texts written by Boerhaave and translator of and commentator on his fundamental eight-volume Institutions de médecine. Historians of science, who have reappraised Boerhaave’s role in the history of medicine, have acknowledged that his understanding of human physiology was less clearly iatromechanical and more nuanced than previously thought.

Like Boerhaave’s, La Mettrie’s view of human physiology was much less strictly mechanistic than previous scholars have assumed. As La Mettrie worked through Boerhaave’s medical and physiological works, he hardened what might be seen as materialist tendencies in Boerhaave’s work into a more consistent materialist physiology. Where Boerhaave suggested that Lockean accounts of mental states might parallel brain activity, La Mettrie was willing to assert a causal connection. His exposure to Boerhaave was crucial to La Mettrie’s development both as a philosophical and medical writer; it gave him a philosophical position and a critical perspective from which to evaluate contemporary medicine. He returned from Leiden a staunch proponent of a cautious, empiricist, and utilitarian approach to knowledge and an opponent of rationalist metaphysics.

Recent scholarship has been more appreciative of the positive contributions of La Mettrie’s satires to his overall medical agenda. The awareness of professional issues that La Mettrie gained as a medical student led him to lampoon the ignorance and venality of Parisian medical practitioners. In his satires, he not only supported the surgeons in their dispute with the Faculty of Medicine but also honed his attack on the metaphysical foundations of medicine and argued instead for a medical practice rooted in empirical observation and clinical teaching and dedicated to public health.

La Mettrie also wrote five medical treatises on specific diseases, such as smallpox and venereal disease, which were (as the DSB article noted) not especially original treatments. These texts were nonetheless important for their reliance on case studies as the most legitimate to approach the study of diseases and for their intent to raise public awareness of heath issues by conveying information to the public.

The original DSB article emphasized the significance of La Mettrie’s appreciation of Boerhaave in bringing medicine into the philosophical and intellectual context of the eighteenth century. However, as scholars of eighteenth-century culture have moved beyond the great luminaries of the Enlightenment to less prominent figures and to scientific and literary institutions, they have recognized that medical writings and ideas had a greater impact on the Enlightenment than earlier scholarship acknowledged. Thus La Mettrie was important but not unique in appreciating the empirical foundation and method medicine could offer to philosophical investigations. However, as scholars increasingly appreciate, medicine was the decisive foundation for La Mettrie’s philosophy. For him, medicine demonstrated the dependence of mind on body, the variety of human constitutions, and the different responses of individual constitutions to external stimuli. Medicine also gave La Mettrie his distinctive philosophical style. He wrote with polemical zest, his points corroborated by physiological evidence and medical case studies, and addressed to issues of public health.

The most significant reappraisal of La Mettrie has been the emergence of a scholarly consensus about his best-known work, L’homme machine. Previous scholars often considered the text an attempt to apply Cartesian mechanism to human beings. Scholars now recognize that the text asserts that the smallest particles of organic matter are characterized by life and mobility; thus, in essence, La Mettrie’s materialism is vitalistic. The text vehemently rejects René Descartes’s bête machine as an absurd characterization of animals and also refutes human dualism, documenting (as extensively as possible) the effects of physical states on human behavior and the comparability between human and animal anatomy and behavior. He presents physiological and clinical examples as privileged evidence and defers to the authority of the physician over the metaphysician and the theologians.

Scholars have also recognized the significance of La Mettrie’s Discours préliminaire. Written in 1751 to introduce a collection of his philosophical works, La Mettrie explicitly identified his work in medicine and philosophy with the reformist agenda of the nascent intellectual movement we now call the Enlightenment. He defined the médecin-philosophe as the ideal intellectual, embodying the astute empirical observation of surgeons, the thorough training in physiology of an idealistic physician, and the zeal of the reform-minded philosophe. The médecinphilosophe was thus the most effective practitioner of critical analysis and reform.

Despite La Mettrie’s self-identification with the Enlightenment, scholars have difficulty defining his relationship to that movement. In many ways, La Mettrie defies easy classification. He wrote from a medical perspective, very early in the movement, and without some of the stylistic verve and innovation of the later Enlightenment. He deliberately positioned his more radical ideas in the context of the established philosophical tradition. In Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1747), La Mettrie placed his arguments against a distinctly human, immortal soul in the context of Aristotle’s three souls. He set his ideas about humanity’s possible evolution from an elemental mud in a discussion of Epicurus, and presented his dangerous moral ideas as a response to Stoicism.

However, more recent studies acknowledge the originality and prescience of some of La Mettrie’s ideas. For example, he offered a systematic materialism twenty years before Paul-Henri d’Holbach’s Système de la nature and asserted the unity of organic life before Georges-Louis de Buffon. La Mettrie was one of the earliest to speculate about human evolution, although he postulated no explanatory mechanism.

The misapprehension of La Mettrie as a mechanist made him a figure often cited as a forerunner to modern interests in artificial intelligence and computer simulations of mental functions, and, to some degree, he is still invoked as a progenitor in these fields. In more recent years, La Mettrie has been more accurately acknowledged as a proponent of comparative anatomy and organic models of human life. As a significant advocate for the physiological bases of human behavior, La Mettrie’s work resonates in modern discussions of neurobiology and the genetic sources of human behavior. Although the moral implications of his philosophy were considered extremely dangerous in the eighteenth century, moderns have come to appreciate his endorsement of human pleasure, his concern with public health, and his humanitarianism, especially as reflected in his calls for tolerance.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Several modern editions of some of La Mettrie’s works have become available.

WORKS BY LA METTRIE

Œuvres philosophiques. Hildesheim, Germany: G. Olms Verlag, 1974.

Œuvres philosophiques. Paris: Fayard, 1987.

Man the Machine and Other Writings. Edited by Ann Thomson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Several English translations of La Mettrie’s work have appeared.

De la volupté: Anti-sénèque ou le souverain bien; L’École de la volupté; Système d’Epicure. Edited by Ann Thomson. Paris: Desjonquières, 2000.

Ouvrage de Pénélope, ou, Machiavel en médecine. Paris: Fayard, 2002.

OTHER SOURCES

Corpus: Revue de philosophie. Paris, 1987. Vol. 5/6 is dedicated to La Mettrie.

Jauch, Ursula. Jenseits de Maschine: Philosophie, Ironie und Ästhetik bei Julien Offray de La Mettrie. Munich, Germany: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998.

Roggerone, Giuseppe Agostino. Controilluminismo: Saggio su La Mettrie ed Helvétius. 2 vols. Lecce, Italy: Milella, 1975.

Stoddard, Roger. Julien Offray de La Mettrie: A Bibliographical Inventory. Cologne, Germany: Verlag Jurgen Dinter, 2000.

Thomson, Ann. Materialism and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: La Mettrie’s “Discours préliminaire.” Geneva: Droz, 1981. Excellent critical edition. The text is in French and the monograph-length introduction in English.

Verbeek, Theodorus. Traité de l’âme de La Mettrie. 2 vols. Utrecht, Netherlands: OMI-Grafisch Bedrijf, 1988. Excellent critical edition, with monograph-length introduction.

Wellman, Kathleen. La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.

Kathleen Wellman