>>1773Sure. I've read 5 of their articles on La Mettrie so far. They all were very similar in that all of the described the biography of Mettrie, talking about how he published 'the human machine', the book his is today most known for, very early in his philosophical career. The human machine is a very radical early materialist text, arguing that everything originates out of matter, including the psyché. Afterwards he had to flee several times from different countries, until he was invited to the philosophers court of Frederic II. LSR now argues that the works he has written here are his actually interesting material, because works like 'The art of lust' are different from other enlightenment philosophers of his time in that they were nihilistic instead of mormative.
I haven't read those books yet (they are currently already borrowed out at my local library) but from what the LSR author describes La Mettrie saw the main factor that was keeping people from truely enjoying themselves (specifically their lust) was their own conscience, which was forced into them by their sorroundings through the transmission of social norms. However La Mettrie apparently also differentiated between a healthy, satisfying desire and a desire that's also influenced by the conscience, only that the lust derived from this desire is not satisfying, because it only exists as the destruction of the conscience and is therefore still tied to it. From this point on La Mettrie was basically hated by the philosophers of his time, because they felt the whole moral nihilism thing was bad optics for the enlightenment, so he got cancelled.
I guess the parallels to Stirner are quite obvious, and I'm really interested to read the actual works by La Mettrie himself, so it might take my time to read the next texts of the website.
I also read 2 stirner articles,the one about nietzsche knowing stirner and 'Die Negation des irrationalen Über-Ichs bei Stirner', or 'Stirner's negation of the irrational super-ego', which tried to interpret Stirner as an 'anarchist' 'pedagogue'. The idea here is that Stirners concept of 'Der Eigner' or 'the owner/unique' could be used as the groundwork for an education that doesn't have the implementation of certain values and norms into a child as it's goal, but the support of the child in developing itself into a unique one. If there is interest, I can go deeper here, but alot of this is similar to other secondery literature on Stirner which alot of people here might already know. The important point as fas as LSR goes is that this new form of raising children is essential in realising the project of the second enlightenment, and the both the traditional enlightenment theorists and modern educational science normative views are part of the reason the original enlightenment failed.