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3. The Mundane World

Brief Historical Introduction

Materialism is a view of nature that assumes nothing is real except matter and energy behaving according to set rules. Although there are subtle variations among various materialist philosophical schools, all of them share certain core assumptions, such as: the lack of any possible immaterial substances or agencies; the absence of any beginning or end to the material making up the universe; and the purely material basis of mind and consciousness. “This plenitude of being has no gaps, breaks, or noncontinuities. There is no immaterial or supernatural region zoned off from it […] Terrestrial life is an accidental realization of one [kind] of being possible to material substance […] Human thought and feeling […] consists of neural events that individually are as insensitive, unthinking, and unfeeling as all other basic chemical reactions….”34. Since the posited material is governed by rules and since it is the job of science to ascertain what those rules are, materialism and science are closely related (and occasionally confused with each other). The precise relationship between science and materialism is important for the present work, and we will examine it more carefully later.

Various strains of materialism have arisen in many times and cultures. To get a better sense of materialist thinking, let’s briefly examine five examples: materialism in Classical Antiquity, Enlightenment materialism, nineteenth century European materialism, the Carvaka school of materialism in India, and the American naturalist school in the twentieth century.

Among the Greek pre-Socratic philosophical speculations on nature, a version of materialism was prominent. The well-known “atoms” of Democritus were everlasting and indestructible, the only stuff from which all things are made. The forms and structures of the world, including ourselves and the gods, come and go as the atoms bundle together and fly apart; the atoms themselves remain unchanged. An important aspect of this thinking is that these atoms are governed by no kind of animating spirit or intelligence. They move, joining and sundering, only according to necessity, creating worlds and beings that pass away in time. Nothing else exists.

Democritus inherited these ideas from his teacher Leucippus, and the system was later incorporated into the broader philosophy of Epicurus. A more extensive formulation of the ideas is presented in the famous long poem by the Roman Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things). But this school of philosophy was later eclipsed by the schools of Plato and Aristotle, involving Ideas and Purposes. It’s all the more remarkable, then, what a modern-sounding ring the materialism of antiquity has, especially the idea that a deeper understanding of reality is to be found in the myriad motions of invisible particles. Just for this reason, we should also bear in mind the prescientific and highly speculative basis for the ideas, and the often wildly incorrect explanations of specific phenomena.

Materialist philosophies almost disappear in medieval Europe, reappearing in the Renaissance mixed both with Christianity and with the burgeoning new mechanical science. The works of Gassendi and of Hobbes are examples of this reappearance, which is part of a more general phenomenon that we’ll examine in more detail later, namely the desacralization of nature during and after the Scientific Revolution. For now, we’ll look briefly at a purely materialistic strain of thought that resulted from these beginnings after about a century elapsed, during the Enlightenment period. The erosion of clerical authority accompanied an increasingly secular intellectual culture. A new form of materialism was developed, based on two pillars: advancing scientific knowledge (to which it was only loosely related) and a clear commitment to atheism (which had a polemical dimension). This version of materialism is presented in d’Holbach’s The System of Nature. The atheism that had been latent in the materialism of antiquity now becomes a more overt and important point. Meanwhile, the link with science, though largely rhetorical rather than substantive, is an important innovation that continues on (in some sense) to the present day.

This association of materialism with science is even more strongly expressed in the writings of nineteenth century European (mostly German) materialists, such as Vogt, Moleschott, and Buechner. The rise of this materialist movement was driven in part by a reaction to the dominance of romantic and idealist philosophy and in part by the dramatic progress made in the sciences around this time. Two major scientific advances were particularly influential: the development of the principle of the conservation of energy and the explanation of the origin of species by natural selection. Energy conservation is fully consistent with the contention of materialism that nothing in the material universe is ever lost or gained, that the original uncreated material substance is only transformed. Natural selection, on the other hand, enabled thinkers to dispense with the previously perceived need for immaterial influences in the formation of living things. Buechner’s popular exposition, Force and Matter, was very widely read for decades, serving both as a vehicle to disseminate scientific knowledge and as a materialist manifesto. Interestingly, the promulgators of this strain of materialism were mostly scientists by discipline, not philosophers.

Materialism has not, however, merely been a Western philosophical tradition. Over two millennia ago, a materialistic philosophy known as the Carvaka school existed in India. Holding a doctrine called Lokayata, this school was a rival to the idealist and intuition-based Hindu schools of philosophy, in which the spiritual destiny of humans is of prime importance. In contrast, the Lokayata proclaimed “that only this world exists and there is no beyond. There is no future life. Perception is the only source of knowledge; what is not perceived does not exist. […] The soul is only the body qualified by intelligence. It has no existence apart from the body.”35 Though the Carvaka enjoyed significant popularity at various times and places, it has in general been a minor influence in Indian philosophy, which has heavily emphasized introspection, the spiritual, a synthetic approach to religious tradition, and an aim toward non-attachment to worldly values. On the other hand, materialist tracts, featuring now the influence of Western science, were published in India during the twentieth century.

Our last topic here is also from the twentieth century, namely the American naturalist movement. The naturalists, represented by such thinkers as Dewey, Santayana, and Woodbridge, have been an important influence in intellectual culture. Their fundamental assumption is that all real phenomena and entities are part of an empirically perceptible natural order, and hence amenable to analysis along basically scientific lines. They are clearly materialists in the sense that they reject the reality of immaterial and transcendent beings and concepts (such as Platonic Ideas, or God and the human soul as conceived by many religions), but they are distinguished from other schools of materialism in several ways. For example, the American naturalists are not reductionist in their thinking; it is not their program to try to explain all things in terms of irreducible particles’ behavior, and they don’t necessarily assume this is possible. Also, the naturalists accept religion and a spiritual dimension of life (along with art, ethics, and so on) as real and important subjects for inquiry. Ultimately, however, their inquiry must be grounded in and limited by their fundamental assumption, which is materialistic in character.

Materialism and Science

Materialism as a philosophical position thus entails certain basic assumptions: matter (in a broad sense that includes both matter and energy) constitutes all that there is; nothing immaterial (including any possible spiritual order of reality) exists; as a corollary, only that which is accessible to the senses (and their extension through instrumentation) is real. This last point is important, because it connects materialism to science, since science makes the same restriction in its allowable subjects for discourse. We need to explore this relationship between science and materialism more deeply, but first we must clear up several points of nomenclature.

There is no consistency among different writers in their usage of the terms materialism, naturalism, and physicalism. Though sometimes distinguished by fine definitional differences, these terms are often used interchangeably in the literature. Since it appears to me that the use of any of these terms would satisfy the three basic assumptions just listed, my custom will be to use materialism as a broad concept that includes the basic meanings of the other two terms.

Some writers, however, restrict materialism to include only reductionist explanations of phenomena. There is no legitimate reason that I can see for this restriction. Whatever the merits or failures of reductionism as a philosophical doctrine, it is independent of our choice concerning a materialistic metaphysics; holism and emergence are equally consistent with the assumptions of materialism as defined above (not to mention being important in certain areas of modern science). Likewise, materialism is often assumed to imply determinism, but this usage is merely a relic of nineteenth century scientific thought. A strictly deterministic interpretation of phenomena is belied by both non-linear dynamics and quantum theory. Obviously, I will make none of these restrictions in the meaning of materialism used here.

There is also sometimes confusion between positivism and materialism, because positivism demands the elimination of unobservable entities, which would include the immaterial entities disallowed also by materialism. The two positions are not identical, however. Perfectly materialistic concepts might well be rejected by positivism if they cannot be tied directly to some empirical consequence (e.g. Mach’s rejection of atoms). On the other hand, later versions of positivism (in order to avoid being criticized for making unjustified ontological claims) were carefully restricted to the logical analysis of language. Hence, later positivists would avoid making any explicit claims about a materialistic (or any other) basis for reality, the question being undecidable (and uninteresting) based on their philosophy. Positivism and materialism are indeed sympathetic to one another, but neither one actually implies the other.

This brings us face to face with our crucial question: how are science and materialism related to each other? That they are related is quite clear, similar in a sense to the assertion that positivism and materialism are related. “All scientists are formal materialists in so far as their philosophies can be deduced from their behavior.”36 In a broad sense, the mission of science is to study the properties of matter; if anything else has any claim to be real, then that lies outside the domain of science. But for this very reason, we can’t legitimately claim that science implies some warrant for a claim of materialism. “If we take materialism in its nontrivial meaning, as the philosophical doctrine that denies the existence of nonmaterial realities, neither empirical science nor epistemology has anything to say about this. The reason is precisely because empirical science concentrates on the study of the material world and it makes no sense to derive from it assertions about spiritual realities. To interpret this as the ‘ontology of science’ is also meaningless.”37 The logic here seems very persuasive: surely we can’t draw any conclusions from science about questions that are not within the purview of what science studies. This logic is correct, but oversimplified. Although the validity of materialism cannot be asserted based on any scientific findings, it is nevertheless true that science proceeds (methodologically) by implicitly presupposing that a materialistic worldview is correct. The illogic of making any materialist ontological claims based on this is beside the point; the relationship between materialism and science is deeply embedded in a thinking process, not a logical claim.

This relationship can be exploited by proponents of materialism who fully understand the logical issues. “Conceding that materialist philosophy as a whole is no more scientifically provable than its competitors, [Buechner] argues for its relatively greater plausibility on grounds of the greater conformity of its approach to reality with that of science.”38 Once this reasoning is accepted, the enormous success of science as an explanatory methodology and as a cultural influence may well incline many towards materialism, even those who nominally belong to some religious faith. Equally important, those of us who value science highly find ourselves, while doing science, in an ontologically comfortable materialist world even if we dispute the validity of materialism on other grounds. To repeat, we are not necessarily saved from this problem by the strictly logical compatibility of science as such with the philosophical rejection of materialism. I will argue that the solution to the problem lies elsewhere.

Materialism and Spirit

The type of materialism that we have been discussing so far does not attribute any properties to matter that are not discoverable by science. For this reason, I will call (in conformance with standard usage) this type of materialism “scientific materialism” and generally use the terms (with and without modifier) synonymously. However, it is possible to adopt a broader conception of the properties of matter that includes spiritual aspects, and this has been done by many thinkers from the ancient Greeks down to the present day. “In this conception spirit is chief among the internal properties of matter, and may accordingly be defined as the dominant inner quality of a material thing.”39 Such thinking avoids the problems of dualism while acknowledging the reality of a spiritual order by having the spiritual reality inherent in matter itself, as opposed to a lifeless and inert matter animated by a separate and immaterial spirit. Scientific materialism, of course, also avoids dualism by eliminating spirit altogether. The issues surrounding this view of matter as fundamentally imbued with mind and spirit, along with its relationship to science and to immaterial being, will be more carefully analyzed in due course. For now, I merely wish to maintain that in order to avoid terminological confusion such thinking ought not to be called materialism. In the present work, at any rate, “materialism” will always mean scientific materialism as we’ve defined it here. This scientific materialism is what I am calling the mundane view of nature.

This brings us to one last question: is an outlook of scientific materialism compatible with religion? If we restrict the scope of religion to ethical guidance or to personal meaning that we project onto the world, then the answer is clearly yes. This was essentially the position taken by the American naturalists. However, if we ascribe serious ontological reality to a transcendent ground of Being, for example, then our beliefs can no longer remain compatible with scientific materialism. These beliefs can certainly be compatible with science as such, but given the proposed linkage between materialism and science there is still a significant problem to resolve. A materialist worldview does not conflict with our feeling that nature is sacred, but rather with sacredness being a genuine attribute of nature itself.