MATERIALISM
- INTRODUCTION.
Materialism as a solution to the problem of being holds that physical
matter and its motion explains the nature of things and events; that is,
the kind of being that physical things have is the only real kind there
is; mind and/or consciousness is derived from matter and can be explained
in terms of the behavior of matter. Materialism thus holds that the
material has primacy over the spiritual or immaterial and is the opposite
of idealism, which asserts the primacy of the spiritual over the material.
The following are the three basic beliefs of materialism:
- All things and events, including life, consciousness, and mind, are
explained in terms of matter or energy, and represent different levels
of the origanization of them.
- Whatever happens is the effect of the operation of a uniform system
of physical laws to which all things, alive or not, are subject.
- There is no spiritual (immaterial) entity or God that is required to
explain the existence and nature of the world.
Materialism like idealism is a monistic system, that is, it seeks to
explain all things in terms of one kind of being. Monism does not mean
that there is only one being, one quantitatively, but there is one kind of
being, one qualitatively. As idealism holds that there is only one basic
kind of being that is mind, materialism holds that there is only one basic
kind of being that is matter. They both are opposed to the view the there
two (dualism) or more (pluralism) kinds of matter. Materialism denies that
their any dualism of mind and matter, of spiritual and material; it holds
that there is only one fundamental reality, matter or energy, and everything
is a form or aspect of that one kind of reality. Materialism also denies
any dualism of determinism and indeterminism or freedom; it holds that
there is one comprehensive system of physical laws that determines all things.
- HISTORY OF MATERIALISM.
- Greek Atomists.
The fifth century Greeks Leucippus (c. 440 B.C.) and Democritus
(460-370 B.C.) held that all things are combinations of tiny indivisible
particles called atoms [Greek, a, "not" + tomos,
"cutable", hence, "indivisible"] which move through empty space or
void according to a principle of necessity inherent in
them. The human mind is composed of particularly light and delicate
particles. They held that there are gods but they are physical beings
composed of very light atoms. The Roman philosopher Lucretius
(c. 99-55 B.C.) in his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things,
expressed atomism in Latin verse. He held that gods existed in the
interspaces between worlds, but they are self-sufficient beings and
have nothing do with humans, not interfering in human affairs; they
have no control over the laws of Nature and since worlds come into
being by natural causes, no creation is required.
- Thomas Hobbes
The English philosopher. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) held that all
reality is corporeal and is controlled by rigid causal laws. Everything is
explained in terms of bodies in motion. Causality is to be explained
in terms of the transmission of motion from one body to another by means
of physical contact. But since reality is causal, every event has its
sufficient reason; as part of a causally determined whole man too is
causally derermined. In the common sense meaning of freedom, man is not
free. The source of all human knowledge is in sensations, for, he
tells us in his book Leviathan, "there is no conception in a man's
mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon
the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original." The
object of perception is the motion which has gained entrance into our
minds. After the object is removed, or the eyes shut, the brain
retains an image of the thing seen, though more obscure. Memory and
imagination are, therefore, "decaying sense" which Hobbes calls
"phantasms" and all our thinking is made up of such material. Trains
of thought or mental discourse, "man talking to himself," in a man are
due to motions in his brain.
- Mechanism.
With development of machines, such as clocks, and the conception of a
world composed of physical bodies operating upon one another in regular
predictable patterns or laws, expressed in Newton's laws of motion and
of gravity, gave rise to veiw that all reality is one big machine.
Descartes, himself not a materialist, put forth the dictum that all
living substance other than man were machines. This was extended
to man by the 18th century French materialist, La Mettrie
(1709-1751), in his book titled Man a Machine. And if, then, man
is a mechanism, his psychical awareness and its modifications will be
the result of psychological causes. Furthermore the intelligence and
the mind will be a function of the character of the brain; the
character of a person will be determined by his physical environment.
The conception that all things are governed by a uniform system of
physical laws leads to the view that reality is a machine, called
mechanism, and its corollary determinism. Mechanism asserts the
primacy of a causal sequence called mechanical causality in contrast to
"free" or "purposive" causality. When one billard ball knocks another
into a certain position, we do not think that the rolling ball "chooses"
to act that way. Rather we think that the ball "must" act that way,
because of a force acting on it in certain direction. And further, we
could by prior calculation predict the behavior of the ball in advance,
if we knew the initial conditions. The astronomer LaPlace maintained
that an intellect which knew the initial conditions of all bodies in the
universe and the forces operating upon them could then calculate with
certainty, not only all the past states of the universe, but every
future state as well. Only the complexity of human behavior prevent
this being done to it, but in principle it could be done, because in the
principle, the materialist maintains, human behavior is essentially
deterministic.
- Evolutionary Materialism.
In the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution in the 19th century a wave
of materialist essays couched in the idiom of biology rather than
physics was published. Herbert Spencer (1820-1905) and Thomas Henry
Huxley (1825-1895) in England and Ernest Haeckel (1834-1919) in
Germany developed an evolutionary materialism that held that living forms,
including man, were the chance products of molecular combinations
in a vast process of cosmic evolution. Spencer extended the principle
biological evolution as a philosophical principle of evolution, defining
it as the passage from a "relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity"
to a relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity. Evolution is thus
the principle of increasing complexity. He identified the "more
complex" with "higher." He distinguished three forms of evolution:
inorganic evolution of the chemical elements, the earth, and the other
planets; organic evolution studied in the biological and psychological
sciences; and super-organic evolution of societies. Huxley believed
that all living forms are mechanical systems and mind and consciousness
is epiphenomenal, a by-product of the processes of the physical
organism. Consciousness is the effect of bodily processes and the
cause of nothing. Haeckel believed that all matter possessed
low-grade will and sensibility. This hylozoistic or panpsychic hypothesis
supported his naturalistic view of reality, which allowed him to view
human consciousness as a function of man's organism, facilitated by
the central nervous system. He held that "consciousness, thought, and
speculation" are "functions of the ganglionicc cells of the cortex of the
brain." In his famous book, The Riddle of the Universe, he sees
the world as an eternal evolution of substance, and man as part of that
evolution. The "law of substance," a law of mechanical causality,
established "the eternal persistence of matter and force, their
unvarying constancy through the entire universe." He considered the
laws of the conservation of matter and of energy as inseparable and as
parts of his law of substance. He referred to "great eternal iron
laws," and rejected all teleological views. The appearance of design
in the world, he held, is a result of natural selection rather than the
action of a purposive agency. Haeckel was especially opposed to
theological dualism, and carefully distinguished his view from both
materialistic and idealistic monisms. But because his specific
views were similar to 19th century materialism, his contemporaries
were inclined to classify him as a materialist.
- Dialectic Materialism
Many of the disciples of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770-
1831) included not only a religious and theologically oriented group
(the "right-wing" Hegelians) but also a left-wing group, sympathetic
to materialism and absorbed by social and political problems. This
group was the intellectual setting from which Karl Marx (1818-1883)
and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) developed the most powerful form of
modern materalism. This dialectic materialism became the offical philosophy
of the Soviet Union, as the result of the work of the Russian Marxist,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1879-1924). This philosophy conbines the
fundamental materialism that matter alone is real with the Hegelian dialectic
of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It asserts the primacy of matter.
Says Engels: "The material, sensuously perceptible world to which we
ourselves belong is the only reality... Out consciousness and thinking
are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a
product of mind, but mind itself is merely the hightest product of
matter." and Lenin says: "Matter is that which, acting upon our
sense-organs, produces sensation; matter is the objective reality
given to us in sensation... Matter, nature, being, the physical is
primary, and spirit, consciousness, sensation, the psychical is
secondary... The world picture is a picture of how matter moves and
of how 'matter thinks.'" Dialectic materialism says 18th century
"mechanical" materialism must be corrected; it saw the world of matter
as a simple mechanical assemblage of physical bodies isolated from and
independent of each other. This must be replaced by a view that the
material world is "a connected and integral whole, in which things,
phenomena, are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined
by, each other." But the entire system is constantly changing and
developing. The older mechanical materialism, says Marx, fails to
account for change. It treats of change simply as the relocation of
static bits of matter in new positions, which change is not change at
all. Dialectic materialism holds that matter is not static, but dynamic.
It is constantly developing, continually manifesting itself in new
formations of forces and phenomena out of the breakdown of the old.
But how does matter develop? Marx and Engels answered that matter
develops dialectically. They held that Hegel was wrong in claiming
that reality is primarily Idea and Spirit. His idealism must be
rejected. Reality is primarily matter. But Hegel was right in his
view that the world process changes dialectically, that is, by means
of opposites inherent in the development of things. "In its proper
meaning," says Lenin, "dialectics is the study of the contradiction
within the very essence of things." The history of every object and
event can be understood only terms of the development within the object
or event of its own opposite or contradiction, and the emergence from
that opposition of something new upon the dissolution of that which
gave it birth. To describe this dialectical development of the material
world Marx and Engels adapted three Hegelian principles or laws:
- the law of transformation of quantity into quality;
(All changes which takes place in nature are not merely quantitative.
their accumulation eventually precipitates new qualities in a
transition appears to be sudden in comparison to the gradualness of
quantitative changes up to the point of transition.)
- the law of unity of opposities;
(Opposites, like positive and negative, never represent an absolute
difference but are some way identified. What is negative to the
debtor is positive to the creditor. The opposites are are not
contradictories but contraries.)
- the law of the negation of the negation.
(The series of quantitative changes and emerging qualities is unending.
Each state or phase of development is considered a synthesis which
resolves the contraries contained in the preceding synthesis and
that generates its own contraries on the next qualitative level.)
These law are applied to economic and human history; for example, under
capitalism the proletariat or working class seeks to expand and to change
the system of social relations; this is opposed by the capitalistic
"bourgeoisie," who control the means of production; when the conflict
reaches a "breaking" point, a sudden and violent leap, via revolution,
from bourgeois capitalism to a new social order, scientific socialism,
communism, the classless society.