Eighteenth-century French materialism clockwise and anticlockwise

ABSTRACT

Because of their reliance on mechanistic metaphors and analogies referring to machines, the eighteenth-century materialists La Mettrie and Diderot have sometimes been described as ‘mechanistic materialists’. However, if one pays close attention to the ways in which mechanical analogies and metaphors were used in eighteenth-century French materialism, one sees that the recourse to these metaphors and comparisons in no way implies mechanism in the sense of physicalist reductionism. Instead, early instances of these comparisons appear in arguments pointing out that technological artefacts have functional properties which are not reducible to their physical properties. When La Mettrie compares man to a machine in his L'homme machine, he insists at the same time on the fact that, just like a machine, man is a cultural artefact. According to La Mettrie, man's very existence depends on language and culture, and it is precisely this dependence on culture which distinguishes him from other animals. However, La Mettrie's sceptical stance renders his position towards physicalistic reductionism ambiguous. Diderot, who by contrast was interested in the distinction between the living and non-living, distances himself from the ambiguous use of mechanistic metaphors and insists on the irreducibility of physiological and biological phenomena to the physical.