qui - maria vita romeo

e other Mandeville: the origins of a scandalous thought. Mechanism, ecc. 63
portant to trace the changes that mark a different feeling or a diverse philosophical
trend into Mandeville’s thought, such as the conception of soul
and its relation to body. Recalling the second argumentative couple—philosophy
and medicine, soul and body, men and brutes—it is observable a
reduction of the early Cartesianism in favour of a materialism close to
Hobbes’ positions. e substantial distinction between soul and body stated
in the first writings, here, is limited and discussed. ere is a sort of
convergence of the immaterial substance on the material one and, with
that, a conjunction of men and brutes, so creating a flattening not only
quantitative—“res cogitans” is brought to “res extensa”—but also qualitative:
men are not (substantially) different from brutes. A textual passage
clearly testifies this transition.
Philopirio—the “Lover of Experience”—is Mandeville’s spokesman
and Misomedon his sceptical interlocutor. 41 Although this distinction can
be useful to identify the points of view, it must not bring to fix the characters’
roles and it must not always lead to consider the result of the Mandeville’s
thinking what Philopirio says. Conversely, this narrative solution
allows Mandeville to write and, in part, to assume some radical positions
that otherwise would have been the subject of a scandal. In other words,
this can allow him to embrace not easy philosophical and ontological positions
without facing of his responsibilities: for example, the devaluation
of the substance of soul. Probably it is not accidental that this theme is discussed
in the Treatise and in the second part of e Fable of the Bees: both
dialogues. Observing two passages of the Treatise, one from the 1711 and
the other from the 1730 edition, I would present the changes that led Mandeville
to discuss his early Cartesianism in favour of a Hobbesian materialism,
which opens the way to physiological naturalism. More exactly, the
mechanism related to the ontological distinction between soul and body is
reduced to the material dimension of the physiological functions. Into
these limits, mechanism is employed to give an internal explanation of the
same physiology—so of human nature and of nature tout court—about the
origins of thought and mind, formerly considered, from a Descartes’ point
of view, characteristics of soul.
41 Cf. footnote 28 and 39.