Matières incandescentes: problématiques matérialistes des Lumières françaises (1650–1780) by Pierre Berthiaume (review)

Pierre Berthiaume presents here a remarkably comprehensive and detailed account of what he calls the two axes of French Enlightenment materialism: on the one hand, an evolving ‘discours athée’ (p. 18), which works to undermine structures of religious belief and claims to religious authority; on the other, a properly materialist science, which seeks to construct, in the space cleared in the name of reason, a new understanding of matter and the organism. Berthiaume’s intellectual history positions the materialism that develops in France post 1750 as the culmination of a struggle that began in the seventeenth century, with the emergence (owing in part to Descartes) of a rationalism capable of doing battle with all the forces of ‘immatérialisme’ (chief among them, of course, the Catholic Church). The first two chapters of the book thus focus on the materialist critique of religion — a critique that both enables the development of later materialist philosophies of matter and embodiment and persists alongside them. The remaining five chapters give a wide-ranging and carefully researched account of the move away from Cartesian mechanism (with its endorsement of substance as passive and inert) and towards a notion of matter as self-organizing, with a dynamism inherent to it. This is the transition from dualism to monism, from substance to matière, from body to organism, even from soul to psychology (to use an anachronism) — a move that sets the stage for the flexible materialism of Diderot, for d’Holbachian conceptions of the universe as a ‘vast assemblage’, and for the vitalist physiology of Montpellier. Berthiaume’s range is both dizzying and galvanizing. He eloquently charts the complex systems of affinity linking together diverse texts (including the work of obscure botanist Jean Marchant, for instance, in his bravura discussion of materia actuosa in Toland, d’Holbach, Benoît de Maillet, and Buffon) and diverse traditions (attending at various moments to the English, German, Italian, and Dutch influences on the French). And his own sympathies are always clear: the second chapter, on discussions by Du Marsais, Meslier and d’Holbach (among others) of the exploitation of human fear and ignorance by institutionalized religion, is entitled ‘Théofascisme’. In the end, while Diderot and d’Holbach are crucial to the development of Berthiaume’s analysis — in different ways the ‘ultimate expression’ of the materialist position as he sees it (p. 19) — they are not exactly the heroes of this story. Berthiaume asserts that their monism ultimately devolves into unfounded comparison and analogy unmoored from experimentation — into figure, in other words, although Berthiaume prefers the term ‘fiction’. For Berthiaume, ‘les penseurs matérialistes n’ont pu asseoir leurs thèses sur des fondements irréfutables’ (p. 298). Thought and human consciousness remain enigmatic, describable only by way of ‘images’. The incandescent matter of the title is thus presumably forced to await the arrival of modern biology (and psychology) to come into its own. For Berthiaume, materialism fails where it merges with poetics. ‘Ideas’ — the vehicle of argument, in Berthiaume’s formulation — fall victim to their own insubstantiality. How, then, are we to explain their contagious power?