“A person is not considered a great sage unless he disagrees with another sage”.
This adage suitably describes the career of La Mettrie, whose contentious writings during the eighteenth century were almost universally reviled by his contemporaries during the age of the Enlightenment. Even Frederick the Great, who afforded him protection and patronage following his banishment from France and Holland, declared that one could attain peace of mind by not reading La Mettrie’s works. Notwithstanding the general distaste with which they were met, the ideas he espoused have proved long standing and influential in the modern science of medicine, psychiatry, neurology and psychology.
Perhaps his most provocative work was entitled “Man a Machine” in which he makes a number of extraordinary claims, many of which we will pass over. The main thrust of the work was that only physicians (amongst whom he could count himself) had the right to speak on the soul, because, he felt, the soul itself was a product of the interaction of the organs of the body.
As a physician who himself suffered from maladies in his early career, La Mettrie noted that the bodily condition affected what he understood as the soul, namely, the personality traits of individuals. For example, an injury to the brain may change a person’s “soul” turning him from a wit to a fool, or from a passive nature to a furious one. He observed that a slight change in the physical structure of the brain could change a person’s personality substantially. This would later become known as the “argument from brain damage”, later refined as the “argument from neuroscience”, both of which appear in the philosophical lexicon of avowed monists, that is, those who consider the mind (sometimes interpreted as the soul) to be a product of the body.
In fact, almost all of the arguments which modern day monists use to justify their position that the “soul” or mind is nothing more than a function of the brain can be found in this work by La Mettrie. Before concluding his tract with the words “Dispute it who will”, La Mettrie bolsters his case by announcing the inconceivability of the notion of two incompatible substances, the body and the soul, meeting and interacting unceasingly.
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