Physiologizing the Resurrection: Bonnet as Reader of Malebranche

In this contribution, I continue the conversations I began with Stephen Gaukroger on the role of Cartesianism role in the advent of modern anthropology. Drawing on one of his most recent works, the translation and critical edition of Charles Bonnet’s Analytical Essay on the Faculties of the Soul (1760), I show that Bonnet gradually finds in Malebranche a synchronic and diachronic form of cerebral holism, extending in an unprecedented way to the explanation of the physiological propagation of original sin. I then describe how he extends and radicalizes it. By mobilizing the biological theory of preformation, Bonnet founds a “physics of resurrection” that opens the way to the moral perfection of all organized beings in the universe. By dismissing theology to make restitution a philosophical dogma involving the natural relationship between souls and bodies, he also dismisses the arbitrariness of this perfection and inaugurates a new ecology.