Claude-Adrien Helvétius

Biography

Within the Encyclopédistes and materialist S of his century, Helvétius (Latinization of Schweitzer) develops a sensualism materialist, where the interest alone directs the judgments and regards the education as the principal component of the spirit of the human ones, which are, according to him, all likely to also inform itself.

It is strongly inspired by Locke, of which it very early reads the Essai on the human understanding . Its ideas on the constitution of the human spirit will be clearly influenced by it. He wants to exceed however any idea of God by defending a relative Athéisme. He regards the Croyance as a God and the heart as the result of our incapacity to include/understand the operation of the Nature, and sees in the Religion S, in particular the religion Catholique, a Despotisme having like drank only the maintenance of ignorance for a better exploitation of the men.

Often presented as a physiocrat (it assembles a manufacture, fact bankruptcy, then is success) and a philosopher Matérialiste, according to Michel Onfray Helvétius are more to however bring closer to a philosopher Nominaliste and deist. One finds in his texts several references to God and his existence: “ the supreme being ”, “ the eternal ”, “ the celestial legislator ” are expressions which return several times in its work Of the Man ; it defines even God in it as being “ the still unknown cause of the order and the movement ”. The reason of this amalgam is partly due to the political recovery of its texts, which it is a question of discrediting its work (Jésuites, Jansénistes, the Pape Clément XIII or royal capacity of Louis XV) or of making of it a thinker impossible to circumvent of the scientific Socialisme (Marxistes).

Thus, if Helvétius is anti-Christian, he does not deny the existence of a force in nature and it defends even the idea of a rather positive philosophy in this once purified religion of its fanaticism, superstitions and institutions.

He was in addition freemason and member of the Loge of the Last nine Sisters.

Philosophy

Helvétius was at the same time materialist and sensualist. The materialism is a philosophical system which does not admit other substance only the matter: he is opposed in particular to the religion and the concept of immaterial heart. According to sensualism, all our knowledge and our ideas rise from the feelings, of which they are only the increasingly complex combination. Sensualism is opposed to the spontaneous activity of the spirit.

Posterity

In addition to the posterity due to his philosophy, one can attach the history of the Idéologue S to Helvétius. Indeed, this philosophical group of the end of the conduit by Destutt de Tracy, met regularly at his wife Anne-Catherine Helvétius, with Cabanis which, as of 1778, had settled in the property of the inconsolable widow.

Principal works

Of the Spirit (1758) Text on line. Accepted by the censure at the time of the publication then put at the index.
Of the Man (posthumous, 1773). “What is remarkable in this book of Helvétius, it is the way in which he explains how the small events of the infantile life, and, in particular, the emotional factors of the family circle, can involve a major differentiation of the characters and intelligences. There it shows undoubtedly a precursor of the designs freudiennes. ” Jean Rostand, to 1952.Voir bibliographie.

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