A Brief History of Materialism
Part One: A Body Blow
It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who never change
Confucius
We tend to think of Materialism as being a recent hypothesis, but it is as old as the Greeks, and probably much older. There must have been more than one Palaeolithic hero who found himself, one freezing evening, huddled round a fire that wouldn’t catch properly, soaked through and shivering, thinking ‘Blow this for a game of hunter-gatherers. I mean what’s the bloody point?’
He may have mentioned his pique to the shaman, who may have explained that those howling wolves were reincarnations of the moon, or somesuch, and to stop whingeing and hurry up with cooking that badger, before the bear-god came and bit off his head.
Our hero might well have thought that reincarnations of the moon wouldn’t howl quite so blood-curdlingly, and that bear-gods ought surely to show a bit more couth, and that all that stuff from the shaman was self-serving codswallop. What really mattered was to get warm and dry as soon as possible, and to get a fair chunk of that badger inside him. Then kip. The world’s first Materialist had arrived.
§ If you’d asked our palaeolithic friend he might, if pushed, have agreed with Plato when he said the world was made of two philosophical types: those who thought the lesser created the greater and those who thought that the greater created the lesser. But hunger always overrules philosophical niceties.
And so it has been ever since: on the one hand, a never ending stream of shamans, wearing ever fancier frocks and hats, with or without drums, wands, croziers or magic mushrooms, spouting no end of unprovable and fanciful guff about harps and virgins and eternal torment; and on the other hand, down-to-earth types in the public bar who didn’t believe a word of it. This situation still pertains, although I’m optimistic that we will one day realise that there is merit in both the generalised paranormal insistence of the shamans, and also the generalised scepticism of the man in the pub when it comes to certain exotic details.
I’ve been unable to find evidence of Materialism in the pre-Greek world. This does not mean that it didn’t exist, but just that it was not recorded. And from what I’ve read of ancient societies, Materialism would have been seen as one step away from lèse-majesté, and a lengthy execution. Ancient Egypt was obsessed with the afterlife. The Pharaoh was himself a god, so to suggest that ‘We all, including you, O Mighty Pharaoh, are but mud and lightning’, would clearly be a risky position to hold.
The early Greeks thought of a universe derived from a non-material primal essence, back to which the visible universe would eventually return.
§ The idea of a non-material primal essence persisted down the centuries until the current era, when Scientific Materialism took over and ejected it from the public mind. It survives in Eastern religions like Hinduism, of which more later. There are even parallels in Christianity, in Genesis (‘The earth was without form, and void’) and Revelation (‘And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together’).
Physical things had somehow derived from this non-physical and formless intelligent essence. Plato’s contribution was to add the notion of intermediary ‘Forms’ (what Pythagoras before him had called ‘Seals’). The theory was that a designing intelligence made the template (Form), and the template made the physical objects, or somehow enabled them to be made.
The mechanism linking thought (Mind) to stuff (Matter) was (and remains) unknown. (To recap: we currently call the above interpretation a version of ‘Idealism’. Its opponent, ‘Materialism’, claims that all things, including Consciousness, arose from insensate matter alone, and by accident.)
§ If Consciousness was created by chemicals, then Materialists should be able to point out which particular chemical did this act of creation, and in which chemical Consciousness currently resides, as it must reside somewhere material, in a Materialist world.
Aristotle agreed that nature was filled with some kind of vital essence out of which the physical world was derived. For him this vital urge aimed towards a teleological perfection: Man.
§ Teleology: The explanation of observed reality in terms of ultimate purpose or design. I find it convenient to split teleology into two:
Teleo A: the need to have a plan in mind when doing anything at all, like reading a book or whistling for the cat. This clearly does exist, and Materialists are bound to accept it or risk appearing seriously out of touch.
Teleo B: is the grander notion of there being over-riding purpose in the universe, such as Aristotle’s belief that God was aiming ultimately at Man and that Man must therefore have some sort of purpose too. Materialists reject this, although it’s really the same as Teleo A writ large, and no problem at all for an Idealist, give or take the nature of this ‘God’. And here’s a possibly unexpected quotation:
‘As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.’ – Charles Darwin, penultimate paragraph, On the Origin of Species.
So not only did Darwin require ‘a Creator’, he also saw the process of natural selection as being benevolent and teleological: thus, ‘purposeful‘. How could Professor Dawkins have failed to notice this? It’s even in his own first edition of Origins.
For Plato the physical item was only partially ‘real’, being a mere reflection of the perfectly real Form. Aristotle claimed that the physical objects were fully real and the Forms were just concepts. Nonetheless, he said, the Forms do exist, and it is man’s job to learn to distinguish between them. Thus, he continued, as we don’t know how Plato’s Thought-Form became Physical-Form, it might make more sense to start with the Physical-Form and work backwards. Science has adopted this approach ever since. One can see how the Materialist belief that ‘there is only Matter’ might have derived from such a nose-down approach.
§ This pragmatic stance explains Aristotle’s great interest in the natural world. He also accepted the vital essence which was the invisible cause of everything, including, naturally, life.
Aristotle argued that we should work from observations made in the field. This led to the principal tool of science: the Inductive Method of inferring broad principles from many observations. One may then use this new principle to deduce things about a new phenomenon, and continue this process ad infinitum, building up reliable knowledge on the way.
§ A naïve example of Induction and Deduction in action:
1) Observe that some creatures lay eggs. They are all birds. The Broad Principle derived is that ‘all birds lay eggs while no furry animals do’. (Induction)
2) A creature is brought back from a foreign land. It has feathers and wings, eats all manner of stuff, but can’t fly. But as it is definitely a bird, it must lay eggs. (Deduction) This proves to be the case. The Broad Principle holds.
3) Then one day, somebody brings back a duck-billed platypus and the ‘Only birds lay eggs’ Broad Principle needs to be re-thought.
We usually call a Broad Principle a Hypothesis, and any Hypothesis is only as good as the evidence which supports it. It takes just one anomalous ‘white crow’ or indeed ‘platypus’ to destroy it.
§ I was still trying to find that one ‘white crow’ that Materialism could not possibly account for. Maybe the shamanic call to porpoises to beach themselves, as witnessed by Arthur Grimble in A Pattern of Islands, or the strange series of Polaroid photographs apparently imprinted by mind power alone, as reported by Dr Jule Eisenbud, in The World of Ted Serios?
Plato and Aristotle were both Idealists. Other thinkers, however, were not.
The ‘Miletan materialists’: Heraclitus, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Thales variously believed that the universe derived from water, air, fire, or just the ‘apeiron’: that infinite essence which lay behind the other three (a bit like the Chinese ‘Tao’). However they all seem to have somehow believed in the gods, or God, or pantheism of some sort. It’s never been easy being a Materialist.
The Romans came, saw, conquered, declined, and fell without adding much to The Great Debate. Practical folk, the Romans, who tended to trust in the sword rather than the Lord. They honoured innumerable more or less savage deities, and were tolerant of other people’s gods and often incorporated them into their own pantheon.
The ‘dark ages’ which followed Rome became gradually enlightened by the Christian missionaries who walked unaccompanied through forests and bogs to strange lands, spreading the Gospel of love and kindness. In many places the Gospel had already been preached since Rome had officially adopted Christianity in 312 CE, but when the central command of the empire collapsed a century or so later, the new religion tended to fade and old pagan ways drifted back. However, The Church gradually re-impressed its message of peace and love and cooperation across much of what we now call Europe and established an uneasy truce with the hardmen of the day.
§ This truce is well-illustrated by the relationship between Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket. Henry, after his apparent/alleged complicity in the murder of Becket, made a pilgrimage, barefoot and in sackcloth, to the Archbishop’s tomb in Canterbury cathedral where he submitted to a public scourging by the priests.
A German Emperor fared even worse after falling foul of a mighty pope. He went to plead forgiveness, and was kept waiting in the snow for three days.
The philosophy of ‘believe or be damned’ (quite literally) had a gradual calming effect, and as the benefits of coexistence slowly filtered through, so smaller tribes coalesced into larger units, and a kind of Pax Ecclesiastica eventually ruled where once the Pax Romana had. Rome had returned. The people of the day regarded themselves first and foremost as citizens of Christendom, owing duties to a local lord (‘to Caesar’, to quote the New Testament), but their ultimate loyalty was ‘to God’, via the Pope and his Church and representatives, who held a rigid monopoly in such matters.
Some 1500 years after Aristotle, European man began to think and ponder once more. In the thirteenth century, Roger Bacon, inevitably a monk, as only monks had any proper access to books and the time in which to read them (or the skill), revived the idea of observation and experiment.
Contact with the Muslims in Spain around the twelfth century, and ideas picked up via the Crusades, had led to the re-discovery of Greek ideas, and Islamic extensions of them. Universities were founded in Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge. Bacon’s axioms of ‘Cease to be ruled by dogmas and authorities: look to the world!’ and ‘Nullius in verba’ (‘Take nobody’s word for it’, deriving from the Roman poet, Horace) became the watchwords for the Renaissance.
Thus, during this period of intellectual ‘re-birth’ (Re-naissance) observation took precedence over philosophising. The question of ‘What is the world made of and what makes it tick?’ became more important than ‘Where did the universe come from, and why?’ The ‘How?’ of science was about to replace the ‘Why?’ of religion. Big stuff.
The notion of ultimate particles had been a familiar one since the Greek Democritus (~400 BCE) and the Roman Lucretius (~50 BCE) but now began the hunt to find out what these particles actually were. What was the world made of? The great scientific principles of Empiricism, Reductionism and Mechanics were developed here.
§ Empiricism: the use of experiment and observation to establish facts and truth
Reductionism: the assumption that more may be learned by reducing a complex entity to its constituents.
Mechanics: the study of practical/applied maths. Also blokes who fix carts, windmills, etc and leave greasy handprints on the brake blocks, miller’s daughter, etc.
Also, the idea of Law in science was conceived. It is difficult to overstate the importance of these developments. They are the foundations upon which all modern science and technology, and hence our whole Western societies, are based, but at the time they were utterly revolutionary, and very exciting to men of intelligence.
Inevitably the question ‘What is man’s place in the universe?’ gave way to ‘What is man actually made of? What is the body? How does it work?’
It is a measure of the power of The Church that little progress was made in this direction. The Church was still the fount of all wisdom and ethics, and it frowned upon the idea of human dissection, as it was believed that as man was made in God’s image, dissection must therefore be sacrilege.
§ The logical derivative of this seems not to have been a problem. Did God therefore have curly hair and a broken nose, like the poor sod on the slab?
This ruling against anatomy lasted well into the nineteenth century, and the era of the ‘Resurrectionists’, who stole corpses for respectable surgeons to dissect. Burke and Hare actually murdered people for the same purpose.
§ From mid-C16 The Church of England replaced the Church of Rome in the UK. Thus, ‘The Church’ from now on usually means the C of E. The differentiation is hardly worth noting, actually. Neither Church could accept that unquestioned Dogma might be superseded by verifiable Fact…. an attitude inherited, alas, by Materialist Science.
Leonardo da Vinci made important discoveries in human physiology, but it was Vesalius’ Concerning the Structure of the Human Body in 1543 that really started investigation into bodily mechanics. This book showed that the human body obeyed the mechanical laws that were being uncovered by the new techniques of systematic observation, experiment and theorising. Experiment and observation, rather than abstract philosophy, began to yield further exciting fruit. For example, up till now, The Church had told everyone how the cosmos fitted together. It accepted Aristotle’s claim that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun and stars rotated around it, in a series of concentric spheres. Common sense confirmed this. Even the merry tippler with the badger sandwich could see that the Sun goes round the Earth. We don’t need a pope to tell us that, thankyou. And mine’s another pint, since I could see you were about to ask.
But Copernicus’ book Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (also published in 1543) showed for the first time in a dozen centuries that The Church was demonstrably wrong about something. The Church stated as a dogmatic unquestionable fact that the Earth was the centre and that the Sun revolved around it. Copernicus’ careful observations, using the new methodical tools of empirical science, showed beyond any reasonable doubt that it was the Earth that orbited the Sun.
§ In fact, Aristarchus of Samos proved heliocentricity in ~250 BC, but the news seems not to have reached The Church. (And it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he got it from the Egyptians or the Hindus. Needless to say, Aristarchus was persecuted by the religious authorities of the day. Plus ça change.)
The importance of Copernicus’ book can not be overstated. The Pope, the head of the all-powerful Catholic Church, the over-riding authority throughout Europe and the known world, who controls even your liege lord… and whose claim to power challenged Kings and Emperors…. this titan is showed to be plain WRONG about something.
And if The Church was wrong and Copernicus was right, the relative positions of Man, the Earth and the Universe were all thrown into flux. If the planets went round the sun, and were thus all in motion, where was the absolute and unchanging perfection of the heavens that medieval theology had preached? Suddenly the heavens began to look less like The Heavens and rather more like a huge impersonal mechanism, the likes of which had never been imagined before.
§ This notion of ‘mechanicalness’ or ‘Mechanism’ that the astronomers had released upon the world was soon reflected by philosophers and experimenters. It is with us to this day, as part of the backbone of Materialist Science.
And if Heaven did not lie in the perfect heavens, where was it? Or dare one ask… did it exist at all? Could The Church be wrong even about that? Was there even a God, if Heaven was no longer ‘up there’? Speculation, questions, ferment… Maybe The Church was wrong about all sorts of things? And if it was, why should anyone obey any of the papal diktats, or pay The Church any money?
§ The ‘tithe’ was the tax that everyone was forced to pay The Church in medieval times. This amounted to some 10% of earnings. This was fine for the rich, who could just screw the poor a little harder, but for the poor, 10% of very little could mean starvation. Tithes were widely resented. The ‘priest-as-parasite’ notion so central to the French Revolution and the thinking of Karl Marx had its roots in bitter experience.
The experimenters (the ‘scientists’ of tomorrow) had more than a little in common with agnostic freethinkers, and the new Protestants, who objected to other Church dogmas and practices.
§ Like selling Indulgences, for example. These were pedalled by Church authorities as Get Out of Hell Free cards. Pay the dosh; sins forgiven. Nobody seemed to wonder what Jesus would have thought of this, despite everyone knowing how he treated the moneylenders in the Temple. Indulgences were not invented by The Church, however. They irritated Plato and Socrates, 2,000 years earlier. Plus ça change again.
Absolute Authority might now be rationally challenged.
Although most researchers remained Christian, the stock of critical Materialism rose. The Almighty Church had been proved wrong. The world would never be the same again.
In the three centuries following Copernicus’ bombshell the level of observation of the natural world, and hands-on experiment, exploded (sometimes literally: early chemistry was a notoriously risky pursuit).
A Brief History of Materialism
Part Two: A Knock-down
Man is a rational animal
Aristotle
By mid-C19 the new canals had expanded trade throughout the country and farm crops could move in bulk into the cities along with fresh milk for the first time. Thus health might improve. Railways speeded up the process even more. People might even aspire to days at the seaside or a visit to the Capital. The nation was being drawn into a unity. Steam-powered factories turned out consumer goods cheaply for all. Gas lighting arrived, and by the 1850’s researchers were rapidly developing the greatest marvel of all, electricity.
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