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The Development of Enlightenment French Materialism From the Physical Body to the Body Social: The Development of Enlightenment French Materialism By Nan Zhou A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in History in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada November, 2020 Copyright @ Nan Zhou, 2020 Abstract This thesis examines the development of materialism in the French Enlightenment from 1745 to 1789. As a relatively new intellectual category in the eighteenth century, materialism was systematized after the 1740s in France and endorsed a monistic ontology and cosmology of matter and motion; at the same time, the materialists were opponents of Christianity and the Church, which gave rise to the denunciations from the religious and governmental authorities and led to the moralization of the originally amoral materialist principles. My main argument is that eighteenth-century French materialism consisted of a series of efforts to base the physical and the human worlds on secular theories of nature—in essence, on the autonomy of the human body, or the corporeality of human beings. These efforts were heterogeneous and caused a crisis of ideas about the relationship between nature and order, which undercut the theory of the autonomy of the physical body and led to the arrival of the body social. Consequently, the plan of nature gave way to the plan of society. I discuss the thought of major materialists like La Mettrie, Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, and show how French materialism gradually changed its original course. Besides, one chapter is devoted to Montesquieu. Although not a materialist, his thought is important for understanding the peculiar position of French materialism that was torn between nature and order. i Acknowledgement I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Harold Mah, for his constant encouragement, guidance, and tolerance during the writing process of this thesis, even after his retirement. He did not only bring me into the field of European Intellectual History, but also greatly broadened my horizons with his erudition and insights. As the supervisor of a non-native speaker of English, he also put considerable effort in helping me overcome the difficulties caused by language and culture. I would like to thank Professor Andrew Jainchill for the invaluable inspiration, feedback, and support I received from him. I also hope to thank Professors Ana Siljak, Jeffrey Collins, and Anthony D’Elia for their enjoyable classes as well as their kind and enlightening suggestions. Professor Kang Li, the supervisor of my master’s degree, provided long-term support for my work. Professors Chi Zhang, Rongshan Li, and Jiao Jiao shared many of their ideas with me and provided great help. Patrick Corbeil, Stefan Brown, Marie Hoffmann, Xiaojin Qi, Yijue Liu, Peng Ji, Huan Xie, Keming Wang, Xiaochao Song, Chang Liu, Yun Liu, Jun Wang, and Professor Xianhua Wang also helped my study in this or that form. Ms. Cathy Dickison at the Department of History always offered solutions to the problems I encountered in the program. I hope to thank all of them and many others whom I cannot name one by one. I am indebted to my parents, Xigang Zhou and Mingfang Li, for their selfless and incessant support and love. I hope to thank my wife and best friend, Liya Ma, for her encouragement, love, and for all the treasurable time and moments we spent together. Without them, this thesis is impossible to complete. I also hope to thank my newborn daughter, Ciela, whose arrival brings much excitement to us during the last months of my study. This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother, Mulan Shen. Without her wisdom, open- mindedness, and love, my life will be entirely different. I cherish the precious memory of her life. ii Table of Contents Abstract ······································································································ i Acknowledgement ························································································· ii Table of Contents ························································································· iii Introduction ································································································ 1 Chapter One: The Art of Enjoyment: Corporeality, Pleasure and the Hedonistic Individuality in La Mettrie’s Philosophy ···························································· 11 1. Cartesian Dualism and the Beast-Machine Problem ··········································· 14 2. Can Matter Think? Locke and Voltaire on the Body and the Soul ···························· 19 (1) John Locke ······················································································ 19 (2) Voltaire ·························································································· 22 3. Man-Machine and Active Matter: La Mettrie’s Monistic Materialism ······················ 27 4. Spinozism or Epicureanism? The Formation of the Hedonistic Individuality··············· 43 5. Conclusion ·························································································· 57 Chapter Two: The Metamorphosis of Necessity: Montesquieu between Physical and Moral Nature ······································································································ 60 1. Montesquieu and Spinozism ······································································ 65 2. Justice and Natural Law ··········································································· 77 3. Climate and the Body Politic ····································································· 90 4. Conclusion ························································································ 107 Chapter Three: The Paradox of the Natural Order: Nature, Individuality and Society in the Thought of Diderot ················································································ 109 1. Diderot’s Philosophy of Nature ·································································· 114 (1) The Formation of Diderot’s Materialism·················································· 117 (2) Le Rêve de d’Alembert ··································································· 127 2. Can the Natural Order Be Moralized? Diderot between Morality and Politics············ 146 (1) Physiocracy, the Natural Order and the Emergence of the Body Social ············· 146 (2) Diderot’s Criticism of Physiocracy ······················································· 158 (3) Diderot and Helvétius ······································································ 165 3. Conclusion ························································································ 179 Conclusion and D’Holbach’s Resolution ··························································· 183 D’Holbach’s Resolution ············································································ 187 Bibliography ···························································································· 201 iii Introduction Que je crains que votre ordre naturel ne soit contre nature! —Abbé Mably1 The concept of materialism signified a relatively new category of thought in eighteenth- century France. The word “materialist” appeared in English in the second half of the seventeenth century and entered French as matérialisme at the turn of the eighteenth century; Leibniz helped to popularize its use in French. But only after the 1740s, especially after the publication of La Mettrie’s works, materialism became an important concern of the religious and governmental authorities in France. This enmity was further strengthened because of the publication of l’Encyclopédie since 1751 and the event of Helvétius’s De l’esprit in 1758. The trend of materialism peaked in d’Holbach’s Système de la nature in 1770.2 He carried on writing in the 1770s and constructed a gigantic system about society, politics, and morality built on his materialist doctrines, although these later books received much less attention than the Système de la nature. He died in 1789 just months before the inception of the Revolution. The essential doctrine of Enlightenment materialism consisted of a monistic ontology and 1 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Doutes proposées aux philosophes économistes sur l' Ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (La Haye [Paris], 1768), 10. 2 On the semantic history of matérialisme and its general development in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Franck Salaün, L'Ordre des moeurs: essai sur la place du matérialisme dans la société Française du XVIIIe siècle, 1734-1784 (Paris: Editions Kimé, 1996), 43-65; Charles T. Wolfe, “Materialism,” in The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy, ed. Aaron Garrett (London: Routledge, 2014), 91-5. 1 cosmology of matter and motion: the principle that everything in the world, including mental activities, is material or produced by the movement of matter, and that matter cannot be separated from motion.3 At the same time, the materialists were usually, if not always, radical opponents of Christianity and the Church, and objected to the existence of supernatural powers, the immaterial soul, free will, finalism, and other religious ideas.4 Beyond a naturalism, materialism was also a set of moral theories.5 As Franck Salaün has noticed, in the 1760s, materialism almost replaced pantheism, Pyrrhonism, Spinozism, and atheism, forming a compound of them that was denounced as irreligious and immoral.6 This reaction led major materialists
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