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Claude Adrien Helvétius

Claude Adrien Helvétius (/hɛlˈvʃəs/;[1] French: [klod adʁijɛ̃ ɛlvesjys]; 26 January 1715[2] – 26 December 1771) was a French philosopher, freemason[3] and littérateur.

Claude Adrien Helvétius
Born(1715-01-26)26 January 1715
Died26 December 1771(1771-12-26) (aged 56)
Paris, France
Era18th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolUtilitarianism
French materialism
Main interests
Ethics · Political philosophy

Life edit

Claude Adrien Helvétius was born in Paris, France, and was descended from a family of physicians, originally surnamed Schweitzer (meaning "Swiss" in German; Latinized as Helvétius). His great-grandfather Johann Friedrich Schweitzer known as "Helvetius", was a Dutch physician and alchemist, of German extraction. His grandfather Adriaan Helvetius introduced the use of ipecacuanha;[4] his father Jean Claude Adrien Helvétius was first physician to Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France. Claude Adrien was trained for a financial career, apprenticed to his maternal uncle in Caen,[5] but he occupied his spare time with poetry. Aged twenty-three, at the queen's request, he was appointed as a farmer-general, a tax-collecting post worth 100,000 crowns a year. Thus provided for, he proceeded to enjoy life to the utmost, with the help of his wealth and liberality, his literary and artistic tastes - he attended, for example, the progressive Club de l'Entresol. As he grew older, he began to seek more lasting distinctions, stimulated by the success of Pierre Louis Maupertuis as a mathematician, of Voltaire as a poet, and of Montesquieu as a philosopher.[6] His wife, Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, maintained a salon attended by the leading figures of the Enlightenment for over five decades.

In 1758 Helvétius published his philosophical magnum opus, a work called De l'esprit (On Mind), which claimed that all human faculties are attributes of mere physical sensation, and that the only real motive is self-interest, therefore there is no good and evil, only competitive pleasures. Its atheistic, utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines raised a public outcry, and the Sorbonne publicly burned it in 1759, forcing Helvétius to issue several retractions.

 
Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher)

In 1764 Helvétius visited England, and the next year, at the invitation of Frederick II, went to Berlin, where the king paid him much attention.[6]

After 10 years, when he thought his fortune sufficient, he gave up the post of farmer-general, and retired to a country estate in France, where he employed his fortune in the relief of the poor, the encouragement of agriculture and the development of industries.[6] For this he won the admiration of many of the philosophers.

 
Helvétius was one of several French philosophes who spent time at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia (depicted above)

Helvétius' family lived alternately on Château de Voré (Collines des Perches, Loir-et-Cher) and their Parisian townhouse at the rue Sainte-Anne.

Religiously, Helvétius was a Deist, albeit a "most indifferent" one.[7]

He died in Paris on December 26, 1771.

A work found in his papers called De l'homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation (On Man), was published in 1773.

Philosophy edit

De l'esprit and its reception edit

Helvétius' philosophical studies ended in the production of his famous book De l'esprit (On Mind). It was first published in 1758 and was intended to be the rival of Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, with Helvétius arguing strongly against Montesquieu's theory that climate influenced the character of nations.

The work attracted immediate attention and aroused the most formidable opposition, especially from the dauphin Louis, son of King Louis XV. The Advocate General Joly de Fleury condemned it in the Parlement of Paris in January 1759. The Sorbonne condemned the book, while the priests persuaded the court that it was full of the most dangerous doctrines. The book was declared to be heretical – so atheistic that it was condemned by Church and State and was burned. Helvétius, terrified at the storm he had raised, wrote three separate and humiliating retractions. In spite of his protestations of orthodoxy, the book was publicly burned by the Paris hangman.[8]

It had far-reaching negative effects on the rest of the philosophes, in particular, Denis Diderot, and the great work he was doing on the Encyclopédie. The religious authorities, particularly the Jesuits and the new Pope, began to fear the spread of atheism and wanted to clamp down on the 'modern thought' hard and quickly. De l'esprit became almost a scapegoat for this.[5]

 
Cover page of a 1759 English translation of De l'Esprit

This great publicity resulted in the book being translated into almost all the languages of Europe. Voltaire said that it lacked originality. Rousseau declared that the very benevolence of the author gave the lie to his principles. Grimm thought that all the ideas in the book were borrowed from Diderot. Madame du Deffand felt that Helvétius had raised such a storm by saying openly what everyone thought in secret. Madame de Graffigny claimed that all the good things in the book had been picked up in her own salon.[6]

Psychological egoism edit

Helvétius' philosophy belongs to the Egoist school:

  1. All man's faculties may be reduced to physical sensation, even memory, comparison, judgment. Our only difference from the lower animals lies in our external organization.
  2. Self-interest, founded on the love of pleasure and the fear of pain, is the sole spring of judgment, action, and affection. Human beings are motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. "These two," he says, "are, and always will be, the only principles of action in man."[9] Self-sacrifice is prompted by the fact that the sensation of pleasure outweighs the accompanying pain and is thus the result of deliberate calculation.
  3. We have no freedom of choice between good and evil. There is no such thing as absolute right – ideas of justice and injustice change according to customs.[6]

This view of man was largely Hobbesian – man is a system deterministically controllable by a suitable combination of reward and punishment, and the ends of government are to ensure the maximization of pleasure.

Natural equality of intelligences edit

"All men," Helvétius maintained, "have an equal disposition for understanding."[10] As one of the French Enlightenment's many Lockean disciples, he regarded the human mind as a blank slate, but free not only from innate ideas but also from innate natural dispositions and propensities. Physiological constitution was at most a peripheral factor in men's characters or capabilities. Any apparent inequalities were independent of natural organization, and had their cause in the unequal desire for instruction. This desire springs from passions, of which all men commonly well organized are susceptible to the same degree. We thus owe everything to education. Social engineering is therefore an enterprise unconstrained by the natural abilities of men.

This natural equality applied to all men in all nations, and thus the differences in national characteristics were not the result of innate differences between the people therein, but rather a byproduct of the system of education and government. "No nation," wrote Helvétius, "has reason to regard itself superior to others by virtue of its innate endowment."[11]

This radically egalitarian aspect of Helvétius' philosophy caused Diderot to remark that if it were true, De l'esprit might just as well have been written by Helvétius' dogkeeper.[citation needed]

Omnipotence of education edit

Since all men have the same natural potential, Helvétius argued, they all have the same ability to learn. Thus, education is the method by which to reform society, and there are few limits to the drastic social improvements that could be brought about by the appropriate distribution of education. Although people seem to possess certain qualities in greater abundance than their neighbours, the explanation for this comes 'from above' – it is caused by education, law and government. "If we commonly meet in London, with knowing men, who are with much more difficulty found in France," this is because it is a country where "every citizen has a share in the management of affairs in general."[12] "The art of forming men," he concludes, "is in all countries [...] strictly connected to the form of the government", and thus education via governmental intervention is the method of reform.[13]

The crux of his thought was that public ethics has a utilitarian basis, and he insisted strongly on the importance of culture and education in national development.[14] His thinking can be described as unsystematic.[by whom?]

Influence edit

The original ideas in his system are those of the natural equality of intelligences and the omnipotence of education, neither of which gained general acceptance, though both were prominent in the system of John Stuart Mill. Cesare Beccaria states that he was largely inspired by Helvétius in his attempt to modify penal laws. Helvétius also exerted some influence on the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham.

The materialistic aspects of Helvétius, along with Baron d'Holbach, had an influence on Karl Marx, the theorist of historical materialism and communism, who studied the ideas of Helvétius in Paris and later called the materialism of Helvétius and d'Holbach "the social basis of communism".[15]

Criticism edit

German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann vigorously opposed Helvétius's rationalistic doctrines.[16]

British philosopher Isaiah Berlin listed Helvétius, along with Hegel, Fichte, Rousseau, Saint-Simon and Maistre as one of the six "enemies of freedom" who constituted the ideological basis for modern authoritarianism, in his book Freedom and Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.[17]

Poetry edit

His poetic ambitions resulted in the poem called Le Bonheur (published posthumously, with an account of Helvétius's life and works, by Jean François de Saint-Lambert, 1773), in which he develops the idea that true happiness is only to be found in making the interest of one person that of all.[6]

Bibliography edit

A work called De l'homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son éducation, found among his manuscripts, was published after his death. There is a complete edition of the works of Helvétius, published at Paris, 1818.[18]

For an estimate of his work and his place among the philosophers of the 18th century see Victor Cousin's Philosophie sensualiste (1863); PL Lezaud, Résumés philosophiques (1853); FD Maurice, in his Modern Philosophy (1862), pp. 537 seq.; J Morley, Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (London, 1878); DG Mostratos, Die Pädagogik des Helvétius (Berlin, 1891); A Guillois, Le Salon de Madame Helvétius (1894); A Piazzi, Le idee filosofiche specialmente pedagogiche de C. A. Helvétius (Milan, 1889); Georgi Plekhanov, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Materialismus (Stuttgart, 1896); L Limentani, Le teorie psicologiche de C. A. Helvétius (Verona, 1902); A Keim, Helvétius, sa vie et son œuvre (1907);[18] Isaiah Berlin, "Helvétius" in Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy, (Oxford, 2002), pp. 11–26.

References edit

  1. ^ "Helvétius". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  2. ^ Ian Cumming, Helvetius: His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought, Routledge, 2013, p. 7.
  3. ^ Ian Cumming, Helvetius: His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought, Routledge, 2013, pp. 115–132.
  4. ^ Helvetius, Adriaan in Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden, vol 8, (1867), p. 509.
  5. ^ a b Helvetius: A Study in Persecution by David Warner Smith, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1965.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Chisholm 1911, p. 254.
  7. ^ Duzer, Charles Hunter Van (1935). Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought. Johns Hopkins Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-598-51150-8. Helvetius himself was a Deist – a most indifferent Deist
  8. ^ Chisholm 1911.
  9. ^ Helvétius, Claude Adrien, Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and his Education, transl. W. Hooper, M. D., (London: Albion Press, 1810), p. 146
  10. ^ Helvétius, Claude Adrien, De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties, (London: 1759), p. 286
  11. ^ Helvétius, De l'esprit, p. 21
  12. ^ Helvétius, De l'esprit, p. 100.
  13. ^ Helvétius, De l'esprit, p. 325
  14. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 254–255.
  15. ^ Mehring, Franz, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (Routledge, 2003) pg. 75
  16. ^ Robert Alan Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project, University of Toronto Press, 2011, p. 34.
  17. ^ Berlin, Isaiah, Freedom and Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2003)
  18. ^ a b Chisholm 1911, p. 255.

Attribution:

External links edit

  • Works by or about Claude Adrien Helvétius at Internet Archive
  • A Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties & His Education by Helvétius - English translation by W. Hooper, 1777, Google Books
  • De l'Esprit, or Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties by Helvétius - English translation by William Mudford, 1807, Google Books

claude, adrien, helvétius, other, uses, helvetius, disambiguation, french, klod, adʁijɛ, ɛlvesjys, january, 1715, december, 1771, french, philosopher, freemason, littérateur, born, 1715, january, 1715paris, francedied26, december, 1771, 1771, aged, paris, fran. For other uses see Helvetius disambiguation Claude Adrien Helvetius h ɛ l ˈ v iː ʃ e s 1 French klod adʁijɛ ɛlvesjys 26 January 1715 2 26 December 1771 was a French philosopher freemason 3 and litterateur Claude Adrien HelvetiusBorn 1715 01 26 26 January 1715Paris FranceDied26 December 1771 1771 12 26 aged 56 Paris FranceEra18th century philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolUtilitarianismFrench materialismMain interestsEthics Political philosophy Contents 1 Life 2 Philosophy 2 1 De l esprit and its reception 2 2 Psychological egoism 2 3 Natural equality of intelligences 2 4 Omnipotence of education 2 5 Influence 2 6 Criticism 3 Poetry 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External linksLife editClaude Adrien Helvetius was born in Paris France and was descended from a family of physicians originally surnamed Schweitzer meaning Swiss in German Latinized as Helvetius His great grandfather Johann Friedrich Schweitzer known as Helvetius was a Dutch physician and alchemist of German extraction His grandfather Adriaan Helvetius introduced the use of ipecacuanha 4 his father Jean Claude Adrien Helvetius was first physician to Marie Leszczynska queen of France Claude Adrien was trained for a financial career apprenticed to his maternal uncle in Caen 5 but he occupied his spare time with poetry Aged twenty three at the queen s request he was appointed as a farmer general a tax collecting post worth 100 000 crowns a year Thus provided for he proceeded to enjoy life to the utmost with the help of his wealth and liberality his literary and artistic tastes he attended for example the progressive Club de l Entresol As he grew older he began to seek more lasting distinctions stimulated by the success of Pierre Louis Maupertuis as a mathematician of Voltaire as a poet and of Montesquieu as a philosopher 6 His wife Anne Catherine de Ligniville Madame Helvetius maintained a salon attended by the leading figures of the Enlightenment for over five decades In 1758 Helvetius published his philosophical magnum opus a work called De l esprit On Mind which claimed that all human faculties are attributes of mere physical sensation and that the only real motive is self interest therefore there is no good and evil only competitive pleasures Its atheistic utilitarian and egalitarian doctrines raised a public outcry and the Sorbonne publicly burned it in 1759 forcing Helvetius to issue several retractions nbsp Chateau de Vore Collines des Perches Loir et Cher In 1764 Helvetius visited England and the next year at the invitation of Frederick II went to Berlin where the king paid him much attention 6 After 10 years when he thought his fortune sufficient he gave up the post of farmer general and retired to a country estate in France where he employed his fortune in the relief of the poor the encouragement of agriculture and the development of industries 6 For this he won the admiration of many of the philosophers nbsp Helvetius was one of several French philosophes who spent time at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia depicted above Helvetius family lived alternately on Chateau de Vore Collines des Perches Loir et Cher and their Parisian townhouse at the rue Sainte Anne Religiously Helvetius was a Deist albeit a most indifferent one 7 He died in Paris on December 26 1771 A work found in his papers called De l homme de ses facultes intellectuelles et de son education On Man was published in 1773 Philosophy editDe l esprit and its reception edit Helvetius philosophical studies ended in the production of his famous book De l esprit On Mind It was first published in 1758 and was intended to be the rival of Montesquieu s The Spirit of the Laws with Helvetius arguing strongly against Montesquieu s theory that climate influenced the character of nations The work attracted immediate attention and aroused the most formidable opposition especially from the dauphin Louis son of King Louis XV The Advocate General Joly de Fleury condemned it in the Parlement of Paris in January 1759 The Sorbonne condemned the book while the priests persuaded the court that it was full of the most dangerous doctrines The book was declared to be heretical so atheistic that it was condemned by Church and State and was burned Helvetius terrified at the storm he had raised wrote three separate and humiliating retractions In spite of his protestations of orthodoxy the book was publicly burned by the Paris hangman 8 It had far reaching negative effects on the rest of the philosophes in particular Denis Diderot and the great work he was doing on the Encyclopedie The religious authorities particularly the Jesuits and the new Pope began to fear the spread of atheism and wanted to clamp down on the modern thought hard and quickly De l esprit became almost a scapegoat for this 5 nbsp Cover page of a 1759 English translation of De l EspritThis great publicity resulted in the book being translated into almost all the languages of Europe Voltaire said that it lacked originality Rousseau declared that the very benevolence of the author gave the lie to his principles Grimm thought that all the ideas in the book were borrowed from Diderot Madame du Deffand felt that Helvetius had raised such a storm by saying openly what everyone thought in secret Madame de Graffigny claimed that all the good things in the book had been picked up in her own salon 6 Psychological egoism edit Further information Psychological egoism Helvetius philosophy belongs to the Egoist school All man s faculties may be reduced to physical sensation even memory comparison judgment Our only difference from the lower animals lies in our external organization Self interest founded on the love of pleasure and the fear of pain is the sole spring of judgment action and affection Human beings are motivated solely by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain These two he says are and always will be the only principles of action in man 9 Self sacrifice is prompted by the fact that the sensation of pleasure outweighs the accompanying pain and is thus the result of deliberate calculation We have no freedom of choice between good and evil There is no such thing as absolute right ideas of justice and injustice change according to customs 6 This view of man was largely Hobbesian man is a system deterministically controllable by a suitable combination of reward and punishment and the ends of government are to ensure the maximization of pleasure Natural equality of intelligences edit Further information Tabula rasa All men Helvetius maintained have an equal disposition for understanding 10 As one of the French Enlightenment s many Lockean disciples he regarded the human mind as a blank slate but free not only from innate ideas but also from innate natural dispositions and propensities Physiological constitution was at most a peripheral factor in men s characters or capabilities Any apparent inequalities were independent of natural organization and had their cause in the unequal desire for instruction This desire springs from passions of which all men commonly well organized are susceptible to the same degree We thus owe everything to education Social engineering is therefore an enterprise unconstrained by the natural abilities of men This natural equality applied to all men in all nations and thus the differences in national characteristics were not the result of innate differences between the people therein but rather a byproduct of the system of education and government No nation wrote Helvetius has reason to regard itself superior to others by virtue of its innate endowment 11 This radically egalitarian aspect of Helvetius philosophy caused Diderot to remark that if it were true De l esprit might just as well have been written by Helvetius dogkeeper citation needed Omnipotence of education edit Further information Nature versus nurture Since all men have the same natural potential Helvetius argued they all have the same ability to learn Thus education is the method by which to reform society and there are few limits to the drastic social improvements that could be brought about by the appropriate distribution of education Although people seem to possess certain qualities in greater abundance than their neighbours the explanation for this comes from above it is caused by education law and government If we commonly meet in London with knowing men who are with much more difficulty found in France this is because it is a country where every citizen has a share in the management of affairs in general 12 The art of forming men he concludes is in all countries strictly connected to the form of the government and thus education via governmental intervention is the method of reform 13 The crux of his thought was that public ethics has a utilitarian basis and he insisted strongly on the importance of culture and education in national development 14 His thinking can be described as unsystematic by whom Influence edit The original ideas in his system are those of the natural equality of intelligences and the omnipotence of education neither of which gained general acceptance though both were prominent in the system of John Stuart Mill Cesare Beccaria states that he was largely inspired by Helvetius in his attempt to modify penal laws Helvetius also exerted some influence on the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham The materialistic aspects of Helvetius along with Baron d Holbach had an influence on Karl Marx the theorist of historical materialism and communism who studied the ideas of Helvetius in Paris and later called the materialism of Helvetius and d Holbach the social basis of communism 15 Criticism edit German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann vigorously opposed Helvetius s rationalistic doctrines 16 British philosopher Isaiah Berlin listed Helvetius along with Hegel Fichte Rousseau Saint Simon and Maistre as one of the six enemies of freedom who constituted the ideological basis for modern authoritarianism in his book Freedom and Betrayal Six Enemies of Human Liberty 17 Poetry editHis poetic ambitions resulted in the poem called Le Bonheur published posthumously with an account of Helvetius s life and works by Jean Francois de Saint Lambert 1773 in which he develops the idea that true happiness is only to be found in making the interest of one person that of all 6 Bibliography editA work called De l homme de ses facultes intellectuelles et de son education found among his manuscripts was published after his death There is a complete edition of the works of Helvetius published at Paris 1818 18 For an estimate of his work and his place among the philosophers of the 18th century see Victor Cousin s Philosophie sensualiste 1863 PL Lezaud Resumes philosophiques 1853 FD Maurice in his Modern Philosophy 1862 pp 537 seq J Morley Diderot and the Encyclopaedists London 1878 DG Mostratos Die Padagogik des Helvetius Berlin 1891 A Guillois Le Salon de Madame Helvetius 1894 A Piazzi Le idee filosofiche specialmente pedagogiche de C A Helvetius Milan 1889 Georgi Plekhanov Beitrage zur Geschichte des Materialismus Stuttgart 1896 L Limentani Le teorie psicologiche de C A Helvetius Verona 1902 A Keim Helvetius sa vie et son œuvre 1907 18 Isaiah Berlin Helvetius in Freedom and Its Betrayal Six Enemies of Liberty ed Henry Hardy Oxford 2002 pp 11 26 References edit Helvetius Random House Webster s Unabridged Dictionary Ian Cumming Helvetius His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought Routledge 2013 p 7 Ian Cumming Helvetius His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought Routledge 2013 pp 115 132 Helvetius Adriaan in Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden vol 8 1867 p 509 a b Helvetius A Study in Persecution by David Warner Smith Clarendon Press Oxford 1965 a b c d e f Chisholm 1911 p 254 Duzer Charles Hunter Van 1935 Contribution of the Ideologues to French Revolutionary Thought Johns Hopkins Press p 55 ISBN 978 0 598 51150 8 Helvetius himself was a Deist a most indifferent Deist Chisholm 1911 Helvetius Claude Adrien Treatise on Man His Intellectual Faculties and his Education transl W Hooper M D London Albion Press 1810 p 146 Helvetius Claude Adrien De l esprit or Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties London 1759 p 286 Helvetius De l esprit p 21 Helvetius De l esprit p 100 Helvetius De l esprit p 325 Chisholm 1911 pp 254 255 Mehring Franz Karl Marx The Story of His Life Routledge 2003 pg 75 Robert Alan Sparling Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project University of Toronto Press 2011 p 34 Berlin Isaiah Freedom and Betrayal Six Enemies of Human Liberty Princeton University Press 2003 a b Chisholm 1911 p 255 Attribution nbsp This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain Chisholm Hugh ed 1911 Helvetius Claude Adrien Encyclopaedia Britannica Vol 13 11th ed Cambridge University Press pp 254 255 External links edit nbsp Wikisource has original works by or about Claude Adrien Helvetius nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Claude Adrien Helvetius Works by or about Claude Adrien Helvetius at Internet Archive A Treatise on Man His Intellectual Faculties amp His Education by Helvetius English translation by W Hooper 1777 Google Books De l Esprit or Essays on the Mind and Its Several Faculties by Helvetius English translation by William Mudford 1807 Google Books Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Claude Adrien Helvetius amp oldid 1175539846, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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