Materialism
Materialism is the philosophical doctrine that postulates that matter is primary and that consciousness exists as a consequence of a highly organized state of it, which produces a qualitative change.
Regarding the relationship of human thought, the world around us, and the knowability of that world, materialism asserts that the world is material and that it exists objectively, independently of consciousness. According to this conception, consciousness and thought develop from a higher level of organization of matter, in a process of reflection of objective reality.
Materialism also maintains that the world and its regularities are knowable by humans, since it is possible to demonstrate the accuracy of this way of conceiving a natural process, reproducing it ourselves, creating it as a result of its own conditions and also putting it up to date. service of our own ends, destroying the "thing in itself, unattainable".
The affirmations of materialism come into opposition with those of idealism. By asserting that there is only one "kind of substance" (matter) materialism is a type of ontological monism.
Introduction
The opposition between the materialist approach and the idealist approach is one of the oldest and most persistent philosophical controversies. In the 17th century the term "materialism" was used mainly to avoid the sense of physical representations about matter. In that sense modern natural sciences have a completely materialistic approach.
Since the beginning of the XIX century, influenced by historical materialism, the term is also used in the context of science social. In this sense, materialism refers to various theoretical frameworks that seek the causes of historical processes and cultural change in material causes. For this historical materialism, the ultimate causes of social phenomena are determined by material factors and it explicitly rejects explanations involving supernatural factors, taking as a fact the scientific irrelevance of God, spirits and a supposed intelligence of the world in the historical development. According to materialism, the ultimate causes must be sought in measurable or empirically apprehensible factors.
Although historically materialism was popularized within Marxism, where it remains a major theme, there are pre-Marx antecedents. It is currently present in anthropology, theory of history or sociology, making historical materialism encompass a whole series of theoretical elaborations that are not necessarily Marxist. Outside the field of Marxism, historical materialism is the hypothesis that the defining features of human societies and their historical evolution have been determined by material factors (available technology, production system, geographic and climatic characteristics). Due to the attempt to establish the ideas of historical materialism independently of the Marxist version of it, new terms have been coined such as: cultural materialism, ecological functionalism, geographic determinism, economic determinism, and others, which can be considered as material conceptions of History. Various academic authors such as Jared Diamond or Marvin Harris have dealt in detail with the historical evolution of extensive geographical areas, and have tried to explain defining features of society based on material factors, pointing out that these types of factors are predominant when it comes to understanding the evolution of societies and civilizations.
History
Materialist doctrines of the Ancient East
The first traces of the materialist doctrine date back to the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC. of no. and. in the Egyptian and Babylonian cultures, where the first spontaneous materialistic conceptions were formed. Also, and a little later but with greater completeness, it is found in the philosophy of India and Ancient China.
In monuments of ancient Egyptian culture, for example, "the cold water that creates all beings and from which all things come, as well as the air that fills space and is found everywhere" is mentioned, which shows that already at that time the question of the material origin of natural phenomena was posed in embryonic form. Or they may have interpreted these elements from a purely symbolic point of view.
In Babylonian culture, for example, we find the astronomer Seleucus (II century BC) who already at that time he formulated conjectures about the heliocentric structure of the world.
In Ancient India it appears in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. C. in the Lokaiata doctrine (or school of the chārvākas) who maintained that the world was material, composed of four primordial elements: earth, water, fire and air. Living beings were also formed from these elements, including the human being, which after dying decomposed again into these elements. The Chārvākas also criticized the prevailing religious doctrines at that time about the existence of God, the soul and the world of the afterlife, endorsing that when the body died, consciousness disappeared, for which they considered the doctrine of transmigration absurd. of the souls
The materialism of the Chárvakas was closely related to their atheism. Later in the Sāṃkhya current (around the year 600 B.C.) it was held that the material character of the world developed from a primordial substance (prakriti); but the most important achievement of this current was the postulate that movement, space and time are inseparable properties of matter.
As ancient Hindu philosophy developed, the conception of matter composed of the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth) was replaced by more developed representations based on the atomistic structure of the world. In the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika schools of philosophy, the ideas arise that the world is made up of small particles of various qualities found in the ether, in space and in time. These particles would be eternal, uncreable and indestructible, while the objects composed of them would be mutable, unstable and transitory. These materialistic ideas exerted a strong influence on religious schools and doctrines of the time, such as the Mīmāṃsā religious school, which recognized the reality of the world, whose being does not depend on any creator, exists eternally and is made up of particles governed by the autonomous law of karma.
In Ancient China we find the materialist doctrine in the theory of knowledge of Mozi (479-381 BC) in opposition to Confucius. Important contributions were also made by Taoism, whose creator Lao-Tse (6th to 4th centuries BC) maintained that the world, which is eternal, is in continuous movement and mutation. The movement, according to the Taoists, is governed by the Tao (natural law), which although it is an abstract and metaphysical concept, is at the same time anti-spiritual since the Tao is considered immaterial but natural, and not of divine origin. or supernatural, so the Taoist worldview results in a materialist-metaphysical dialectic, dually naturalistic and non-spiritual.
The naive materialist ideas gained successive development in the doctrine of Xun Zi (313-238 B.C.), one of the relevant figures of Confucianism, who, unlike other Confucians, considered that the sky does not possess consciousness and is part of nature, which also included the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the seasons of the year, light and darkness, wind and rain, and that the succession of celestial phenomena runs according to certain natural laws, so that the destiny of people cannot be governed by a non-existent “will of heaven”.
Xun Zi affirmed that human beings, contrary to animals, know how to pool their efforts and organize their public life, that they can know the surrounding world and take advantage of the knowledge acquired for their good; besides that knowledge begins with perception, but is governed by thought that complies with natural laws.
Lastly, around our era we find it in Wang Chung (27-97 B.C.) who maintained that the world is made up of the substance qì, which moves in eternity, while the tao is the law of reality itself. By the reciprocal action of two qi —the rarefied ones found in the celestial space and the condensed ones found on the earth constituting the various bodies— all things are engendered. He maintained that man is a natural being composed of material substance in which a vital energy has been installed, a spiritual principle elaborated by the circulation of blood, which disappears when man dies. This materialism was naive and metaphysical.
Ancient Greek Materialism
From the 6th century B.C. C. philosophy develops with greater impetus in Ancient Greece and post modern. There the materialistic current arises in controversy with religion mainly in the philosophers representing the so-called school of Miletus; Thales of Miletus (ca. 624-547 BC), Anaximander (ca. 610-546 BC), and Anaximenes (ca. 585-525 BC).
According to the doctrine of Thales, water is the beginning of all things; everything comes from water and everything becomes water.
Anaximander took the apeiron as the primary substance of all that exists, an indeterminate principle that engenders things and phenomena through movement and the segregation of opposites such as «the wet and the dry», « the cold and the warm» «the sweet and the salty». According to this doctrine, everything is in constant rotation, one thing arises from the apeiron and another disappears and decomposes becoming an apeiron, which, following a materialist course, makes one of the first attempts to represent the world dialectically, in movement.
Anaximenes took air as its primordial substance, whose movement determines the emergence and disappearance of things.
Another Greek philosopher who made great contributions to the materialist doctrine was Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 530-470 BC) who took fire as his primary substance. He sustained the world's existence in eternity, independent of any supernatural forces, as an eternally living fire, which with regular order is kindled and with regular order is extinguished. He emphasized the idea of constant movement and change in the world, of contradiction as a source of movement, of the possibility of reciprocal transformation of opposites. He expressed ideas about dialectical principles, which reflect in one way or another the true state of things, although not supported by scientific knowledge.
The most profound development of the materialist current in Ancient Greece is seen in the doctrine of Democritus of Abdera (460-370 BC), who promoted the atomistic theory of the structure of matter. According to this theory, the cardinal principle of the world is the existence of a vacuum and the atoms that move in a vacuum, meeting and forming different bodies and even the soul of man, which dies when the organism perishes.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) who argued that all things had a raw material at their base, which was characterized by a lack of determination, of form, that is, they were nothing but a possibility of existence. This possibility becomes a true sensible thing only when matter is united with one or another form that gives it its determination. This conception, although it is materialist in its essence, has serious shortcomings because it separates the primary matter from the movement, which is introduced by the form from outside, in addition to the fact that its transition from an indeterminate to a determined state ultimately takes its origin from the gods and other divinities, who come to be the first propellant.
Finally, within the materialist current, although somewhat more inconsistent, we find the Greek philosopher Epicurus (342-270 BC). Influenced by the atomism of Democritus, he maintains that all reality is made up of two fundamental elements. On the one hand, the atoms, which have shape, extension and weight, and on the other, the void, which is nothing but the space in which these atoms move. These atoms can deviate from their trajectory allowing a certain causal freedom. The Latin poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius (99 - 55 BC) reflects the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus.
This conception, along with the elements of dialectic and materialistic tendencies, also contains metaphysical traits and idealistic tendencies.
After Aristotle, a decadence conditioned by the general crisis experienced by the Greek State is observed, outlining a transition from materialism to idealism and mysticism.
Materialism in the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, religion dominated all spheres of the spiritual life of society. Philosophy becomes in that period the servant of theology, justifying and arguing religious dogmas and demonstrating their veracity and immutability. In this period, special attention is paid to the problem of the correlation of general ideas and things of the sensible world, and the struggle between materialism and idealism focuses on resolving the question of the correlation of the singular and the general, of the general ideas and particular things.
In this sense, materialists affirm that the universal cannot exist in reality, much less before the singular. In reality there are only singular things and the general is only a name that does not reflect anything and therefore does not exist in reality. This materialistic current was called nominalism.
At the same time, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, Confucian ideology rapidly lost its role in China, the religious mysticism of the Taoist sect spread, and Buddhism increasingly penetrated India.
The materialist thinkers of that time intervened against that mysticism and idealism.
Fan Zhen (century V to VI) propagated the idea that the world beyond does not exist and that the soul of man is a form of existence of the body and disappears when man dies.
The Confucians of the 7th to 9th centuries advanced some materialist propositions but later renounced it, culminating in a Neo-Confucian idealist doctrine.
The main defender of the materialistic orientation within Neo-Confucianism was Zhang Zai (1020-1077) who refuted the idealistic representations that heaven and earth are a set of subjective apprehensions; he promoted the idea that the world of things, which really exists, rests on matter substance, which takes various forms. The original of them is the infinite space full of scattered invisible particles that when condensed form a nebulous mass called "magna harmony", composed of passive and active particles, from which all things arise. Zhang Zai also refers to the changes and development of things, giving important dialectical insights, but from which he drew metaphysical conclusions. He pointed out that all things are mutually conditioned and interconnected; the process of development of the phenomena takes two forms -gradual and sudden-; that every process occurs in the contest of opposing forces: the active principle and the passive principle; but he concluded that the final result of the struggle between these opposing forces is their reconciliation.
Towards the 17th and 18th centuries, the materialist postulates gained greater development and deeper foundation in philosophers such as Wang Chuanghan (1619-1692) and Dai Zhen (1723-1777) who founded and developed the materialist ideas about nature and the laws of development but that in social questions do not advance further than their precursors.
In India, for its part, in this period, the orthodox systems nyaya, vaisesika, sankhya, yoga, mimansa and vedanta and the heterodox charvaca-lokayatamanta, Jainism and Buddhism, integrated this by four schools: vaibhasika, sautrantika., madhyamika and yogacara. Of them, only the charvakas maintained a coherent materialistic tendency, in the rest materialistic and idealistic elements coexisted or were consistent idealists.
In that period and based on ancient Greek philosophy and philosophical thought in the East, arabographic philosophy emerged and reached a high level.
From the 10th to the 13th centuries it was represented by the currents: Eastern Peripatetism (Aristotelianism), the doctrine of the Brothers of Purity, Sufism and orthodox Muslim philosophy.
Renaissance-era materialism
Italy was the first country where capitalist relations began to develop. Economically, the most developed region was the north, with its commercial maritime republics of Venice and Genoa, and the industrial one of Florence. At the center of attention of the advanced thinkers of the time was the human person. The ideologues of the rising bourgeoisie that needed freedom of movement, free enterprise and free trade, dreamed of freeing man from feudal despotism.
This new direction of culture was called "humanism" (from the Latin humanus, 'human'). The old sentence of "I am a man and nothing human is foreign to me" became the motto of the humanists. The particularity of the philosophical thought of the Renaissance is its anti-scholastic character. It must be taken into account that scholasticism, both on the side of the Church and the State, was the official philosophy throughout the Middle Ages and was taught in most universities. Unlike scholasticism, the philosophy of the humanists ceased to be the servant of theology. In opposition to scholasticism and the theology of the Middle Ages, materialist philosophy began to develop in Italy.
Two Italian philosophers
Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588) took an important step in the development of Italian philosophy. He founded a philosophical academy in which, in opposition to medieval Aristotelianism, the empirical study of nature was propagated. His main work is entitled On the nature of things according to their own principles . Fundamentally he was a materialist and maintained that eternal and immutable, homogeneous, uncreated and indestructible matter objectively exists. But, at the same time, he leaned towards the idea that all the forces of nature are animated. As a source of the movement of matter, Telesio indicated the opposition of heat and cold.
The great Italian thinker Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) drew profoundly materialistic and atheistic conclusions from Copernicus' heliocentric theory. He was born in Nola (near Naples). At fifteen he entered the Dominican order. Thanks to his tenacious and independent effort, he became one of the most cultured men of his time.
For his advanced ideas he was accused of heresy and excommunicated. He was forced to flee Italy and, for long years, had to wander through Switzerland, France, England and Germany, spreading his materialistic conception of the universe everywhere.
In 1592 he returned to Italy, where he was captured by the Inquisition and thrown into prison. Despite the torture he suffered, he did not retract his convictions, being sentenced to death. "You are more afraid to pronounce my sentence than I am to hear it," Bruno said, addressing his executioners. Finally, on February 17, 1600, he was burned alive in the Plaza de las Flores (in Rome).
His main works are: The dinner of ashes (1584), Of the cause, principle and one (1584), Of infinity, of the universe and the worlds (1584), Of the triple minimum and measure (1591), Of the immense and the innumerable (1591), Of the monad, of the number and of the figure (1591). In his book entitled The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1584) he unmasks the papacy and the Catholic religion. His work The Mystery of Pegasus, with the Annex of Killen's Ass (1586), constitutes a brilliant and caustic satire against the medieval scholastics and theologians.
According to Giordano Bruno's thought:
- Nature is infinite;
- The Sun is not the center of the universe but only the center of our planetary system;
- Not only does the Sun have planets but also the other stars;
- The whole universe is homogeneous; that is, it has the same substances on Earth;
- All other planets are also populated;
- Matter is the mother and lighter of all things and capable of infinitely producing new and new forms;
- Man is an inseparable part of nature, is the microcosm that reflects macrocosm;
- He admits the degrees of knowledge that Nicholas of Cusa had established: the senses, understanding and reason. Although it gives priority to reason;
- Understanding the universe as infinity leads the Italian philosopher to the "dialectic of the coincidence of the opposites", both in the infinitely great and in the infinitely small.
Metaphysical (mechanistic) materialism. H.H. XVII and XVIII
(Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza).
With the emergence of capitalist relations of production, production is fostered, industry and commerce unfold, which requires concrete knowledge of the laws of the surrounding world and the need to study and investigate nature appears. This gives a boost to philosophy which is proclaimed as a science called to find out the truths that help in practical life and guide the creation of material values, the postulates of medieval philosophy and its method are declared false by induction to errors and new means of investigation and methods are offered to discover the truth.
One of the main philosophers of this current was Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who harshly criticized idealist philosophy, beginning with Antiquity and reaching the Middle Ages, for having become a servant of theology and having come to found their theses with religious dogmas, due to their speculative nature, the vacuity and the inconsistency of their postulates. Bacon considered experience as the foundation of the knowledge process if man and his consciousness were freed from all kinds of prejudices. He defended the infinite and eternal material world, one of its fundamental properties being movement, which Bacon reduced to a few forms.
Bacon's method is also inherent in metaphysics and mechanics, since he understood that objects were a mechanical combination of certain permanent qualities and that they could be understood through the mechanical unification of data on their various aspects. Despite his shortcomings, Bacon's doctrine was a considerable step forward in the development of philosophical thought and marked the emergence of a new form of philosophical materialism, metaphysical materialism.
The materialist doctrine continued to be developed by philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who understood that nature represents a totality of bodies that possess two main properties: extension and figure, and reduced the variety of movement to mechanical movement, understanding as movement the translation of bodies in space. He established the mathematical method as the only scientific method of knowledge, supported by the operations of adding and subtracting.
Many years later, we have Pierre Gassendi, a representative of the materialist tradition, who opposed René Descartes's attempts to base the natural sciences on dualist foundations.
18th century French materialism
The French cleric Pierre Gassendi (1592-1665) represented the materialist tradition in opposition to the attempts of René Descartes (1596-1650) to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. The materialist and atheist priest Jean Meslier (1664-1729), Julien Offray de La Mettrie, the Franco-German Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789), the encyclopedist Denis Diderot (1713-1784), as well as others followed. French Enlightenment thinkers; also in England John Stewart (1747-1822), whose insistence on seeing matter as endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) came to state that "thought is a material action: it is a result of the movement of the nervous fluid".
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) wrote that "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take himself into account". He stated that an observer can only know material objects through of the brain and its particular organization.
The materialist and atheist anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach (XIX century) would point to a new shift in materialism in his book The Essence of Christianity (The essence of Christianity, 1841), which provided a humanist vision of religion as the external projection of the inner nature of the human being. Feuerbach's materialism would later have a notable influence on Karl Marx.
More recently, thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze have attempted to rethink and strengthen the classical ideas of materialism. Contemporary theorists such as Manuel de Landa, working within the framework of this revitalized materialism have come to be classified as 'new materialists'. 39;.
Dialectical Materialism
Created in the mid-XIX century by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels and further developed by Vladimir Ilyich "Lenin& #3. 4;. Marx and Engels, turning Georg Hegel's idealistic dialectic "top-down" on its head, provided materialism with a process of quantitative and qualitative change called dialectical materialism, and with a materialist view of history, known as materialism. historical. Other Russian philosophers followed this line of thought such as Vissarion Belinski, Aleksandr Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliúbov.
New Materialism
New materialism emerges as a trend within the social sciences. Representatives of new materialism include Rosi Braidotti, Manuel de Landa, Karen Barad, Quentin Meillassoux, Jacques Lacan, and Judith Butler.
Materialism today
Materialism is a current of philosophy that arises strictly and exclusively as a counterpart to another, called idealism, to answer that fundamental question of philosophy about what comes first: thought or material. Then, and as is clear from the name that was attributed to it, materialism gives absolute prominence to the material world, since the material will always precede thought.
The concept affects not only the philosophical view of the world but also science. Although in the natural sciences non-materialist approaches were discarded long ago, in the social sciences there has been a controversy in the last centuries around materialism as a research approach. More recently Marvin Harris proposed a materialist research approach to cultures and societies called cultural materialism; even Paul and Patricia Churchland have promoted a new non-reductionist approach to materialism, known as eliminative materialism, which holds that some mental phenomena do not really exist and that to talk about these concepts, as is done in popular psychology, is something like giving credence to the diseases caused by the devil. In Spain, a current representative of materialism with a similar line of thought is, for example, Martín López Corredoira, by advocating for a vision of the world in which everything that exists is physical matter-energy following its corresponding natural laws and excluding the possibility of any other non-material entity (mind, free will, person as a being with its own identity, feelings,...), or relegating it to a mere mental representation of something non-existent in itself.
Materialism has often been understood as an entirely scientific and rationalist way of viewing the world, particularly by religious thinkers who oppose it and by Marxists. Materialism as a philosophical or scientific principle is typically contrasted with dualism, phenomenology, idealism, and vitalism.
The definition of «matter» in modern philosophical materialism includes all scientifically observable entities, the stroma, such as energy, forces and the curvature of space. Many authors of the 20th century, particularly epistemologists and philosophers of science, prefer the name physicalism because it lacks so much of the emotional connotations of the word "materialism" as well as the historical restrictions associated with it. It emphasizes the physical, be it matter or energy. Materialism flourished during the second half of the 20th century at various universities in Australia taking a skeptical approach to abstract objects, along which is known as materialism or Australian realism.
The deepening of the idea of the perceived world based on the definition of stroma has resulted in two currents, the stratology of Urbina and the stromatic philosophy of A. Muñoz
Eliminative materialism
Specifications on materialism
Mario Bunge maintains that modern materialism must be "logical and scientific", considering as inadequate the most widespread definitions of the concept of matter offered in the past. The "new ontology" It would be characterized by simultaneously being exact, systematic, scientific, materialist, dynamic, emergentist and evolutionary whose more appropriate name would be scientific materialism. However, and to avoid vagueness, Bunge's materialism is usually called as systemic materialism or emergentist systemic materialism, due to its emphasis on the fact that the entire universe and even that universe itself are material systems, organized at different levels of emergent properties. For Mario Bunge, the concept of matter refers to the abstract and immaterial set of all material things or individuals, that is, changing or mutable objects, with a certain energy. Followers of Bunge who have continued his work have presented modified definitions of matter, such as Gustavo E. Romero. For Romero, when material things are organized into complex systems, they can remain in thermodynamic equilibrium and, therefore, with energy but zero work unable to generate changes; but it is clear that they remain material. Therefore, Romero argues that it is necessary to add that complex material systems define their change or mutability not so much by having a certain energy but also by having an entropy differential. Besides, this last author understands that something would be material simply if a thing can vary in its state spaces.
Colloquial use as a synonym for consumerism
In common parlance it is used as a pejorative label for a lifestyle that seeks wealth, money, and comfort rather than spiritual or mental development. This term has nothing to do with the position of materialistic philosophers or scientists, but is identified with the term consumerism.
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