Materialism is a form of philosophical monism
which holds that matter is the fundamental
substance in nature, and that all things,
including mental aspects and consciousness,
are results of material interactions.
In Idealism, mind and consciousness are first-order
realities to which matter is subject and secondary.
In philosophical materialism the converse
is true.
Here mind and consciousness are by-products
or epiphenomena of material processes (the
biochemistry of the human brain and nervous
system, for example) without which they cannot
exist.
According to this doctrine the material creates
and determines consciousness, not vice versa.
Materialist theories are mainly divided into
three groups.
Naive materialism identifies the material
world with specific elements (e.g. the scheme
of the four elements—fire, air, water and
earth—devised by the pre-Socratic philosopher
Empedocles).
Metaphysical materialism examines separated
parts of the world in a static, isolated environment.
Dialectical materialism adapts the Hegelian
dialectic for materialism, examining parts
of the world in relation to each other within
a dynamic environment.
Materialism is closely related to physicalism,
the view that all that exists is ultimately
physical.
Philosophical physicalism has evolved from
materialism with the discoveries of the physical
sciences to incorporate more sophisticated
notions of physicality than mere ordinary
matter, such as: spacetime, physical energies
and forces, dark matter, and so on.
Thus the term "physicalism" is preferred over
"materialism" by some, while others use the
terms as if they are synonymous.
Philosophies contradictory to materialism
or physicalism include idealism, pluralism,
dualism, and other forms of monism.
== Overview ==
Materialism belongs to the class of monist
ontology.
As such, it is different from ontological
theories based on dualism or pluralism.
For singular explanations of the phenomenal
reality, materialism would be in contrast
to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism.
Despite the large number of philosophical
schools and subtle nuances between many, all
philosophies are said to fall into one of
two primary categories, which are defined
in contrast to each other: idealism and materialism.
The basic proposition of these two categories
pertains to the nature of reality, and the
primary distinction between them is the way
they answer two fundamental questions: "what
does reality consist of?" and "how does it
originate?"
To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects
of mind (ideas) are primary, and matter secondary.
To materialists, matter is primary, and mind
or spirit or ideas are secondary, the product
of matter acting upon matter.The materialist
view is perhaps best understood in its opposition
to the doctrines of immaterial substance applied
to the mind historically, famously by René
Descartes.
However, by itself materialism says nothing
about how material substance should be characterized.
In practice, it is frequently assimilated
to one variety of physicalism or another.
Materialism is often associated with reductionism,
according to which the objects or phenomena
individuated at one level of description,
if they are genuine, must be explicable in
terms of the objects or phenomena at some
other level of description—typically, at
a more reduced level.
Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects
this notion, however, taking the material
constitution of all particulars to be consistent
with the existence of real objects, properties,
or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically
used for the basic material constituents.
Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view,
according to which empirical laws and explanations
in "special sciences" like psychology or geology
are invisible from the perspective of basic
physics.
A lot of vigorous literature has grown up
around the relation between these views.
Modern philosophical materialists extend the
definition of other scientifically observable
entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature
of space.
However philosophers such as Mary Midgley
suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive
and poorly defined.Materialism typically contrasts
with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, vitalism,
and dual-aspect monism.
Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked
to the concept of determinism, as espoused
by Enlightenment thinkers.
During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels extended the concept of materialism
to elaborate a materialist conception of history
centered on the roughly empirical world of
human activity (practice, including labor)
and the institutions created, reproduced,
or destroyed by that activity (see materialist
conception of history).
Later Marxists, such as Vladimir Lenin and
Leon Trotsky developed the notion of dialectical
materialism which characterized later Marxist
philosophy and method.
== History ==
=== Axial Age ===
Materialism developed, possibly independently,
in several geographically separated regions
of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed
the Axial Age (c. 800–200 BC).
In ancient Indian philosophy, materialism
developed around 600 BC with the works of
Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada, and the
proponents of the Cārvāka school of philosophy.
Kanada became one of the early proponents
of atomism.
The Nyaya–Vaisesika school (c. 600 BC – 100
BC) developed one of the earliest forms of
atomism, though their proofs of God and their
positing that consciousness was not material
precludes labelling them as materialists.
Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued
the atomic tradition.
Ancient Greek atomists like Leucippus, Democritus,
and Epicurus prefigure later materialists.
The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
(99 BC – c. 55 BC) reflects the mechanistic
philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.
According to this view, all that exists is
matter and void, and all phenomena result
from different motions and conglomerations
of base material particles called "atoms"
(literally: "indivisibles").
De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations
for phenomena such as erosion, evaporation,
wind, and sound.
Famous principles like "nothing can touch
body but body" first appeared in the works
of Lucretius.
Democritus and Epicurus however did not hold
to a monist ontology since they held to the
ontological separation of matter and space
i.e. space being "another kind" of being,
indicating that the definition of "materialism"
is wider than given scope for in this article.
=== Common Era ===
Wang Chong (27 – c. 100 AD) was a Chinese
thinker of the early Common Era said to be
a materialist.Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi
Bhatta (6th century) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha
("The upsetting of all principles") refuted
the Nyaya Sutra epistemology.
The materialistic Cārvāka philosophy appears
to have died out some time after 1400.
When Madhavacharya compiled Sarva-darśana-samgraha
(a digest of all philosophies) in the 14th
century, he had no Cārvāka/Lokāyata text
to quote from, or even refer to.In early 12th-century
al-Andalus, the Arabian philosopher, Ibn Tufail
(Abubacer), wrote discussions on materialism
in his philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan
(Philosophus Autodidactus), while vaguely
foreshadowing the idea of a historical materialism.
=== Modern philosophy ===
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Pierre Gassendi
(1592–1665) represented the materialist
tradition in opposition to the attempts of
René Descartes (1596–1650) to provide the
natural sciences with dualist foundations.
There followed the materialist and atheist
abbé Jean Meslier (1664–1729) and the works
of the French materialists: Julien Offray
de La Mettrie, the German-French Baron d'Holbach
(1723–1789), Denis Diderot (1713–1784),
and other French Enlightenment thinkers.
In England John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822)
insisted in seeing matter as endowed with
a moral dimension had a major impact on the
philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth
(1770–1850).
In late modern philosophy, German dialectical
materialist and atheist anthropologist Ludwig
Feuerbach would signal a new turn in materialism
through his book, The Essence of Christianity
(1841), which presented a humanist account
of religion as the outward projection of man's
inward nature.
Another notable school of naturalist thought
that developed in the middle of the 19th century
was German materialism: members included Ludwig
Büchner, Jacob Moleschott, and Karl Vogt.Feuerbach's
materialism would later heavily influence
Karl Marx, who in the late 19th century elaborated
the concept of historical materialism, which
is the basis for what Marx and Engels outlined
as scientific socialism:
The materialist conception of history starts
from the proposition that the production of
the means to support human life and, next
to production, the exchange of things produced,
is the basis of all social structure; that
in every society that has appeared in history,
the manner in which wealth is distributed
and society divided into classes or orders
is dependent upon what is produced, how it
is produced, and how the products are exchanged.
From this point of view, the final causes
of all social changes and political revolutions
are to be sought, not in men's brains, not
in men's better insights into eternal truth
and justice, but in changes in the modes of
production and exchange.
They are to be sought, not in the philosophy,
but in the economics of each particular epoch.
Later, Vladimir Lenin outlined philosophical
materialism in his book Materialism and Empirio-criticism,
which connected the political conceptions
put forth by his opponents to their anti-materialist
philosophies.
Therein, Lenin attempted to answer questions
concerning matter, experience, sensations,
space and time, causality, and freedom.
=== Contemporary philosophy ===
==== Continental philosophy ====
Contemporary Continental philosopher Gilles
Deleuze has attempted to rework and strengthen
classical materialist ideas.
Contemporary theorists such as Manuel DeLanda,
working with this reinvigorated materialism,
have come to be classified as "new materialist"
in persuasion.
New materialism has now become its own specialized
subfield of knowledge, with courses being
offered on the topic at major universities,
as well as numerous conferences, edited collections,
and monographs devoted to it.
Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter (Duke UP,
2010) has been particularly instrumental in
bringing theories of monist ontology and vitalism
back into a critical theoretical fold dominated
by poststructuralist theories of language
and discourse.
Scholars such as Mel Y.
Chen and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, however, have
critiqued this body of new materialist literature
for its neglect in considering the materiality
of race and gender in particular.
Other scholars such as Hélene Vosters have
questioned whether there is anything particularly
"new" about this so-called "new materialism",
as Indigenous and other animist ontologies
have attested to what might be called the
"vibrancy of matter" for centuries.
==== Analytic philosophy ====
Contemporary analytic philosophers—e.g.,
Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald
Davidson, and Jerry Fodor—operate within
a broadly physicalist or scientific materialist
framework, producing rival accounts of how
best to accommodate mind, including functionalism,
anomalous monism, identity theory, and so
on.Scientific materialism is often synonymous
with, and has so far been described, as being
a reductive materialism.
In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland
have advocated a radically contrasting position
(at least, in regards to certain hypotheses);
eliminativist materialism holds that some
mental phenomena simply do not exist at all,
and that talk of those mental phenomena reflects
a totally spurious "folk psychology" and introspection
illusion.
That is, an eliminative materialist might
believe that a concept like "belief" simply
has no basis in fact—the way folk science
speaks of demon-caused illnesses would be
just one obvious example.
Reductive materialism being at one end of
a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts)
and eliminative materialism on the other (certain
theories will need to be eliminated in light
of new facts), Revisionary materialism is
somewhere in the middle.
== Defining matter ==
The nature and definition of matter—like
other key concepts in science and philosophy—have
occasioned much debate.
Is there a single kind of matter (hyle) which
everything is made of, or multiple kinds?
Is matter a continuous substance capable of
expressing multiple forms (hylomorphism),
or a number of discrete, unchanging constituents
(atomism)?
Does it have intrinsic properties (substance
theory), or is it lacking them (prima materia)?
One challenge to the traditional concept of
matter as tangible "stuff" came with the rise
of field physics in the 19th century.
Relativity shows that matter and energy (including
the spatially distributed energy of fields)
are interchangeable.
This enables the ontological view that energy
is prima materia and matter is one of its
forms.
On the other hand, the Standard Model of Particle
physics uses quantum field theory to describe
all interactions.
On this view it could be said that fields
are prima materia and the energy is a property
of the field.
According to the dominant cosmological model,
the Lambda-CDM model, less than 5% of the
universe's energy density is made up of the
"matter" described by the Standard Model of
Particle Physics, and the majority of the
universe is composed of dark matter and dark
energy—with little agreement amongst scientists
about what these are made of.With the advent
of quantum physics, some scientists believed
the concept of matter had merely changed,
while others believed the conventional position
could no longer be maintained.
For instance Werner Heisenberg said "The ontology
of materialism rested upon the illusion that
the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality'
of the world around us, can be extrapolated
into the atomic range.
This extrapolation, however, is impossible...
atoms are not things."
Likewise, some philosophers feel that these
dichotomies necessitate a switch from materialism
to physicalism.
Others use the terms "materialism" and "physicalism"
interchangeably.The concept of matter has
changed in response to new scientific discoveries.
Thus materialism has no definite content independent
of the particular theory of matter on which
it is based.
According to Noam Chomsky, any property can
be considered material, if one defines matter
such that it has that property.
== Physicalism ==
George Stack distinguishes between materialism
and physicalism: In the twentieth century,
physicalism has emerged out of positivism.
Physicalism restricts meaningful statements
to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable
or in principle verifiable.
It is an empirical hypothesis that is subject
to revision and, hence, lacks the dogmatic
stance of classical materialism.
Herbert Feigl defended physicalism in the
United States and consistently held that mental
states are brain states and that mental terms
have the same referent as physical terms.
The twentieth century has witnessed many materialist
theories of the mental, and much debate surrounding
them.
== Criticism and alternatives ==
=== From scientists ===
Rudolf Peierls, a physicist who played a major
role in the Manhattan Project, rejected materialism,
saying "The premise that you can describe
in terms of physics the whole function of
a human being...including knowledge and consciousness,
is untenable.
There is still something missing."Erwin Schrödinger
said "Consciousness cannot be accounted for
in physical terms.
For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.
It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything
else".Werner Heisenberg, who came up with
the uncertainty principle wrote "The ontology
of materialism rested upon the illusion that
the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality’
of the world around us, can be extrapolated
into the atomic range.
This extrapolation, however, is impossible…Atoms
are not things".
==== Quantum mechanics ====
Some 20th century physicists (such as Eugene
Wigner and Henry Stapp) and modern day physicists
and science writers—such as Paul Davies
and John Gribbin—have argued that materialism
has been disproven by certain scientific findings
in physics, such as quantum mechanics and
chaos theory.
In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their
book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of
which, "The Death of Materialism", contained
the following passage:
Then came our Quantum theory, which totally
transformed our image of matter.
The old assumption that the microscopic world
of atoms was simply a scaled-down version
of the everyday world had to be abandoned.
Newton's deterministic machine was replaced
by a shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of
waves and particles, governed by the laws
of chance, rather than the rigid rules of
causality.
An extension of the quantum theory goes beyond
even this; it paints a picture in which solid
matter dissolves away, to be replaced by weird
excitations and vibrations of invisible field
energy.
Quantum physics undermines materialism because
it reveals that matter has far less "substance"
than we might believe.
But another development goes even further
by demolishing Newton's image of matter as
inert lumps.
This development is the theory of chaos, which
has recently gained widespread attention.
==== Digital physics ====
Davies' and Gribbin's objections are shared
by proponents of digital physics who view
information rather than matter to be fundamental.
Famous physicist and proponent of digital
physics John Archibald Wheeler wrote "all
matter and all things physical are information-theoretic
in origin and this is a participatory universe."
Their objections were also shared by some
founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck,
who wrote:
As a man who has devoted his whole life to
the most clear headed science, to the study
of matter, I can tell you as a result of my
research about atoms this much: There is no
matter as such.
All matter originates and exists only by virtue
of a force which brings the particle of an
atom to vibration and holds this most minute
solar system of the atom together.
We must assume behind this force the existence
of a conscious and intelligent Mind.
This Mind is the matrix of all matter.
=== Religious and spiritual views ===
According to Constantin Gutberlet writing
in Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), materialism,
defined as "a philosophical system which regards
matter as the only reality in the world [...] denies
the existence of God and the soul".
In this view materialism could be perceived
incompatible with most world religions.
Materialism could be conflated with atheism.
However Friedrich Lange wrote in 1892 "Diderot
has not always in the Encyclopaedia expressed
his own individual opinion, but it is just
as true that at its commencement he had not
yet got as far as Atheism and Materialism".Most
of Hinduism and transcendentalism regards
all matter as an illusion called Maya, blinding
humans from knowing the truth.
Transcendental experiences like the perception
of Brahman are considered to destroy the illusion.Joseph
Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint
movement, taught: "There is no such thing
as immaterial matter.
All spirit is matter, but it is more fine
or pure, and can only be discerned by purer
eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies
are purified we shall see that it is all matter."
This spirit element is believed to always
have existed and to be co-eternal with God.
=== Philosophical objections ===
Kant argued against all three forms of materialism,
subjective idealism (which he contrasts with
his "transcendental idealism") and mind–body
dualism.
However, Kant also argues that change and
time require an enduring substrate, and does
so in connection with his refutation of idealism.
Postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers also
express a skepticism about any all-encompassing
metaphysical scheme.
Philosopher Mary Midgley, among others, argues
that materialism is a self-refuting idea,
at least in its eliminative form.
==== Idealisms ====
An argument for idealism, such as those of
Hegel and Berkeley, is ipso facto an argument
against materialism.
Matter can be argued to be redundant, as in
bundle theory, and mind-independent properties
can in turn be reduced to subjective percepts.
Berkeley presents an example of the latter
by pointing out that it is impossible to gather
direct evidence of matter, as there is no
direct experience of matter; all that is experienced
is perception, whether internal or external.
As such, the existence of matter can only
be assumed from the apparent (perceived) stability
of perceptions; it finds absolutely no evidence
in direct experience.
If matter and energy are seen as necessary
to explain the physical world, but incapable
of explaining mind, dualism results.
Emergence, holism, and process philosophy
seek to ameliorate the perceived shortcomings
of traditional (especially mechanistic) materialism
without abandoning materialism entirely.
=== Materialism as methodology ===
Some critics object to materialism as part
of an overly skeptical, narrow or reductivist
approach to theorizing, rather than to the
ontological claim that matter is the only
substance.
Particle physicist and Anglican theologian
John Polkinghorne objects to what he calls
promissory materialism—claims that materialistic
science will eventually succeed in explaining
phenomena it has not so far been able to explain.
Polkinghorne prefers "dual-aspect monism"
to materialism.Some scientific materialists
have been criticized, for example by Noam
Chomsky, for failing to provide clear definitions
for what constitutes matter, leaving the term
"materialism" without any definite meaning.
Chomsky also states that since the concept
of matter may be affected by new scientific
discoveries, as has happened in the past,
scientific materialists are being dogmatic
in assuming the opposite.
== See also ==
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Further reading ==
== External links ==
"Materialism".
Encyclopædia Britannica.
17 (11th ed.).
1911.
Stanford Encyclopedia:
Physicalism
Eliminative Materialism
Philosophical Materialism (by Richard C. Vitzthum)
from infidels.org
Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind on Materialism
from the University of Waterloo
Materialism, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Anthony
Grayling, Caroline Warman and Anthony O'Hear
(In Our Time, Apr. 24, 2008)
