Some Thoughts on Materialism

In the past month I have engaged the work of Karl Marx at a deeper level than ever before, reading most of Capital, Volume 3 and big pieces of Volume 1 again, as well as his doctoral dissertation, his early Economic Manuscripts, the German Ideology, and several other essays that really brought to light for me both my disagreements with Marx, as well as the areas of the Marxian framework that I feel are virtually undeniably accurate, such as the fetishism of commodities, the alienation and exploitation of the worker within the capitalist mode of production, and the constant reification of the capitalist system by way of its inherent cycles of crisis; this last bit can even be pointed to as a lifting off point for postmodern analysis of social-cultural phenomena.

While it is primarily Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production and its obvious affect upon the ordering of human society, perhaps more now than ever before, that I utilize his theoretical framework for, it is his early interest in natural materialism that has really sparked further readings. Marx takes as a basic truth of humanity, or the extant universe in general, that humans cannot create matter, but merely shape it.  This may sound like an overly simplistic, and undoubtedly obvious sentiment, but if we dig a little deeper into what that means, entire new levels of analysis develop.

Marx was particularly influenced by the natural materialism of the Greek philosopher and physiologist Epicurus.  Most of what Marx knew, and what we today know of Epicurus is from the very few letters that were uncovered and the unfolding philosophical school of thought derived from them, Epicureanism.  His most important pieces of knowledge, and what Marx took through all his work, is that the universe is infinite and eternal, that nothing can dissolve into nothing, nor be born of nothing, and that all events in the extant universe are based on the interactions and motions of atoms moving through empty space.  The debate between Epicurus and Democritus about whether or not atoms moved in only one direction in space, straight down, or in a myriad directions based more on chaos than anything else, was what Marx actually wrote his dissertation on.  He agreed with Epicurus that if atoms only moved down, never touching one another, no matter could in fact be formed.  Sure, basic stuff today, but this was ancient Greece, long before electron microscopes and the like.

The point here is this.  All that is, is based on matter interacting with matter.  There is no non-matter.  What used to be referred to the in early periods of physiology as "the void" we now know, thanks to post-Neutonian theoretical physics, as dark matter and dark energy, which together makes up 84% of the known universe.  I am a materialist, but only to the extent that I accept this basic foundational assumption that matter is the basis of what we like think of as reality.  Only after accepting that can I begin to address the ecopolitical reality that I, as a theorist, am attuned to.

But this admonition that I am indeed a materialist is not enough.  As long as materialism is a school of thought, there are those who think of materialism as only that early mechanistic understanding of scientific materialism that we see in the work of the liberal individualist philosophers, classical and neoliberal economists, and physicalists in general.  That is, the simplistic linear logic of A causes B and C is a reaction to B, and so on.  This mechanistic materialism was just the early throws of humanity's understanding of the concept of matter and humanity's interaction with it.  We now know it is infinitely deeper than that, and it is often some of our earliest philosophers who are educating us on such subjects.

What is sometimes codified as postmodern materialism tends to challenge this basic idea that if one is a materialist, he or she must also be determinist and absolutist.  This certainly stems from the mechanistic period, which frankly extended to just a few decades ago and still persists today, as I have already mentioned.  Just because I believe that all of what we assume is originated in matter; that all will eventually return to being nothing but matter; that matter is in fact the basis of all reality, does not mean that I must also believe that those interactions are predictable, inevitable, or even identifiable.

I will venture to say that consciousness itself is a product of the interactions of matters.  Human matter interacting with nonhuman matter.  Sentient matter interacting with its negation.  Atomic matter interacting with subatomic matter.  Reality interacting with its own negation, if you will.  We know that the brain is a big mess of neuro-regulatory process points, but we still don't really know why it does what it does, nor why we have such things as dream states, sleep, and imagination.  Are all those things not also matter?

Here is my main point:  If matter is the basis of all physicality, and physicality is the basis of all non-physicality, i.e. thinking, imagination, emotion, etc., is not the negation of matter an impossibility?  In other words, conceptual frameworks like spirituality, imagination, and thought itself, all arise with the use of our brain and its processing of physical stimuli into emotional and sensory response.  If we negate matter, we negate reality, and if we negate reality, we are negating our existence.  If we negate our existence, as some have, we enter a new realm of anti-consciousness that is not likely to provide much in the way of humanistic enlightenment or understanding.  Therefore, we again return to matter.  In the framework I have just eluded to, matter is clearly not mechanistic, nor predictable, nor even identifiable.  Furthermore, even mainstream physics tells us that matter is energy, so the computer screen I am looking at right now, is both a physical material entity and a vast array of energetic particles dancing in chaotic patterns, forming 1's and the 0's.  Or are they?

I am suggesting that by embracing the idea that we are made of matter and that we interact, all of the time, with matter, we may better understand the human condition, but that we do not need to wall ourselves off into some naive mechanistic view of materialist science in understanding humanity.  Thought is ultimately a production of human-material interaction.  Perhaps if we close the divide between the tangible and the intangible, by recognizing their commingling with matter, we may eventually learn to see in multiple dimensions; to exist in frameworks of knowledge that do not depend upon vulgar causal mechanisms.  And maybe, just maybe, through that realization, the ignorant systemic problems we have developed, like that of capitalism, will cease to be of use.