Julien Offray de La Mettrie
1709-1751 · French Enlightenment · Prominent
La Mettrie was a French physician and the boldest materialist of the Enlightenment. His Man a Machine calls a human being a machine that winds its own springs, thought and conscience included, all of it matter in a particular arrangement. He drew the cheerful conclusion he wanted, a hedonism grounded in the workings of the body. Pleasure runs on the flesh, so take it, with no soul left to answer to for it.
Signature
The position La Mettrie is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only
- Theology
- Atheism
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only (0 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Ethics
- leans Ends (25 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- Ignorance
- mildly between Bondage and Bliss (40 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or La Mettrie refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Pleasure
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Utilitarian Calculation / Egoism
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Eternal Cosmos
What is the origin of reality? - Law
- Social Contract
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal / Tabula Rasa
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Self
What is your primary bond and loyalty?