Julien Offray de La Mettrie - Icon Profile | Alexandria
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) stands as one of the most radical and controversial philosophers of the French Enlightenment, whose materialist philosophy and mechanistic view of human nature challenged the fundamental religious and philosophical assumptions of his time. Known primarily for his provocative work "L'Homme Machine" (Man a Machine), La Mettrie emerged as a physician-philosopher who dared to extend Cartesian mechanistic philosophy to its logical, if unsettling, conclusion: that human beings, like animals, are sophisticated machines devoid of an immortal soul.
Born in Saint-Malo, Brittany, to a prosperous textile merchant family, La Mettrie's early education with the Jansenists at the College d'Harcourt paradoxically laid the groundwork for his later atheistic materialism. His medical studies at Leiden under the renowned Herman Boerhaave proved pivotal, introducing him to empirical observation and mechanistic explanations of bodily functions. During a fever in 1733, La Mettrie's self-observation of how mental states corresponded to physical conditions sparked his revolutionary insights about mind-body unity.
La Mettrie's intellectual journey was marked by exile and controversy. His first major work, "Natural History of the Soul" (1745), forced him to flee France. Later, "L'Homme Machine" (1747) compelled him to abandon Holland for Prussia, where Frederick the Great offered protection despite widespread condemnation from both religious and secular authorities. His philosophical works, combining medical knowledge with materialist philosophy, argued that consciousness emerged from physical processes alone—a stance that prefigured modern neuroscientific theories by two centuries.
The philosopher's death in 1751, allegedly from consuming a large quantity of pâté, added a final ironic chapter to his legacy. Though long dismissed as a crude materialist and libertine, contemporary scholarship has revealed La Mettrie as a sophisticated thinker whose insights into human nature anticipated important developments in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. His emphasis on the continuity between animals and humans, and his insistence that mental phenomena must be understood through physical processes, continue to resonate in contemporary debates about consciousness, free will, and human nature. La Mettrie's legacy persists as a reminder that the most condemned ideas of one era often become the accepted wisdom of another.