Materialism

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Materialism is a term with both metaphysical and social meanings. As a metaphysical position materialism regards matter (Latin materia) as the primary or most real substance. In modern times materialism also has taken practical forms. Because science studies empirical objects and because material entities are more perceptible than are immaterial ones, the scientific worldview tends to assume materialism at least for heuristic purposes or on provisional grounds. Moreover, modern technological progress, especially in its early phases, provided mostly material improvements. Thus, one effect that technology seems to have had on culture is the creation of social forms of materialism such as consumerism.

As a form of metaphysical monism, materialism attempts to reduce all phenomena to a single basic substance: matter. Thus, the opposites of metaphysical materialism are doctrines such as spiritualism, which holds that spirit is the ultimate reality; idealism, which sees the phenomenal world and matter as creations of the mind; and immaterialism, which rejects the reality of matter itself.

The idea of materialism was present when ancient Greek philosophy originated with Ionian natural philosophers who began to explain phenomena by referring to natural causes instead of religious myths in the sixth century B.C.E. The first systematically materialistic philosophers were the atomists Democritus and Leucippus of Abdera in the fifth century B.C.E. Among the major schools of philosophy in antiquity, Epicureanism professed materialism. In the modern period important materialists have included Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1672), Heinrich Dietrich d'Holbach (1723–1789), Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).

One important difference between premodern and modern materialism is that the former tended to promote acceptance of the state of affairs in the world, whereas the latter is used to promote human action to change the world. Marxist materialism strongly illustrates the modern version of materialism. Indeed, Marx and Engels's philosophy developed in the former socialist countries into what was called dialectical materialism. It was materialism in the sense that it strictly denied the existence of immaterial entities, arguing that, for example, religious beliefs were part of a false ideology. The word dialectical referred to the quality of the laws that govern transformations in nature, history, and the human mind. Dialectical materialism saw these laws as based on the interplay of opposites.

Because science in principle does not make metaphysical commitments, science is not materialistic in the strict sense of the word. In fact, a more proper term for describing the way science perceives reality is naturalistic. The progress of modern natural science, however, has made materialism a more creditable stance than it was previously. Science studies phenomena that can be experimented on or otherwise brought to the impartial attention of the community of scientists. Clearly immaterial things such as the soul, supernatural events, values, ideals, and meanings are difficult or impossible to research scientifically. Thus, it seems from a scientific perspective that things one cannot examine scientifically are not real.

In practical life and in the adaptation of science the tendency toward materialism is manifested, for instance, in measuring. Measuring is essential in all science-related activities because exact scientific research is based on calculating measured quantities. An object of science must be measurable in some sense. Hence, it is difficult to do scientific research on phenomena in their qualitative aspects. For example, a scientist easily can determine the weight, size, and age of an ancient Chinese vase, but it is impossible to specify scientifically its degree of beauty. In consequence, quantity appears to be "more real" category than quality.

In ethics the success of natural science has had both implicit and explicit consequences. The most explicit consequence was the logical positivist argument in the 1920s that ethics is a merely emotional use of language that lacks empirical content. Although this extreme view soon softened, ethics nevertheless struggled throughout much of the twentieth century against the tendency in a culture dominated by science to perceive reality as being defined by the possible objects of science. For instance, medicine can study whether smoking harms health, but it is a value question whether harming health is wrong. The only scientific approaches to value in this sense appear to consist of empirical research on expressed preferences or arguments for the evolutionary development of certain behaviors. Because values, norms, and ideals in the normative sense—moral sociology is another question—are not objects of scientific inquiry, ethics as a rational pursuit has had a credibility problem.

Until recently technological advancement has contributed mainly to the improvement of the material conditions of life. This has meant highly increased material well-being for the majority of the people in industrialized societies.

According to some cultural critics, however, this development has not been free of malaise. It appears to those critics that human life has lost some of its dignity in the course of material success. This lack of dignity has been pointed out in consumerism, the loss of traditional skills, the sacrifice of ideals in the search for economic profit and quick satisfaction, and so on. Culture itself has been turned into a commodity to be mass produced and marketed industrially. The rule of quantity over quality in social and political life often is expressed in attitudes that make money and financial success the final arbiters of the good.

Some analyses of contemporary culture have suggested that classical Western ethics is incapable of addressing current issues because it does not pay sufficient attention to the material culture, that is, the production and use of material goods. At the heart of such criticisms is the notion of alienation. Cultural critics are afraid that the materialistic mass culture estranges human beings from themselves, other people, and nature. When it comes to nature, ecological problems are the most pressing issues related to materialistic consumerism.

However, science and technology also have crucial immaterial aspects. Mathematics is indispensable for science, and mathematical abstractions are clearly immaterial. Moreover, science attempts to find regular patterns in reality and to form lawlike theories to describe those patterns. The structures, laws, and theories that science develops while investigating material reality are all immaterial. In this sense the object of science is material phenomena but the results of research are immaterial concepts that give new meanings to material reality. This is especially true in the most recently developed fields in science, such as computer science, genome studies, and neurological research.

Science can ask the question "What is matter?" but its answers are extremely complex and theoretical. Matter appears to consist mostly of empty space between elementary particles. Modern physics thus challenges any idea of matter "in itself" because what can be known about matter in the early twenty-first century is eminently theoretical and experiment-dependent.

In the realm technology information technologies and nanotechnology, which are highly theory-based forms of technology, deal mostly with immaterial phenomena. Generally speaking, technology can be interpreted as making matter less significant for human beings. For instance, communication and transportation technologies have made the globe "smaller" and reduced the role of time and place, which form the ultimate framework for matter, in human life. In this sense technology has made matter "serve" humankind.

Some essential immaterial aspects can be found in production as well. The emphasis of the economic structure in advanced societies has moved increasingly toward the production of immaterial services and information processing. Furthermore, in designing and marketing material commodities, aesthetic values, symbols, concepts, and myths form something that is now called a "brand." More and more companies do not sell only a material product but market an idea and a lifestyle. One does not buy a cell phone, one buys a successful person's phone.

These transformations in the economic structure and the style of production have been referred to as dematerialization. This term denotes the reduction of material used to produce specific goods and services. Dematerialization has raised hopes that economic growth and ecological sustainability may be reconciled so that consumers characteristically will purchase functions rather than material objects.

These reflections indicate how materialism is an ambivalent issue for science, technology, and ethics. Techno-scientific development has passed through a phase of studying and molding material reality, but currently the most important fronts in science and technology involve work on largely immaterial phenomena.

Consumerism;; Dematerialization;; Material Culture;; Two Cultures.

Cornforth, Maurice. (1971). Dialectical Materialism. New York: International Publishers. A basic exposition of the Soviet Marxist version of materialism.

Moser, Paul K., and J. D. Trout. (1995). Contemporary Materialism: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Sixteen essays defending science-based materialism or "physicalism," with the final three essays addressing issues of materialism and ethics.

Rosenberg, Bernard, and David Manning White, eds. (1971). Mass Culture Revisited. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. A good collection of articles criticizing the materialistic culture industry; first published in 1957.

Trungpa, Chögyam. (1973). Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, ed. John Baker and Marvin Casper. Boston: Shambhala. Finds materialism a temptation even in religious practice.

Twitchell, James B. (2000). Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. New York: Columbia University Press. A witty defense of cultural materialism that reviews and rejects many of the criticisms.

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