18th-Century French Materialism

A materialist philosophical theory that developed from the camp of Enlightenment thinkers in the preparatory period of the French bourgeois revolution in the 18th century, representing the second form in the history of development of materialism (also known as “mechanical materialism”).

The 18th-century French materialism has inherited and developed the materialist thoughts of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Epicurus and others as well as the mechanical materialist thought in Cartesian physics, inherited the thoughts of the 17th-century British materialist empiricism, especially Locke’s thought of materialist empiricism. Tightly coupled with the achievements of the then development of natural sciences and on the basis of natural materialism and atheism, it made a fierce criticism of Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas, Berkeley’s subjective idealism, Hume’s agnosticism as well as various religious theologies, and constructed a unique materialist philosophical system. Its chief representatives were La Mettrie, Helvetius, Diderot and d’Holbach.

In the conception of nature, the 18th-century French materialists upheld the idea of the material unity of the world, and upheld the materialist conception of matter, motion and epistemology. They affirmed that only one substance exists in the world, i.e., matter, that matter exists in diverse objective qualities, and that the material world is unified. They abandoned Newton’s and Deists’ erroneous view of prime mover and regarded motion as the inherent attribute of matter, thus provided a more solid theoretical basis for atheism. On the basis of upholding to the materialist conception of nature, they upheld the knowability of the material world and put forth a materialist doctrine of reflection. They affirmed that the material world is the sole object of human cognition, holding that human sensation is the reflection of the objective world, and that sense experiences are reliable and the sole source of all knowledge, while reason arranges these sense experiences into knowledge, and the role of the experiment lies in testing such knowledge.

The most distinctive feature of 18th-century French materialism was its open, consistent and militant atheism. The 18th-century French materialists held that the world was not created by God or any supra-natural factor, and that matter and its motion could interpret and explain the world. The root cause for the emergence of religion was “ignorance coupled with deception”, and the only way to abolish it was “propagating atheism and awakening people to reason”. They fundamentally denied the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and actively exposed the hypocritical and evil nature of religion, holding that it fettered scientific development and human progress. On the basis of their criticism of the theological theory of religion, they resolutely  opposed connecting morality with religion, holding that religion had no positive effect on morality, but rather was extremely harmful. They also derived a set of utilitarian ethical principles from materialist empiricism, holding that human nature is to seek benefit and avoid harm and that the principles of self-love, self-preservation or self-interest were the driving force of all human activity, and that religious asceticism was against human nature and therefore immoral. It was only moral to satisfy man’s sensuous desires and to act in accordance with the principle of self-interest. Self-interest and altruism were unified; everyone needs the help of others in the pursuit of his or her own personal happiness, and in order to receive help from others one must first help others; to be altruistic was to be self-interested.

18th-century French materialists have connected philosophy with the development of natural science and social struggles at that time, closely combined materialism with atheist thought, which made the development of modern materialism reach a new height and become an important stage in the history of development of materialism. 18th-century French materialism was the ideological-theoretical forerunner of the French bourgeois revolution and was one of the important theoretical sources of Marxist philosophical materialism. The classic writers of Marxism spoke highly of the 18th-century French materialism and its militant atheism. In the Refugee Literature, Engels pointed out that that French materialist literature “made its greatest achievement both in form and in content and, considering the level of science at that time, it is still infinitely high today as far as content is concerned and has not been equaled as to form.” In his article On the Significance of Militant Materialism, Lenin also emphasized: “The keen, vivacious and talented writings of the old 18th-century atheists wittily and openly attacked the prevailing clericalism and will very often prove a thousand times more suitable for arousing people from their religious torpor.” However, the 18th-century French materialism eventually stopped at the form, stage and level of mechanical materialism, and interpreted natural phenomena in terms of the isolated, static, one-sided point of view of metaphysical materialism, and has relapsed into idealism and heroistic conception of history in the conception of the history of society, thus has the theoretical defects of mechanism, metaphysics and inconsistent materialism. In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin pointed out that Engels has enumerated three fundamental “limitations” of the 18th-century French materialism point by point, “the first limitation was that the views of the old materialists were ‘mechanical’, in the sense that they believed in ‘the exclusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a chemical and organic nature’… The second limitation was the metaphysical character of the views of the old materialists, meaning the ‘anti-dialectical character of their philosophy’… The third limitation was the preservation of idealism ‘up above’, and in the realm of the social sciences, a non-understanding of historical materialism.”