10.16.08
What is materialism?
I just received a copy of Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present (Paperback)
by John Bellamy Foster (Author), Brett Clark (Author), Richard York (Author)
I haven’t finished reading it, and will comment further later (it is not offcially out yet, so the Amazon review slot is not yet open). Here are some earlier comments here:
Earlier post on MR book on ID
An early reaction (this is from reading the first few chapters, and isn’t a judgment of the book): the book springs to the defense of ‘materialism’ against religious critics of evolution, a dangerous tactic. While I certainly support the foundational perspectives of modern science,including its ‘materialism’, these have become equivocal on the issue of ‘materialism’, a statement that should not be misunderstood.
What is materialism? As a project of physics it works beautifully, with extensions in the realm of force fields, etc, …., but as you zoom in more and more, well, what do you get, … and it may work as well in other fields, but so far has failed to close the case. Indeed, materialism in biology is confusing the issue, not because it is false, but because it leads to reductionist thinking. Where are the force fields in biology? Are there any? Are we missing the full kaboodle?
This statement can be turned on its head, as the false antithesis of ‘spirit’ (the term ‘spiritualism’, table rapping, has changed its meaning, and is unusable here) produces even more confusion, far worse perhaps than that of the materialists, but there are many things/areas/zones of discourse that are not clarified by materialist fundamentalism: science still can’t resolve the simple question of brain vs mind. What if mind is different from brain? (I said, what if). It is hardly ‘spiritual’ for that reason, not my point. At the very least we have a distinction not unlike that between hardware and software. What is the status of software? Or of the mathematical ideas used in physics?
I am certainly not recommending the rejection of materialism, merely noting the flatfootedness of modern Cartesianism/anti-Cartesianism, on both sides.
It is worth noting that one of the most ancient ‘spiritual’ (? Not!) legacies of India was the ‘materialist’ Samkhya, where there are three levels of materiality, and one extra beyond all three, prakriti and purusha, a unique construct of triadic dualism, light years beyond Cartesian dualism, despite its ‘primitive’ character. The point here is that ‘mind’ is thus automatically ‘material’, but in a different sense from that of physical particles.
The point here for the evolution debate is that arguments are polarized around ‘spiritual’ claims and ‘material’ claims, and the spiritual claims suffer unique muddle, while the material claims start to deny the existence of ‘higher matters, qua Samkhya’, thus provoking irate reactions from the ‘spiritual muddle zone’.
The brand of nineteenth century materialism, promoted by Marxists, in the book here under discussion, is thus likely to suffer stalemate arguing with fundamentalists, alarming as that may be to the scientifically inclined.
Cartesian dualists tend to oppose the material and the spiritual, body, soul. But one of the most ancient partitions is triadic, that of body, soul, and spirit. A little history shows this to be a garbled version of the ancient Samkhya, which doesn’t use the terms ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, but its three levels of materiality. The Samkhya system however has fallen into the hands of people who no longer understand it, and it is hard to really know what it meant. But the point is that to deny ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ (terms to be translated into material terminology) and claim only the ‘body’ as the real is likely to fail.
In passing, and as one possibility for the meaning of the original Samkhya, it is worth noting that the philosopher J.G. Bennett, recently discussed at The Gurdjieff Con blog, and cited here a while back, produced an interesting variant of all this with his ingenious partition: Function, Being, Will
The ideas of function and being replace materiality, and all three replace the matter/spirit distinction.
Unfortunately Bennett wasn’t consistent and mixed his thinking with theological confusions of his own. But in essence his approach at least shows one way out of the sterile materialism/spirit debate (which has endured in grim futility a mere two millennia, if not longer). This approach, unfortunately, must reify a metaphysical idea of ‘will’.
It has a resemblance to the thinking of Schopenhauer.
Which should remind us that in the philosophy of Kant we have, not the material/spiritual boundaries, but the phenomenal/noumenal distinction. We can’t complete the project of ‘samkhya’ with a consistent material terminology, because the ‘higher matters’ do not, despite a possible materiality, have a phenomenal aspect. Thus we call them ‘spiritual’, to the unending chaotification of discourse.