Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization: The Maupertuis-Diderot Debate
Résumé
In his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés (originally published in Latin
in 1751 as Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, under the
pseudonym Dr Baumann), Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin
Academy of Sciences and a natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes
of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, described living minima which he termed
molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence.” Now, Maupertuis was a
Leibnizian of sorts; his molecules possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties, recalling
La Mettrie’s statement in L’Homme-Machine, that Leibnizians have “rather spiritualized
matter than materialized the soul.” But Maupertuis also debated this issue with
Diderot, who critiqued this theory in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation
de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living
minima, Diderot argues that these can only be ‘organizational’, i.e., properties of the
whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism.