Man a Machine by Julien Offray de la Mettrie

Ghost in the Shell made me aware of this old philosophical treatise on materialist philosophy (written mid-18th century). I was curious about how de la Mettrie could provide a context for thinking through a time in which man (human beings) are literally becoming mechanized and the strict separation between human and machine is disappearing. The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway is also a valuable companion for thinking through this.

de la Mettrie is a physician who wrote medical texts in addition to his engagement in philosophy, who, after a violent fever, "became obsessed with the vision of man as a machine." He is writing in a very particular intellectual context, in the midst of debates between rationalism and empiricism, spiritualism and materialism, and the existence of God. de la Mettrie himself proves to be an empiricist, a hard materialist, and an atheist.

de la Mettrie begins by embedding the soul into the body:
"In disease the soul is sometimes hidden, showing no signs of life..."
"Is the circulation too quick? the soul can not sleep. Is the soul too much excited? the blood cannot be quieted: it gallops through the veins with an audible murmur."

He then does a quick comparison of the anatomy of human beings and animals, de-exceptionalizing human beings (organisms with souls):
"[If the ape were taught a language] then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman..."

de la Mettries moves onto de-exceptionalize the innate human capacity for ethical behaviour (or natural law), demonstrating that animals can "show us sure signs of repentance, as well as of intelligence..." while human beings often behave in flagrant disregard for it. He concludes that "man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven."

Afterward, de la Mettrie attempts to tackle the source of the soul. He starts disarmingly, and writes that he does "not mean to call in question the existence of a supreme being" (of course he does). Interestingly, he makes a critique of religion that is often recounted in contemporary political discourse: "if atheism, said he, were generally accepted, all the forms of religion would them be destroyed and cut off at the roots. No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religions--such terrible soldiers!"

Through this process, the soul falls from its former sacred position: "... Since all the faculties of the soul depend to such a degree on the proper organization of the brain and the whole body, that apparently they are but this organization itself, the soul is clearly an enlightened machine."

My edition of de la Mettrie's Man a Machine is excellent: it has the original French, supplementary notes to contextualize the essay and excerpts from de la Mettrie's "The Natural History of the Soul" to better contextualize his philosophy.

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