In much contemporary discourse the word ‘materialistic’ refers to a way of life – ‘excessive devotion to bodily wants or financial success’, as the Chambers English Dictionary puts it. If the followers of such a way of life can, by extension, be classed as materialists, it is important to emphasise that this book is not about them or their credo. This book is about philosophical materialism, which at heart is a theory about the kind of things that exist. To adopt such a philosophical stance has no necessary connection with any particular attitude about how life should, or should not, be lived. Indeed, it is commonly, though not universally, agreed that an injunction to act in a certain way cannot be derived from a statement of how things are – an ‘ought’ cannot be derived from an ‘is’.
While philosophical materialism may have no logical connection with any ethical system or way of life, asserting that only material things exist, and thereby denying the existence of spiritual things, does perhaps suggest that one should only be interested in material things, and seek one’s rewards in life rather than in some afterlife. Hence, there are connections between philosophical materialism and what might be called ‘hedonistic materialism’, which is the view that life should be devoted to material pleasures.
However, errors arise from the ambiguous use of the single term ‘materialism’ for both. Furthermore, hedonistic materialism only degenerates into the way of life referred to in the dictionary definition quoted above – call it ‘decadent materialism’ – if a particular choice is made concerning which material things and pleasures to pursue amongst many possible ones. The natural world of flora and fauna, the arts and sciences and technology and engineering, to name just a few areas of human endeavour – all these may engage the interest of the philosophical materialist as much as, if not more than, fine food, fast cars and money. Nothing in philosophical materialism implies greed or gluttony.
The origins of philosophical materialism lie in the ancient world and arose in contrast to religious schools of thought (as Chapter 2 explains). It was a time when philosophical thought always had an ethical strand. The religious schools derived much of their teaching on the ethical life from their religious doctrines, including, typically, worship and rituals of sacrifice. In the later, monotheistic traditions, the glory of the spiritual stood in contrast to the ‘lowly’ pleasures of the body. With no religious belief to turn to as the bedrock of philosophical materialist ethics, materialist schools in both the East and West named the pursuit of pleasure as the true goal of life – but there are many different kinds of pleasure, as pointed out above. The most famous materialist of the ancient world, Epicurus, lived ascetically, along with the great majority of philosophically inclined people of his time in Athens, and taught, in his school, the ‘Garden’, that this was an appropriate way to live. Yet the great Roman poet Horace wrote of ‘the sty of Epicurus’, which is an outrageous calumny. Although critics can cite instances in his writings that are ambiguous on the question, for Epicurus the path to pleasure was by no means associated with excess or lavish taste.
Materialism was, until the twentieth century, associated with the liberal or radical traditions of the societies in which it occurred, for the straightforward reason that it stood in opposition to the prevailing conservative religious orthodoxies of the time. As such, materialism contrasts with more ascetic, self-denying styles of life that were based on religious doctrine, implying these styles of life are based on falsehoods and, therefore, largely pointless. Fasting, and other, sometimes more dramatic, self-inflicted physical torments, were rarely valued by philosophical materialists, but they did not promote decadent materialism as an alternative. They are accused of doing so because their enemies considered their actual views so dangerous. As a consequence, proponents of philosophical materialism have faced intolerance and persecution for long periods of time. That intolerance continues in many places today. Of course, materialists are not the only people to have faced persecution on account of their beliefs. Many religious people have suffered the same fate, and, since the turn of the twentieth century, that persecution has sometimes been, regrettably, at the hands of materialists.