Lire le matérialisme by Charles T. Wolfe (review)

If 'lire le matérialisme, c'est lire l'histoire du matérialisme', as Charles T. Wolfe and Pierre-François Moreau both remark in this book (pp. 9 and 15), reading Lire le matérialisme is to read a materialistic history of materialism. Or, better: it is to read one of the many conceivable materialistic histories of materialism—a non-history, in this case. Wolfe's 'materialism' is an umbrella term encompassing a wide range of allegedly only tenuously connected philosophical views: from a mechanistic materialism whose existence Wolfe himself had previously questioned in his 'Machine et organisme chez Diderot' (Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie, 26 (1999), 213–31), to eighteenth-century vitalist materialism and contemporary new materialism; from a metaphysical materialism (and even a Christian materialism) down to the mind–brain identity theory or Australian materialism. Accordingly, Wolfe's history of materialism is, unlike Friedrich Albert Lange's now classic Geschichte des Materialismus (Iserlohn: Baedeker, 1866), a Newtonian, or rather Foucauldian, history; it is an archaeology of materialism. (Until one gets to Chapter 8, where the author brilliantly highlights the new materialists' debt to eighteenth-century vitalism, further pointing to Friedrich Engels's essay on Ludwig Feuerbach as the source of their simplistic reading of ancient and early modern materialism.) Given Wolfe's anti-evolutionistic interpretation of materialism ('les épisodes matérialistes dans l'histoire de la philosophie ne communiquent quasiment pas entre eux, disparaissant et renaissant comme le phénix', p. 181), his decision to bring together in a single volume six previously published articles and book chapters, however revisited, and a forthcoming one, may appear odd. All the more so because the author does not seem to envisage a new public for his (old) pieces: to be sure, Wolfe's anti-synthetic approach does not render the book particularly suitable for students or non-academic readers—except, perhaps, for Chapter 1 ('Sommes-nous les héritiers des Lumières matérialistes?'), which includes a very clear discussion of the five (or six) fundamental tenets of eighteenth-century materialism. In a sense, therefore, one wonders whether the author could have not profited from the publication of this volume to highlight similarities and connections among the various strands of early modern and contemporary materialism—something he would have been very well placed to do—rather than insisting on their differences. After all, just like his analytic approach, this synthetic one would have been perfectly in keeping with materialism, or at least with a certain materialistic tradition—suffice it to think of Diderot, his emphasis on continuity, his well-known theory of 'rapports', and his unique ability to combine analysis and reductionism ('Il semble que la nature se soit plu à varier le même mécanisme d'une infinité de manières différentes' (Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature)). That said, the importance of Wolfe's contributions to the history of philosophy is well known among scholars—especially those working on La Mettrie and Diderot— and the essays printed (or reprinted) in this volume are no exception. Of particular interest are the author's reflections on the links between materialism and religion, on the one hand, and between materialism and the (life) sciences, on the other. It is only to be hoped that some of these chapters will be translated into English—especially the concluding ones, which engage more closely with present-day anglophone philosophy, and may very well rekindle among non-continental philosophers an interest in the much-neglected eighteenth-century French philosophical tradition.