Man—Machine - Early Modern Texts

1 Man MachineJulien Offray de La MettrieCopyright Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved[Brackets]enclose editorial explanations. Small dots enclose material that has been added, but can be read asthough it were part of the original text. Occasional bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis .. indicates theomission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reportedbetween brackets in normal-sized type.

2 The most recent translation and edition of this work, by Ann Thomson(Cambridge UP 1996), gives much historical and bibliographical material that is needed for a serious scholarlystudy of the work. It also includes translations of other works by La Mettrie that have never before been translatedinto English. The original title isL Homme machine , an odd bit of French two nouns side by side which has tobe translated into odd English. The usual choice has beenMan a machine . Ann Thomson s edition usesMachineMan, which emits an unwanted whiff of Hollywood.

3 (It was chosen not by her but by the editor of her series.) Thedivision into sections is added in this version; it is meant only as a rough guide to the places where new topicsare started launched: December 2009 Man MachineLa MettrieContentsA start on thinking about materialism .. 1 Divine revelation .. 1 Some empirical facts ..3 Food ..5 Other influences ..6 Physical constitution .. 7 The ability to learn ..8 Language ..10 Imagination .. 11 Humanity s assets ..13 Attention .. 14 Man and the other animals.

4 15 Innocent criminals .. 17 The law of nature ..18 The existence of God ..19 The law of nature .. 21 Self-moving body parts ..22 The springs of the human machine ..23 More about the organisation of the human body ..26 Feeling and thought .. 27 Solving two riddles ..28 From sperm to man ..30 Reconciling ourselves to our ignorance .. 31 The moral advantages of La Mettrie s view of man ..33 Man MachineLa MettrieFor a wise man, it is not enough to study nature and thetruth; he must be willing to proclaim it for the benefit of thefew who are willing and able to think.

5 As for the rest thewilling slaves of prejudice they can t reach the truth anymore than frogs can start on thinking about materialismPhilosophers theories regarding the human soul? Basicallythere are just two of them: the first and older of the two is materialism; the second is spiritualism.[As you will see, thishasnothingto do with the spiritualism that traffics in communicationwith the dead etc.]The metaphysicians who implied that matter might wellhave the power to think didn t disgrace themselves asthinkers.

6 Why not? Because they had the advantage (for inthis case it is one) of expressing themselves badly. To askwhether unaided matter can think is like asking whether unaided matter can indicate the time. It s clear alreadythat we aren t going to hit the rock on which Locke had thebad luck to come to grief in his speculations about whetherthere could be thinking matter .The Leibnizians with their monads have constructedan unintelligible hypothesis. Rather than materialising thesoul like the philosophers I have just mentioned , theyspiritualised matter.

7 How can we define a being like theso-called monad whose nature is absolutely unknown tous?Descartes and all the Cartesians among whom Male-branche s followers have long been included went wrongin the same way, namely by dogmatising about somethingof which they knew nothing . They admitted two distinctsubstances in man, as if they had seen and counted them!Divine revelationThe wisest have said that the soul can be known only by thelight of faith; but as rational beings they claimed the rightto examine what the Bible meant by the word spirit , whichit uses when speaking of the human soul.

8 And if in theirresearch they disagree with the theologians on this point,are the theologians any more in agreement with each otheron everything else?Here, in a few words, is the result of all their reflections.(1)If there is a God, he is the creator of nature as muchas of revelation; he gave us the one to explain the other, andreason to reconcile them.(2)To distrust what we can learn by studying livingbodies is to see nature and revelation as hostile opposites,and consequently to come out with an absurdity that Godcontradicts himself in his different works, and deceives us.

9 (3)If there is a revelation, it can t contradict nature. It sonly through nature that we can discover what the Gospel swords mean: experience is the only guide to that. Previouscommentators have only confused the truth. We ll see anexample of that when we look into the work of the author oftheSpectacle of Nature, Abb Pluche , who writes this aboutLocke: It is surprising that a man who debases our soul tothe point of thinking it to be made of clay venturesto set up reason as the judge and supreme arbiterof the mysteries of faith.

10 What an astonishing ideaof Christianity we would have if we tried to followreason! These reflections, as well as throwingnolight on anything todo with faith, are frivolous objections to the method of thosewho think they can interpret the holy books sofrivolousthat I am almost ashamed of spending time refuting MachineLa MettrieWhat makes reason excellent is not its beingimmaterial(what a grand meaningless wordthatis!), but its force, itsscope, or its acuteness. Contrast these two: A soul of clay which tackles countless ideas that arehard to grasp, and sees at a glance, so to speak, howthey are related to one another and what they imply; A silly, stupid soul made of the most precious is obvious which of these would be the better soul to have!