Matérialisme et passions (review)

Approximately half the material in this collection of six articles concerns writers in English: Hobbes, Toland, David Hartley, Joseph Priestley, and a number of lesser-known Enlightenment figures. La Mettrie and Helvétius are the main French thinkers represented, with some passing reference to Diderot. Modernity, says the introduction, is marked by a 'pathétique généralisée': the passions are liberated from the moralizing grip of theology and promoted to a commanding position where they are viewed as a positive driving force in human behaviour. The more local question being asked by the collection concerns the extent to which this overall shift is reflected, as one might expect it to be, in materialist thinking of the long Enlightenment. Dominique Weber presents Hobbes's treatment of the passions as, ultimately, a rationalist one: although dualism is rejected and the passions rehabilitated, the most important of these is curiosity, which leads to the construction of procedures of explanation, prediction and control (science, the State). If curiosity and control are counters to primal fear in Hobbes, Pierre Lurbe argues that, for Toland, the fear of death is the negative passion which drives human beings. Toland's Epicurean response is that a materialist philosophical understanding will dispel the irrational dogmas such as the belief in the immortality of the soul which fear produces. When it comes to political thought, however, Lurbe signals a contradiction which is reminiscent of Voltaire and points up the limits of Enlightenment thinking about democracy: where philosophy seeks to master fear and combat superstition, the political thinker accepts the political use of superstition (Lurbe sees this a tension between education and conditioning). In a piece which marks the transition from a British to a French focus, Ann Thomson argues that, whereas materialism and determinism can coexist with some kind of Christian thinking in Harvey or Priestley (via notions of teleology and final causes), the particularity of La Mettrie, which indeed led to him being seen as an unacceptable extremist, is his insistence on, and acceptance of, the anarchic unpredictability of a human world driven by ungovernable passions. Causality is situated within human beings themselves. The relationship between exteriority and interiority in La Mettrie is taken up by Anne Léon-Miehe, who argues that one of the consequences of the author's materialist position is to undermine the enunciating subject of philosophy, and to make philosophical positions a function of positionality (p. 74). The final piece, by Moureau, develops the idea found in the introduction of a rehabilitation of the passions, applying it to Helvétius. The passions are praised, since they counter a natural human tendency to inertia. From this follows a valorization of the grand homme as an individual marked by passion and energy. Moureau promises a discussion of the relation of materialism to politics, but I felt that this did not really materialize. I would have liked to see a stronger sense of the political dimension emerging from the collection. The papers offer a series of investigations, but the collection does not really come to any conclusions, even of a provisional nature.