« Le libertinage est-il une conséquence nécessaire du matérialisme ? L’ontologie matérialiste face à l’éthique »

The materialism of La Mettrie and Diderot has been the object of some recent reevaluations, most of which focus on their conception of matter, and how this changes, notably, our idea of a predominantly mechanistic materialism in the period. Less attention has been paid to their conception of liberty, or conversely, their denial thereof. Indeed, of the typical, and strident objections to materialism in terms of human freedom, building on the usual view of materialism as a necropolis of ‘dead matter’, two core objections emerge: that materialism reduces humans to deterministic, passive, sets of atoms, and that it is an immoralism. In this paper I focus chiefly on the second claim, and turn to Diderot’s own objections to La Metttrie in this regard. Both philosophers share a large number of materialist tenets, but Diderot is upset by the ethical consequences La Mettrie draws. My aim is not to defend one or the other of their materialist approaches to ethics (and liberty) but to reflect on the aporias involved therein, in considering whether ‘libertinage’ is a necessary consequence of materialism.