Critical Battle against French Materialism

“Spinozism dominated the eighteenth century, both in its French development, which made matter into substance, and in theism, which gave matter a more spiritual name.… Spinoza’s French school and the adherents of theism were only two sects quarrelling over the true meaning of his system.… The simple fate of this Enlightenment was its downfall in Romanticism, after it had had to surrender to the reaction that began after the French movement.” So far Criticism.

To the critical history of French materialism we shall oppose, in a brief sketch, its profane, mass history. We shall acknowledge with due reverence the gulf between history as it really happened and history as it happens according to the decree of “Absolute Criticism,” the creator alike of the old and of the new. Finally, obeying the precepts of Criticism, we shall make the “Why?”, “Whence?” and “Whither?” of critical history “the object of persevering study.”

“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense,” the French Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in particular French materialism, was not only a struggle against the existing political institutions and against the existing religion and theology, but just as much an open, an avowed struggle against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century and against all metaphysics, in particular against that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Philosophy was opposed to metaphysics, just as Feuerbach, when he first came out decisively against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which had been driven from the field by the French Enlightenment and in particular by the French materialism of the eighteenth century, experienced its victorious and substantial restoration in German philosophy, and in particular in the speculative German philosophy of the nineteenth century. After Hegel had united it in a masterly way with all subsequent metaphysics and with German idealism, and had founded a metaphysical universal kingdom, the attack on theology again corresponded, as in the eighteenth century, to an attack on speculative metaphysics and on all metaphysics. It will be defeated for ever by materialism, which has now been completed by the work of speculation itself and coincides with humanism. But as Feuerbach represented materialism coinciding with humanism in the field of theory, so French and English socialism and communism represented it in the field of practice.

“Speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense,” there are two trends of French materialism, one of which derives its origin from Descartes, the other from Locke. The latter is pre-eminently a French element of culture and leads directly to socialism. The former, mechanical materialism, merges into French natural science proper. The two trends cross in the course of their development. We need not go further into the French materialism deriving directly from Descartes, any more than into the French school of Newton and the development of French natural science in general.

Therefore only this much:

In his physics Descartes had endowed matter with self-creative power and conceived mechanical motion as its act of life. He had completely separated his physics from his metaphysics. Within his physics matter is the only substance, the only ground of being and of knowledge.

Mechanical French materialism attached itself to Descartes’s physics in opposition to his metaphysics. His disciples were anti-metaphysicians by profession, namely physicists.

This school begins with the physician Leroy, reaches its height with the physician Cabanis, and the physician Lamettrie is its centre. Descartes was still alive when Leroy, as Lamettrie did similarly in the eighteenth century, transferred the Cartesian construction of the animal to the human soul, declared the soul to be a mode of the body and ideas to be mechanical motions. Leroy even believed that Descartes had concealed his real opinion. Descartes protested. At the end of the eighteenth century Cabanis completed Cartesian materialism in his work: “Rapport du physique et du moral de l’homme.”

Cartesian materialism exists in France to this very day. It has its great successes in mechanical natural science, which, speaking exactly and in the prosaic sense, will least of all be reproached with romanticism.

The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, represented in France chiefly by Descartes, had materialism as its antagonist from the hour of its birth. In person it confronted Descartes in the shape of Gassendi, the restorer of Epicurean materialism. French and English materialism always remained in close relation to Democritus and Epicurus. Cartesian metaphysics had another opponent in the English materialist Hobbes. Gassendi and Hobbes defeated their opponent long after their death, at the very moment when it already reigned as the official power in all the French schools.

Voltaire remarked that the indifference of the French of the eighteenth century to the disputes of the Jesuits and the Jansenists was brought about less by philosophy than by Law’s financial speculations. So the downfall of the metaphysics of the seventeenth century can be explained from the materialist theory of the eighteenth century only in so far as this theoretical movement is itself explained from the practical shape of French life at that time. This life was directed to the immediate present, to worldly enjoyment and worldly interests, to the earthly world. To its anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialist practice there had to correspond anti-theological, anti-metaphysical, materialist theories. Metaphysics had in practice lost all credit. We have here only to indicate briefly the theoretical course of events. In the seventeenth century (think of Descartes, Leibniz and so on) metaphysics was still mixed with positive, profane content. It made discoveries in mathematics, physics and other definite sciences that seemed to belong to it. As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century this appearance was destroyed. The positive sciences had separated themselves from it and drawn their own independent circles. The whole wealth of metaphysics now consisted only of beings of thought and heavenly things, just when real beings and earthly things were beginning to concentrate all interest on themselves. Metaphysics had become insipid. In the very year in which the last great French metaphysicians of the seventeenth century, Malebranche and Arnauld, died, Helvetius and Condillac were born.

The man who theoretically deprived the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, and all metaphysics, of its credit was Pierre Bayle. His weapon was scepticism, forged from the magic formulas of metaphysics itself. He himself started out from Cartesian metaphysics. Just as Feuerbach was driven by the struggle against speculative theology to the struggle against speculative philosophy, precisely because he recognised speculation as the last prop of theology, because he had to force the theologians to flee back from pseudo-science to crude, repulsive faith, so religious doubt drove Bayle to doubt about the metaphysics that supported this faith. He therefore subjected metaphysics in its whole historical course to criticism. He became its historian in order to write the history of its death. He refuted chiefly Spinoza and Leibniz.

Pierre Bayle not only prepared the reception of materialism and of the philosophy of common sense in France by the sceptical dissolution of metaphysics. He heralded the atheistic society that was soon to come into existence by proving that a society of nothing but atheists could exist, that an atheist could be a respectable man, that man is degraded not by atheism but by superstition and idolatry.

Pierre Bayle was, in the words of a French writer, “the last of the metaphysicians in the sense of the seventeenth century and the first of the philosophers in the sense of the eighteenth.”

Besides the negative refutation of the theology and metaphysics of the seventeenth century, a positive, anti-metaphysical system was needed. A book was needed that would bring the practice of life of that time into a system and give it a theoretical foundation. Locke’s work on the “Origin of Human Understanding” came, as if called for, from across the Channel. It was received with enthusiasm as a long-awaited guest.

The question arises: is Locke perhaps a disciple of Spinoza? “Profane” history may answer:

Materialism is the native son of Great Britain. Already its scholastic Duns Scotus asked himself “whether matter could not think.”

To bring about this miracle he took refuge in God’s omnipotence, that is, he forced theology itself to preach materialism. He was moreover a nominalist. Nominalism is found as a chief element among the English materialists, as it is in general the first expression of materialism.

The true progenitor of English materialism and of all modern experimental science is Bacon. For him natural science counts as the true science, and sensuous physics as the most distinguished part of natural science. Anaxagoras with his homoiomeries and Democritus with his atoms are often his authorities. According to his teaching the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. Science is the science of experience and consists in applying a rational method to what is given by the senses. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation and experiment are the chief conditions of a rational method. Among the properties innate in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only as mechanical and mathematical motion, but still more as impulse, vital spirit, tension, as the “Qual” — to use Jacob Böhme’s expression — of matter. The primitive forms of matter are living, individualising forces of being, inherent in it and producing the specific differences.

In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still holds within itself, in a naive way, the germs of an all-round development. Matter smiles at the whole man with a poetic, sensuous glow. The aphoristic doctrine itself, on the other hand, still teems with theological inconsistencies.

In its further development materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the systematiser of Baconian materialism. Sensuousness loses its bloom and becomes the abstract sensuousness of the geometer. Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical motion; geometry is proclaimed the chief science. Materialism becomes hostile to man. In order to overcome the misanthropic, fleshless spirit on its own ground, materialism must itself mortify its flesh and become an ascetic. It appears as a being of the understanding, but it also develops the ruthless consistency of the understanding.

If the senses supply man with all his knowledge, Hobbes demonstrates, starting from Bacon, then perception, thought, imagination and so on are nothing but phantoms of the corporeal world, more or less stripped of their sensuous form. Science can only give names to these phantoms. One name can be applied to several phantoms. There can even be names of names. But it would be a contradiction, on the one hand to have all ideas find their origin in the world of the senses, and on the other to maintain that a word is more than a word, that besides the beings we imagine, which are always individual, there are also general beings. An incorporeal substance is rather the same contradiction as an incorporeal body. Body, being, substance are one and the same real idea. Thought cannot be separated from a matter that thinks. It is the subject of all changes. The word infinite is meaningless unless it means the capacity of our mind to go on adding without end. Because only what is material is perceptible and knowable, nothing is known of the existence of God. Only my own existence is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical motion that ends or begins. The objects of the impulses are the good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical. Hobbes had systematised Bacon, but had not further substantiated his fundamental principle, the origin of knowledge and ideas from the world of the senses.

Locke substantiates the principle of Bacon and Hobbes in his Essay on the Origin of Human Understanding.

Just as Hobbes destroyed the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism, so Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley and others destroyed the last theological barrier of Locke’s sensualism. Theism, at least for the materialist, is no more than a convenient and lazy way of getting rid of religion.

We have already mentioned how opportunely Locke’s work came to the French. Locke had founded the philosophy of bon sens, of common sense; that is, he had said in a roundabout way that there are no philosophers distinct from the healthy human senses and the understanding based on them.

Locke’s immediate disciple and French interpreter, Condillac, at once turned Locke’s sensualism against the metaphysics of the seventeenth century. He proved that the French had rightly rejected it as a mere botch of the imagination and of theological prejudices. He published a refutation of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Malebranche.

In his work “L’essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines” he developed Locke’s thoughts and proved that not only the soul but also the senses, not only the art of making ideas but also the art of sensuous perception, are matters of experience and habit. The whole development of man therefore depends on education and external circumstances. Condillac was driven out of the French schools only by eclectic philosophy.

The difference between French and English materialism is the difference between the two nationalities. The French endowed English materialism with esprit, with flesh and blood, with eloquence. They gave it the temperament and grace it still lacked. They civilised it.

In Helvetius, who also starts from Locke, materialism receives its properly French character. He conceives it at once in relation to social life (Helvetius, De l’homme). The sensuous qualities and self-love, enjoyment and rightly understood personal interest, are the foundation of all morality. The natural equality of human intelligences, the unity between the progress of reason and the progress of industry, the natural goodness of man, the omnipotence of education, are the chief elements of his system. A union of Cartesian and English materialism is found in the writings of Lamettrie. He uses Descartes’s physics down to the details. His “L’homme machine” is a treatise on the model of Descartes’s animal-machine. In Holbach’s Système de la nature the physical part likewise consists of a combination of French and English materialism, just as the moral part rests essentially on the morality of Helvetius. The French materialist who is still most connected with metaphysics, and who is for that reason praised by Hegel, Robinet (De la nature), refers expressly to Leibniz.

We need not speak of Volney, Dupuis, Diderot and others, any more than of the physiocrats, now that we have proved the double descent of French materialism from the physics of Descartes and from English materialism, and the opposition of French materialism to the metaphysics of the seventeenth century, to the metaphysics of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz. This opposition could become visible to the Germans only since they themselves have stood in opposition to speculative metaphysics.

Just as Cartesian materialism merges into natural science proper, so the other trend of French materialism leads directly into socialism and communism.

It requires no great acuteness to see from the teachings of materialism — on the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, the influence of external circumstances on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment and so on — its necessary connection with communism and socialism. If man forms all his knowledge, sensation and so on from the world of the senses and from experience in the world of the senses, then what matters is so to arrange the empirical world that he experiences what is truly human in it, becomes accustomed to it, experiences himself as man. If rightly understood interest is the principle of all morality, then what matters is that the private interest of man should coincide with human interest. If man is unfree in the materialist sense, that is, free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, then crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social birthplaces of crime must be destroyed, and each must be given the social space for the essential expression of his life. If man is formed by circumstances, then circumstances must be formed humanly. If man is by nature social, he develops his true nature only in society, and the power of his nature must be measured not by the power of the single individual but by the power of society.

These and similar propositions are found almost word for word even in the oldest French materialists. This is not the place to judge them. Characteristic of the socialist tendency of materialism is the Apology for Vice of Mandeville, an earlier English disciple of Locke. He proves that in present-day society vices are indispensable and useful. This was no apology for present-day society.

Fourier proceeds directly from the teaching of the French materialists. The Babouvists were crude, uncivilised materialists, but developed communism too derives directly from French materialism. For this materialism, in the form Helvetius gave it, returns to its mother country, England. Bentham founds his system of rightly understood interest on the morality of Helvetius, just as Owen, proceeding from Bentham’s system, founds English communism. Exiled to England, the Frenchman Cabet is stimulated by the communist ideas there and returns to France to become the most popular, if also the shallowest, representative of communism. The more scientific French communists, Dézamy, Gay and others, develop, like Owen, the teaching of materialism as the teaching of real humanism and as the logical basis of communism.

Where, then, have Herr Bauer or Criticism managed to obtain the documents for the critical history of French materialism?

But at any price “Spirit” had to decree a “simple-minded fate” for its “adversary,” materialism.

The connection of French materialism with Descartes and Locke, and the opposition of the philosophy of the eighteenth century to the metaphysics of the seventeenth, are set out in detail in most recent French histories of philosophy. Against Critical Criticism we had here only to repeat what is known. On the other hand, the connection of the materialism of the eighteenth century with the English and French communism of the nineteenth still needs a detailed exposition. We confine ourselves here to quoting a few pregnant passages from Helvetius, Holbach and Bentham.