Every now and then I feel the roots of my study in Dutch literature. While studying today on the difference between reductionistic and holistic view on reality (in order to get a better understanding of complex systems), good old Julien Offray De La Mettrie came to my mind. If his name doesn’t sound very Dutch, that’s because he wasn’t Dutch. He was as French as his name. However, claiming an extreme materialistic and reductionist view, he had to flee from France. In 1745 you could still visit Holland if you had any deviant opinion that religious leaders considered dangerous, and more important: you could have your books printed. That’s why he lived in Leiden and that’s one of the reasons his book L’Homme machine entered my curriculum of Dutch literature. I never read the book. It was mentioned as an example of how the very productive reductionistic views of Newton and Descartes pervaded the thoughts at the time. In the book La Mettrie explained human beings as machines.
The whole idea of his book is a wonderful example of how a reductionist view can be right (human have some machine like properties, for instance the ability to lift weights) and utterly wrong at the same time. And he was dead serious about it. Of course his ideas where heavily influenced by the struggle for an atheist view on the world. And his comparison is not so much more idiot then the current opinion that our human mind is a ’sort of computer’ (a view both insulting to the human mind and to computers).
Not that I have an argument against reductionists per se. Newton was one of the superminds. He is considered by the Royal Society as the greatest scientists in history and therefore was rated over Einstein (because other than Einstein he was not only a huge theorist but a brilliant . His views where revolutionary. And I guess at the time the reductionist views where needed badly, given the predominant religious view on reality and science. On top of that, the view absolutely works brilliantly in the field of Newtons study. But I guess the reductionist view have their limits. And De La Mettrie surely went beyond. .
But as you can clearly see in his face, reductionists can have fun. He is supposed to have died because he indulged too much in the good things of life. I don’t want to keep this wonderful sentence from his Wikipedia Bio:
It is claimed that La Mettrie wanted to show either his power of glutony or his strong constitution by devouring a large quantity of pâte aux truffes. As a result, he developed a fever, became delirious, and died.
I would have liked to drink a pint with him before that happened.
(picture taken from the Wikipedia website)
Tags: reductionisic view, science