Claude Adrien Helvétius - Biography

Claude Adrien Helvétius (January 26, 1715 – December 26, 1771) was a French philosopher who came to philosophy after tiring of life of the court in 1751. He was a tax collecting farmer-general after studying at College Louis le Grand. Along with pursuing his own studies, he also contributed funds to others as a private benefactor. As with any book publicly burned and condemned, Claude Adrien Helvétius's Essays on the Mind, published in 1759 in London, was read more than any book of the time period and translated into most of the European languages. There also was posthumously published his A Treatise on Man; his Intellectual Faculties and his Education and Happiness, a six canto poem, both in 1772.

Claude Adrien Helvétius was born in Paris 1715. Although his family's usual path of occupation was physician, he was trained in finance and apprenticed to his mother's uncle. His post as farmer-general was lucrative and the comfortable wealth allowed him to also follow his interests in literature and art, eventually allowing him to quit the post entirely and devote himself to his own work and, as previously mentioned, that of others. The inspiration to follow philosophy other than his training and status perhaps came from a situation he witnessed as a young child traced by La Harpe and recounted by Chalmers. Claude Adrien Helvétius apparently was struck by adventurer Pierre Louis Maupertuis a mathematician (as well as literary wit) who traveled to the Artic in search of evidence for his theory that the Earth was oblate. Claude Adrien Helvétius espied Maupertuis in a public garden surrounded by women and it was this attention coupled with the fact that Maupertuis had been admitted to membership of most of scientific societies that La Harpe concludes as a the impetus for Claude Adrien Helvétius's inclination to pursue his philosophic vocation.

In truth, Helvétius had always had a penchant for the arts and humanities (although they were not necessarily called this at the time). He was in attendance at the Club de l'Entresol, a popular salon founded in 1724 by Pierre-Joseph Alary and held in the home of president Henault of which Montesquieu and the future Madame de Pompadour were amongst the illustrious attendees. Helvétius's admiration for Maupertuis was not just for his social but his mathematical skills just as Helvétius admired Voltaire for his poetry and received pleasant feedback from the established satirist on his own poetry. Another of Helevetius' admirees was Diderot who was working to put together the Encyclopedie and this is what sometimes puts the label of Encyclopedist to Helvétius although once his Essays on the Mind was published in 1758, a great strain would be placed upon the relationship

The condemnation of Helvétius's De l'esprit (On Mind, Essays on the Mind) put Diderot's Encyclopedie project in peril as Helvétius was associated with it and the new Pope and Jesuits were terrified of the power of modern thought that was arising which was based on the faculties of human reason and not the faculties of faith in God. These forces along with opposition from the son of King Louis XV and the condemnation from the Sorbonne due to the dangerous doctrines of the book created quite the stir. Fortunately for Diderot and unfortunately for Helvétius, the religious anger and fear in face of these seemingly atheistic pursuits coalesced and intensified upon Helvétius's Essays on the Mind which quickly became a scapegoat for the horrors of modern thought.

The Essays on the Mind consist of three essays or sections entitled “Of the Mind Considered in Itself,” “Of the Mind Relatively to Society,” and “Whether Genius Ought to be Considered as a Natural Gift, or as an Effect of Education.”

The first essay, “Of the Mind Considered in Itself,” centers on the development of the argument that the cause of ideas within an individual stem from natural sensibility and memory. In a step greatly foreshadowing Henri Bergson, Helvétius lays out that “We consider the Mind either as the effect of the faculty of thinking, and in this sense the Mind is no more than an assemblage of our thoughts; or, we consider it as the very faculty of our thinking.” He goes on to elucidate the faculty of mind as two-fold (again preempting Bergson's work on Matter and Memory) that “one is the faculty of receiving the different impressions caused by external objects, and is called Physical Sensibility. The other is the faculty of preserving the impressions caused by these objects, called Memory,” but it is here where Bergson will contest and develop further for Helvétius falls into the trap of thinking of memory as “nothing more than a continued, but weakened, sensation.”

It is Claude Adrien Helvétius's steps in the importance of physical sensation along with his s separation of man and animal due to the external organizational capacities of man that have put him in the utilitarian camp, but this should not come from a reductive step but from a radical base that Helvétius builds from to develop claims about judgment's close relation to feeling and how errors in judgment more than likely arise from passions or our ignorance. It is from here that Claude Adrien Helvétius moves in the the second essay “Of the mind Relatively to Society” which he describes thus:
“It is proposed to prove, in this discourse, that the same interest which influence the judgment we form of actions, and makes us consider them as virtuous, vicious, or allowable, according as they are useful, prejudicial, or indifferent, with respect to the public, equally influences the judgment we form of ideas; and that, as well in subjects of morality, as in those of genius, it is interest alone that dictates all our judgments; a truth that cannot be perceive in its full extent, without considering probity and genius, relatively, 1. to an individual, 2. to a small society, 3. to a nation, 4. to a different ages and countries, and 5. to the whole world.”

While Claude Adrien Helvétius was a major advocate and proponent of Enlightenment's concept of tabula rasa, that human beings begin with a blank slate that is then built upon by experience (in contrast to the Christian notion of original sin for instance), he also believed in the importance of the contextual nature of personal experience. By highlighting the issues of “the mind relatively to society,” he pushed forward the power of society to provide an social environment that may differ from others in modes of judging and perceiving (hence arguing against Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws that argues for the climate in engendering nations). Helvétius's claim that he builds from is that “it is proved by facts, that we esteem in others, only the ideas that we have an interest in esteeming” which provokes his next rational step that “we are always, through indolence and vanity, forced to proportion our esteem for the ideas of others, to the analogy and conformity of those ideas with out own.” It is from here that Helvétius spins the essay to show how this can, in turn, effect a nation and its ideals.

Claude Adrien Helvétius's third essay goes on to detail “Whether Genius Ought to Be Considered as a Natural Gift, or as an Effect Of Education” where the outcome of hailing tabula rasa as true is to find that 'men' have more or less an equal grounding for understanding and discrepancies only lay in education (something that has followed through in Enlightenment ideals through Marx and Adam Smith alike) The stress on education and culture for national development was crucial for Claude Adrien Helvétius. He did caution, however, continually against errors in judgment arising from 'passion' that “The discouragement given to men of genius from imputations frequently filled with calumny, seem already to presage the return of the age of ignorance. It is in every instance, only in mediocrity of talents that people find an asylum against the pursuits of the envious. Mediocrity is now become a protection...”

As previously mentioned, Essays on Mind was not received well by the powers that be, and were also derided by the intellectual environment as it was at the time with two well-known salon hostesses (Deffand and Graffigny) claiming that either Helvétius had stolen ideas from the salon or had merely voiced what everybody already thought. Voltaire considered the work unoriginal and some thought he had borrowed everything from Diderot. Perhaps these things are true, perhaps the intellectual community was “envious,” or perhaps Claude Adrien Helvétius was able to accurately articulate the spirit of the time and place of which he was a part.

Besides visiting England in 1764 and subsequently visiting Frederick II the next year and being well attended to, Helvétius passed his life in relative peacefulness in his country estate.