Claude Adrien Helvétius facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Claude Adrien Helvétius
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| Born | 26 January 1715 |
| Died | 26 December 1771 (aged 56) Paris, France
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| Era | 18th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Utilitarianism French materialism |
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Main interests
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Ethics · Political philosophy |
Claude Adrien Helvétius (/hɛlˈviːʃəs/; French: [klod adʁijɛ̃ ɛlvesjys]; 26 January 1715 – 26 December 1771) was a French philosopher, freemason and littérateur.
Contents
Life
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; 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, 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. 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.
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.
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. For this he won the admiration of many of the philosophers.
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.
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
Psychological egoism
Helvétius' 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." 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.
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
"All men," Helvétius maintained, "have an equal disposition for understanding." 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."
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.
Omnipotence of education
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." "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.
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. His thinking can be described as unsystematic.
Influence
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".
Criticism
German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann vigorously opposed Helvétius's rationalistic doctrines.
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.
Poetry
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.
See also
In Spanish: Claude-Adrien Helvétius para niños
