Physicians From France

"[T]he sciences that are expressed by numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and... this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra."

"La Mettrie who had himself painted and engraved as a second Democritus laughs only the first time one looks at him. Repeated contemplation changes the philosopher into a fool, his laughter changes into a grin."

"In very different fashion does the book set to work that already in its very title declares that man is a machine. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' was cautious, cunningly arranged, and only gradually surprising us with its results, here, on the contrary,the final conclusion is expressed at the outset of the work. While the 'Natural History of the Soul' allied itself with the whole Aristotelian metaphysics only in order to prove by degrees that the soul is but an empty form, into which we may pour a materialistic content, here we no longer deal in all those fine distinctions."

"These features show truly the master Of jollities, laughter and wit; Too bold he was in his nature To take off the corners of it. He would have been but for one sage The victim alas! of the fools of his age."

"La Mettrie was born with a fund of natural and inexhaustible gaiety; he had a quick mind, and such a fertile imagination that it made flowers grow in the arid field of medicine. Nature had made him an orator and a philosopher; but a yet more precious gift which he received from her was a pure soul and an obliging heart. All those who are not imposed upon by the pious insults of the theologians mourn in La Mettrie a good man and a wise physician."

"[H]e... finally concludes: " The soul, then, depends essentially upon the organs of the body, with which it is formed, grows, decreases: 'Ergo participem leti quoque convenit esse.' ""

"Lamettrie is a bold who sees in materialism only the justification of his profligacy."

"Lamettrie goes back to the father of the Church, Arnobius, from whose book, ' Adversus Gentes,' he borrows a hypothesis, which possibly became the original of the statue-man which plays its part in Diderot, Buffon, and particularly in Condillac. Let us suppose that in a feebly illuminated subterranean chamber, from which all sounds and sense-impressions are far removed, a new-born child is scantily nourished by a naked and ever-silent nurse... reared up without any knowledge... of the world or of human life until the age of... forty years. Then let this being leave his solitude. And now let him be asked what thoughts he has had in his solitude, and how he has been nourished and brought up. He will make no answer; he will not even know that the sound addressed to him has any meaning. Where now is that immortal particle of deity? Where is the soul that enters the body so well taught and enlightened? Like Condillac's statue, then, this creature, which has only the shape and the physical organisation of a man, must be supposed to have received feelings through the use of the senses that gradually arrange themselves, and education must do what else is necessary to give him the soul, the capacity for which is only dormant in his physical organisation. Although Cabanis, as pupil of Condillac, rightly rejected this unnatural hypothesis, we must nevertheless concede to it a certain justification as compared with the extremely weak foundation of the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas."

"In conclusion, Lamettrie lays down the principles, " No senses, no ideas." " The fewer senses, the fewer ideas." " Little education, few ideas." " No sense-impressions, no ideas.""

"The 'Natural History of the Soul' begins by showing that as yet no philosopher, from Aristotle down to Malebranche, had been able to account for the nature of the soul."

"Very ingeniously Lamettrie observes that at bottom I am immediately certain only of my own feeling. That other men also feel, I conclude with very much stronger conviction from the expression of their feelings in gestures and cries than from their articulate speech. That energetic language of the emotions is, however, the same in the animals as in men, and it carries with it much stronger proof than all the sophisms of Descartes. ...[T]he internal organisation of man and of the animals offers a perfect analogy. If it remains for the present incomprehensible how the capability of feeling can be an attribute of matter, it is with this, as with a thousand other puzzles, in which, according to an idea of Leibniz, instead of the thing itself we see only the veil that hides it. ...[S]ensation, like motion, must at all events potentially belong to all matter. So thought the ancients, whose philosophy is preferred by all capable minds to the inadequate attempts of the moderns. After this Lamettrie passes to the doctrine of substantial forms..."

"Whether the soul occupies only a particular point or a circuit we do not know, but as all nerves do not meet in one point in the brain, the former supposition is improbable. All knowledge is in the soul only at the moment in which it is affected by it; all preservation of it is to be resolved into organic conditions. Thus the 'Natural History of the Soul,' starting from ordinary notions, gradually leads us on into Materialism, and it is concluded that... which feels must also be material. How this comes about Lamettrie too does not know; but why should we (according to Locke) limit the omnipotence of the Creator because of our ignorance? Memory, imagination, passions, and so on, are then explained in a thoroughly materialistic way."

"In the year 1742 he... received there a position as surgeon to the Guard. In this capacity he made a campaign in Germany, and... was seized by a violent fever, and used this opportunity in order to institute observations upon himself as to the influence of quickened circulation upon thought. He came to the conclusion that thought is nothing but a consequence of the organisation of our mechanism. ...[H]e tried during his convalescence to explain the mental functions by the help of anatomy, and he had his conjectures printed under the title of a 'Natural History of the Soul.' The regimental chaplain sounded the alarm, and soon a universal cry of indignation was raised... His books were recognised as heretical, and he could no longer continue to be surgeon of the Guard. ...about the same time ...writing a satire on his rivals, the foremost Paris practitioners. ...He fled in the year 1746 to Leyden. Here he wrote ...a new satire upon the charlatanism and ignorance of doctors, and soon afterwards (1748) appeared also his 'Homme Machine.'"

"[I]n [Lamettrie's] ' Natural History of the Soul,' the Materialism is covered only by a very transparent veil. In the same work we find an idea which in all probability afforded the suggestion for Condillac's sensitive statue [ Traité des sensations]."

"That the true connection could so long be misrepresented is, next to the influence of Hegel and his school, chiefly to be attributed to the resentment excited by Lamettrie's attack upon the Christian morality. People forgot, in consequence, his theoretical writings; and the calmest and most serious of them, including the 'Natural History of the Soul,' were most completely forgotten."

"The very much shorter section on the rational soul discusses freedom, reflection, judgment, and so on, with the same strong leaning to Materialism there follows a chapter over which is written, "...religious faith alone can confirm our belief as to the existence of a rational soul." ...[T]he object... is to show how metaphysics and religion came to adopt the notion of a soul, and it concludes by saying that true philosophy freely confesses that the... soul is unknown to her. ...[M]ention is also made of Voltaire's phrase, 'I am body, and I think;' and Lamettrie refers with pleasure to the way in which Voltaire scoffs at the Scholastic proof for the proposition that no matter can think."

"As a friend, he may have been obliging and self-sacrificing; as an enemy, he was, as in particular had to experience, malicious and low in the choice of his means."

"Lamettrie was not only the extremest of the French Materialists, but was the first also in point of time. ...for several decades men could with virtuous indignation condemn this sinner, while they were gradually absorbing his ideas."

"Hettner forgets his own chronological data when he maintains that Lamettrie, instigated chiefly by Diderot's 'Pensées Philosophiques,' wrote in 1745 the 'Histoire Naturelle de l'Ame,' and in 1748 'L'Homme Machine;' and in Schlosser's ' History of the World' we may read that Lamettrie was a very ignorant man, who had the impudence to pass off the discoveries and observations of others as his own. Only that in nearly every case where we find a striking similarity of ideas between Lamettrie and any famous contemporary of his, the former had an indisputable priority!"

"With regard to the questions with which we are concerned, Lamettrie stands at the commencement of the whole series."

"Julien Offray de la Mettrie, or simply Lamettrie... is one of the most abused, but one of the least read, authors in the history of literature—an author known even superficially to but few of those who thought proper to abuse him when it suited them."

"Unity of principle in the multiplicity of organisms... we find it developed with great clearness and distinctness by Lamettrie as early as the 'L'Homme Plante' in 1748. Lamettrie was led to write this treatise by Linné's just published pioneering work on the classification of plants (1747), just as we find in all his writings constant traces of the zealous following up of the newest scientific investigations. Lamettrie cites Linné; none of the later writers think it necessary to cite Lamettrie... Whoever swims with the stream of tradition and neglects the chronology, will of course represent the 'ignorant' Lamettrie as decking himself with borrowed plumes!"

"[E]verything is the work of imagination, and... all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination..."

"[T]he last chapter... bears the title, " Narratives which prove that all Ideas are derived from the Senses." ...Everywhere the consequence is drawn that only the education he receives through the senses makes man man, and gives him what we call the soul, while no development of the mind from within outwards ever takes place."

"Though he loved many innovations in science and devoted his life to introduce useful ones in the arts, he didn't like them in politics and even less in the statutes of the academies"

"New “agronomy,” [was] an experimental science of agriculture founded around midcentury by the chemist and botanist Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau"

"There is nobody who is not surprised of the small price of pins; but we shall be even more surprised, when we know how many different operations, most of them very delicate, are mandatory to make a good pin. We are going to go through these operations in a few words to stimulate the curiosity to know their detail; this enumeration will supply as many articles which will make the division of this work... The first operation is to have brass go through the drawing plate to calibrate it."

"The French botanist and chemist Henri-Louis Duhamel de Monceau (1700–1782) identified a fungal disease on the bulbs of saffron crocus (now named Helicobasidium purpureum) and illustrated its sclerotia on the bulbs. His report was read to the Academie royale des Sciences in April 1728; it was “wellconceived, thorough, and conclusive, and led to his election as adjoint chimiste in the same year” (Eklund 1971:223). Duhamel discovered that this fungus spreads underground from one bulb to another. In his Éléments d’agriculture (two volumes, 1762; English edition, 1764), he also accepted insects as a cause of some plant diseases."

"This Duhamel has invented an infinity of machines which serve no purpose, has written and translated a multitude of books on agriculture, of which it is not known if they have any useful result, that is still awaited."

"As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy."

"There can be little doubt that the fear of not being at a sufficiently high intellectual level, of having missed something which 'everyone important sees to feel is so crucial' has played a very large role in Lacan's success. Lacan himself - apparently quite deliberately - played upon this fear. When he appeared in a two-part television special in France in 1974, he began the programme by announcing that 'most of his audience were surely idiots, and that he was surely in error in trying to make them understand.' Such intellectual bullying is characteristic of Lacan's style. In his seminars, highly intelligent people were persuaded to listen attentively to propositions which were for the most part obscure, incomprehensible and entirely without explanatory value."

"Lacan's writings, in addition to being bad or lunatic psychiatry, are also bad mathematics."

"Lacan's thought certainly does possess a complex logical pattern. Concepts which have been introduced in one place are rarely if ever clarified by references to them elsewhere in his writing. But they are continually modified and overlaid with yet more layers of complexity and ostensible significance."

"If [Lacan’s biographer] Elizabeth Roudinesco’s account is accurate, [Lacan] must have made a hash of his first case presentation to the Société Neurologique: his patient, she says, supposedly had ‘pseudobulbar disorders of the spinal cord’—a neurological impossibility. (The innocence with which Roudinesco reports all kinds of clinical cock-ups makes this book a particularly disturbing read for a medic.) Abandoning neurology was obviously a wise career move. Unfortunately, though he lacked all the qualities necessary to make a half-way decent doctor (e.g., kindness, common sense, humility, clinical acumen and solid knowledge), Lacan did not abandon medicine altogether, only its scientific basis."

"[Lacan’s] clients committed suicide at a rate that would have alarmed a man armed with less robust self-confidence. He claimed that it was due to the severity of the cases he took on but it may also have had something to do with the way he would start and stop analysis at whim and would sometimes cast aside, at very short notice, people who had been under his ‘care’ for years."

"On the principle of credo ut intelligam his disciples still believed [Lacan] even when, in his last few years, he was manifestly suffering from multi-infarct dementia."

"Lacan portrayed this break [of his psychoanalytic school from the International Psychoanalytical Association] as the result of an ideological conflict between the old school and the progressive, true Freudians represented by himself. Actually it was about his greed. He needed to maximise his throughput of patients in order to finance his lavish lifestyle. (He died a multi-millionaire.) He started to shorten his sessions, without a pro rata reduction of fee, to as little as ten minutes. Unfortunately, Freudian theory fixes the minimum length of a session at 50 minutes. Lacan was therefore repeatedly cautioned by the IPA."

"The Lacan phenomenon is a bizarre one. Attempts to understand it have not been helped by the insistence of many of Lacan's apologists that the 'pure' theoretical issues can be separated from Lacan's therapeutic practice and the extraordinary manner in which he behaves towards his disciples. Such an attitude is no more defensible in the case of Lacan than it is in the case of Freud himself. Indeed, perhaps the only real resemblance between Lacan and Freud is that both played the role of prophet or messiah with extraordinary effectiveness and both attracted disciples who treated their person as sacred and their word as law."

"Lacan's synthesis of Freud, Hegel and structuralism was often held to contain deep truths about the nature of desire in general and the way women live, or have lived, should or should not live in particular."

"Lacan, Derrida and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity and inaction."

"Where are the flows in Lacan? Where would one be less likely to find anything that flows than in the gnarled post-Saussurian fetish of the signifier that dominates his texts?"

"Lacan goes wrong by relying (quite uncritically!) on Saussure's signifier-signified conception of language. It is understandable that Lacan, when he began to write in the 1930s, should learn Saussure's turn-of-the-century linguistics. But even at the end of his life he and now his followers write about signifiers and signifieds as though the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics had never happened. Contemporary literary theorists tirelessly quote Saussure. But why? Today's linguists no more use Saussure's model than today's physicists use the concept of phlogiston. I do not mean to suggest that linguists have all adopted Chomsky's views. They are still controversial, and he would be the first to acknowledge that they are subject to revision in the light of further evidence. Linguists who reject Chomsky's ideas, however, are trying to offer alternatives or to go beyond Chomsky. They are not turning back to Saussure. My point is not that Chomsky is right but that Saussure and Lacan are wrong."

"Saussure was trying to de-psychologize linguistics. But Lacan re- psychologizes Saussure's linguistics. Lacan is using a formal theory of language to explain empirical events in the mind. Saussure was trying precisely not to say what goes on in your or my mind when we understand a word or make up a sentence, and, within the limits of his theory, he succeeded. Lacan, however, applies Saussure's carefully apsychological theory to describe precisely what it avoided describing."

"Lacan's most widely quoted maxim is, “The unconscious is structured like a language,” and like that sentence, Lacan's whole oeuvre rests on a certain idea of language. His proclaimed "return to Freud" meant remedying Freud's failure to use "modern" linguistics. "Modern" linguistics for Lacan, however, means turn-of-the-century linguistics---specifically, Ferdinand de Saussure's. The trouble is that very little of Saussure's linguistics stands up today, after nearly a century's work in linguistics. [...] In writing this essay, for example, I had trouble finding linguistic texts that even refer to Saussure. Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics, Lacanians, and the occasional philosopher."

"Lacan is a tyrant who must be driven from our shores. Narrowly trained English professors who know nothing of art history or popular culture think they can just wade in with Lacan and trash everything in sight."

"Whether used in the clinic or the seminar room, Lacan's ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature."

"As I became more familiar with Lacan's teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacan's bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought. But whereas most of Lacan's commentators preferred to ape the master's style, and perpetuate the obscurity, I wanted to dissipate the haze and expose whatever was underneath – even if it meant seeing that the emperor was naked."

"Because very few cultural theorists have a background in psychology, it can be difficult for them to assess the strengths or weaknesses of Lacanian accounts. Too much, then, has to be taken on trust or distrust. [...] Lacan’s psychological ideas, despite being widely used, have seldom been evaluated directly in terms of their evidential bases."

"Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy."

"It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good,a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics."