The Goal: a Science of Man

Abstract

Central to the aspirations of enlightened minds was the search for a true ‘science of man’. Different thinkers had different ideas of what this would involve. La Mettrie and other ‘materialists’ (those who denied the independent existence of ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’) hoped to develop a medico-scientific physiology of man understood as a delicate piece of machinery, or perhaps as just the most successful of the primates [95]. Some, such as Helvétius, thought it was the mechanisms of man’s thinking processes above all which needed to be investigated [46; 91]. Others, like the Italian Vico, believed man would best be understood by tracing the steps and stages of his emergence from some primitive condition, or state of nature — which some envisaged as a golden age and others saw as a level of bestial savagery [83]. Still others thought the key to a science of man lay in analysing the political and economic laws governing the interactions between the individual and society at large [69; 22].