Julien Offray de La Mettrie 1709 – 1751

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was a French physician and Enlightenment philosopher whose uncompromising materialism made him one of the most controversial thinkers of his age. Forced into exile first to the Netherlands and then to the court of Frederick the Great, he produced Man a Machine, an extension of the Cartesian doctrine of animal automata to human beings, and Anti-Seneca, a naturalist treatise on happiness that scandalized his Enlightenment colleagues with its frank hedonism. He died at forty-two, reportedly from indigestion brought on by enjoying too much pheasant pate.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was born in 1709 at Saint-Malo, the son of a wealthy textile merchant. He studied medicine at Reims and at Leiden under the great teacher Hermann Boerhaave, served as a regimental surgeon in the War of the Austrian Succession, and was forced successively from France and from his Dutch refuge by his philosophical writings. From 1748 until his death he was lector to Frederick II at Sanssouci.

His major works are the Natural History of the Soul (L'Histoire naturelle de l'ame, 1745), the scandalous Man a Machine (L'Homme machine, 1747) for which his books were burned by the Dutch authorities, the Man a Plant, the Anti-Seneca or Discourse on Happiness, and the satirical Penelope: or, the Machiavelli of Medicine. He wrote, by his own boast, in less than a year and published in haste.

La Mettrie pushed Cartesian beast-machine and Lockean epistemology into a thoroughgoing physiological materialism: the human mind is a function of the organized body, and ethics consists in the cultivation of those pleasures that comport with health. He thus anticipated the materialism of the System of Nature and drew the public anger of his erstwhile patrons d'Holbach and Diderot, who denounced his hedonism. He died at Berlin in November 1751 of indigestion after a banquet.