Materialism

Materialism

MATERIALISM: SCIENTIFIC VERSUS DIALECTIC

MATERIALITY AND THE METHODOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF THINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Materialism is a philosophical doctrine of existence that argues that human consciousness is determined either principally or exclusively by matter and its change or manipulation. This “primacy” of matter has its foundation in an early philosophical argument that while material being (or the body) can exist without the mind, the mind is unable to exist without corporeality. Because materialism in its most basic and unifying sense as a doctrine relies on the denial of the nonmaterial (and thus a mechanistic relationship between the nature and its manipulation), many view it as quite different from other conceptualizations of existence (or ontologies) that analyze the relationship between entities such as mind, body, and spirit. It is seen rather as a philosophical assertion in juxtaposition to a doctrine of idealism, and in particular its invocation of the supernatural or disembodied existence. Later forms of materialism proved far less reductionist with respect to the mind and subjective experience; still, at its most basic, materialism implicitly denies the possibly of any Cartesian mind/body dualism, as processes of the mind are subordinated to the physical environment in which they must take place, and not to some disembodied realm of existence.

Questions of materiality are among the oldest of philosophical inquiries. Epicurus and Democritus, the Greek philosophers on whom the noted historical materialist Karl Marx based his doctoral thesis, were among the earliest thinkers to expound a metaphysical doctrine of materialism. Early forms of materialism sought to explain human experience in terms of how atoms interacted with one another in nature to manifest different objects. This type of thinking was opposed to that of some of their Hellenic contemporaries (notably Plato and Aristotle) who proposed the existence of immateriality. It is the implicit denial of a spirit or otherworldly embodiment of the mind in these early forms of materialism that has led many to argue that materialism is an intrinsically atheistic philosophy. This point about the tension between religion and intellectual inquiry is significant, because materialism’s emergence as a significant doctrine occurred as a product of Enlightenment questions about the role of science and religion in social life.

MATERIALISM: SCIENTIFIC VERSUS DIALECTIC

Materialism has had a propensity for misrepresentation as teleological and deterministic philosophical doctrine, wherein critics warn of insinuations that matter is being afforded a kind of unmediated rationality in guiding action and history. This is in part attributable to a misunderstanding of the major philosophical and social scientific debates that have taken place since the introduction of the concept of dialectics in the nineteenth century. A common error, for instance, rests on characterizing Marx’s historical materialism (a term in fact coined by Friedrich Engels) as such by referencing his introduction to his Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859), in which he concludes that legal and political superstructures arise out of the economic base (infrastructure) of society. Of course, Marx had a lifelong engagement with Hegelian dialectics, and was more centrally concerned philosophically with trying to make sense of the social relations through a theory of praxis, not through a mechanistic determinism. And it is important to understand how such dialectical interventions emerging at that time engaged, and continue to engage, with materialist approaches unabashed in their determinism. The materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris once remarked that Marx’s materialism would be palatable if he could just get the Hegelian monkey off his back (Harris 1979). An extreme position (and anticipatory of Harris’s reductionist cultural materialism), it does however underscore a fundamental difference about what role ideas, beliefs, or immaterial states have to different kinds of materialists.

Scientific materialism emerged most notably in nineteenth-century Germany as a response to idealism and clerical domination over intellectual life. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), a student of Hegel best known as the inspiration for Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach (1845), catalyzed a materialist movement that had important consequences for the future relationship between the sciences and religion. Materialists of this ilk believed that the rapid advances in science and medicine occurring at this time constituted evidence of the power of science to answer questions about the material and immaterial alike as reflections of biological, chemical, and physical processes. Such atheism worried many advocates of science and led to the caricaturing of evolution as an antireligious doctrine. The devoutly religious Charles Darwin (1809–1882) declined Marx’s invitation to dedicate Capital (1867) to him because he feared further associations with materialism and social evolutionism.

Scientific materialism did anticipate further problems in philosophy. Indeed, claims about determinism and physicalism remain important to the identity thesis in materialist philosophy, the view that “there are no philosophical considerations that rule out the possibility that future scientific inquiry will show that every mental state and event is identical with some material state or event ” (Rosenthal 2000, pp. 8–9; emphasis added). Eliminative materialism, for example, has been a subject of interest to some of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century (e.g., Richard Rorty, Paul Feyerabend, W. V. O. Quine, Paul Churchland, and Wilfrid Sellars) who have been concerned with the legitimacy of separating mental states apart from the physical state in which they take place.

Georgi Plekhanov and Vladimir Lenin are famous for developing the concept of dialectical materialism. In his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism ([1909] 1947) Lenin sought to develop a philosophy of materialism that relied less on the reductionist claims of nineteenth-century “vulgar materialism.” He eschewed the trivializing analogies of the scientific materialists—such as that thoughts were to the brain as bile was to the liver—evoked to assert that nothing other than matter existed, in favor of a materialism that saw mental processes as emanating from material ones. Although also clearly influenced by Feuerbach, Lenin claimed that the material world (nature) was primary and the mind and spirit were secondary in a dependent relationship for the development of knowledge.

Some contemporary materialist philosophers remain wary of mind/body dualism generally, in particular of theories that “either deny causal interaction between the mental and the physical, deny causal efficacy to mental states, picture the mental and the physical as being two wholly distinct realms of being, or fail to give integrity to one term of the mind-body relationship” (Peters 1995, p. 8). Notwithstanding philosophical debates as to the efficacy of mental and material realms as categories of analysis, the legacy of materialist philosophy for the social sciences can be said to be twofold. First, materialism abjectly underscores empirical method and observation as essential for an adequate understanding of human societies. And second, it has legitimated the innovation and honing of viable methods for comprehending human action through an emphasis on materiality (and the manipulation thereof) as an entry point of social analysis.

MATERIALITY AND THE METHODOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF THINGS

To understand the significance of materialism to contemporary social science, it is necessary to identify the fundamental changes that the academy has undergone in the last two centuries toward the formation of sciences of social processes. In the nineteenth century Auguste Comte (1798-1857) authored a theory of “social physics,” a primitive social science method based on an analogy to the physical sciences that had a profound influence on the development of positivism. The vitality of empirical and positivist theory during this period was aided by the derivation and development of empirical methods that proved successful in their capacity for establishing laws for social processes. The philosopher Ian Hacking (1990) has argued that the honing of techniques for prediction and the establishment of probability in both the physical and social sciences created conditions of possibility for contemporary ways of thinking about the knowability of the world. Among materialist scholars there remains much difference with respect to the degree to which the world is exhaustively knowable. Cultural materialism, for instance, rejects dialectics outright, prioritizing instead positivism, probability, and the primacy of human use of the environment for the understanding of social process. Still, materialist doctrine in the social sciences has become more of an operationalization of a particular positivist method than an outright philosophical account of human activity.

There are a number of methodical approaches to the study of materiality that have become increasingly popular in the social sciences, particularly as all of its disciplines have sought to make sense of social processes that are increasingly informed by global flows of information, communication, and technology. Economics for the most part has always remained unabashedly materialist, methodologically individualist, and positivist as a discipline. Cultural ecological approaches historically have been significant traditions in anthropology and geography. And long-standing subdisciplines such as economic sociology and economic anthropology have gained increased visibility as scholars throughout the social sciences have increasingly queried the meanings and impacts of globalization. Two relevant approaches to the contemporary study of materiality in the social sciences merit particular notice.

Since the mid-1980s there have been numerous studies devoted to the study of a single material object with the aim of understanding the complexities of human global relationships. These commodity biographies have traced the social and economic importance of various globally significant commodities, including tobacco, coal, potatoes, cod, bananas, and salt (see Mantz and Smith 2006, pp. 78–80 for summary). Some of these scholars were influenced by Arjun Appadurai’s groundbreaking anthology The Social Life of Things (1986), and accordingly tend to orient themselves to discussions of how consumption of material objects frames political economic relationships. Others, emphasizing the importance of global production systems to the origination of political economic inequalities, originate their work in Sidney Mintz’s The Sweetness of Power (1985), or more broadly in the cultural ecology and political economic traditions from which it came. Mintz’s account shows how sugar played an instrumental role in building the economies of industrial Europe around extractive plantation production regimes in the Caribbean. A more recent study has attempted to understand how political economic structural inequalities developed under capitalism are taking on a parallel form in the digital age with the extraction of Congolese coltan, an ore essential to digital technologies such as mobile phones (Mantz and Smith 2006).

At the same time, a growing field of material culture studies has emerged with a specific interest in the consumptive dimensions of human social economic practice (e.g., Miller 2004). Though many of these scholars certainly would not recognize themselves or their approaches as materialist per se, the fact that their entry point remains largely concerned with the human use of material objects indicates their importance to the legacy of materialism in the social sciences. With influences from linguistics and semiotics, and a foundation that engages (at times both sympathetically and critically) with the Frankfurt school, this school of thought has been concerned principally with attempting to unravel the social meaning of objects. This tradition represents a radical break from the traditional domination of studies of the material by materialists. The departure is reflected in a philosophical heritage indebted to the early-twentieth-century German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918), as a purported alternative to the materialism of Marxian political economy. A number of the commodity biographies approaches likewise endeavor to move the focus of the study of objects away from their productive sites and instead into the consumptive realms in which they have discernible semiotic and sociological meaning.

There are a number of reasons why the study of material objects has moved away from the materialist philosophy in which it was once firmly ensconced. First, approaches having determinist legacies or “metanarrative” claims have become unpopular among a large number of social scientists, particularly given the influence of postmodernism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Second, the end of the cold war has precipitated an increased discomfort with dialectical materialist approaches that were influential to the creation and development of Soviet socialism. At the same time, the scientific materialist approaches of the nineteenth century, as well as the more orthodox approaches of the twentieth century such as cultural materialism, have not been appealing to social scientists uncomfortable with their unwavering dedication to physicalism. And finally, a historic divide between the humanities and sciences—a rift separating what C. P. Snow referred as “two cultures” (1959)—remains unresolved and taxing for the development of a unified and truly interdisciplinary social scientific theory and method. Nonetheless, there remain dedicated approaches to political economy principally influenced by materialist philosophy and method that hold great possibility for unifying various approaches to the study of material objects in the social sciences.

SEE ALSO Marx, Karl; Marxism; Materialism, Dialectical

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. 1986. The Social Life of Things. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Armstrong, David M. 1968. A Materialist Theory of the Mind. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Campbell, Keith. 1984. Body and Mind. 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Harris, Marvin. 1979. Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture. New York: Random House.

Lenin, Vladimir I. [1909] 1947. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing.

Mantz, Jeff W., and Jim H. Smith. 2006. Do Cellular Phones Dream of Civil War? The Mystification of Production and the Consequences of Technology Fetishism in the Eastern Congo. In Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena, ed. Max Kirsch, 71–93. New York: Routledge.

Marx, Karl. [1845] 1969. Theses on Feuerbach. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1, trans. W. Lough, 13–15. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl. [1859] 1971. A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.

Miller, Daniel, ed. 2004. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Miller, Richard W. 1984. Analyzing Marx. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking.

Peters, Selton L. 1995. Emergent Materialism: A Proposed Solution to the Mind/Body Problem. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Rosenthal, David M., ed. 2000. Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Snow, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Jeffrey Mantz