Man a Machine
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Man a Machine (French L'homme machine) is a work of philosophy by the 18th-century French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, first published in 1748. In this work, La Mettrie extends Descartes' argument that animals were mere automatons or machines to human beings, denying the existence of the soul as a substance separate from matter.
The book led the materialist charge by rejecting Cartesian dualism of mind and body, and proposed the metaphor of the human being as machine.
Background
After publishing Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745), so great was the outcry caused in his native France that La Mettrie was forced to quit his position with the French Guards, taking refuge in Leiden, Holland. There he developed his doctrines even more boldly and completely in L'Homme machine a hastily-written treatise based upon consistently materialistic and quasi-atheistic principles. La Mettrie's materialism was in many ways the product of his medical concerns, drawing on the work of 17th-century predecessors such as the Epicurean physician Guillaume Lamy.
Excerpt
- Look, they say, at men like Spinoza, Vanini, Desbarreau, and Boindin, apostles who honor deism more than they harm it. The duration of their health was the measure of their unbelief, and one rarely fails, they add, to renounce atheism when the passions, with their instrument, the body, have grown weak."
See also
