Abstract
From Hegel to Engels, Sartre and Ruyer (Ruyer, Revue Philosophique 116(7–8):28–49, 1933), to name only a few, materialism is viewed as a necropolis, or the metaphysics befitting such an abode; many speak of matter’s crudeness, bruteness, coldness or stupidity. Science or scientism, on this view, reduces the living world to ‘dead matter’, ‘brutish’, ‘mechanical, lifeless matter’, thereby also stripping it of its freedom (Crocker LG, An age of crisis, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). Materialism is often wrongly presented as ‘mechanistic materialism’ – with ‘Death of Nature’ echoes of de-humanization and hostility to the Scientific Revolution (which knew nothing of materialism!), also a powerful Christian theme in Cudworth, Clarke and beyond. Here I challenge this view, by examining some ‘moments’ of radical Enlightenment materialism such as La Mettrie and Diderot (including his Encyclopédie entry “Spinosiste”), but also anonymous, clandestine texts such as L’Âme Matérielle, to emphasize their distinctive focus on the specific existence of organic beings. Second, I show how this ‘embodied’, non-mechanistic character of Enlightenment ‘vital materialism’ makes it different from other episodes, and perhaps more of an ethics than is usually thought (also via the figure of the materialist as ‘laughing philosopher’). Third, I reflect on what this implies for our image of the Enlightenment – no longer a Frankfurt School and/or Foucaldian vision of ‘discipline’, regimentation and order – but ‘vital’, without, conversely, being a kind of holist vitalism some scholars seek to oppose to materialism: vital materialism is still materialism. Its ethics tends towards hedonism, but its most radical proponents (Diderot, La Mettrie and later Sade) disagree as to what this means.
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Notes
- 1.
Vitalism and mechanism in the period are in fact entirely syncretistic compounds, hybrids of whatever ‘pure’ form of these concepts might have existed. Two examples: the vitalist Ménuret speaks of the “human machine” as “a harmonious composite of various springs, each of which is impelled by its own motion but (which) all concur in the general motion” (Ménuret 1765, 435b, emphasis mine); the anti-materialist Abbé Lelarge de Lignac speaks of the “organic resources on which the machine draws for its [self]-preservation” (Lelarge de Lignac 1760, I, 175).
- 2.
“Ceux qui ont eu quelques habitudes avec Spinoza, et les paysans du village où il vécut en retraite pendant quelque temps, s’accordent à dire que c’était un homme d’un bon commerce, affable, honnête, officieux, et fort réglé dans ses mœurs” (Bayle, article “Spinoza” in Bayle 1740, IV, 257); see also the partly analogous description of Vanini’s virtuous life and death in § 182 of the Pensées diverses sur la comète, in Bayle (1737), 117 (also § 174, 111); Israel (2001), ch. 18; more focus on Spinoza and Bayle in Dagron (2009), 193f. Diderot’s version of the virtuous atheist is presented in his late ‘tale’, the Entretien avec la Maréchale de *** (Diderot 1994, 929f.).
- 3.
Frederick II, “Examen critique du Système de la nature” (1770), in Frederick II (1985), 393.
- 4.
Bentley (1713/1838), 386.
- 5.
- 6.
‘La Vérité, pièce trouvée parmi les papiers de La Mettrie’ (1787), in Sade (1986). However, La Mettrie’s medical stance makes him explicitly amoral (or, concerned with an ethics of pleasure to which the doctor can contribute knowledge of the body); Sade is more of a reverse moralist, as has been said at least since Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. In ‘La Vérité’ he speaks of ‘insulting Nature’ (Sade 1986, 553). Francine Markovits has also observed that in his works on pleasure such as L’Art de jouir, La Mettrie, contrary to Sade, does not put forth any ‘combinatorics of pleasure’.
- 7.
L’Homme-Machine, in La Mettrie (1987), I, 92; Système d’Epicure, § xlviii, in ibid., 370.
- 8.
Sayous, Histoire de la littérature française à l’étranger (1853), cit. Leduc-Fayette (1979), 108.
- 9.
- 10.
Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, op. cit.
- 11.
Fragment now considered to be from a 1768 letter to Grimm, in Diderot (1955–1970), vol. 3, 188n.
- 12.
Meslier is acknowledged in the history of Communism – his name appears on a monument in Gorky Park in Moscow – and his ideas first circulated in an abbreviated, more conformist version thanks to Voltaire (his Mémoire, known for a long time as Testament, was written in the 1720s before he died in 1729). Meslier called for an end to private property and a transformation of nationalism into class warfare (Meslier 1970, II, 60–67), a “union of peoples” to fight against oppression (III, 140, 147) … all while debating the Cartesian cogito, Malebranche’s occasionalism and a variety of versions of the ontological argument for the existence of God.
- 13.
Philosophische Terminologie II, (1974), 172, cit. in Benítez (1996), 307.
- 14.
Hegel (1895), vol. 3, 384.
- 15.
Réfutation d’Helvétius, in Diderot (1975-), XXIV, 555.
- 16.
- 17.
Éléments de physiologie, in Diderot (1975–), XVII, 334–335.
- 18.
Cf. the Encyclopédie entry “Sympathie (Physiolog.)” by Jaucourt: “Il s’agit ici de cette communication qu’ont les parties du corps les unes avec les autres, qui les tient dans une dépendance, une position, une souffrance mutuelle, et qui transporte à l’une des douleurs, les maladies qui affligent l’autre. Il est vrai pourtant que cette communication produisait aussi quelquefois par le même mécanisme un transport, un enchaînement de sensations agréables. La sympathie, en physique anatomique, est donc l’harmonie, l’accord mutuel qui règne entre diverses parties du corps humain par l’entremise des nerfs, merveilleusement arrangés, et distribués pour cet effet” (Jaucourt 1765, 736a). The vast majority of occurrences of the term in the Encyclopédie are in a medical or chemical sense.
- 19.
- 20.
Anon., Democritische Feestzangen, bij der eerste verjaaring der Revolutie van het Jaar 1795 [n.p.], 37: “Steeds beloeij’ ons vast Verbond met Frankrijks vrij gebiet!/Hoezee! (bis) nooit flaauw’ de pret in’t vrolijk Democriet!” (bis), cited in Lüthy (2000), 460.
- 21.
- 22.
Diderot, Dieu et l’homme a review of Pierre-Louis Sissous de Valmire, Dieu et l’homme, Amsterdam (Troyes), 1771, intended for the Correspondance littéraire but unpublished, in Diderot (1975-), XX, 655–656.
- 23.
- 24.
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Wolfe, C.T. (2016). Vital Materialism and the Problem of Ethics in the Radical Enlightenment. In: Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction. SpringerBriefs in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24820-2_5
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