Originally published 3 October 2000
When I was in school back in the 1940s and ’50s — parochial schools — materialism was thrown up to us as the bugbear of bugbears. Not even “Godless communism” offered a more perfidious peril for our souls.
We were never quite clear what materialism was. Our teachers might as well have said “Beelzebub.” Whatever it was, we knew it made no place for God or spirit. It was the great eraser of soul from the world.
Later, at university, we learned that materialism was one of two great philosophical categories by which humans have tried to explain reality, the other being idealism. As a philosophy, materialism, like idealism, had a long and honorable history, going back (at least) to the Pre-Socratics, and listing among its adherents such luminaries as Lucretius, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx.
Broadly speaking, materialists believe that matter is the essence of reality. Everything comes from matter, including life and mind. Nature exists independently of mind, but no mind can exist independently of matter.
Idealists, on the other hand, believe that mind and spirit are the ultimate basis of reality. Spirit abides; matter is ephemeral. Idealism leaves open the possibility of a supernatural power that precedes and creates the material universe.
The materialist/idealist split is behind all other dualisms in philosophy: natural-supernatural, body-soul, mortal-immortal, even, according to our elementary and high school teachers, the difference between the grim Satanic horrors of Soviet Russia and the God-showered blessings of American democracy.
Where did these philosophies come from? Presumably from our experience of the world.
Materialism may have had its origin in our experience of thunder and lightning, sun and moon, weight and force, the sharp edge of a knapped stone, fire, food, blood, bone.
Idealism may have sprung from self-awareness, dreams, light and dark, the mystery of birth, the loss of death, the vague but incontrovertible intuition that there is more to the world than meets the eye.
Scientists have been both materialists and idealists, but science itself is thoroughly materialist, at least since the 17th century. Only the materialist view of the world has offered a useful program for research or progress.
Disembodied mind, vital spirits, and the supernatural just don’t lend themselves to scientific exposition. Wherever progress has been made in science, it has started with the assumption that the world is material — which may explain some of the popular antipathy towards science.
Meanwhile, our understanding of what we mean by matter has been radically changing. No more hard little particles rattling around in the void, as proposed by Democritus, Lucretius, and Newton. No more billiard balls writ small. Matter, as it shows itself at the turn of the millennium, is a thing of astonishing, almost “immaterial” subtlety.
As physicists probe the structure of atoms, the particles dissolve into a kind of cosmic music, all resonances, vibrations, and spooky entanglements. There is nothing at the heart of matter that is quite “material” in the way we previously understood the word.
If the matter created in the Big Bang was only hydrogen and helium, as the physicists say, then those primeval atoms certainly possessed the built-in capacity to complexify and diversify, to spin out stars and galaxies, carbon, oxygen, iron, and ultimately life and consciousness.
Every issue of Science and Nature, the premier weekly journals of science, has articles that reveal the mind-blowing beauty and creative potential of matter, as it animates the world. This column was inspired by a report in the Sept. 7 [2000] issue of Nature on the molecular machinery involved in the division of a cell — microtubular motor proteins that sort out and separate the cell’s chromosomes in preparation for a split. The material wizardry of cell division is enough to take one’s breath away.
Other reports in the same issue reveal other kinds of molecular machinery ceaselessly weaving the stuff of life and mind — without the intervention of conscious human thought.
Far from explaining away the mystery of the world, our new knowledge of matter rubs our noses in the mystery of nature. The more we learn, the more we become aware that matter — ordinary matter — is more than we had ever dared to guess.
Maybe it is time to dump the old debates between materialism and idealism. The practical success of science should be enough to satisfy the most ardent materialist, and the shimmering, prodigiously creative and perhaps ultimately inexplicable potential of matter should be enough to satisfy the idealist’s hankerings for the transcendental.
