"The School of Voluptuousness" & "The Art of Enjoyment" by Julian Offray de la Mettrie

Has anyone read this book?

It's been on my shelf for a little bit as I concerned myself more with Lucretius & Greenblatt/Klein. For context, its author is a forgotten French Materialist & Hedonist thinker from the Enlightenment, its noted as he was more of a physician than philosopher. He was continually chased out of cities in Europe for his hedonistic & Epicurean beliefs, but was allowed by Frederick The Great to practice in Prussia & was appointed a court reader, indeed it was even Frederick The Great who was the orator at Mettrie's funeral.

Right away it invokes Epicurus, Lucretius, and Horace, and makes the point that not all bodily pleasures are sufficient for happiness. It looks promising, but throughout the middle ages up until the later enlightenment there was a gross misinterpretation of Epicurus & Epicurean Philosophy (though it seems like that's still true today!).

Front Cover
Back Cover

Quote from Cassius

1 - How did you hear of him?

I found out about him while studying French Philosophy from the 1700s alongside The Marquis de Sade. He's not well known unfortunately. But I have a tendency to find and locate lesser-known people from history who were Epicurean.

Quote from Cassius

2 - Have you come across any essays on him you can recommend?

No, not yet. Only these two books, though I'm sure you could find "Machine Man" by him as a pdf somewhere, maybe on Project Gutenberg.

Quote from Cassius

But I didn't read deep enough, and I also get the impression that commentators tend to immediately jump from "he's a materialist" to "he's a hard determinist" and that may not necessarily be so (as Epicurus and Lucretius show by their example).

Cassius This section from "Man a Machine" seems to indicate the type of determinism that Mattrie espoused, one that the academia.edu article correctly identified, as opposed to the hard determinism as listed on wikipedia.

"We are veritable moles in the field of nature; we achieve little more than the mole's journey and it si our pride which prescribes limits to the limitless. We are in the position of a watch that should say (a writer of fables would make the watch a hero in a silly tale): ``I was never made by that fool of a workman, I who divide time, who mark so exactly the course of the sun, who repeat aloud the hours which I mark! No! that is impossible!'' In the same way, we disdain, ungrateful wretches that we are, this common mother of all kingdoms, as the chemists say. We imagine, or rather we infer, a cause superior to that which we owe all, and which truly has wrought all things in an inconceivable fashion. No; matter contains nothing base, except to the vulgar eyes which do not recognize her in her most splendid works; and nature is no stupid workman. She creates millions of men, with a facility and a pleasure more intense than the effort of a watchmaker in making the most complicated watch. Her power shines forth equally in creating the lowliest insect and in creating the most highly developed man; the animal kingdom costs her no more than the vegetable, and the most splendid genius no more than a blade of wheat. Let us then judge by what we see of that which is hidden from the curiosity of our eyes and of our investigations, and let us not imagine anything beyond. Let us observe the ape, the beaver, the elephant, etc., in their operations. If it is clear that these activities cannot be performed without intelligence, why refuse intelligence to these animals? And if you grant them a soul our are lost, you fanatics! You will in vain say that you assert nothing about the nature of the animal soul and that you deny its immortality. Who does not see that this is a gratuitous assertion; who does not see that the soul of an animal must be either mortal or immortal, whichever ours is, and that it must therefore undergo the same fate as ours, whatever that may be, and that thus in admitting that animals have souls, you fall into Scylla in an effort to avoid Charybdis?"

As well as this much shorter paragraph.

"Let us not say that every machine or every animal perishes altogether or assumes another form after death, for we know absolutely nothing about the subject. On the other hand, to assert that an immortal machine is a chimera or a logical fiction, is to reason as absurdly as caterpillars would reason if, seeing the cast-off skins of their fellow caterpillars, they should bitterly deplore the fate of their species, which to them would seem to come to nothing. The soul of these insects (for each animal has its own) is too limited to comprehend the metamorphoses of nature. Never one of the most skillful among them could have imagined that it was destined to become a butterfly. It is the same way with us. What more do we know of our destiny than of our origin? Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends."

This indicates that he did believe in a casual form of determinism, one that is dependent on physics, physiology, and even social & environmental factors, but yet we still have limited agency. Then again, while this is his most famous work, he considers "Discours sur le bonheur" (Discourses on Happiness) to be his masterpiece and expands upon the ethics found in "Machine A Man", which was reported to be hastily written & based off of the teachings of a physician he studied under, who was Epicurean.

Given his overtly materialist philosophy including the semi-atheistic sayings found in there, I'm sure he intends that the soul is part of the body and would thus be converted back into matter upon decomposition.

Oh, I stumbled across an interesting find regarding Mettrie.

It seems that in his Second Volume of Philosophy, he has a book titled "Epicure's System" or "The Epicurus System"

I have to head out to work, and the document is in French, but luckily I can roughly read and translate French (it might take the whole day).