A Semiotic Tale of Two Pyramids: One Vertical the Other Inverted

Materialism has been criticised by religious thinkers opposed to it, who regard it as a spiritually empty philosophy. Marxism also uses materialism to refer to a “materialist conception of history”, which is not concerned with metaphysics but centres on the roughly empirical world of human activity (practice, including labour) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history).

History of materialism

In Ancient Indian philosophy, materialism developed around 600 BCE with the works of Ajita Kesakambali, Payasi, Kanada, and the proponents of the Carvaka School of philosophy. Kanada was one of the early proponents of atomism. The Nyaya-Vaisesika school (600 BCE – 100 BCE) developed one of the earliest forms of atomism. The tradition was carried forward by Buddhist atomism and the Jaina school.

Xun Zi developed a Confucian doctrine oriented on realism and materialism in Ancient China. Other notable Chinese materialists of this time include Yang Xiong and Wang Chong.

Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Epicurus, and even Aristotle prefigure later materialists. The poem De Rerum Natura by Lucretius recounts the mechanistic philosophy of Democritus and Epicurus. According to this view, all that exists is matter and void, and all phenomena are the result of different motions and conglomerations of base material particles called “atoms.” De Rerum Natura provides mechanistic explanations for phenomena, like erosion, evaporation, wind, and sound that would not become accepted for more than 1500 years. Famous principles like “nothing can come from nothing” and “nothing can touch body but body” first appeared in the works of Lucretius.

Later Indian materialist Jayaraashi Bhatta (6th century CE) in his work Tattvopaplavasimha (”the Upsetting of all principles”) refuted the Nyaya Sutra epistemology. The materialistic Carvaka philosophy appears to have died out some time after 1400 CE. Later on, Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi represent the materialist tradition, in opposition to René Descartes’ attempts to provide the natural sciences with dualist foundations. Later materialists included Denis Diderot and other French enlightenment thinkers, as well as Ludwig Feuerbach, and, in England, the pedestrian traveller John “Walking” Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major imnpact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.

Schopenhauer wrote that “…materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself.” (The World as Will and Representation, II, Ch. 1). He claimed that an observing subject can only know material objects through the mediation of the brain and its particular organization. The way that the brain knows determines the way that material objects are experienced. “Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. But all this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time.” (ibid., I, §7)