History of materialism

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. 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 swerves—a doctrine that was also used to explain free will. Epicurus’s materialism therefore differed from that of Democritus in being an indeterministic 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.

Modern materialism

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 Encyclopédie, 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 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 nonmaterialistic 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 nonliving, 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.