Man a Machine/Man a Plant [antikvár]

IntroductionL'Homme machine {Man a Machine) was published in 1748 anonymously, widi good reason, considering its brazen thesis. Its author, Julien de La Mettrie, argues that animals are machines and that humans are animals and so are machines as well. Claiming that this conclusion derives from Descartes, La Mettrie also attacks a certain "M. Charp" who recently had derided Descartes's demonstration that animals are machines. Yet "M. Charp" is none other than La Mettrie himself. How to explain this byzantine and operatic circumstance?Using his dictum "I think; therefore I am," René Descartes (1596-1650) provides a compelling metaphysical rationalization for the view that human souls are different from matter, that we survive the death of our body, and that the notion that we are simply complicated biological mechanisms is absurd. I call Descartes's argument a rationalization because he realized that advances in anatomy, biology, and neurophysiology might well be thought to have begun to form a firm scientific basis for materialism. This echoes Sigmund Freud's claim that paranoia is a caricature of Cartesian philosophy: the paranoid's egotistical constructions bewitch only himself, while Descartes's dualism captivated philosophy well into this century.Descartes stood in need of such a rationalization in that he himself did much of the anatomical and neurological work that led to La Mettrie's materialism. Descartes, notoriously, showed in detail that animals are complicated machines and that human bodies can be studied as machines as well. After the persecution of Galileo, however, Descartes prudently suppressed his mechanistic writings on the world and man. A hundred years later, on the basis of many further advances in physiology, Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) argued that man, like other animals an evolutionary product of nature, is a machine, controlled by neurological mechanisms in the brain.Early in his teens. La Mettrie turned away from a talent for poetry and oratory to Jansenism, a puritanical, mystical, fatalistic, and beleaguered movement in French Catholicism. According to Frederick1