Blogosophy

MaterialismWhen ordinary folks say "materialism"

Materialism

When ordinary folks say "materialism" they mean the desire for wealth and material goods, but when philosophers say "materialism" they mean the doctrine that matter is the only reality. The ordinary usage might be because of an implicit intuituion that if matter is all there is, then it's only sensible to regard accumulation of material things as the greatest or only good. Accepting materialism as a doctrine, though, doesn't necessarily commit you to the position that concepts like love and beauty have no meaning, any more than it commits you to the position that the concept of a storm isn't meaningful because only air and water molecules are real. A materialist might say that they are real, but only insofar as their interpretation rests ultimately on facts about the material world. Materialism is usually understood as being in contrast with idealism, which holds that only ideas are real and that matter is an illusion (Platonic idealism is a form of this).

According to a materialist, for instance, something is beautiful because of the way that the real physical object causes certain patterns of sensations in our sense organs which cause physical changes in our brain that we experience as a certain kind of pleasure which we call "beauty" (leaving aside for a moment the question as to just what the hell we mean when we say "experience" in that sentence, or indeed what we mean by "we", concepts which philosophers have argued are not without their problems). An idealist would maintain that something is beautiful because it possesses the objective immaterial property of beauty, or that a physical form is beautiful insofar as approximates the perfect ideal form, and that's all there is to it. Our sense organs and all that other crap, insofar as they exist at all, are just there to allow us to more-or-less dimly apprehend the existence of that property.

The above example, by the way, is just one kind of materialist/idealist split, and not all materialists and idealists would endorse it even as a gross simplification of their views. In particular, the idea that beauty is an ideal property is called Aesthetic Idealism, and one could be an idealist without being an aesthetic idealist in that one believes in the existence of certain immaterial forms, ideals, or ideas without counting beauty among them. I think it's fair to say, though, that nobody who called herself a materialist would accept that beauty is a real thing that has a metaphysical existence unconnected to the material world.

Epicurus and Materialism

Epicurus was a materialist: he held that Platonic forms didn't really exist, and everything was made up of small indivisible bits of matter called atoms moving through empty space. In this he was following Democritus, although unlike Democritus he believed that individual atoms had weight, size and shape, and that properties of objects like sweetness and color weren't just "conventions" but actual properties caused by the differing configurations and properties of atoms, and that atoms sometimes moved about randomly.

It is tempting for people of a certain point of view (I call it the "Silly Ancients" school of thought) to think that any resemblance between views such as Epicurus's and modern physics to be purely coincidental, and exaggerated by taking the term "atom" directly from Democritus, but I think that they underestimate the power of reason to understand the natural world. Epicurus had rational reasons for all of these beliefs, and to the extent that we know his arguments (much of which, including his treatises on physics, have been lost) they still seem logically sound, although sometimes based on premises which we now know (but he could not have) to be false. For example, Epicurus reasoned that the cosmos must be infinite, since if it wasn't you could walk up to the boundary, stick your fist beyond it and the cosmos would have a new outermost edge--and this process could be repeated ad infinitum. If, as we now suspect, the universe is finite it's not because there's a big wall at the edge (a la a certain Star Trek movie), but because space folds back on itself in a higher dimension so that no matter what direction you go you will eventually return to your starting point; I'm inclined to forgive Epicurus for not spotting that possibility.

It's also tempting for some people to make too much of the similarities (the "Dancing WuLi" school of thought), and pretend that everything we now believe was prefigured in some pre-modern viewpoint somewhere and sometime and we are only now rediscovering their wisdom, but there were definitely things that Epicurus was wrong about. Atoms, for instance, do not have a tendency to fall straight downward at uniform velocity forever, and in this Epicurus was wrong. However, and I think this is the important point, it seems clear that not only would Epicurus understand and probably accept our reasons for believing otherwise if they were explained to him, it seems likely that if he had access to our data he would arrive at the same conclusions that we do. The reason he believed that all naturally atoms travelled downward wasn't any a priori commitment, but a simple empirical observation that objects tend to fall. Since atoms must be moving (or else how would macroscopic bodies form and come apart again?) it's reasonable to suppose atoms, too, tend to fall.

Materialism and Me

I think materialism is a perfectly reasonable position to start from: whatever else may or may not exist, the material world certainly seems to. Programs of radical skepticism are either self-defeating or unlivable (nobody actually behaves as if radical skepticism or solipsism were true, especially in the act of defending it, so why should the burden of proof fall upon skepticism's opponents?), and while I'm not entirely out of sympathy with attempts to temporarily adopt a radically skeptical point of view with an aim towards constructing a logically sound basis for our intuitions about the existence of the material world starting from first principles, I'm not about to sit around and wait for that program to be satisfactorily completed. Justifying our belief about the existence of the material world is all very well, but if some particular justification fails that doesn't make us any less sure, and if an argument came to the opposite conclusion--that the world was completely illusory, most of us--myself included--would take that to be the reductio ad absurdam that disproved the argument. But if that's the case, then the apparent reality of the world is just the sort of primary fact upon which we are entitled to rely as a basis for further reasoning. At least, any counter-argument that starts out by denying it has a much tougher row to hoe than the argument that assumes it. Posted by joshua at May 15, 2003 12:06 PM