Uns 2030 Study Guide
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MATERIALISM
Table of Contents
1.0
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 2
2.0
DEFINITION OF MATERIALISM ............................................................................... 3
3.0
HISTORY OF MATERIALISM .................................................................................... 3
3.1 PERSPECTIVE OF MIND .............................................................................................. 4
3.2 GREEK AND ROMAN MATERIALISM ...................................................................... 5
3.3 MODERN MAERIALISM .............................................................................................. …show more content…
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3.4 TWENTIETH CENTURY MATERIALISM .................................................................. 8
3.5 AXIAL AGE .................................................................................................................... 9
3.6 COMMON ERA ............................................................................................................ 10
3.7 MODERN ERA.............................................................................................................. 10
4.0
CONCEPTS OF MATERIALISM ............................................................................... 11
4.1 MATERIALISM IN PRE-20TH CENTURY .................................................................. 11
4.2 MODERN MATERIALISM & SOME OF ITS MAIN CONCEPTS ........................... 11
4.3 MATERIALISM ............................................................................................................ 12
4.4 MATERIALISM: ONTOLOGICAL & METHODOLOGICAL ................................... 15
4.5 MATERIALISM IN ISLAM ......................................................................................... 16
5.0
SOLUTIONS TO PREVENT MATERIALISM .......................................................... 18
6.0
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 20
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1.0 INTRODUCTION
Materialism is the belief that only physical matter exists, and that there is no spiritual world.
Materialism is a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all beings and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.
In materialistic worldview, only matter matters. Everything that is not physical and material is not accepted.
It rejects, therefore, the existence of God or gods on whom the universe would depend for its existence or mode of operation; it denies the existence of angels or spirit; it questions the notion of a soul, if taken to be an immaterial entity separable, in principle, from the human body. Its two main targets are therefore theism and idealistic views of human nature. Theism means belief in the existence of a god or gods, specifically of a creator who intervenes in the universe. The term „materialism‟ has covered a variety of theses and programs. It has quite a long history, dating back at least to Aristotle‟s objections to the „earlier thinkers‟ who overemphasize the „material element‟ in Book Alpha of his Metaphysics. It is relatively easy to identify a chain of paradigmatic materialists: Democritus, Empedocles, Lucretius, Hobbes, d‟Holbach, Vogt, Biichner, Feuerbach, Marx, J. C. C. Smart, David Lewis, and David
Armstrong. Materialism encompasses much more than a thesis or set of theses in the philosophy of mind. It would not be adequate, for example, to identify materialism with the thesis that human beings (or indeed all possible persons) are essentially embodied. This would incorporate only a small part of what materialists, like Aristotle or Leibniz (at least with respect to finite and sublunary persons).
Materialism entails the affirmation of at least four central theses:
I.
Everything that exists and has real causal efficacy an inductively discoverable nature can be located within space and time. Nature forms a causally closed system.
II.
All genuine causal explanation has a factual basis consisting of some fundamental particles (or arbitrarily small and homogenous bits of matter) with specific intrinsic natures. All genuine explanation is bottom-up.
III.
These intrinsic natures of the fundamental material things (whether particles or homogeneous bits) are non-intentional and non-teleological.
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The existence, location persistence-conditions, causal powers and the re modal properties of the fundamental material things are ontologically independent of the existence or properties of minds, persons or societies and their practices and interests.
Ontological and metaphysical realism
Given these four principles, there is a relatively simple and homogeneous backing for all vertical causal explanation, and this foundation is independent of and prior to all intentionality, teleology and normatively. Understanding the world consist simply in decomposing all complex phenomena into their constituent parts and uncovering the causal powers of those parts. These parts and their causal powers are of a mystery of merely intentional existence or impenetrable subjectivity.
2.0 DEFINITION OF MATERIALISM
From the Oxford Dictionary, the meaning of materialism is a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. From the other dictionary, the meaning of materialism is the attitude of someone who attaches a lot of importance to money and wants to possess a lot of material things.
3.0 HISTORY OF MATERIALISM
Materialism is the idea that everything is either made only of matter or is ultimately dependent upon matter for its existence and nature. It is possible for a philosophy to be materialistic and still accord spirit a (secondary or dependent) place, but most forms of materialism tend to reject the existence of spirit or anything non-physical.
In the wider world, however, the word materialism may bring to mind dialectical materialism, which was the orthodox philosophy of communist countries. This is most importantly a theory of how changes arise in human history, though a general metaphysical theory lies in the background. Dialectical materialists contrast their view with what they call “vulgar” materialism; and it does, indeed, appear that their theory is not an extreme materialism, whether mechanical or physicalist. They seem to hold merely that mental processes are dependent on or have evolved from material ones. Though they might be akin to emergent materialists, it is hard to be sure; their assertion that something new emerges at higher …show more content…
levels
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of organization might refer only to such things as that a computer is different from a mere heap of its components. And if so, even an extreme physicalistic materialist could acquiesce in this view. The distinctive features of dialectical materialism would thus seem to lie as much in its being dialectical as in its being materialist. Its dialectical side may be epitomized in three laws that of the transformation of quality into quantity, that of the interpenetration of opposites, and that of the negation of the negation. Nondialectical philosophers find it hard, however, to interpret these laws in a way that does not make them into either platitudes or falsehoods. Perhaps because of the historical determinism implicit in dialectical materialism, and perhaps because of memories of the mechanical materialist theories of the 18th and 19th centuries, when physics was deterministic, it is popularly supposed that materialism and determinism must go together. This is not so. As indicated below, even some ancient materialists were indeterminists, and modern physicalist materialism must be in deterministic because of the indeterminism that is built into modern physics. Modern physics does imply, however, that macroscopic bodies behave in a way that is effectively deterministic, and, because even a single neuron (nerve fibre) is a macroscopic object by quantum-mechanical standards, a physicalistic materialist may still regard the human brain as coming near to being a mechanism that behaves in a deterministic way.
3.1 PERSPECTIVE OF MIND
A rather different way of classifying materialist theories, which to some extent cuts across the classifications already made, emerges when the theories are divided according to the way in which a materialist accounts for minds. A central-state materialist identifies mental processes with processes in the brain. An analytical behaviourist, on the other hand, argues that, in talking about the mind, one is not talking about an actual entity, whether material (e.g., the brain) or immaterial (e.g., the soul); rather, one is somehow talking about the way in which people would behave in various circumstances. According to the analytical behaviourist, there is no more of a problem for the materialist in having to identify mind with something material than there is in identifying such an abstraction as the average plumber with some concrete entity.
Analytical behaviourism differs from psychological behaviourism, which is merely a methodological program to base theories on behavioral evidence and to eschew introspective
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reports. The analytical behaviourist usually has a theory of introspective reports according to which they are what are sometimes called “avowals”: roughly, he contends that to say “I have a pain” is to engage in a verbal surrogate for a wince. Epistemic materialism is a theory that can be developed either in the direction of central-state materialism or in that of analytical behaviourism and that rests on the contention that the only statements that are inter subjectively testable are either observation reports about macroscopic physical objects or statements that imply such observation reports (or are otherwise logically related to them).
Before leaving this survey of the family of materialistic theories, a quite different sense of the word materialism should be noted in which it denotes not a metaphysical theory but an ethical attitude. A person is a materialist in this sense if he is interested mainly in sensuous pleasures and bodily comforts and hence in the material possessions that bring these about. A person might be a materialist in this ethical and pejorative sense without being a metaphysical materialist, and conversely. An extreme physicality materialist, for example, might prefer a
Beethoven recording to a comfortable mattress for his bed; and a person who believes in immaterial spirits might opt for the mattress.
3.2 GREEK AND ROMAN MATERIALISM
Though Thales of Miletus (c. 580 BCE) and some of the other pre-Socratic philosophers have some claims to being regarded as materialists, the materialist tradition in Western philosophy really begins with Leucippus and Democritus, Greek philosophers who were born in the 5th century BCE. Leucippus is known only through his influence on Democritus. According to
Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms (indivisible chunks of matter) in empty space (which he seems to have thought of as an entity in its own right). These atoms can be imperceptibly small, and they interact either by impact or by hooking together, depending on their shapes.
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The great beauty of atomism was its ability to explain the changes in things as due to changes in the configurations of unchanging atoms. The view may be contrasted with that of the earlier philosopher Anaxagoras, who thought that when, for example, the bread that a person eats is transformed into human flesh, this must occur because bread itself already contains hidden within itself the characteristics of flesh. Democritus thought that the soul consists of smooth, round atoms and that perceptions consist of motions caused in the soul atoms by the atoms in the perceived thing.
Because Epicurus‟s philosophy was expounded in a lengthy poem by Lucretius, a Roman philosopher of the 1st century BCE, Epicurus (died 270 BCE) was easily the most influential
Greek materialist. He differed from Democritus in that he postulated an absolute up-down direction in space, so that all atoms fall in roughly parallel paths. To explain their impacts with one another, he then held that the atoms are subject to chance swerve a doctrine that was also used to explain free will. Epicurus‟s materialism therefore differed from that of
Democritus in being an in deterministic one. Epicurus‟s philosophy contained an important ethical part, which was a sort of enlightened egoistic hedonism. His ethics, however, was not materialistic in the pejorative sense of the word
3.3 MODERN MAERIALISM
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Materialism languished throughout the medieval period, but the Epicurean tradition was revived in the first half of the 17th century in the atomistic materialism of the French Roman
Catholic philosopher Pierre Gassendi. In putting forward his system as a hypothesis to explain the facts of experience, Gassendi showed that he understood the method characteristic of modern science, and he may well have helped to pave the way for corpuscular hypotheses in physics. Gassendi was not thoroughgoing in his materialism inasmuch as he accepted on faith the Christian doctrine that people have immortal souls. His contemporary, the English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes also propounded an atomistic materialism and was a pioneer in trying to work out a mechanistic and physiological psychology. Holding that sensations are corporeal motions in the brain, Hobbes skirted, rather than solved, the philosophical problems about consciousness that had been raised by another contemporary, the great French philosopher
René Descartes. Descartes‟s philosophy was dualistic, making a complete split between mind and matter. In his theory of the physical world, however, and especially in his doctrine that animals are automata, Descartes‟s own system had a mechanistic side to it that was taken up by 18th-century materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie, the French physician whose appropriately titled L‟Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine, applied Descartes‟s view about animals to human beings.
Denis Diderot, chief editor of the 18th-century Encyclopaedia, supported a broadly materialist outlook by considerations drawn from physiology, embryology, and the study of heredity; and his friend Paul, baron d‟Holbach, published his Système de la nature (1770;
System of Nature), which expounded a deterministic type of materialism in the light of evidence from contemporary science, reducing everything to matter and to the energy inherent in matter. He also propounded a hedonistic ethics as well as an uncompromising atheism, which provoked a reply even from the Deist Voltaire.
The 18th-century French materialists had been reacting against orthodox Christianity. In the early part of the 19th century, however, certain writers in Germany usually with a biological or medical background reacted against a different orthodoxy, the Hegelian and Neo-Hegelian tradition in philosophy named for the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
HegelAmong these were Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt. The latter is notorious for his assertion that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile. This metaphor of secretion, previously used by P.-J.-G. Cabanis, a late 18th-century French materialist, is no
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longer taken seriously, because to most philosophers it does not make sense to think of thought as a stuff. The Hobbesian view, also espoused by Büchner, that thought is a motion in the brain, has been viewed as more promising.
The synthesis of urea (the chief nitrogenous end product of protein metabolism), discovered in 1828, broke down the discontinuity between the organic and the inorganic in chemistry, which had been a mainstay of non-materialistic biology. Materialist ways of thinking were later strengthened enormously by the Charles Darwin‟s theory of evolution, which not only showed the continuity between humans and other living things back to the simplest organisms but also showed how the apparent evidences of design in natural history could be explained on a purely causal basis.
There still seemed to be a gap, however, between the living and the non-living, though E.H.
Haeckel, a 19th-century German zoologist, thought that certain simple organisms could have been generated from inorganic matter and, indeed, that a certain simple sea creature may well be in process of generation in this way even now. Though Haeckel was wrong, 20th-century biologists proposed much more sophisticated and more plausible theories of the evolution of life from inorganic matter. Haeckel and his contemporary, the British zoologist T.H. Huxley, did much to popularize philosophical accounts of the world that were consonant with the scientific thought of their time, but neither could be regarded as an extreme materialist.
3.4 TWENTIETH CENTURY MATERIALISM
Perhaps because modern developments in biochemistry and in physiological psychology greatly increased the plausibility of materialism, there was in the mid-20th century a resurgence of interest in the philosophical defence of central-state materialism. Central-state materialists proposed their theories partly because of dissatisfaction with the analytical behaviourism of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle himself was reluctant to call himself a materialist, partly because of his dislike of all “isms” and partly because he thought that the notion of matter has meaning only by contrast with that of mind, which he thought to be an illegitimate sort of contrast.
Nevertheless, it would seem that analytical behaviourism could be used to support a physicality materialism that would go on to explain human behaviour by means of neural mechanisms. (Ryle himself was suspicious of mechanistic accounts of biology and psychology.) Analytical behaviourism was felt to be unsatisfactory, however, chiefly because
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of its account of introspective reports as avowals (see above Types distinguished by their account of mind), which most philosophers found to be unconvincing.
Philosophers distinguished two forms of central-state materialism, namely, the translation form and the disappearance form. The translation form is the view that mentalistic discourse can be translated into discourse that is neutral between physicalism and dualism, so that the truth of a person‟s introspective reports is compatible with the objects of these reports being physical processes. The disappearance form is the view that such a translation cannot be done and that this fact, however, does not refute physicalism but shows only that ordinary introspective reports are contaminated by false theories.
3.5 AXIAL AGE
Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age (approximately 800 to 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 (600
BC - 100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism, though their proofs of God and their positing that the consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists.
Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued the atomic tradition.
Xunzi (ca. 312 until 230 BC) developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China.Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Anaxagoras (ca. 500
BC until 428 BC), Epicurus and Democritus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De
Rerum Natura by Lucretius (ca. 99 BC until ca. 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.
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3.6 COMMON ERA
Chinese thinkers of the early Common Era said to be materialists include Yang Xiong (53 BC until AD 18) and Wang Chong (c AD 27 until AD 100).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.
3.7 MODERN ERA
Later on, Pierre Gassendi represented the materialist tradition, in opposition to René
Descartes ' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist Jean Meslier, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d 'Holbach, Denis Diderot, and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as in England,
John "Walking" Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.
Schopenhauer wrote that "materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of him". He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. That is, the brain itself is the "determiner" of how material objects will be experienced or perceived. "Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."
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The materialist and atheist Ludwig Feuerbach would signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity, which provided a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man 's inward nature. Feuerbach 's materialism would later heavily influence Karl Marx.
4.0 CONCEPTS OF MATERIALISM
4.1 MATERIALISM IN PRE-20TH CENTURY
It rested on assumptions that were ultimately metascientific, though never metaphysical in the
Aristotelian sense. That is, the assumptions of materialism reached beyond empirical science, though never beyond physical reality. These metascientific assumptions were, first of all, that the material or natural reality formed an unbroken material continuum that was eternal and infinite. Nature had no beginning or end. It was an eternal, self-generating and self-sustaining material fact without any sort of barrier or limit zoning it off from a nonmaterial, nonphysical, or supernatural type of being. The only foundational being there was, was material being, and some kind of natural substance underlay all visible phenomena.
Of course these assumptions implied, secondly, the lack of any governance or management of the universe of any sort of transcendental intelligence. Materialism has always viewed atheism merely as a necessary consequence of its premises, not as a philosophically important end in itself. Supernatural gods, spiritual deities, or immaterial moralizers could obviously not be taken seriously, or for that matter even imagined to exist, in the materialist hypothesis.
Thirdly and last, materialism has always assumed that life is wholly the product of natural processes. All human thought and feeling emerges from the nonliving, inorganic matrix of physical nature and ends at death. So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed, because the basic assumption of valid science has also always been that nature is governed by coherent, discoverable physical laws.
4.2 MODERN MATERIALISM & SOME OF ITS MAIN CONCEPTS
When someone today describes himself or herself as a materialist, they generally mean they stand somewhere in a spectrum defined at one end as reductive materialism and at the other
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end as eliminative materialism. Reduction and eliminative materialism describes the poles of the process known as intertheoretic reduction. Intertheoretic reduction refers to what happens when a new scientific theory either better explains or else completely invalidates an existing scientific theory. If the new theory better explains the old one, it is said to have reduced it to a fuller, more convincing explanation. A successful reduction of this kind was the incorporation and clarification of Newton 's laws of motion in Einstein 's theory of relativity, or of Maxwell 's laws of electromagnetism in quantum theory.
The other pole of intertheoretic reduction, eliminative materialism, consists of the invalidation or complete displacement of an earlier theory by a new one. Examples of this kind of elimination are: the theory of demonic possession being eliminated by the theory of mental disease, the theory of phlogiston being eliminated by the discovery of oxygen as the cause of combustion, or creationism being eliminated by evolution as an explanation of the earth 's history.
Obviously, modern reductive and eliminative materialists are allies in believing, as pre-20th century materialists did, that science has always confirmed and will most probably always continue to confirm the basic hypotheses of materialist philosophy: that is, first, that all reality is essentially a material reality and that therefore, second, no supernatural or immaterial reality can exist; and, third, that all organic life arises from and returns to inorganic matter.
4.3 MATERIALISM
As the word itself signifies, Materialism is a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of
God and the soul. It is diametrically opposed to Spiritualism and Idealism, which, in so far as they are one-sided and exclusive, declare that everything in the world is spiritual, and that the world and even matter it are mere conceptions or ideas in the thinking subject. Materialism is older than Spiritualism, if we regard the development of philosophy as beginning in Greece.
In Greece the first attempts at philosophy were more or less materialistic; they assumed the existence of single primordial matter water, earth, fire, air or of the four elements from which the world was held to have developed.
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Materialism was methodically developed by the Atomists. The first and also the most important systematic Materialist was Democritus, the "laughing philosopher". He taught that out of nothing comes nothing; that everything is the result of combination and division of parts (atoms); that these atoms, separated by empty spaces, are infinitely numerous and varied. Even to man he extended his cosmological Materialism, and was thus the founder of
Materialism in the narrow sense, that is the denial of the soul. The soul is a complex of very fine, smooth, round, and fiery atoms: these are highly mobile and penetrate the whole body, to which they impart life. Empedocles was not a thorough-going Materialist, although be regarded the four elements with love and hatred as the formative principles of the universe, and refused to recognize a spiritual Creator of the world.
Epicurus further asserted that bodies alone exist; only the void is incorporeal. He distinguished, however, between compound bodies and simple bodies or atoms, which are absolutely unchangeable. Since space is infinite, the atoms must likewise be infinitely numerous. This last deduction is not warranted, since, even in infinite space, the bodies might be limited in number in fact, they must be, and as otherwise they would entirely fill space and therefore render movement impossible. And yet Epicurus ascribes motion to the atoms, i.e. constant motion downwards.
Since many of them deviate from their original direction, collisions result and various combinations are formed. The difference between one body and another is due solely to different modes of atomic combination; the atoms themselves have no quality, and differ only in size, shape, and weight. These materialistic speculations contradict directly the universally recognized laws of nature. Inertia is an essential quality of matter, which cannot set itself in motion, cannot of itself fix the direction of its motion, least of all change the direction of the motion once imparted to it.
The existence of all these capabilities in matter is assumed by Epicurus: the atoms fall downwards, before there is either "up" or "down"; they have weight, although there is as yet no earth to lend them heaviness by its attraction. From the random clash of the atoms could result only confusion and not order, least of all that far-reaching design which is manifested in the arrangement of the world, especially in organic structures and mental activities.
However, the soul and its origin present no difficulty to the Materialist.
According to him the soul is a kind of vapour scattered throughout the whole body and mixed with a little heat. The bodies surrounding us give off continually certain minute particles
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which penetrate to our souls through our sense-organs and excite mental images. With the dissolution of the body, the corporeal soul is also dissolved. This view betrays a complete misapprehension of the immaterial nature of psychical states as opposed to those of the body to say nothing of the childish notion of sense-perception, which modern physiology can regard only with an indulgent smile.
The brilliant success of the natural sciences gave Materialism a powerful support. The scientist, indeed, is exposed to the danger of overlooking the soul, and consequently of denying it. Absorption in the study of material nature is apt to blind one to the spiritual; but it is an evident fallacy to deny the soul, on the ground that one cannot experimentally prove its existence by physical means. Natural science oversteps its limits when it encroaches on the spiritual domain and claims to pronounce there an expert decision, and it is a palpable error to declare that science demonstrates the non-existence of the soul. Various proofs from natural science are of course brought forward by the Materialists. The "closed system of natural causation" is appealed to: experience everywhere finds each natural phenomenon based upon another as its cause, and the chain of natural causes would be broken were the same brought in. On the other hand, Sigwart (1830-1904) justly observes that the soul has its share in natural causation, and is therefore included in the system.
At most it could be deduced from this system that a pure spirit, that God could not interfere in the course of nature; but this cannot be proved by either experience or reason. On the contrary it is clear that the Author of nature can interfere in its course, and history informs us of His many miraculous interventions. In any case it is beyond doubt that our bodily conditions are influenced by our ideas and volitions, and this influence is more clearly perceived by us than the causality of fire in the production of heat. We must therefore reject as false the theory of natural causation, if this means the exclusion of spiritual causes.
But modern science claims to have given positive proof that in the human body there is no place for the soul. The great discovery by R. Mayer (1814 until 78), Joule (1818-89), and
Helmholtz (1821-94) of the conservation of energy proves that energy cannot disappear in nature and cannot originate there. But the soul could of itself create energy, and there would also be energy lost, whenever an external stimulus influenced the soul and gave rise to sensation, which is not a form of energy.
Now recent experiment has shown that the energy in the human body is exactly equivalent to the nutriment consumed. In these facts, however, there is absolutely nothing against the
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existence of the soul. The law of the conservation of energy is an empirical law, not a fundamental principle of thought; it is deduced from the material world and is based on the activity of matter. A body cannot set itself in motion, can produce no force; it must be impelled by another, which in the impact loses its own power of movement. This is not lost, but is changed into the new movement. Thus, in the material world, motion, which is really kinetic energy, can neither originate nor altogether cease.
This law does not hold good for the immaterial world, which is not subject to the law of inertia. That our higher intellectual activities are not bound by the law is most plainly seen in our freedom of will, by which we determine ourselves either to move or to remain at rest. But the intellectual activities take place with the cooperation of the sensory processes; and, since these latter are functions of the bodily organs, they are like them subject to the law of inertia.
They do not enter into activity without some stimulus; they cannot stop their activity without some external influence. They are, therefore, subject to the law of the conservation of energy, whose applicability to the human body, as shown by biological experiment, proves nothing against the soul. Consequently, while even without experiment, one must admit the law in the case of sentient beings, it can in no wise affect a pure spirit or an angel. The "Achilles" of materialistic philosophers, therefore, proves nothing against the soul. It was accordingly highly opportune when the eminent physiologist, Dubois Reymond (1818-96), called a vigorous halt to his colleague by his "Ignoramus et Ignorabimus". In his lectures, "Ueber die
Grenzen der Naturerkenntniss" (Leipzig, 1872), he shows that feeling, consciousness, etc., cannot be explained from the atoms. He errs indeed in declaring permanently inexplicable everything for which natural science cannot account; the explanation must be furnished by philosophy. 4.4 MATERIALISM: ONTOLOGICAL & METHODOLOGICAL
Materialism is the philosophical stance that "all that exists", or is real, is material - that is, it consists of the various forms of matter and energy as we know them, and, possibly, other forms of "material" that we just simply don 't know about yet. The word is usually used by creationists and their use is usually vaguely defined.
Accusations of materialism in science tend to confuse two differing meanings of the word:Ontological materialism is the belief, or assumption, that only material matter and
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energy exist. For the ontological materialist anything immaterial must be the product of the material. In principle all immaterial phenomena must be reducible to (explicable by) natural laws. Methodological materialism is neither a belief nor an assumption but a restriction on method.
Briefly stated it holds that a non-material assumption is not to be made. Science, for example, is necessarily methodologically materialist. Science wishes to describe and explain nature.
Diversion into the “supernatural” begins to describe and explain matters that are not natural and obfuscate the natural.
Methodological materialism is a defining characteristic of science in the same way that
“methodological woodism” is a defining characteristic of carpentry. Science seeks to construct natural explanations for natural phenomena in the same way that carpentry seeks to construct objects out of wood. In operating in this manner neither discipline denies the existence of supernatural forces or sheet plastics, their usefulness or validity. The use of either supernatural forces or sheet plastics is simply distinguished as belonging to separate disciplines. Many scientists are also ontological materialists. Richard Dawkins espouses ontological materialism when he claims a completeness of science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, is a methodological materialist.
Both forms of materialism are very closely related to philosophical and methodological naturalism and at first glance seem almost identical. Materialism and naturalism differ only in that while naturalism assumes or studies the observable, materialism assumes or studies the observable and material.
4.5 MATERIALISM IN ISLAM
“As long as one is shackled to materialism, one can never attain dignity in life,” stated
Hojatul Islam Ibrahim Kazerooni during his Muharram lectures.
In Islam, human dignity is intrinsic, since human beings are considered to be Allah‟s vicegerents on earth. As the Holy Quran says:
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“We have bestowed dignity on the children of Adam…and conferred upon them special favours above the greater part of Our creation”.
(Surat Al-Isra. 17:70)
As Muslims, our main goal should be success in the Hereafter and not amassing wealth in this world. Indeed, the Holy Quran warns us about the excessive accumulation of riches:
“Those who hoard gold and silver, and do not spend it in the way of Allah, inform them of a painful punishment.” (Surah Al-Tawbah 9:34)
Elsewhere, the Quran warns us:
“Abundance diverts you, until you come to the graves.” (Surah Al-Takathur, 102:1-2)
To emphasize the dangers of materialism, the Quran brings the story of the rich Israelite
Qarun (Korah), who oppressed the poor just like the moneyed materialists in the West.
Korah possessed so much wealth that even strong men had difficulty merely carrying the keys to his treasures!
“Indeed, Korah was of the people of Moses, but he oppressed them; and We had given him so much treasure that its keys would have been a burden to a group of strong men.” (Surah AlQasas 28:76)
He was even warned by the elders of his own people not to behave this way, rather he was advised to do good deeds with his money and to plan for the Hereafter.
“Then, his people said to him, „Do not rejoice (in your riches), for Allah does not like
those who rejoice. And seek by means of what Allah has given you, the future abode, and do not neglect your portion of this world, and do good [to others] as Allah has done good to you.”
(Surah Al-Qasas 28:76-77)
Like affluent Americans, Korah loved to flaunt his wealth, and those people of his time who were shackled to materialism envied him and wanted to be like him.
“So he went forth to his people in his finery. Those who desire this world‟s life said, „O would that we had the like of what Korah is given;” (Surah Al-Qasas 28:79)
As a result of his arrogant behavior and misuse of wealth, Korah, his riches and his possessions were swallowed up by the ground in an earthquake.
“So We caused the earth to swallow him up and his house,” (Surah Al-Qasas 28:81)
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So as Muslims, how can we break the shackles of materialism and achieve the intended dignity in life? By using our wealth to elevate the oppressed -- those whose dignity is being devoured by materialism -- for Allah wants to show them favor as the Quran states:
“We desire to show favor to those who are oppressed in the land, and to make them leaders and to make them inheritors.” (Surah Al-Qasas, 28:5)
And spending money to help the oppressed even results in material gain for the giver, for
Imam Sadiq (AS) relates that the Prophet (S) said, “Give charity since it will cause an increase in your wealth”.
So by using our wealth in the way of Allah; paying our Zakat (alms-tax) and Khums (onefifth levy), giving Sadaqa (charity) and by engaging in Jihad (striving) to eliminate unjust differences between rich and poor, we can break the shackles of materialism.
5.0 SOLUTIONS TO PREVENT MATERIALISM
1)
Importance of the Hereafter. Many materialistic societies used to forget that life in
this world is only a short time compared with the Hereafter.
It was related that Abu Hurairah (r.a.) radhi Allahu anhu (May Allah be pleased with him) said that the Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: “This life is a prison for the believers and a
Paradise for the unbelievers.” (Muslim)
2)
You can see that this hadith clearly explains that for some people the life in this world
is like Paradise. These people think that their life is very important. They don‟t realize that it is only for a small or temporary moment. In the Qur‟an we can read.
“What is the life of this world but play and amusement? But best is the Home in the
Hereafter, for those who are righteous. Will you not then understand?” (6:32)
3)
We must understand that life in the Hereafter is much more important than life in this
dunya. If the people realize that they can live according to Islam, a materialistic way of life is of no value.
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Narrated Abu Hurairah (r.a.): Allah‟s Messenger (SAW) said: “The slave of the Dinar, the slave of the Dirham, and the slave of bordered silk cloath are wretched. If such one is given anything he is pleased, but if not he is displeased.” (Bukhari)
4)
Allah‟s Messenger (SAW) stresses the problems which conduct many people to a
false way. Therefore he (SAW) informs us how we should life.
Narrated Sahl bin Sa‟d (r.a.): “A man came to the Prophet (SAW) and said: “O Allah‟s
Messenger direct me to a deed which if I do, shall be loved by Allah and by people.”
He
replied, “If you practice abstinence in the world Allah will love you, and if you abstain from people‟s possessions they will love you.” (Ibn Majah)
5)
Wealth and materialistic way of living won‟t help in the Hereafter. We Should live
according to Qur‟an and Sunnah.
“And whoever obeys Allah and his Messenger, fears Allah, and keeps his duty (to him), such are the successful.” (Qur‟an 24:52)
6)
Only such a way of life will help us and lead us to success. If you are rich, you should
know that this is is only for this dunya (world). Let‟s look at how the best generation of Islam lived: Umar bin Al-Khatab (r.a.) reproached himself for missing the Asr prayer in congregation by giving away 200,000 dirhams10. Imagine how pious the first generation of
Islam was living. These are the people we should respect and follow.
7)
It is also very important to stress that Islam is a religion of social justice. Therefore
zakah is one of the pillars of Islam. Allah subhana wa ta‟ala commands:
“And establish the prayer (salah) and pay the obligatory charity (zakah).” (73:20)
On gold and silver usually 2.5% must be given as zakah. This amount should be given for example to the poor (al- Fuqara or al-Miskin), the people with debts (al Gharimun), etc. You can see that Islam helps the needy in order that they feed their families and have a proper
(halal) way of living. With the zakah the poor people get enough and will not resort to any form of illegal buisiness or commit crimes in order to get food or satisfy their basic needs.
We realize that Islam is based on humanitarian and just system of life.
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6.0 CONCLUSION
Materialism In today‟s society, materialism takes part in every person‟s life, no matter what social class they are. The idea of being materialistic can be considered immoral, but there is a fine line between morality and personal interests. It is safe to say that everybody is materialistic to a certain extent, whether it is from buying the same brand of jeans because they fit nice, to purchasing a wide variety of hot rods. It is obvious that the latter of the two is the one which can be considered to cross the line. Buying some nice clothes here and there is normal for people and everybody does it once in a while. While on the other hand, buying 5 or 6 sports cars can be considered somewhat pretentious.
There are many factors that go into a person being immoral based on the materials that they have. Greed and excessive luxuries are what can determine the immorality of a person.
Growing up in a fairly affluent community, it was easy to distinguish the differences amongst different social classes and the way which they present themselves in the community. Being materialism will also affect one‟s health status.
Due to materialism desire, they spend most of their time to chase for physical matter but never take good care of their body. Therefore, most of not all of time died at a early stage because of bad health condition. Besides, being too materialism will harm relationship between you and me. Materialism people spend too much of time to chase for matter and at last neglected his/ her family, soul partner, and also dearest friend.In a nutshell, being materialistic brings more harms than advantages. Maybe sometimes we should have materialism thoughts to gain.
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7.0 REFERENCES
1) The Islamic Worldview, department of General Studies, 2008
2) Robert, C.K., and George, B., (2010), The Waning of Materialism, 1st, United States,
Oxford University Press Inc, New York.
3) Oxford Dictionaries, [online]. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com 4) Richard C. Vitzthum
[This essay is from a lecture given to the Atheist Students Association at the University of
Maryland, College Park, on November 14, 1996.]
5) Gutberlet, C. (1911). Materialism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert
Appleton
Company.
Retrieved
October
21,
2013
from
New
Advent:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10041b.htm
6) Gutberlet, Constantin. "Materialism." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 10. New
York:
Robert
Appleton
Company,
1911.
21
Oct.
2013
.
7) Yuram Abdullah Weiler in Tehran Times, Wednesday 12 December 2012
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Table of Contents
1.0
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 2
2.0
DEFINITION OF MATERIALISM ............................................................................... 3
3.0
HISTORY OF MATERIALISM .................................................................................... 3
3.1 PERSPECTIVE OF MIND .............................................................................................. 4
3.2 GREEK AND ROMAN MATERIALISM ...................................................................... 5
3.3 MODERN MAERIALISM .............................................................................................. …show more content…
6
3.4 TWENTIETH CENTURY MATERIALISM .................................................................. 8
3.5 AXIAL AGE .................................................................................................................... 9
3.6 COMMON ERA ............................................................................................................ 10
3.7 MODERN ERA.............................................................................................................. 10
4.0
CONCEPTS OF MATERIALISM ............................................................................... 11
4.1 MATERIALISM IN PRE-20TH CENTURY .................................................................. 11
4.2 MODERN MATERIALISM & SOME OF ITS MAIN CONCEPTS ........................... 11
4.3 MATERIALISM ............................................................................................................ 12
4.4 MATERIALISM: ONTOLOGICAL & METHODOLOGICAL ................................... 15
4.5 MATERIALISM IN ISLAM ......................................................................................... 16
5.0
SOLUTIONS TO PREVENT MATERIALISM .......................................................... 18
6.0
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 20
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1.0 INTRODUCTION
Materialism is the belief that only physical matter exists, and that there is no spiritual world.
Materialism is a theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all beings and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter.
In materialistic worldview, only matter matters. Everything that is not physical and material is not accepted.
It rejects, therefore, the existence of God or gods on whom the universe would depend for its existence or mode of operation; it denies the existence of angels or spirit; it questions the notion of a soul, if taken to be an immaterial entity separable, in principle, from the human body. Its two main targets are therefore theism and idealistic views of human nature. Theism means belief in the existence of a god or gods, specifically of a creator who intervenes in the universe. The term „materialism‟ has covered a variety of theses and programs. It has quite a long history, dating back at least to Aristotle‟s objections to the „earlier thinkers‟ who overemphasize the „material element‟ in Book Alpha of his Metaphysics. It is relatively easy to identify a chain of paradigmatic materialists: Democritus, Empedocles, Lucretius, Hobbes, d‟Holbach, Vogt, Biichner, Feuerbach, Marx, J. C. C. Smart, David Lewis, and David
Armstrong. Materialism encompasses much more than a thesis or set of theses in the philosophy of mind. It would not be adequate, for example, to identify materialism with the thesis that human beings (or indeed all possible persons) are essentially embodied. This would incorporate only a small part of what materialists, like Aristotle or Leibniz (at least with respect to finite and sublunary persons).
Materialism entails the affirmation of at least four central theses:
I.
Everything that exists and has real causal efficacy an inductively discoverable nature can be located within space and time. Nature forms a causally closed system.
II.
All genuine causal explanation has a factual basis consisting of some fundamental particles (or arbitrarily small and homogenous bits of matter) with specific intrinsic natures. All genuine explanation is bottom-up.
III.
These intrinsic natures of the fundamental material things (whether particles or homogeneous bits) are non-intentional and non-teleological.
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The existence, location persistence-conditions, causal powers and the re modal properties of the fundamental material things are ontologically independent of the existence or properties of minds, persons or societies and their practices and interests.
Ontological and metaphysical realism
Given these four principles, there is a relatively simple and homogeneous backing for all vertical causal explanation, and this foundation is independent of and prior to all intentionality, teleology and normatively. Understanding the world consist simply in decomposing all complex phenomena into their constituent parts and uncovering the causal powers of those parts. These parts and their causal powers are of a mystery of merely intentional existence or impenetrable subjectivity.
2.0 DEFINITION OF MATERIALISM
From the Oxford Dictionary, the meaning of materialism is a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values. From the other dictionary, the meaning of materialism is the attitude of someone who attaches a lot of importance to money and wants to possess a lot of material things.
3.0 HISTORY OF MATERIALISM
Materialism is the idea that everything is either made only of matter or is ultimately dependent upon matter for its existence and nature. It is possible for a philosophy to be materialistic and still accord spirit a (secondary or dependent) place, but most forms of materialism tend to reject the existence of spirit or anything non-physical.
In the wider world, however, the word materialism may bring to mind dialectical materialism, which was the orthodox philosophy of communist countries. This is most importantly a theory of how changes arise in human history, though a general metaphysical theory lies in the background. Dialectical materialists contrast their view with what they call “vulgar” materialism; and it does, indeed, appear that their theory is not an extreme materialism, whether mechanical or physicalist. They seem to hold merely that mental processes are dependent on or have evolved from material ones. Though they might be akin to emergent materialists, it is hard to be sure; their assertion that something new emerges at higher …show more content…
levels
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of organization might refer only to such things as that a computer is different from a mere heap of its components. And if so, even an extreme physicalistic materialist could acquiesce in this view. The distinctive features of dialectical materialism would thus seem to lie as much in its being dialectical as in its being materialist. Its dialectical side may be epitomized in three laws that of the transformation of quality into quantity, that of the interpenetration of opposites, and that of the negation of the negation. Nondialectical philosophers find it hard, however, to interpret these laws in a way that does not make them into either platitudes or falsehoods. Perhaps because of the historical determinism implicit in dialectical materialism, and perhaps because of memories of the mechanical materialist theories of the 18th and 19th centuries, when physics was deterministic, it is popularly supposed that materialism and determinism must go together. This is not so. As indicated below, even some ancient materialists were indeterminists, and modern physicalist materialism must be in deterministic because of the indeterminism that is built into modern physics. Modern physics does imply, however, that macroscopic bodies behave in a way that is effectively deterministic, and, because even a single neuron (nerve fibre) is a macroscopic object by quantum-mechanical standards, a physicalistic materialist may still regard the human brain as coming near to being a mechanism that behaves in a deterministic way.
3.1 PERSPECTIVE OF MIND
A rather different way of classifying materialist theories, which to some extent cuts across the classifications already made, emerges when the theories are divided according to the way in which a materialist accounts for minds. A central-state materialist identifies mental processes with processes in the brain. An analytical behaviourist, on the other hand, argues that, in talking about the mind, one is not talking about an actual entity, whether material (e.g., the brain) or immaterial (e.g., the soul); rather, one is somehow talking about the way in which people would behave in various circumstances. According to the analytical behaviourist, there is no more of a problem for the materialist in having to identify mind with something material than there is in identifying such an abstraction as the average plumber with some concrete entity.
Analytical behaviourism differs from psychological behaviourism, which is merely a methodological program to base theories on behavioral evidence and to eschew introspective
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reports. The analytical behaviourist usually has a theory of introspective reports according to which they are what are sometimes called “avowals”: roughly, he contends that to say “I have a pain” is to engage in a verbal surrogate for a wince. Epistemic materialism is a theory that can be developed either in the direction of central-state materialism or in that of analytical behaviourism and that rests on the contention that the only statements that are inter subjectively testable are either observation reports about macroscopic physical objects or statements that imply such observation reports (or are otherwise logically related to them).
Before leaving this survey of the family of materialistic theories, a quite different sense of the word materialism should be noted in which it denotes not a metaphysical theory but an ethical attitude. A person is a materialist in this sense if he is interested mainly in sensuous pleasures and bodily comforts and hence in the material possessions that bring these about. A person might be a materialist in this ethical and pejorative sense without being a metaphysical materialist, and conversely. An extreme physicality materialist, for example, might prefer a
Beethoven recording to a comfortable mattress for his bed; and a person who believes in immaterial spirits might opt for the mattress.
3.2 GREEK AND ROMAN MATERIALISM
Though Thales of Miletus (c. 580 BCE) and some of the other pre-Socratic philosophers have some claims to being regarded as materialists, the materialist tradition in Western philosophy really begins with Leucippus and Democritus, Greek philosophers who were born in the 5th century BCE. Leucippus is known only through his influence on Democritus. According to
Democritus, the world consists of nothing but atoms (indivisible chunks of matter) in empty space (which he seems to have thought of as an entity in its own right). These atoms can be imperceptibly small, and they interact either by impact or by hooking together, depending on their shapes.
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The great beauty of atomism was its ability to explain the changes in things as due to changes in the configurations of unchanging atoms. The view may be contrasted with that of the earlier philosopher Anaxagoras, who thought that when, for example, the bread that a person eats is transformed into human flesh, this must occur because bread itself already contains hidden within itself the characteristics of flesh. Democritus thought that the soul consists of smooth, round atoms and that perceptions consist of motions caused in the soul atoms by the atoms in the perceived thing.
Because Epicurus‟s philosophy was expounded in a lengthy poem by Lucretius, a Roman philosopher of the 1st century BCE, Epicurus (died 270 BCE) was easily the most influential
Greek materialist. He differed from Democritus in that he postulated an absolute up-down direction in space, so that all atoms fall in roughly parallel paths. To explain their impacts with one another, he then held that the atoms are subject to chance swerve a doctrine that was also used to explain free will. Epicurus‟s materialism therefore differed from that of
Democritus in being an in deterministic one. Epicurus‟s philosophy contained an important ethical part, which was a sort of enlightened egoistic hedonism. His ethics, however, was not materialistic in the pejorative sense of the word
3.3 MODERN MAERIALISM
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Materialism languished throughout the medieval period, but the Epicurean tradition was revived in the first half of the 17th century in the atomistic materialism of the French Roman
Catholic philosopher Pierre Gassendi. In putting forward his system as a hypothesis to explain the facts of experience, Gassendi showed that he understood the method characteristic of modern science, and he may well have helped to pave the way for corpuscular hypotheses in physics. Gassendi was not thoroughgoing in his materialism inasmuch as he accepted on faith the Christian doctrine that people have immortal souls. His contemporary, the English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes also propounded an atomistic materialism and was a pioneer in trying to work out a mechanistic and physiological psychology. Holding that sensations are corporeal motions in the brain, Hobbes skirted, rather than solved, the philosophical problems about consciousness that had been raised by another contemporary, the great French philosopher
René Descartes. Descartes‟s philosophy was dualistic, making a complete split between mind and matter. In his theory of the physical world, however, and especially in his doctrine that animals are automata, Descartes‟s own system had a mechanistic side to it that was taken up by 18th-century materialists, such as Julien de La Mettrie, the French physician whose appropriately titled L‟Homme machine (1747; Man a Machine, applied Descartes‟s view about animals to human beings.
Denis Diderot, chief editor of the 18th-century Encyclopaedia, supported a broadly materialist outlook by considerations drawn from physiology, embryology, and the study of heredity; and his friend Paul, baron d‟Holbach, published his Système de la nature (1770;
System of Nature), which expounded a deterministic type of materialism in the light of evidence from contemporary science, reducing everything to matter and to the energy inherent in matter. He also propounded a hedonistic ethics as well as an uncompromising atheism, which provoked a reply even from the Deist Voltaire.
The 18th-century French materialists had been reacting against orthodox Christianity. In the early part of the 19th century, however, certain writers in Germany usually with a biological or medical background reacted against a different orthodoxy, the Hegelian and Neo-Hegelian tradition in philosophy named for the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
HegelAmong these were Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt. The latter is notorious for his assertion that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile. This metaphor of secretion, previously used by P.-J.-G. Cabanis, a late 18th-century French materialist, is no
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longer taken seriously, because to most philosophers it does not make sense to think of thought as a stuff. The Hobbesian view, also espoused by Büchner, that thought is a motion in the brain, has been viewed as more promising.
The synthesis of urea (the chief nitrogenous end product of protein metabolism), discovered in 1828, broke down the discontinuity between the organic and the inorganic in chemistry, which had been a mainstay of non-materialistic biology. Materialist ways of thinking were later strengthened enormously by the Charles Darwin‟s theory of evolution, which not only showed the continuity between humans and other living things back to the simplest organisms but also showed how the apparent evidences of design in natural history could be explained on a purely causal basis.
There still seemed to be a gap, however, between the living and the non-living, though E.H.
Haeckel, a 19th-century German zoologist, thought that certain simple organisms could have been generated from inorganic matter and, indeed, that a certain simple sea creature may well be in process of generation in this way even now. Though Haeckel was wrong, 20th-century biologists proposed much more sophisticated and more plausible theories of the evolution of life from inorganic matter. Haeckel and his contemporary, the British zoologist T.H. Huxley, did much to popularize philosophical accounts of the world that were consonant with the scientific thought of their time, but neither could be regarded as an extreme materialist.
3.4 TWENTIETH CENTURY MATERIALISM
Perhaps because modern developments in biochemistry and in physiological psychology greatly increased the plausibility of materialism, there was in the mid-20th century a resurgence of interest in the philosophical defence of central-state materialism. Central-state materialists proposed their theories partly because of dissatisfaction with the analytical behaviourism of the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle himself was reluctant to call himself a materialist, partly because of his dislike of all “isms” and partly because he thought that the notion of matter has meaning only by contrast with that of mind, which he thought to be an illegitimate sort of contrast.
Nevertheless, it would seem that analytical behaviourism could be used to support a physicality materialism that would go on to explain human behaviour by means of neural mechanisms. (Ryle himself was suspicious of mechanistic accounts of biology and psychology.) Analytical behaviourism was felt to be unsatisfactory, however, chiefly because
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of its account of introspective reports as avowals (see above Types distinguished by their account of mind), which most philosophers found to be unconvincing.
Philosophers distinguished two forms of central-state materialism, namely, the translation form and the disappearance form. The translation form is the view that mentalistic discourse can be translated into discourse that is neutral between physicalism and dualism, so that the truth of a person‟s introspective reports is compatible with the objects of these reports being physical processes. The disappearance form is the view that such a translation cannot be done and that this fact, however, does not refute physicalism but shows only that ordinary introspective reports are contaminated by false theories.
3.5 AXIAL AGE
Materialism developed, possibly independently, in several geographically separated regions of Eurasia during what Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age (approximately 800 to 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 (600
BC - 100 BC) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism, though their proofs of God and their positing that the consciousness was not material precludes labelling them as materialists.
Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school continued the atomic tradition.
Xunzi (ca. 312 until 230 BC) developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China.Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Anaxagoras (ca. 500
BC until 428 BC), Epicurus and Democritus prefigure later materialists. The Latin poem De
Rerum Natura by Lucretius (ca. 99 BC until ca. 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.
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3.6 COMMON ERA
Chinese thinkers of the early Common Era said to be materialists include Yang Xiong (53 BC until AD 18) and Wang Chong (c AD 27 until AD 100).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.
3.7 MODERN ERA
Later on, Pierre Gassendi represented the materialist tradition, in opposition to René
Descartes ' attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. There followed the materialist and atheist Jean Meslier, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d 'Holbach, Denis Diderot, and other French Enlightenment thinkers; as well as in England,
John "Walking" Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.
Schopenhauer wrote that "materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of him". He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. That is, the brain itself is the "determiner" of how material objects will be experienced or perceived. "Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time."
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The materialist and atheist Ludwig Feuerbach would signal a new turn in materialism through his book, The Essence of Christianity, which provided a humanist account of religion as the outward projection of man 's inward nature. Feuerbach 's materialism would later heavily influence Karl Marx.
4.0 CONCEPTS OF MATERIALISM
4.1 MATERIALISM IN PRE-20TH CENTURY
It rested on assumptions that were ultimately metascientific, though never metaphysical in the
Aristotelian sense. That is, the assumptions of materialism reached beyond empirical science, though never beyond physical reality. These metascientific assumptions were, first of all, that the material or natural reality formed an unbroken material continuum that was eternal and infinite. Nature had no beginning or end. It was an eternal, self-generating and self-sustaining material fact without any sort of barrier or limit zoning it off from a nonmaterial, nonphysical, or supernatural type of being. The only foundational being there was, was material being, and some kind of natural substance underlay all visible phenomena.
Of course these assumptions implied, secondly, the lack of any governance or management of the universe of any sort of transcendental intelligence. Materialism has always viewed atheism merely as a necessary consequence of its premises, not as a philosophically important end in itself. Supernatural gods, spiritual deities, or immaterial moralizers could obviously not be taken seriously, or for that matter even imagined to exist, in the materialist hypothesis.
Thirdly and last, materialism has always assumed that life is wholly the product of natural processes. All human thought and feeling emerges from the nonliving, inorganic matrix of physical nature and ends at death. So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed, because the basic assumption of valid science has also always been that nature is governed by coherent, discoverable physical laws.
4.2 MODERN MATERIALISM & SOME OF ITS MAIN CONCEPTS
When someone today describes himself or herself as a materialist, they generally mean they stand somewhere in a spectrum defined at one end as reductive materialism and at the other
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end as eliminative materialism. Reduction and eliminative materialism describes the poles of the process known as intertheoretic reduction. Intertheoretic reduction refers to what happens when a new scientific theory either better explains or else completely invalidates an existing scientific theory. If the new theory better explains the old one, it is said to have reduced it to a fuller, more convincing explanation. A successful reduction of this kind was the incorporation and clarification of Newton 's laws of motion in Einstein 's theory of relativity, or of Maxwell 's laws of electromagnetism in quantum theory.
The other pole of intertheoretic reduction, eliminative materialism, consists of the invalidation or complete displacement of an earlier theory by a new one. Examples of this kind of elimination are: the theory of demonic possession being eliminated by the theory of mental disease, the theory of phlogiston being eliminated by the discovery of oxygen as the cause of combustion, or creationism being eliminated by evolution as an explanation of the earth 's history.
Obviously, modern reductive and eliminative materialists are allies in believing, as pre-20th century materialists did, that science has always confirmed and will most probably always continue to confirm the basic hypotheses of materialist philosophy: that is, first, that all reality is essentially a material reality and that therefore, second, no supernatural or immaterial reality can exist; and, third, that all organic life arises from and returns to inorganic matter.
4.3 MATERIALISM
As the word itself signifies, Materialism is a philosophical system which regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of
God and the soul. It is diametrically opposed to Spiritualism and Idealism, which, in so far as they are one-sided and exclusive, declare that everything in the world is spiritual, and that the world and even matter it are mere conceptions or ideas in the thinking subject. Materialism is older than Spiritualism, if we regard the development of philosophy as beginning in Greece.
In Greece the first attempts at philosophy were more or less materialistic; they assumed the existence of single primordial matter water, earth, fire, air or of the four elements from which the world was held to have developed.
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Materialism was methodically developed by the Atomists. The first and also the most important systematic Materialist was Democritus, the "laughing philosopher". He taught that out of nothing comes nothing; that everything is the result of combination and division of parts (atoms); that these atoms, separated by empty spaces, are infinitely numerous and varied. Even to man he extended his cosmological Materialism, and was thus the founder of
Materialism in the narrow sense, that is the denial of the soul. The soul is a complex of very fine, smooth, round, and fiery atoms: these are highly mobile and penetrate the whole body, to which they impart life. Empedocles was not a thorough-going Materialist, although be regarded the four elements with love and hatred as the formative principles of the universe, and refused to recognize a spiritual Creator of the world.
Epicurus further asserted that bodies alone exist; only the void is incorporeal. He distinguished, however, between compound bodies and simple bodies or atoms, which are absolutely unchangeable. Since space is infinite, the atoms must likewise be infinitely numerous. This last deduction is not warranted, since, even in infinite space, the bodies might be limited in number in fact, they must be, and as otherwise they would entirely fill space and therefore render movement impossible. And yet Epicurus ascribes motion to the atoms, i.e. constant motion downwards.
Since many of them deviate from their original direction, collisions result and various combinations are formed. The difference between one body and another is due solely to different modes of atomic combination; the atoms themselves have no quality, and differ only in size, shape, and weight. These materialistic speculations contradict directly the universally recognized laws of nature. Inertia is an essential quality of matter, which cannot set itself in motion, cannot of itself fix the direction of its motion, least of all change the direction of the motion once imparted to it.
The existence of all these capabilities in matter is assumed by Epicurus: the atoms fall downwards, before there is either "up" or "down"; they have weight, although there is as yet no earth to lend them heaviness by its attraction. From the random clash of the atoms could result only confusion and not order, least of all that far-reaching design which is manifested in the arrangement of the world, especially in organic structures and mental activities.
However, the soul and its origin present no difficulty to the Materialist.
According to him the soul is a kind of vapour scattered throughout the whole body and mixed with a little heat. The bodies surrounding us give off continually certain minute particles
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which penetrate to our souls through our sense-organs and excite mental images. With the dissolution of the body, the corporeal soul is also dissolved. This view betrays a complete misapprehension of the immaterial nature of psychical states as opposed to those of the body to say nothing of the childish notion of sense-perception, which modern physiology can regard only with an indulgent smile.
The brilliant success of the natural sciences gave Materialism a powerful support. The scientist, indeed, is exposed to the danger of overlooking the soul, and consequently of denying it. Absorption in the study of material nature is apt to blind one to the spiritual; but it is an evident fallacy to deny the soul, on the ground that one cannot experimentally prove its existence by physical means. Natural science oversteps its limits when it encroaches on the spiritual domain and claims to pronounce there an expert decision, and it is a palpable error to declare that science demonstrates the non-existence of the soul. Various proofs from natural science are of course brought forward by the Materialists. The "closed system of natural causation" is appealed to: experience everywhere finds each natural phenomenon based upon another as its cause, and the chain of natural causes would be broken were the same brought in. On the other hand, Sigwart (1830-1904) justly observes that the soul has its share in natural causation, and is therefore included in the system.
At most it could be deduced from this system that a pure spirit, that God could not interfere in the course of nature; but this cannot be proved by either experience or reason. On the contrary it is clear that the Author of nature can interfere in its course, and history informs us of His many miraculous interventions. In any case it is beyond doubt that our bodily conditions are influenced by our ideas and volitions, and this influence is more clearly perceived by us than the causality of fire in the production of heat. We must therefore reject as false the theory of natural causation, if this means the exclusion of spiritual causes.
But modern science claims to have given positive proof that in the human body there is no place for the soul. The great discovery by R. Mayer (1814 until 78), Joule (1818-89), and
Helmholtz (1821-94) of the conservation of energy proves that energy cannot disappear in nature and cannot originate there. But the soul could of itself create energy, and there would also be energy lost, whenever an external stimulus influenced the soul and gave rise to sensation, which is not a form of energy.
Now recent experiment has shown that the energy in the human body is exactly equivalent to the nutriment consumed. In these facts, however, there is absolutely nothing against the
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existence of the soul. The law of the conservation of energy is an empirical law, not a fundamental principle of thought; it is deduced from the material world and is based on the activity of matter. A body cannot set itself in motion, can produce no force; it must be impelled by another, which in the impact loses its own power of movement. This is not lost, but is changed into the new movement. Thus, in the material world, motion, which is really kinetic energy, can neither originate nor altogether cease.
This law does not hold good for the immaterial world, which is not subject to the law of inertia. That our higher intellectual activities are not bound by the law is most plainly seen in our freedom of will, by which we determine ourselves either to move or to remain at rest. But the intellectual activities take place with the cooperation of the sensory processes; and, since these latter are functions of the bodily organs, they are like them subject to the law of inertia.
They do not enter into activity without some stimulus; they cannot stop their activity without some external influence. They are, therefore, subject to the law of the conservation of energy, whose applicability to the human body, as shown by biological experiment, proves nothing against the soul. Consequently, while even without experiment, one must admit the law in the case of sentient beings, it can in no wise affect a pure spirit or an angel. The "Achilles" of materialistic philosophers, therefore, proves nothing against the soul. It was accordingly highly opportune when the eminent physiologist, Dubois Reymond (1818-96), called a vigorous halt to his colleague by his "Ignoramus et Ignorabimus". In his lectures, "Ueber die
Grenzen der Naturerkenntniss" (Leipzig, 1872), he shows that feeling, consciousness, etc., cannot be explained from the atoms. He errs indeed in declaring permanently inexplicable everything for which natural science cannot account; the explanation must be furnished by philosophy. 4.4 MATERIALISM: ONTOLOGICAL & METHODOLOGICAL
Materialism is the philosophical stance that "all that exists", or is real, is material - that is, it consists of the various forms of matter and energy as we know them, and, possibly, other forms of "material" that we just simply don 't know about yet. The word is usually used by creationists and their use is usually vaguely defined.
Accusations of materialism in science tend to confuse two differing meanings of the word:Ontological materialism is the belief, or assumption, that only material matter and
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energy exist. For the ontological materialist anything immaterial must be the product of the material. In principle all immaterial phenomena must be reducible to (explicable by) natural laws. Methodological materialism is neither a belief nor an assumption but a restriction on method.
Briefly stated it holds that a non-material assumption is not to be made. Science, for example, is necessarily methodologically materialist. Science wishes to describe and explain nature.
Diversion into the “supernatural” begins to describe and explain matters that are not natural and obfuscate the natural.
Methodological materialism is a defining characteristic of science in the same way that
“methodological woodism” is a defining characteristic of carpentry. Science seeks to construct natural explanations for natural phenomena in the same way that carpentry seeks to construct objects out of wood. In operating in this manner neither discipline denies the existence of supernatural forces or sheet plastics, their usefulness or validity. The use of either supernatural forces or sheet plastics is simply distinguished as belonging to separate disciplines. Many scientists are also ontological materialists. Richard Dawkins espouses ontological materialism when he claims a completeness of science. Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, is a methodological materialist.
Both forms of materialism are very closely related to philosophical and methodological naturalism and at first glance seem almost identical. Materialism and naturalism differ only in that while naturalism assumes or studies the observable, materialism assumes or studies the observable and material.
4.5 MATERIALISM IN ISLAM
“As long as one is shackled to materialism, one can never attain dignity in life,” stated
Hojatul Islam Ibrahim Kazerooni during his Muharram lectures.
In Islam, human dignity is intrinsic, since human beings are considered to be Allah‟s vicegerents on earth. As the Holy Quran says:
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“We have bestowed dignity on the children of Adam…and conferred upon them special favours above the greater part of Our creation”.
(Surat Al-Isra. 17:70)
As Muslims, our main goal should be success in the Hereafter and not amassing wealth in this world. Indeed, the Holy Quran warns us about the excessive accumulation of riches:
“Those who hoard gold and silver, and do not spend it in the way of Allah, inform them of a painful punishment.” (Surah Al-Tawbah 9:34)
Elsewhere, the Quran warns us:
“Abundance diverts you, until you come to the graves.” (Surah Al-Takathur, 102:1-2)
To emphasize the dangers of materialism, the Quran brings the story of the rich Israelite
Qarun (Korah), who oppressed the poor just like the moneyed materialists in the West.
Korah possessed so much wealth that even strong men had difficulty merely carrying the keys to his treasures!
“Indeed, Korah was of the people of Moses, but he oppressed them; and We had given him so much treasure that its keys would have been a burden to a group of strong men.” (Surah AlQasas 28:76)
He was even warned by the elders of his own people not to behave this way, rather he was advised to do good deeds with his money and to plan for the Hereafter.
“Then, his people said to him, „Do not rejoice (in your riches), for Allah does not like
those who rejoice. And seek by means of what Allah has given you, the future abode, and do not neglect your portion of this world, and do good [to others] as Allah has done good to you.”
(Surah Al-Qasas 28:76-77)
Like affluent Americans, Korah loved to flaunt his wealth, and those people of his time who were shackled to materialism envied him and wanted to be like him.
“So he went forth to his people in his finery. Those who desire this world‟s life said, „O would that we had the like of what Korah is given;” (Surah Al-Qasas 28:79)
As a result of his arrogant behavior and misuse of wealth, Korah, his riches and his possessions were swallowed up by the ground in an earthquake.
“So We caused the earth to swallow him up and his house,” (Surah Al-Qasas 28:81)
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So as Muslims, how can we break the shackles of materialism and achieve the intended dignity in life? By using our wealth to elevate the oppressed -- those whose dignity is being devoured by materialism -- for Allah wants to show them favor as the Quran states:
“We desire to show favor to those who are oppressed in the land, and to make them leaders and to make them inheritors.” (Surah Al-Qasas, 28:5)
And spending money to help the oppressed even results in material gain for the giver, for
Imam Sadiq (AS) relates that the Prophet (S) said, “Give charity since it will cause an increase in your wealth”.
So by using our wealth in the way of Allah; paying our Zakat (alms-tax) and Khums (onefifth levy), giving Sadaqa (charity) and by engaging in Jihad (striving) to eliminate unjust differences between rich and poor, we can break the shackles of materialism.
5.0 SOLUTIONS TO PREVENT MATERIALISM
1)
Importance of the Hereafter. Many materialistic societies used to forget that life in
this world is only a short time compared with the Hereafter.
It was related that Abu Hurairah (r.a.) radhi Allahu anhu (May Allah be pleased with him) said that the Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: “This life is a prison for the believers and a
Paradise for the unbelievers.” (Muslim)
2)
You can see that this hadith clearly explains that for some people the life in this world
is like Paradise. These people think that their life is very important. They don‟t realize that it is only for a small or temporary moment. In the Qur‟an we can read.
“What is the life of this world but play and amusement? But best is the Home in the
Hereafter, for those who are righteous. Will you not then understand?” (6:32)
3)
We must understand that life in the Hereafter is much more important than life in this
dunya. If the people realize that they can live according to Islam, a materialistic way of life is of no value.
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Narrated Abu Hurairah (r.a.): Allah‟s Messenger (SAW) said: “The slave of the Dinar, the slave of the Dirham, and the slave of bordered silk cloath are wretched. If such one is given anything he is pleased, but if not he is displeased.” (Bukhari)
4)
Allah‟s Messenger (SAW) stresses the problems which conduct many people to a
false way. Therefore he (SAW) informs us how we should life.
Narrated Sahl bin Sa‟d (r.a.): “A man came to the Prophet (SAW) and said: “O Allah‟s
Messenger direct me to a deed which if I do, shall be loved by Allah and by people.”
He
replied, “If you practice abstinence in the world Allah will love you, and if you abstain from people‟s possessions they will love you.” (Ibn Majah)
5)
Wealth and materialistic way of living won‟t help in the Hereafter. We Should live
according to Qur‟an and Sunnah.
“And whoever obeys Allah and his Messenger, fears Allah, and keeps his duty (to him), such are the successful.” (Qur‟an 24:52)
6)
Only such a way of life will help us and lead us to success. If you are rich, you should
know that this is is only for this dunya (world). Let‟s look at how the best generation of Islam lived: Umar bin Al-Khatab (r.a.) reproached himself for missing the Asr prayer in congregation by giving away 200,000 dirhams10. Imagine how pious the first generation of
Islam was living. These are the people we should respect and follow.
7)
It is also very important to stress that Islam is a religion of social justice. Therefore
zakah is one of the pillars of Islam. Allah subhana wa ta‟ala commands:
“And establish the prayer (salah) and pay the obligatory charity (zakah).” (73:20)
On gold and silver usually 2.5% must be given as zakah. This amount should be given for example to the poor (al- Fuqara or al-Miskin), the people with debts (al Gharimun), etc. You can see that Islam helps the needy in order that they feed their families and have a proper
(halal) way of living. With the zakah the poor people get enough and will not resort to any form of illegal buisiness or commit crimes in order to get food or satisfy their basic needs.
We realize that Islam is based on humanitarian and just system of life.
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6.0 CONCLUSION
Materialism In today‟s society, materialism takes part in every person‟s life, no matter what social class they are. The idea of being materialistic can be considered immoral, but there is a fine line between morality and personal interests. It is safe to say that everybody is materialistic to a certain extent, whether it is from buying the same brand of jeans because they fit nice, to purchasing a wide variety of hot rods. It is obvious that the latter of the two is the one which can be considered to cross the line. Buying some nice clothes here and there is normal for people and everybody does it once in a while. While on the other hand, buying 5 or 6 sports cars can be considered somewhat pretentious.
There are many factors that go into a person being immoral based on the materials that they have. Greed and excessive luxuries are what can determine the immorality of a person.
Growing up in a fairly affluent community, it was easy to distinguish the differences amongst different social classes and the way which they present themselves in the community. Being materialism will also affect one‟s health status.
Due to materialism desire, they spend most of their time to chase for physical matter but never take good care of their body. Therefore, most of not all of time died at a early stage because of bad health condition. Besides, being too materialism will harm relationship between you and me. Materialism people spend too much of time to chase for matter and at last neglected his/ her family, soul partner, and also dearest friend.In a nutshell, being materialistic brings more harms than advantages. Maybe sometimes we should have materialism thoughts to gain.
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7.0 REFERENCES
1) The Islamic Worldview, department of General Studies, 2008
2) Robert, C.K., and George, B., (2010), The Waning of Materialism, 1st, United States,
Oxford University Press Inc, New York.
3) Oxford Dictionaries, [online]. Available at: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com 4) Richard C. Vitzthum
[This essay is from a lecture given to the Atheist Students Association at the University of
Maryland, College Park, on November 14, 1996.]
5) Gutberlet, C. (1911). Materialism. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert
Appleton
Company.
Retrieved
October
21,
2013
from
New
Advent:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10041b.htm
6) Gutberlet, Constantin. "Materialism." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 10. New
York:
Robert
Appleton
Company,
1911.
21
Oct.
2013
.
7) Yuram Abdullah Weiler in Tehran Times, Wednesday 12 December 2012
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