Materialism

MATERIALISM. - A philosophical (scientific, historical) system that deduces the form of things and events from their matter, considering the latter as fundamental and primitive, and the former as phenomenal and consequent. It stands in immediate opposition to idealism (v.), insofar as the latter deduces matter from form; and mediately to spiritualism (v.), insofar as the latter affirms the absolute superiority of the world of spirit over matter.

It may, however, also be developed in a particular or methodical form for a single problem or aspect of philosophy: for example, ethical materialism (hedonism, utilitarianism [v.]) posits pleasure or utility (as the matter of consciousness) as the principle of morality, but does not prescribe a materialistic interpretation of the world; biological materialism maintains that the vital phenomena in corporeal beings are generated by the mechanisms and chemistries of inorganic matter, but does not exclude the presence of spiritual life. An all-encompassing materialistic system finds itself unable to achieve full coherence, both because it cannot help attributing to itself as an intellectual system some difference from material processes, and because the definition of the concept of matter is itself formal and therefore not deducible from matter. Materialistic systems are in reality formulas corresponding to epochs of weariness or spiritual decadence, or due to the predominance of empirical knowledge and advances. Their constant error is that while they propose the principle of matter as contrary to the metaphysics of form, it is nevertheless a metaphysical principle that goes beyond sensible experience and is never entirely justified by it. There is indeed a metaphysical materialism in the description by means of material images of the spiritual world and of the genesis of life, such as is proper to the cosmogonies, primitive Greek and Oriental, and to the subsequent theosophies that imitate or reproduce them.

Ancient materialism is still quite close to these forms of naive metaphysics, although inspired by scientific and juridical interests. It is distinguished into atomistic and pneumatological. Atomistic materialism is represented by the school of Abdera (Leucippus, Democritus [v.], 5th-4th centuries B.C.) and by the school of Epicurus ([v.], 3rd century B.C. - 2nd century A.D.). They agree in identifying matter with bodies, and these with atoms or indivisible corpuscles, agitated by perpetual motion in empty space. The weight of the atoms determines their downward motion, and this is the very necessity (ἀνάγαν) that regulates all events (v. ATOMISM). The formulation of the principle of the conservation of matter, and of the canons of scientific research by empirical method, is attributed to ancient atomism, although they are also developed or accepted by other schools. Characteristic is its attitude in religious and social matters: the divinities exist only as corporeal entities, the universal mechanism of necessity excludes providence; religion as a relationship between man and God is useless and harmful and superstitious; the soul, according to Epicurus, dies with the body, and therefore there is neither a beyond nor an afterlife (according to Democritus, the soul had weak survivals subject to the laws of bodies); civilization is formed through aggregations of material and utilitarian interests, and to these are owed social order and the progress of the arts. In this, many evolutionistic views of the ancients are confusedly adopted and reworked (adaptation of species; origins of language and of the social contract): but above all there emerges from the incoherences of the doctrine and from the aridity of reason a poetic melancholy, a veiled pessimism regarding the fortunes of imagination and human life, which inspires the work of Lucretius and his imitators.

Pneumatological materialism is represented by the Stoic school (3rd century B.C. - 2nd century A.D.; v. STOICISM). It appeals, through a rational revision of hylozoism (v.), to the idea of a single, primitive matter (the fiery πνεῦμα), identical with the divine principle, which generates and permeates all things, and maintains their life and animation, particularizing its own universal law and energy into laws and productive principles of individual existences, recognizing itself in human reason, and reabsorbing everything in the periodic consumption and renewal of the world (ἀποκατάστασις). The Stoics thus came to propose the identity of matter and form, and therefore of necessity and freedom, of fate and providence, of experience and reason: but for polemical motives (idealization of wisdom, formalism of the moral law, religious sense of the cosmic order) they did not succeed in eliminating dualism from their doctrine; indeed they justified it logically in the contrast between activity and passivity, λόγος and πάθος. Their materialism therefore did not take the path of science, but that of pantheism (v.) and of a return to metaphysics.

Akin to the Hellenic schools and largely derived from them are the Oriental materialistic schools. In Indian philosophy: the systems of Nyāya and Vaiçeshika (3rd century B.C., scholastic expositions of the 3rd century A.D.) rearrange atomistic theories within categorical schemas; the heterodox tendencies, no less ancient, of the Lokāyatas and the Cārvākas propose sensism and hedonism respectively. In the Persian world, Manichaeism (3rd century A.D.) gives rise to the abstract and rigorous dualism between spirit and matter, which permitted the systematic survival of physical and ethical materialism, as a doctrine parallel to that of the spiritual life, in the heresies of the Middle Ages (v. CATHARS).

With the triumph of Christianity, the danger that materialism might ever become a definitive system ceased — a danger still immanent in the post-Aristotelian schools. There are, however, also Christian heresies of a materialistic nature, for example, that of Montanus (v.; d. 175) followed by Tertullian (v.) in his last phase; which attributed a material substance even to the soul. In the Christian Middle Ages (12th century) there is the pantheistic materialism of Amalric of Bena (identity of the creator and creatures, unity of the essence of all beings) and David of Dinant (and here stultissime posuit Deum esse materiam primam: Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 3, a. 8, c); and logical materialism, or the theory of the indifference of the most general and substantial concepts toward the differences of the concepts of individual, species and genus (Adelard of Bath, Walter of Mortagne), not without some scientific reference to Democritean atomism, known through the Arabs and Constantine the African (11th century). With the first rebirth of culture in the West, Epicureanism returns to vogue for juridical and literary motives (Frederick II of Swabia, Guido Cavalcanti) and this vogue continued in humanism (Lorenzo Valla): but the new Epicureanism tended to accord with finalism or theism, so much so that Albert the Great already considered Anaxagoras an Epicurean as well. In the materialistic tendencies of the Renaissance, however, hylozoism and pantheism prevail (Pomponazzi, Telesio, Libertinism).

Modern materialism begins with the 17th century, and with the molecular theory of matter in which the corpuscular theory and the atomic hypothesis of the ancients were renewed. It is found developed in connection with the mechanical doctrine of nature in the dualistic systems (Galileo, Descartes, Newton), but also upheld, apart from religious problems, as a systematic principle of natural philosophy, by notable thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Robert Boyle (1627-91), whose tendency might be designated as physical materialism. Gassendi, in the name of Epicurus, re-established against Descartes and the synthesis he attempted of atomic theories with the new rational mechanics, the classical corpuscular theory, seeking to explain the free will of atoms as deriving from their individual properties. Hobbes maintained that the corpuscular theory alone is sufficient, with its mechanism, to explain also the origin of living beings and of sensible consciousness. Boyle joined the atomic hypothesis with the magnetic and chemical properties of atoms that he discovered. He was the first to give (De ipsa natura, 1682) a non-metaphysical definition of "matter" on purely scientific grounds. The philosophical current thus formed finally received the name of "materialism" from Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695-97; 2nd ed. 1702); and Berkeley set out to destroy it by denying the existence of matter. But it continued to develop in that form throughout the 18th century in association with deism, starting from John Toland (Letters to Serena, 1704: Motion essential to matter). It thus had singular expressions in that century: the Carteggio sull'essenza dell'anima (1713) of J. G. Westphal and J. D. Hochseisel; the Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745) and L'homme machine of Julien Offray de La Mettrie; the Essai de cosmologie (1750) of Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759), who asked whether atoms themselves can be sensibility, and whether sensibility is not an "epiphenomenon" of the brain; the Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (1754) of Diderot, and the treatise De la nature of J. B. Robinet (1735-1820).

In the second half of the 18th century, however, the tendency to unify materialism and atheism dominates, represented by the Système de la nature of d'Holbach (1774) and by the Encyclopédie des Sans-Dieu of Pierre Maréchal (1800). It is opposed by physiological and ideological materialism, inspired by the sensism of Condillac (Traité des systèmes, 1749), with the doctrine of psychic phenomena as organic reactions to physical phenomena (Charles Bonnet, 1720-93; Claude Adrien Helvétius, 1715-73; Pierre Cabanis [v.], 1757-1808). This allows one to consider a genesis of life as superior to matter, and a formation of consciousness, starting from elementary phenomena such as that of the irritability of tissues and that of sensation as an internal reaction to impressions. A parallel direction is represented by English associationist materialism, which considered (David Hartley, 1705-57) sensations and ideas as "motions" of the soul, entirely similar and parallel to the vibrations of the nervous system and subject to the same kind of mechanical necessity; and proposed (Joseph Priestley [1733-1804], Free discussion of the doctrines of materialism, 1778) to study psychic phenomena in the physical phenomena corresponding to them and according to the same physical law of attraction and repulsion. It was then brought to logical perfection, and to materialistic conclusions, by James Mill (1773-1856: Analysis of the phenomena of human mind, 1829). Spinozism too was interpreted in that era in a materialistic-pantheistic sense (H. de Boulainvilliers, H. Heydenreich).

At the beginning of the 19th century, with the prevalence of idealism, the ideologues (v. IDEOLOGIA) came to accept, albeit veiledly and with varying opposition, the Kantian criticism, which considers physical "matter" and the scientific principles pertaining to it as postulates deriving from intellectual categories, while sensible matter is only the inseparable content of the intuitive form, and its existence in itself is unknowable. It cannot be denied, however, that in this way Kant (v.) attributes to the matter of knowledge, whether intuitive or intellectual, a limiting function of knowing, to overcome which the subsequent transcendental and absolute idealism had to prove itself: which therefore did not succeed in entirely replacing with its doctrine the traditional spiritualism, of Cartesian inspiration and dualistic background.

Dialectical materialism (v.) arose instead toward the middle of the 19th century, through the negation of Hegel's absolute idealism, and gave rise to historical materialism. The economic materialism consequent upon it, and through the work of the same authors, then identified "value" with productive labor, and defined artistic and intellectual values as "surplus value" (v. VALORE). Dialectical, historical, economic materialism, after varying fortunes in the 19th century, are still joined together in the socialism and communism of the 20th century, as at their beginnings. Attempts have been made several times to trace them back to Kantian criticism, unifying the matter and the sensible form of praxis in one and the same act, but the Marxists do not succeed in overcoming the initial sophism of the "overturning" of the idea into its content or matter, since this is comprehensible only insofar as it is in the idea itself.

Psycho-physical materialism (A. Weber, L. Fechner, H. Helmholtz, H. Hertz) arose instead in the first half of the 19th century through the extension of the experimental method and of the progress of the physical sciences to associationist psychology and to materialist Spinozism: Fechner linked it with a pantheistic vision of the universe. It tends predominantly to demonstrate that there are constant and quantitative relations between physical phenomena and psychic phenomena in conformity with the law of conservation of energy (L. Meyer, 1840). Through the development of the new atomic theories (C. Avogadro, P. Gay-Lussac), of evolutionist cosmogony (P. R.

Laplace, H. L. Helmholtz) and of zoogony (K. Vogt, R. Virchow), there also arose, around the middle of the century, mechanical-biological materialism (K. Vogt, Köhlerglaube u. Wissenschaft, 1854; K. Moleschott [v.], Kreislauf des Lebens, 1852; L. Büchner [v.], Kraft u. Stoff, 1855), in which atomic matter constitutes the substrate of organized and organic material forms, the forces required to produce them are reduced to phenomena of matter or to an initial self-division of it, and every autonomy of psychic life in relation to the functions of the brain is denied. This new materialist dogmatism could not fail to conclude with a certain skepticism about the limits of scientific knowledge (P. Du Bois Reymond) and about the possibility of excluding teleology from it (F. Überweg). Corresponding to it, in the social sciences, are the ethical atomism of Max Stirner (Der Einzige, 1845) and determinism.

In the second half of the 19th century, in connection with the predominance of the evolutionist method in the natural sciences (C. Darwin, H. Spencer) and of the electromagnetic theories of matter (W. J. Rankine, J. Maxwell, W. Ostwald), monistic materialism (energetic, evolutionist) gained the upper hand. It replaces the classical concept of atomic matter with that of an indeterminate matter as primitive or fundamental and diffused energy, from which the formation of atomic and molecular nuclei would derive, and which would continue to produce the successive evolving phenomena. This hypothesis, which also inverts the traditional relationship between force and matter, came to be adopted also in psychology with the theory of Mind-Stuff (psychic matter; v. TAIN). It would be theoretically reconcilable with spiritualist systems, since energy is rather form than matter; but thus far it has inspired monistic systems akin to pantheism and decidedly materialistic. Such was that of the evolutionist cosmogony of Ernst Haeckel and Enrico Morselli at the end of the last century, and such is that, contemporary with us, of the quantum physics of Max Planck, which returns to uniting energy with a primitive quantity of nuclear value.

The initial error of materialism was precisely that of attributing to the atom a primitive and uncreated existence, and it is repeated also in the modern activist and energetic forms. Neither the atom nor the instant, neither the elements of extended matter nor those of physical forces or energies are the act of life. Even more evident is their radical insufficiency to account for the forms of spiritual life (truth, freedom, duty), essentially irreducible, by virtue of their ideal value of universality and necessity, to the pure empirical becoming in space and time in which every materialism is resolved and concluded (v. ATEISMO; ATOMISMO; DUALISMO; MONISMO; and the individual thinkers cited).

Santino Caramella