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Machine Man and Other Writings
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51), author of Machine Man (1747), was the most uncompromising of the materialists of the eighteenth century, and the provocative title of his work ensured it a succès de scandale in his own time. It was however a serious, if polemical, attempt to provide an explanation of the workings of the human body and mind in purely material terms and to show that thought was the product of the workings of the brain alone. This fully annotated edition presents an English translation of the text together with the most important of La Mettrie's other philosophical works translated into English, and Ann Thomson's introduction examines his aims and the scandalous moral consequences which he drew from his materialism.
- GenresPhilosophy18th Century
212 pages, Paperback
Published April 26, 1996
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About the author
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
154 books22 followersJulien Offray de La Mettrie 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.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 2, 2022
My thoughts on the essays:
L'Homme Machine (1748): The big one. La Mettrie gave a good argument for materialism using 18th century anatomical knowledge (which is not much). The overarching metaphor is "The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs: it is a living image of the perpetual motion." Considering what technology he was living with, it's the best metaphor he could have used. Now we say a human is an electromechanical-biochemical robot, which though not accurate, might be the best working hypothesis for now. A theory is good not if it's perfect, but if it can lead us quickly to a better one.
> The body is nothing but a clock whose clockmaker is new chyle. Nature’s first care, when the chyle comes into the blood, is to stimulate in it a sort of fever which the chemists, who are obsessed by furnaces, must have taken for a sort of fermentation. This fever produces a greater filtration of the spirits, which then mechanically stimulate the muscles and the heart as if they were sent there on the orders of the will.
L'Homme Plante (1748): The funnier one. It assumes the "great chain of being". I like how he classified men as "monandria": flowering plants with one stamen in the male flowers.
> As for us men, for whom a glance is enough, sons of Priapus, spermatic animals, our stamen is, as it were, rolled up in a cylindrical tube, which is our penis, and sperm is our fertilising powder. Like those plants which have only one male, we are monandria and women are monogynia, as they have only one vagina. And the human race, in which the male is separated from the female, goes to increase the class of dieciae. I use the words derived from Greek and imagined by Linnaeus.
L’Histoire naturelle de l’ame (1745): The boring one. It starts with some Aristotelean physics, which is boring. It then describes Cartesian physics in the framework of Aristotelean physics, which is boring. Then it describes how souls work. Souls must be extended over the brain, as shown by brain damages that destroy one part of the senses but not the other. I like the hypothesis that sensory nerves work by having tiny balls of "animal spirit", such that when something impresses on the sense-organ, the balls conduct the impression quickly across the hollow tube of nerves, and hit upon the brain, like Newton's cradle.
Système d'Épicure (1750): The quick-read. A collection of short paragraphs, explaining Epicurean philosophy, as well as speculating on how life could originate without a designer, by chance and selection. He didn't talk about heritable traits, or how traits can emerge gradually, but it had some glimmering intuition about Darwinian evolution.
Anti-Seneca or the Sovereign Good: Ethics of Materialism. There is no soul. Remorse doesn't work, and we should do away with it. Criminals should be killed, jailed, or reformed, but not hated, because they couldn't do otherwise. Happiness is the only value. Morality is relative, and the happiness from crime is just as valuable as happiness from helping others. We should avoid crime only because crime is risky happiness, while helping others is a surer way to happiness.
Preliminary Discourse: A response to all the controversies La Mettrie got himself into. He argued that an atheist society would work just as well as a Christian society, and it's the religious fanatics that are the real dangers to society. He also argued that philosophers should be allowed to think freely, since free thought poses no danger to society. It's filled with flowery prose and not worth reading.
Also, I think "Man a Machine" and "Man a Plant" translated by Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka is a better translation. This translation is very philological, with more arcane footnotes (for example, "15 John Turbervtile Needham, An Account of Some New Microscopical Discoveries (London, 1745). It was translated into French in 1747."), while that book is more fluid and readable, with helpful footnotes that summarize the main point of views for the 17th century writers (there are at least 30 of them) referred to in this text.
I simply put both books open and read both of them "in parallel".
L'Homme Machine (1748): The big one. La Mettrie gave a good argument for materialism using 18th century anatomical knowledge (which is not much). The overarching metaphor is "The human body is a machine that winds up its own springs: it is a living image of the perpetual motion." Considering what technology he was living with, it's the best metaphor he could have used. Now we say a human is an electromechanical-biochemical robot, which though not accurate, might be the best working hypothesis for now. A theory is good not if it's perfect, but if it can lead us quickly to a better one.
> The body is nothing but a clock whose clockmaker is new chyle. Nature’s first care, when the chyle comes into the blood, is to stimulate in it a sort of fever which the chemists, who are obsessed by furnaces, must have taken for a sort of fermentation. This fever produces a greater filtration of the spirits, which then mechanically stimulate the muscles and the heart as if they were sent there on the orders of the will.
L'Homme Plante (1748): The funnier one. It assumes the "great chain of being". I like how he classified men as "monandria": flowering plants with one stamen in the male flowers.
> As for us men, for whom a glance is enough, sons of Priapus, spermatic animals, our stamen is, as it were, rolled up in a cylindrical tube, which is our penis, and sperm is our fertilising powder. Like those plants which have only one male, we are monandria and women are monogynia, as they have only one vagina. And the human race, in which the male is separated from the female, goes to increase the class of dieciae. I use the words derived from Greek and imagined by Linnaeus.
L’Histoire naturelle de l’ame (1745): The boring one. It starts with some Aristotelean physics, which is boring. It then describes Cartesian physics in the framework of Aristotelean physics, which is boring. Then it describes how souls work. Souls must be extended over the brain, as shown by brain damages that destroy one part of the senses but not the other. I like the hypothesis that sensory nerves work by having tiny balls of "animal spirit", such that when something impresses on the sense-organ, the balls conduct the impression quickly across the hollow tube of nerves, and hit upon the brain, like Newton's cradle.
Système d'Épicure (1750): The quick-read. A collection of short paragraphs, explaining Epicurean philosophy, as well as speculating on how life could originate without a designer, by chance and selection. He didn't talk about heritable traits, or how traits can emerge gradually, but it had some glimmering intuition about Darwinian evolution.
Anti-Seneca or the Sovereign Good: Ethics of Materialism. There is no soul. Remorse doesn't work, and we should do away with it. Criminals should be killed, jailed, or reformed, but not hated, because they couldn't do otherwise. Happiness is the only value. Morality is relative, and the happiness from crime is just as valuable as happiness from helping others. We should avoid crime only because crime is risky happiness, while helping others is a surer way to happiness.
Preliminary Discourse: A response to all the controversies La Mettrie got himself into. He argued that an atheist society would work just as well as a Christian society, and it's the religious fanatics that are the real dangers to society. He also argued that philosophers should be allowed to think freely, since free thought poses no danger to society. It's filled with flowery prose and not worth reading.
Also, I think "Man a Machine" and "Man a Plant" translated by Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka is a better translation. This translation is very philological, with more arcane footnotes (for example, "15 John Turbervtile Needham, An Account of Some New Microscopical Discoveries (London, 1745). It was translated into French in 1747."), while that book is more fluid and readable, with helpful footnotes that summarize the main point of views for the 17th century writers (there are at least 30 of them) referred to in this text.
I simply put both books open and read both of them "in parallel".
February 13, 2022
Il voto è più un 2,5 che un 3. Nell’edizione Feltrinelli del 1955 che ho letto la cosa più bella è la prefazione di Giulio Preti, che ci ricorda di un’epoca in cui la borghesia non ha avuto solo la funzione reazionaria e repressiva che le è propria oggi; ma una funzione progressiva. Lamettrie, per quanto dotato di una penna mediocre, è tra gli emblemi di un’altra epoca: in cui la borghesia rompeva le catene di mondi antichi, spingendo a galla la verità, contro la religiosità di altri ordinamenti. Quella di Lamettrie è una borghesia che si interroga sul reale e sulle sue leggi, per prenderne il controllo, per definire un mondo di una nuova levatura sociale; sorprende un po’ di fronte a un presente in cui la classe dirigente non sarà proiettarsi in alcun modo, sa solo mistificare, sempre più malamente, le sue contraddizioni
October 15, 2024
"Man: Machine" is great, the other essays are not. In particular, the "Preliminary Discourse" is extremely elitist, talking about how the masses can't possibly understand his atheist/materialist philosophy, which is why it serves no threat to the monarchs, who should themselves utilize this philosophy to enact enlightened reforms, like a physician operating on the patient of society.
March 3, 2008
This classic text of Materialism from the mid-1700's was written by medical doctor and philosophe Julien Offray De La Mettrie, who after publishing Machine Man had to flee France. Even the other radical French philosophers denounced him.
"From animals to man there is no abrupt transition".
"If I were now asked where the seat of this innate force in our bodies is, I would reply...in the whole organization of the body".
"Art's fumblings to imitate nature give us an idea of what nature's were like".
"The first animals which came into the world...produced, by dint of mixing with each other...that splendid monster called man".
"I shall try to blunt life's thorns if I cannot reduce their number, in order to increase the pleasure of gathering its roses".
"There is no nesessary connection between believing in only one God or believing in none, and being a bad citizen".
"From animals to man there is no abrupt transition".
"If I were now asked where the seat of this innate force in our bodies is, I would reply...in the whole organization of the body".
"Art's fumblings to imitate nature give us an idea of what nature's were like".
"The first animals which came into the world...produced, by dint of mixing with each other...that splendid monster called man".
"I shall try to blunt life's thorns if I cannot reduce their number, in order to increase the pleasure of gathering its roses".
"There is no nesessary connection between believing in only one God or believing in none, and being a bad citizen".
February 4, 2017
La Mettrie adopts a fluid, restless, boundary-dissolving style of thinking aloud, trying out hypotheses, playing devil’s advocate, putting forward contradictory claims, sowing doubts, all as strategies for unsettling the lines of demarcation between categories (body/soul, man/machine), and between physiological or philosophical schools (vitalism/mechanism). It is really worth reading him still today for his revolutionary way of thinking!
September 3, 2007
Not as good as the accompanying album by Kraftwerk.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews