Julian Offray de La Mettrie -Biography

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was presumably born on November 23, 1709 in Saint-Malo, France and died in Potsdam, Germany on November 11, 1751. He was a physician and a materialist philosopher.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie was the son of Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Marie Gaudron. His father was a wealthy tradesman and the wealth from the family was dedicated to Julien's education. He studied humanities, rhetoric and logics in Coutances, Caen and Paris. Though his father had intended for him the life of a priest, Julien Offray de La Mettrie preferred to study philosophy and science, which he began at the College d’ Harcourt in 1725. Around the year 1728, in Reims, he received a degree in medicine and soon returned to Saint-Malo in order to practice medicine.

For many years, Julien Offray de La Mettrie remained a practicing doctor in Saint-Malo, though in 1733 Julien Offray de La Mettrie travelled to Leiden, to continue his studies with Herman Boerhaave, a famous physician and philosopher whose works he soon translated and expanded upon. Eventually, in 1742, Julien Offray de La Mettrie went to Paris and was made a physician of the Gardes Francaises the Duke of Gramont. In this role, Julien Offray de La Mettrie had to accompany the Duke to several battlefields and subsequently caught a severe fever. During his illness and the respective convalescence, he began to intensely observe his own body coming to the conclusion that organic alterations in the brain and nerves do not only have a direct impact on psychological processes, but are actually causing them. From this he deduced that metaphysical “essence” was nothing but a mechanism. His observations and deductions led him to write and publish the materialist work, Histoire naturelle de l'âme (The Natural History of the Soul, 1745), which created a huge scandal. As a consequence, Julien Offray de La Mettrie was forced to quit his appointment with the Gardes Francaises and after his book was publicly burned, he was essentially exiled from France.

He went back to Leiden in Germany and, away from the constraints of his formal profession, was able to dedicate himself fully to philosophy. It was here where he wrote his most famous and influential work L'Homme machine (Man a Machine), published in 1747. It caused yet again another scandal, for not only was it a materialistic work, but it was also atheist. Drawing on his medical knowledge, Julien Offray de La Mettrie argues that that consciousness is related to physical causes, affirming therewith that body and soul are not separate. While that surely was controversial, what was, most likely, most provocative was his claim that apes and humans are actually quite similar; he even suggested that apes could be trained to learn languages.

Once again his works were burned, and once again Julien Offray de La Mettrie had to flee, this time to Prussia, in the year 1748, as Frederick the Great offered him sanctuary. Gladly accepting his sanctuary he also accepted the monarch’s grant of a pension, which enabled him to continue to work. Over the following years Julien Offray de La Mettrie was not only able to return to his original profession, but also continued to write and wrote extensively during this period.

In L'Homme plante (1748), Julien Offray de La Mettrie already suggests evolutionary thought only to be followed by other radical works such as the Discours sur le bonheur (Discourse on Happiness, 1748), an extension of the Machine, which he considered to be more important. In this work he first develops his “theory of remorse”, which examines the feelings of guilt acquired by children during their enculturation, and affirms such “hedonistic principles” as the notion that man is destined to happiness by nature. Such thoughts eventually made him the enemy of virtually all his contemporary French thinkers of the enlightenment, among them, François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire and Denis Diderot.

Some of his later works include, Le Système d'épicure (1750) and L'Art de jouir (1751). It is often said that it was precisely Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s “hedonistic principles” that eventually led to his early death. In November 1751 he died of food poisoning, leaving behind his wife Louise Charlotte Dréano and their 5 year old daughter. His funeral oration was given by Frederick the Great. After his death, his collected Oeuvres philosophiques were published in London, Berlin and Amsterdam.