Oeuvres philosophiques

A new, corrected and enlarged collected edition of the Œuvres philosophiques of Julien Offray de La Mettrie, published in 1764 and more comprehensive than the first collected edition issued in Berlin in 1751. It includes in particular the Anti-Sénèque, ou Discours sur le bonheur and L'Art de jouir, both absent from that earlier collection.

The two volumes are joined, in a strictly uniform contemporary binding, by L'Homme plus que machine, a work long attributed to La Mettrie but now assigned to Élie Luzac. The three volumes thus form a contemporary collected set.

Contemporary full burgundy morocco, smooth gilt-decorated spines, gilt lettering- and numbering-pieces, covers framed with a triple gilt fillet, all edges gilt. A line of fading to one board of the third volume; possible early restoration to the lower board of the second. A very handsome set, particularly desirable in this condition.

A physician before he was a philosopher, La Mettrie constructed his materialism from the observation of the body. Thought, sensibility, and character no longer required the intervention of a separate immaterial soul: they depended instead upon physical organisation, temperament, and organic change. L'Homme machine thus carried Cartesian mechanism beyond Descartes himself, rejecting the privileged distinction he had maintained between the animal-machine and man endowed with a separate thinking substance.

The celebrated dedication of L'Homme machine to Albrecht von Haller offers a perfect measure of La Mettrie's taste for provocation. A leading physiologist, devout Christian, and opponent of materialism, Haller received an encomium whose very excess turned praise into challenge; La Mettrie thus accompanied the exposition of his philosophy with an irony that contributed almost as much as his doctrines to his scandalous reputation.

The Histoire naturelle de l'âme, published in 1745, had already brought condemnation upon him, and was publicly burned in Paris the following year. Taking refuge in the Dutch Republic, La Mettrie anonymously published L'Homme machine at Leiden in 1748; the resulting scandal soon forced him to seek protection elsewhere. He found it with Frederick II: welcomed to Berlin, granted a pension, and admitted to the Royal Academy of Sciences, he was given the freedom to pursue a body of work regarded by his opponents as both impious and dangerous.

The later works included in this collected edition extend his materialism to the question of happiness. In the Anti-Sénèque and L'Art de jouir, morality is no longer grounded in remorse, asceticism, or transcendent law, but returns instead to the dispositions of the body, sensual pleasure, sensibility, and the pursuit of a happy existence. This philosophy of pleasure was to exercise a lasting influence on French materialism in the second half of the century and also furnished Sade with certain premises that he would radically transform.

The third volume gives the set an additional significance. Élie Luzac, the printer of L'Homme machine at Leiden, had himself suffered the consequences of the scandal surrounding its publication; in 1748 he replied with L'Homme plus que machine, a refutation of the materialism he had just helped to circulate. Long attributed to La Mettrie and at times incorporated into editions of his works, the text bears witness to the uncertainties that surrounded the formation of his canon from an early date.

Bound uniformly together at the time, these three volumes thus bring La Mettrie’s materialism into direct confrontation with one of its earliest refutations, forming a particularly revealing record of the controversy provoked by L’Homme machine in the mid-18th century.