Helvétius

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien (1715–71)

Helvétius was one of the most noteworthy and notorious figures of the French Enlightenment. In common with his fellow philosophes, he asserted that all philosophical discussions should be based on the empiricism of Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1689). But unlike Voltaire, d’Alembert, and the other members of ‘the party of humanity’, Helvétius took literally the notion that each person is a tabula rasa at birth – he boldly argued the case for unabashed environmental determinism. We are what our surroundings have made us, and nothing more.

Immediately after Helvétius published De l’Esprit in 1758, the Catholic authorities cited his book as definitive proof that the philosophes were out to destroy religion, throne, family, and all that is sacred. Only the struggle between court and parliament over control of censorship, along with his ties to Madame de Pompadour and the Duc de Choiseul, saved Helvétius. After suffering the indignity of three recantations, he decided upon posthumous publication of his second major work, De l’Homme (1773).

Not a single philosophe accepted Helvétius’ view that the mind is a completely passive recipient of data received through the senses; nor did any of his comrades second his constantly reiterated claim that all sensibility may be reduced to physical sensations. Some privately expressed their exasperation that Helvétius published so much that seemed to vindicate every charge the Church lodged against them: that they were materialists, advocates of free love, and champions of a scandalous hedonism. Nevertheless at least a few of the philosophes, after setting aside the philosophical suppositions of De l’Esprit, came to appreciate that the larger concern of Helvétius was with their own search for the social and political preconditions of an independent intelligentsia, the would-be agents of Enlightenment.

 

            1 Philosophy

An empiricist, a materialist, and a utilitarian, Helvétius was in every respect a son of the French Enlightenment, yet his fellow philosophes remained wary of his writings, which they regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of their own.

When Helvétius began his studies with the announcement that all the faculties of the human mind – memory, imagination, judgment, reason – can be reduced to sensation, he undoubtedly believed he was merely repeating what Condillac had set forth in his celebrated Treatise on Sensations (1754). Neither Condillac nor any of the philosophes had anything but praise for Locke’s attack on innate ideas (see Locke, J.). Where Locke went wrong, in Condillac’s estimation, was in his retention of the notion of innate mental faculties. Conducting one of the most memorable thought-experiments of the century, Condillac slowly brought a hypothetical statue-man to life, first by endowing it with one sense after another, then by showing how one sense comes to the aid of another, until a being emerges whose mind possesses all the higher mental faculties.

To the philosophes the Treatise on Sensations was a method of research; it provided the means to disprove all notions of innate ideas, especially as used by the Church to place its views beyond the reach of criticism. Alone among their numbers, and much to their dismay, Helvétius transformed Condillac’s method into a system of reductionist philosophy. No longer did the investigation end when painstaking analytical and genetic procedure slowly uncovered the hidden sensual roots of a given faculty of mind. Rather, the books of Helvétius begin with the dogmatic assertion that none of the faculties is anything more than the passive product of sense experience.

No support was forthcoming for the position staked out by Helvétius, not even – as the response of Diderot attests – from other materialists. Overwhelmingly in the eighteenth century, French materialists grounded their position in the newly emerging sciences of life. Sensitive matter, to Diderot, acts on its surroundings no less than the environment shapes matter. Where Helvétius denied the significance of organic constitution, Diderot believed that much of an individual’s character is given from the beginning, and will ultimately win out regardless of environmental circumstances. To Helvétius a new environment makes a new person; to Diderot criminals cannot be rehabilitated because it is impossible to override heredity and physical organization.

In ethics Helvétius was a hedonist and a utilitarian, so it is understandable that Bentham regarded De l’Esprit and De l’Homme as forerunners of his work, all the more so since on more than one occasion Helvétius uttered words virtually identical to Bentham’s formula of ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. But had Bentham taken a closer look, he might well have rejected the notion that Helvétius was his predecessor; for hedonism as understood by Bentham had only the slightest connection with sexual liberation and was in every respect the opposite of a heroic ethic. How shocked, then, Bentham would have been to realize that the primary objective of Helvétius was to recreate the heroic values of antiquity in the modern world, a goal the Frenchman sought to pursue through the lure of sexual rewards.

Surprisingly, it was to ancient Sparta that Helvétius looked for a model of a sexually liberated social existence. Previously Sparta had been regarded as the home of a repressive civic virtue, a city whose citizens were forced to be free, forced to live in accordance with the dictates of their ‘higher selves’. Self-denial and self-overcoming, a constant and painful effort to put the public good above private interest – these themes, long associated with Sparta, were sometimes admired by the philosophes but always rejected, because the virtue of Spartans sounded too much like the monkish virtue they despised. Altogether different was the Sparta depicted by Helvétius. Drawing upon Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, Helvétius conjured up a Sparta in which men eagerly engaged in noble deeds for their country because the greatest citizens were granted the sexual favours of the most beautiful women. ‘Lycurgus made love one of the principal springs of legislation’ (1758, II: 15); he understood that it is great passions that lead to great actions, and was wise enough to stir up grand emotions through the custom of having naked young women dance in front of youthful soldiers, praising the brave men and shaming the cowards.

All the philosophes agreed that the reverse side of denying original sin was an affirmation of the joys of sexuality. They also concurred that virtue and self-interest should not be set in opposition to one another; their shared view was that society should be so ordered that everyone has an interest in acting virtuously. However, it was one thing for Diderot to praise the free sexuality of Tahitians in an unpublished essay and quite another for Helvétius to publish and sign his name to an equally audacious proposal, and to imply, unlike Diderot, that his findings were directly applicable to the Europe of his day. The official Diderot, the public spokesman for the cause of enlightenment, was the author of The Natural Son (1757) and The Father of the Family (17??), two plays that endorsed conventional familial ideals in language that could not have been more exclamatory.

Diderot complained that Helvétius spent so much time attempting to prove that his kennelman, if placed in the proper environment, could have written De l’Esprit; he gasped in disbelief when he saw that Helvétius, in reducing everything to physical sensibility, was forever trying to explain the accomplishments of a genius in terms of copulation and defecation. Still, that did not prevent Diderot from placing De l’Esprit ‘among the great books of the century’.

What was it that Diderot and some of the other philosophes, for all their misgivings, admired in the writings of Helvétius? Above all, they gained a political education from his works; his conviction, that only through better legislation would humans ever have an interest in being virtuous, became theirs as well. ‘Morality is only a frivolous science unless blended with politics and legislation’, wrote Helvétius (1758, II: 15), ‘from which I conclude that, to be useful to the world, philosophers must consider objects from the viewpoint of the legislator’. Originally Diderot and many of the philosophes showed very little interest in forms of government; it was from Helvétius, a political thinker from the outset, that they learned how intimately their concerns about literature and the arts were tied to questions about politics.

2 Politics and the Arts

Both De l’Esprit and De l’Homme are primarily studies of the social situation of the gens de lettres, the intellectuals, under different political regimes. The maturity or childishness of the audience, its willingness or refusal to be instructed as well as entertained, the popularity of certain literary genres and the irrelevance of others, the inspiration or desperation of the writer – these matters and more hinge on the type of political regime that rules a country, argued Helvétius.

Helvétius adapted his study of the links between politics and the arts from Montesquieu. But before taking anything from the Spirit of the Laws (1748), Helvétius deleted Montesquieu’s chapters on climate. Why rule out in advance the possibility that the peoples of some parts of the world can ever hope to live under better conditions, inquired Helvétius, when political and social explanations suffice to account for their present predicament?

Although he rejected climate as a causal explanation, Helvétius kept intact the entirety of Montesquieu’s typology of political regimes, the division of governments into feudal monarchies, Oriental despotisms, and republics ancient and modern. Sparta, as we have seen, was the ancient republic most frequently cited by Helvétius; England, called by Montesquieu a ‘republic hiding under the form of a monarchy’, was the country Helvétius constantly alluded to when he wished to draw a contrast between the monarchy France was and the republic he desired it to be.

The constant complaint of Helvétius was that ‘our [French] mores and the form of our government do not permit us to deliver ourselves to strong passions’. Under monarchy, petty intrigue at court to enhance one’s reputation takes the place in politics that under a republic is filled by the ambition of citizens to win fame for doing great deeds for their country. Wherever monarchy is triumphant, there are subjects rather than citizens, and the socially best-placed of these subjects care only for their personal advantage and that of their family name. A good aristocratic father in France will use all his influence to secure a public office for his incompetent son. How different was the world of republican Rome wherein Brutus did not hesitate to sacrifice his sons for the sake of preserving the public good.

From top to bottom of the social scale Helvétius found nothing to admire and much to condemn in the France of his day. So downtrodden were the peasants, so dehumanized were they by the brutality of the nobles, that Helvétius deemed the life of savages preferable to that of the simple folk living in the French countryside. Nor, for that matter, was the existence of Parisians as admirable as foreign visitors were wont to believe. Beneath the glamour and brilliance of operas, dramas, and salons lay a disturbing human reality. To be successful in social life, Helvétius noted, a man must have a pliable character that assumes as many shapes as the number of mansions he visits. Perhaps it is no accident that it was shortly after the publication of De l’Esprit that Diderot penned a memorable depiction of a ‘man without character’, who had ‘no greater opposite than himself’, in Rameau’s Nephew (1762–74).

The novelty of Helvétius lies in his efforts to apply Montesquieu’s sociopolitical models to the study of literature and the arts. Each type of political regime, the despotic, the monarchical, and the republican, shapes culture in its own image, Helvétius believed. Montesquieu had hinted as much: he had gone so far as to suggest that satirical writings cutting the powerful down to size thrive in England because in that nation society no longer revolves around feudal privilege and legally sanctioned class hierarchy. It was left for Helvétius to convert Montesquieu’s passing suggestions into a systematic treatise on politics and the arts.

About Oriental despotism Helvétius had relatively little to say. He was willing, however, to risk a few statements on the subject of politics and the arts in the non-Western world. It was his contention that Oriental authors, if they ever told the truth, had to present their thoughts in coded form. ‘Under submission to arbitrary power,… it is certain that writers must insensibly contract the habit of thinking allegorically’ (1758, III: 29). Since the historians of despotic countries, unlike the poets, cannot hide behind a veil of allusions and symbols, their account of the past is inevitably a pack of tricks the living play on the dead.

For the most part Helvétius concentrates his energies on drawing a series of sharp contrasts between the vitality of the arts and letters in republican England and the waning of literary glory in monarchical France. Living in a nation that is not politically free, looking up to grands who are idle, spoiled, and vain, the French are ‘the most gallant, the most loveable, but the most frivolous people of Europe’ (1758, II: 20). Boileau, repeating Horace, had indicated that the calling of the writer is to instruct as well as to please; Helvétius, however, complained bitterly that the French, ‘by the form of our government, have less need of instruction than of amusement’ (1758, II: 20). Love affairs, flirtations, coquetry, changes of fashion in clothing, and other private matters, none capable of stirring great passions, are the concerns of monarchical subjects. One trivial preoccupation supplants another with remarkable rapidity in France because persons confined to the pettiness of private lives are readily bored. For years the explicit objective of the philosophes had been to mould the new phenomenon they referred to as ‘public opinion’; Helvétius’ response was to point out that a public exists only where there is a republic.

‘In London it is a merit to be instructed; in Paris it is ridiculous’ (1758, II: 20). Inevitably, then, the English writer is inspired, the French writer diminished, by the audience.

In a free state a man conceives the highest thoughts and can express them as vividly as they enter his mind. Such is not the case in monarchical states: in these countries the interest of certain corporations, that of various powerful individuals, and most of all a false and small politics, thwart the élans of genius.

(De l’Esprit, IV, ch. 4)

Helvétius was typically French in his belief that drama is the highest of the arts, and he was typical of his century in his conviction that the theatre of his day was inferior to that of the grand siècle. But he sounded a new note when he offered a political explanation of the decline of French drama. In republican England, he suggested, the grandeur of the tragic genre still holds sway; by contrast, in monarchical France the pettiness of comedy dominates the stage. Tragedies similar to those written by Corneille during a period of sedition and grand passions continue to be well received in England; but in France, beginning with Racine, the corrupted audience has become as indifferent to uplifting public themes as it is eager for love stories.

I say that in every country where the inhabitants have no part in the management of public affairs, where the words patrie and citoyen are rarely cited, one does not please the public except in representing on the stage passions agreeable to [private] individuals, such as those of love.

(De l’Esprit, II, ch. 19)

Romantic love makes us small; love of country enhances our stature, and there is no better way to promote great civic passion than through offering sexual rewards which satisfy the cravings of physical sensibility. Greek tragedies were as replete with civic lessons as they were devoid of the motif of romantic love. Modern playwrights may yet return to the model set by Sophocles, provided modern legislators precede them in copying the political strategies of Lycurgus. In the posthumous De l’Homme Helvétius proposed to convert France into a federation of thirty republics, each animated by civic passion.

3 Conclusion

One of the favourite topics of the philosophes was the question of how the intellectuals could become independent and influential voices for enlightenment in a social world based on privilege, wealth and patronage. It was Helvétius who convinced at least a few of the philosophes, especially those who remained outside the academies, that only a political solution would suffice. In a civic society writers will be inspired by an enlightened audience and rewarded for their creative efforts. Until the dawn of the new era, the best book will be the one that champions the republican cause.

Evidence of what some philosophes eventually borrowed from Helvétius, as well as what they chose to repudiate, may be found in the Système social of the Baron d’Holbach, published fifteen years after De l’Esprit and at virtually the same time as De l’Homme. Almost word for word Holbach repeated the arguments of Helvétius against dramas revolving around the theme of romantic love and in favour of tragedies modelled on those of ancient Greece. Again echoing Helvétius, Holbach complained that the French were a frivolous people, the women especially because they had been miseducated by erotic paintings and literature, in consequence of which the favourite pastime of the grands was adultery.

When it came to women Helvétius and Holbach could not have been more similar in their diagnosis, nor more different in their solutions. Holbach advocated that women withdraw from high society to the privacy of their families. Motherhood, fidelity, and a restoration of traditional familial virtues was his message. Only if women accept the sanctity of marriage will men recover from their socially induced corruption. Helvétius, in dramatic contrast, would abolish the remnants of feminine modesty so that ‘the favours of women, becoming more common, will appear less precious’ (1758, II: 20). Long ago Plato had made a similar suggestion, and Lycurgus – Helvétius believed – had transformed theory into practice.

Helvétius was not a great thinker, but he was surely one of the most daring writers of his age.