Julien La Mettrie

From Philosopedia

La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (25 December 1709 11 November 1751)

During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited La Mettrie as one of the major atheists of all time. A philosopher and physician, he first studied theology, then switched to become surgeon to the Guards of Paris.

His materialistic philosophy expounded in L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745), which he wrote under the pretense of its being a translation from the English of Charp [Sharp], held that psychical phenomena can be explained as the effects of organic change in the brain and nervous system. His work was burned, and he fled to Leiden.

When he wrote L’Homme machine (1747), he escaped under threat of arrest to Berlin, where Frederick II the Great of Prussia provided him protection. He then wrote L’art de jour (1751), a hedonistic work on ethics. Diderot] and Holbach who were influenced greatly by him, never acknowledged their indebtedness to his ideas.

For La Mettrie, the only real pleasures are those of the senses, which he held are the only avenues to knowledge. The only god of life is pleasure, and it is absurd to assume a god to explain motion. Virtue is self-enlightened self-interest. The “soul” perishes with the body. Only under atheism will religious strife cease.

Unfortunately, La Mettrie died from something he ate. Frederick II himself penned La Mettrie’s biography, describing his life of hedonism and the death from food poisoning, which his opponents said was a providential punishment for such an atheist.

La Mettrie is buried in the garden of Lord Tyrconnel. A recent intellectual history of his thought and its influence is Kathleen Wellman’s La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (1992).

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, Aram Vartanian; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}