Claude-Adrien Helvétius

French philosopher

• Born: January 26, 1715
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 26, 1771
• Place of death: Voré Estate, Collines des Perches, France

Helvétius was a materialist and sensualist philosophe who patronized many of the French Enlightenment’s major figures and was part of the Encyclopedia project. His major work, De l’esprit, angered French authorities and intellectuals alike for its uncompromisingly Epicurean view of human knowledge and understanding.

Early Life

Claude-Adrien Helvétius (ehl-vays-yewhs) was born to the chief physician of the queen of France, Jean-Claude-Adrien, in Paris. After initial education by tutors, he enrolled in the famed Jesuit Collége Louis-le-Grand. Since his parents destined him for a career in public finance, they sent him to live with an uncle, who was the director of the tax farms in the region around Caen in Normandy.

At the age of twenty-three, Helvétius received a gift from the queen in the form of a tax farm, worth annual revenues of 100,000 livres. Over the next thirteen years he worked a number of regions and amassed a considerable fortune. Some of his time he spent at court, but he was on the road for most of each year. While in Paris, Hélvetius befriended many of the great intellectuals of the age, such as Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles-Pinot Duclos, and in the course of his business travels he visited them in their rural retreats. To some of these he provided pensions of several thousand pounds per year as a way of subsidizing their philosophical efforts. He also became an early subscriber and contributor to the Encyclopédie project, which was under the direction of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. As a result of his conversations and correspondence with these figures, and spurred by the success of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix (1748; The Spirit of the Laws, 1750), he developed a set of radical ideas and decided to leave public life to cultivate the life of the philosopher. He purchased a position as maître d’hôtel to the queen, which should have provided a kind of legal protection and assured him of her patronage.

In 1749, Helvétius bought an estate of seventy-five-hundred wooded and arable acres at Voré. He resigned his tax farm in 1751, married (on August 17), and established himself as a landed gentleman at Voré. His wife was Anne-Cathérine de Ligniville, a well-educated and liberal aristocrat with whom he had two children.

Life’s Work

Eight months of each year the couple attended to rural matters at Voré, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius spent much of his time reading and writing. The other four months they spent in Paris, where they held a salon each Tuesday evening at their townhouse at 18 rue Ste-Anne. They met with the likes of Montesqueiu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the other lights of Paris intellectual life, and the gathering gained the reputation for being the most radical of the Paris scene. Helvétius himself was an outspoken opponent of the Catholic Church and the state, and he employed little of the tact that allowed others to launch their critiques without fear.

He gathered his thoughts in a book called De l’esprit (1758), which he considered a companion piece to Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des loix. The work rapidly gained infamy as philosophes feared the official reaction it would provoke. The French authorities condemned its explicitly atheistic, materialistic, and hedonistic content. Though he shared most of his ideas with his fellow intellectuals, Helvétius stated these ideas in the baldest fashion, without regard for anyone’s sensibilities. Prince Louis expressed his outrage; both the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris condemned the work, as did the pope in a letter of January 31, 1759. On February 10, Parlement had the book publicly burned, along with similar works by Voltaire and other authors. The queen revoked Helvétius’s position at court, and even Voltaire publicly decried the work for its commonness and, where it provided new ideas, its obscurity.

On three separate occasions Helvétius was forced to recant the work, and he did so, though without conviction. The publication was also responsible for the closing down of the Encylcopédie project. Although he weathered the firestorm, Helvétius would not publish another work during his lifetime. In 1764 he paid a brief visit to England, where King George III pointedly welcomed the author but not the book. After this he spent about a year at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, dining often with the ruler, who also managed to distinguish his esteemed guest from his radical book. While there, Helvétius was inducted into the Berlin Academy and worked on a less “obscure” version of his work called De l’homme (A Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and His Education, 1777), published posthumously in 1773. His correspondence, numerous short works, and Les progrès de la raison dans la recherche du vrai (1775; the progress of reason in the search for truth) also were published shortly after his death. After his return to Paris he founded the Masonic lodge called The Sciences (1766). Even after his death in late 1771, his salon continued to attract the intellectual elite. Unlike so many intellectuals, he died a very wealthy man, leaving an estate worth 4,000,000 livres.

Helvétius’s thought as expressed in De l’esprit was in many ways right in the mainstream of French Enlightenment thinking. In many ways it was an updated form of Epicureanism, a Hellenistic philosophy that had been revived during the Renaissance. Helvétius’s version was directly influenced by the empiricism of John Locke and its application and development by the French thinker Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, especially in his Traité des sensations (1754; Condillac’s Treatise on Sensations, 1930). In brief, Epicureans believe that what a person knows, or can know, is attained through the senses alone: Individuals have no preexisting, inborn, or innate ideas, nor can a person learn from other faculties. This, of course, undermined Catholic teaching on both spiritual enlightenment and reliance on Church authority. As a materialist, Helvétius went further, adopting the modern form of the ancient Greek idea that all that exists must be made of matter, which is a clear denial of any “spiritual” world or entities, including a nonmaterial soul or spirit.

A person learns about the world by experiencing the world through the senses, and “human nature” is not an absolute but a construct composed of accumulated discrete experiences. The social (and political) environment and education—both formal and informal—create the person, and if these forces are reformed and directed properly, humankind can be transformed or even perfected. Some philosophes, however, were bothered by the radicality of Helvétius’s materialism, for if all human nature is constructed, from what source do human rights stem?

On a moral level, Helvétius reduced the concepts of good and bad to the sensations of pleasure and pain. Thus, the moral life consisted of pursuing physical pleasure and avoiding physical pain. This supported his unconventional hedonism, which virtually required sexual license. Social organization—itself a purely human construct—at its most fundamental is founded on this principle as well, though without the sex. The problem, of course, was reconciling self-interest and personal pleasure with the public interest. Here is where the public control of education became necessary. Properly focused education could shape experiences in such a way as to manipulate the young person to accept the public interest as his or her own. Laws, which inflicted pain for the commission of unapproved acts, would act similarly to shape behavior. Rousseau reacted to this assault on his “natural man” model by branding Helvétius, quite rightly, an atheist.

Helvétius branded as vile all forms of education and governance that shaped behavior to turn away from the true public interest and the pursuit of greatest liberty and pleasure. He linked the intellectual and even aesthetic worlds with the political, and he posited that any true “republic of letters” required a republican form of government. This kind of thinking would lead to political revolution as the radical response to social ills. It was no mere whim that led the revolutionary government in France to rename rue Ste-Anne, as rue Helvétius.

Significance

Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s ideas were in themselves far from novel or revolutionary, but what was revolutionary was his blunt expression of these ideas. In tearing away the veil he exposed the atheistic and materialistic foundations of much enlightened thinking, and he exposed the philosophes to the dangers of a repressive regime. Though heavily criticized in his own day, one may see his emphasis on individual happiness as the goal of a society reflected in Thomas Jefferson’s alteration of John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Helvétius’s works also had a major influence on the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and the ethical components of English utilitarian thought in the nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Cumming, I. Helvétius: His Life and Place in the History of Educational Thought. London: Routledge, 1955. Provides a biography and intellectual history of Helvétius and his philosophical materialism.

Grossman, Mordecai. The Philosophy of Helvétius: With Special Emphasis on the Educational Implications of Sensationalism. New York: AMS Press, 1972. Based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, originally published in 1926, though still a cogent discussion of Helvétius’s thought and its impact on behavioralism.

Helvétius, Claude-Adrien. De l’esprit: Or, Essays on the Mind. Sterling, Va.: Thoemmes, 2000. A reprint of the 1810 edition of Helvétius’s controversial work.

Smith, David Warner. Helvétius: A Study in Persecution. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. A study of French society’s reaction to De l’esprit and other expressions of Helvétius’s thought.