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Winged Men and the Cast of Dice: Anti–Finalism and Radical Materialism in Guillaume Lamy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

Filippo Del Lucchese
Filippo Del Lucchese *
Affiliation:
Brunel University
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Abstract

The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a “radical” current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God’s ends, as scholars have maintained — in other words, a proto–fideist — but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes and from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists.

Résumé

La controverse sur la téléologie se développe dans la première modernité avec une intensité particulière. Dans mon article, je montrerai que Guillaume Lamy représente une courant radical de l’anti–finalisme, sans faiblesse ni compromis avec les adversaires. Son anti–finalisme fait de Lamy non pas un proto–fidéiste – un partisan sincère du caractère inconnaissable de Dieu, comme soutenu souvent par les interprètes – mais un matérialiste lucrétien radical, dont le but est de se distinguer à la fois du refus partiel des causes finales propre au cartésianisme, et de l’épicurisme pâle et délavé des gassendistes.

Type
Philosophie cartésienne et matérialisme
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 49 , Issue 4: Numéro Spécial / Special Issue: Philosophie cartésienne et matérialisme , December 2010 , pp. 527 - 546
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2011

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References

Notes

1 See Duflo, C. , La finalité dans la nature, de Descartes à Kant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Janet, P. , Les causes finales (Paris: Baillière et C.ie, 1876)Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 5.

4 Koyré, Alexandre , “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis,” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 3 (1950): 291–311Google Scholar. See also Cuénot, Lucien , Invention et finalité en biologie (Paris: Flammarion, 1941)Google Scholar and Gilson, Étienne , D’Aristote à Darwin et retour. Essai sur quelques constantes de la biophilosphie (Paris: Vrin, 1971), 9Google Scholar.

5 For a complete bibliography on Guillaume Lamy see Revéillé–Parise, J. H. , “Étude biographique: Guillaume Lamy,” Gazette médicale de Paris 3 ser., 6 (1851): 497–502Google Scholar; Busson, H. , La religion des classiques (1660–1685), (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948)Google Scholar; Vartanian, A. , Diderot and Descartes: A Study of Scientific Naturalism in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; La Mettrie’s L’homme machine. A Study in the Origins of an Idea, ed. Vartanian, A. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Spink, J. S. , French Free–Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (New York: Greenwood Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Roger, J. , Les sciences de la vie dans la pensée française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971)Google Scholar; Plantefol, L. , “Guillaume Lamy,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 7, 1973, ed. Gillespie, C. C. , 611–3Google Scholar; Landucci, S. , “Epicureismo e antifinalismo in Guillaume Lamy,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 33 (1978): 153–67Google Scholar; Marcialis, M. T. , “Filosofia e medicina. Nota su Guillame Lamy,” in Studi di filosofia e storia della cultura (Sassari: Pubblicazioni dell’Istituto di Filosofia dell’Università di Cagliari, 1978)Google Scholar; Thomson, A. , “Guillaume Lamy et l’âme materielle,” Le Matérialisme des Lumières: Dix–huitième siècle 24 (1992): 63–71Google Scholar; Matton, S. , “Raison et foi chez Guillaume Lamy. Réflexions sur le matérialisme d’un médecin gassendiste du XVIIème siècle,” Corpus 14 (1992): 171–98Google Scholar, reprinted in Trois médecins philosophes du XVIIe siècle (Genève: Slatkine, 2004); Mothu, A. , “Guillaume Lamy,” in Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, vol. 3, ed. Mattei, J.–F. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992)Google Scholar; Mothu, A. , “La mort de Guillaume Lamy,” La lettre clandestine 2 (1993)Google Scholar; Kors, A. C. , “Monsters and the Problem of Naturalism in French Thought,” Eighteenth–Century Life 21 (1997): 23–47Google Scholar; Minerbi Belgrado, A. , introduction to Lamy, G. , Discours anatomiques – Explications méchanique et physique des fonctions de l’âme sensitive (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 5–32Google Scholar. It is also interesting to note the bewildering absence of Lamy from some of the fundamental texts on the period. See, for example, Israel, J. , Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar and more recently, Wilson, C. , Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Busson, Henri , La religion des classiques (1660–1685) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 69Google Scholar.

7 For a detailed list of these revisions, see Matton (n. 5) in Trois médecins philosophes, 114–6.

8 Aëtius, De placitis philosophorum, 1.25.4, ed. Diels Doxographi, 321.

9 See Salem, Jean , L’atomisme antique. Démocrite, Épicure, Lucrèce (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1997)Google Scholar. On the automaton see Boisacq, Émile , Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: étudiée dans ses rapports avec les autres langues Indo–européennes (Heidelberg: C. Winter; Paris: Klincksieck, 1938)Google Scholar and Prellwitz, Walter , Etymologisches Wörtebuch der griechischen sprache (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1905)Google Scholar.

10 Aristotle, Physics, 2.6, 197 b 17–22.

11 Ibid., 26–8.

12 Ibid., 28–32.See Chantraine, , Dictionnaire étimologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 672Google Scholar: “[De mate] l’adverbe maten (accusatif), ‘en vain, sans raison, faussement’. … Verbe dénom. Mateo ‘être vain, sans effet, échouer’.” Cf. also Diana Quarantotto, Causa finale, sostanza, essenza in Aristotele (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2005). Curiously enough, as Salem notes, the same word— automaton—is generally translated as “the spontaneous” in Hippocratic texts and as “chance” in the Aristotelian ones. Cf. Salem, 26–7.

13 Galen, De usu partium, 3.10.

14 Lactantius, De opificio Dei, 6.

15 De Angelis, Enrico , La critica del finalismo nella cultura cartesiana. Contributi per una ricerca (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1967)Google Scholar.

16 See Tocanne, Bernard , L’idée de nature en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle. Contribution à l’histoire de la pensée classique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978)Google Scholar and Secada, Jorge , Cartesian Metaphysics: The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Bloch, O. , La philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, Matérialisme et Métaphysique (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 433Google Scholar. See also LoLordo, Antonia , Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

18 See P. Gassendi, Physica, part 2 of Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia (Lyon: 1658) and F. Frommann and Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 1964; Du princip efficient, c’est–à–dire des causes des choses. Syntagma philosophicum. Physique, section I, Livre 4, introduction et notes par S. Taussig (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Disquisitio metaphysica seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa. Recherches métaphysiques, ou doutes et instances contre la métaphysique de R. Descartes et ses réponses, doute I, inst. II, ed. B. Rochot, (Paris: Vrin, 1962). On Gassendi’s critique of Descartes, see LoLordo, Antonia , “’Descartes’ One Rule of Logic’: Gassendi’s Critique of the Doctrine of Clear and Distinct Perception,” British Journal for the History Philosophy 13 (2005): 51–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Instance 2, in Disquisitio metaphysica (n. 18).

20 To put Gassendi’s Epicureanism and atomism in a proper perspective, see especially Osler, M. , Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Ransome Johnson, M. , “Was Gassendi an Epicurean?,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 20 (2003): 339–60Google Scholar.

21 See as an example Malebranche, Entretiens sur la métaphysique, 10.3.

22 Lamy, Guillaume , Discours anatomiques (Rouen: Jean Lucas, 1675), 12Google Scholar. I cite from the original edition of Lamy. For the modern reprint of the Discours and the Explication méchanique, see the version edited by Anna Minerbi Belgrado (Paris: Universitas; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996).

23 Lamy, Guillaume , De principiis rerum (Paris: Petrum Le Monnier, 1679), 291Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., 287.

25 See Landucci, “Epicureismo e antifinalismo in Guillaume Lamy” (n. 5).

26 In his Trois médecins philosophes (n. 5), Matton structures his analysis around Lamy’s relationship with faith and his direct comments on religion. Matton’s erudite analysis follows on his criticism of Henri Busson’s previous interpretation, which maintained that Lamy’s professions of faith are a superficial homage to orthodoxy and a means for asserting—in the libertine perspective of double truths—both respect for the church but also individual freedom of thought at the same time. Matton decides instead to take seriously Lamy’s professions of faith and his explicit subordination of the truth of reason to the truth of faith. What emerges from this is an “Epicurean–Fideist” Lamy, whose deep materialistic and mechanistic convictions would be rigidly subordinated to the absolute inaccessibility to the human mind of God and his “ends.” Thus, according to Matton, Lamy’s position is not that far from Descartes’s. Now, although an author’s statements, as opposed to those of his commentators, should always be taken seriously, I am certain that Lamy’s negation of final causes is truly the theoretical cornerstone of his thought. This is the case well before his more or less sincere professions of faith, which lack substance and are expressed in a banal form, quite in line with the technique of a certain type of libertinism. Lamy is neither Cartesian nor proto–Fideist in these instances, and it is for this reason that his radical materialism takes on such importance in the context of his contemporary scene.

27 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 21.

28 According to Minerbi Belgrado, Lamy’s argument at this point is “quelque peu hâtif ou incomplet,” since the correspondence between a given series of numbers and a precise species is hardly obvious. Minerbi Belgrado rightly points out that this argument may derive from de Bergerac, Cyrano (L’Autre monde ou les Etats et empires de la lune et du soleil [Paris: F. Lachèvre, n. d.]Google Scholar, while underlining at the same time that a precise Lucretian cast is missing from this text. In Lucretius, in fact—especially in 5.419–431—more room is given to the question of “time”: since the number is finite, it is the inexorable flow of time that will inevitably lead to the realization of a precise combination. Although it is true that, on the one hand, Lamy does not obsequiously follow Lucretius’s text, it is also true that his interest at this point in his Discours is focused on another issue. His aim is to “evoke” the argument of chance as a concept tied to the idea of necessity (therefore to the finite and precisely calculable number of possible combinations in the throw of the dice), specifically in an anti–Aristotelian function and in opposition to the absorption of chance into the idea of “in vain” (maten). The reason the argument on time does not appear in this context, it seems justified to conclude, is due not to some theoretical weakness, but because of a different aim that Lamy has set for himself in this part of his work. Chance understood as the lack of a purpose forms the theoretical and polemical object of Lamy’s thought, not the temporal and proto–evolutionist idea of the exhaustion of all possible combinations of matter. Lamy explains himself once again using this example of the dice in his Discours, in the septième réflexion.

29 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.512–522.

30 See Lucretius, De rerum natura, 4.825–857, who is responding in his turn to the Stoics; for this, compare the position of Balbo in Cicero’s De natura deorum, 1, II, 150.

31 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 23.

32 Ibid., Reflexions de Mr Lamy sur les objections qu’on luy a faites, 7, 143–4. See de Galatheau, P. , Dissertation touchant l’empire de l’homme sur tous les autres animaux (Paris: C. Barbin, 1676)Google Scholar.

33 Lamy, Guillaume , Explication mechanique et physique des fonctions de l’ame sensitive, ou des sens, des passions, et du mouvement volontaire (Paris: Lambert Roulland, 1681), 357–8Google Scholar. See also Kors (n. 5), 36.

34 See for example Hacking, Ian , The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)Google Scholar and Daston, Lorraine , Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

35 Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, 2.3. See J. S. Spink (n. 5), 95.

36 I believe that the conclusions A. Thomson comes to in Guillaume Lamy (n. 5), 70, namely that “Nous nous retrouvons donc, avec Lamy, en présence d’un médecin dans la tradition libertine, influencé par Gassendi et par l’épicurisme,” lack in much–needed nuances and complexity.

37 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 24.

38 Aristotle, Physics, 2.8, 198 b 31.

39 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.1024 and 5.187–93.

40 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, Reflexions, 7, 146.

41 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.181 and 5.199.

42 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 28.

43 This is the sense in which Lamy’s expression “the will of God” needs to be taken. It is not a matter of putting into question his good conscience, but rather of calling attention to the specific rhetorical strategy he uses to condemn finalism and providentialism, one that is remarkably similar to Spinoza’s. It is the superstitious and the finalists who, paradoxically, show themselves to be atheists when they assert what I would call the “weak” version of realitas as perfectione: humans could have had wings, monsters might not have existed, and the world might have had a different perfection. If this does not happen, it is because no higher will—whether knowable or not—is at work in the universe, which renders his position incompatible with any form of proto–Fideism. See once again contra S. Matton, Trois médecins philosophes (n. 5).

44 Lamy, Explications mécaniques, 369.

45 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 81.

46 Ibid., 82.

47 See also Kors (n.5), 36.

48 These passages from Lamy are even more important because they diverge from the common, traditionalist, bigoted opinion of many materialist philosophers who are not that distant from his positions. We may remember the opinions of J. de La Mettrie on masturbation, in Oeuvres philosophiques (Paris: Valade, 1774), vol. 2, 209; vol. 3, 223, which also, in other places, directly reproduces Lamy’s conclusions. See A. Thomson (n. 5), 66.

49 Lamy, Discours anatomiques, 83.

50 See Landucci (n. 5).

51 Malebranche, Traité de la nature et de la grâce, 3, Additions.

52 Malebranche, Conversations chrétiennes, 2.

53 See Olivier Bloch (n. 17), 436.