Category: Philosophy

Keith Ward on Materialism, 8     1  2  3  4  5  6  7

We now come to a number of formulations in which the differences between Ward’s case for idealism and personalism on the one hand and the more specific and complete idealism that I am inclined to think could be defended can be noticed. I do not wish to dwell overmuch on this and will focus rather on the parts of his case that I wholly accept, but a little should perhaps be said. This could at least serve the purpose of pointing to the larger idealist argument and position.

“If modern philosophy is the application of reason to the widest possible set of known data, in order to obtain an informed judgement about what sorts of things are real, what sorts of things can be known, and what ways of life are most appropriate to the facts, it seems that we have to begin with the admission that there are many possible philosophical views, and none of them is theoretically certain, or even overwhelmingly probable.” Here a definition of ”data” and ”known data” should, from the perspective of such idealism, be added. It could also perhaps be pointed out that classical philosophy too was the application of reason to at least a wide set of ”known data”, like those of the beginnings of science, which was at this time not separate from philosophy. Nor was it separate from philosophy in the early modern period, when the classical agenda was in some sense resumed after the dominance of Christian theology.

Analytic philosophy, as originally conceived, and the continued ”Enlightenment project” (as Nicholas Capaldi calls it) within it, went too far, however, when it wanted to make itself the servant of science instead of theology. Today, as I discussed earlier, analytic philosophy is often used as a formal apparatus of theoretical instruments in the defence of entirely different positions in the various fields of philosophy.

Science ignored and soon outgrow the absurdly reductionistic positions and theoretical instruments the early analyticists offered, but at the same time sought an independence from philosophy as such which was equally untenable. The effects of this are normally immediately seen when the theories and results of science are stated and communicated in concepts and language, as they of course inevitably must be.

Philosophy, conceived as part of the same distinctive Western intellectual development and project as science, should not withdraw the application of reason from the central class of ”data” and ”known data” that science provides, if the need for definition of the latter terms is kept in mind and scientific theories are included as also being data. But neither should science and scientific theory exist without philosophy. Indeed, science cannot really do without philosophy. It can obviously think this is possible, but what we find then is nonetheless philosophy, as inextricably intervolved in the enterprise as ever. Only now it is inevitably poor speculative philosophy, not knowing and recognizing itself as philosophy, having deliberately relinquished its full theoretical resources and their conscious and systematic use.

I have doubts about the statement that no philosophical view is overwhelmingly probable. It is certainly possible to hold many different philosophical views. The questions of theoretical certainty and probability depend on how philosophy is defined. Some ”theoretical certainties” are not only involved in the very possibility and fact of doing philosophy, they also remain central to its continued pursuit and systematic development. In other respects, theoretical certainty has the specific limits that are intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy as such and the range of its use of reason. In those respects, we rightly speak of probability. But in some of those respects we have to supplement the observation that philosophy can point beyond itself, in the direction of forms of spiritual practice which can yield their own certainty.

But Ward must of course rightly add that “It does not follow that they are equally plausible.” Still, “it does follow that reason alone cannot make final decisions between a fairly wide spectrum of possibilities, ranging from the supremacy of Spirit to the supremacy of matter”. Here, I suggest, is one point in the argument where one must focus on the more precise definition of matter: such definition seems necessary for the meaningfulness of the statement about the spectrum of possibilities including the supremacy of matter. ”Reason alone” also calls for definition. These are questions which idealism in a more specific sense than Ward’s very inclusive one often does ask. I could perhaps later try to develop the case by adding the dimensions of such idealism.

But “What reason can do remains important. It can clarify basic axioms and aim to make them consistent with one another, analyse the strength and validity of inferences from those axioms, lay out a range of competing alternative axioms, test the consistency of an axiomatic system against the best available knowledge, and assess the strong and weak points of the general interpretation of the world that a rational system aims to provide. A rational philosophy is one that scores well on these criteria.” This, one must say, is still quite impressive. Philosophy is, among other things, a general culture of the intellect that is central to civilization. But then, again, “no philosophical view comes out as a clear winner”. Again I have to admit I have always had doubts about this. It seems to me idealism and personalism do come out as clear winners.

Indeed, “It may be thought that at least some views – perhaps that of Plato or Descartes or Bishop Berkeley – have been decisively refuted in the course of the history of philosophy. But I have sought to rescue all three from their critics, and show that their views can be reformulated in entirely plausible ways.” There are still some problematic aspects not lest of Descartes, but yes, both the possibility and reality of plausible reformulation is real, and also for the more specifically personal idealist views. “Of course, reformulation is necessary.”

There are of course many specific points to discuss in the various reformulations. “The Theory of Forms, for instance, needs to be re-stated as a theory of objective mathematical axioms, and related more closely to experimental observation. But it then survives very well in some versions of modern quantum theory, and mathematicians like Roger Penrose can describe themselves as Platonists without embarrassment.” The theory of forms exists in very different versions in Plato himself. One of them, developed in his later years, tends towards a reformulation in mathematical terms. Obviously mathematics is important here, important in idealism, as Plato himself insisted. But understood not least in a comparative perspective of the kind I have tried to introduce in several texts on idealism, it is not clear to me that other aspects of the theory of forms, the paradigmatic model or ontic logos (as Charles Taylor calls it) according to which the phenomenal world is ordered, most obviously with regard to ethics, aesthetics, and society, should or could be simply replaced in a complete re-statement in terms of objective mathematical axioms. Inevitable questions must, I think, arise, pace Penrose, about the relation between the structure of mathematical axioms of contemporary physics and the theory of forms. Does not the comparison, indeed identification, overlook the still pragmatic use of mathematics in physics? Is mathematics understood by the physicists in the way Plato understood it?

Ward thinks it is “not to be expected…that materialism is susceptible to a knock-down refutation”. “Knock-down” may not be the right way of putting it. Of course, “There will always be a possible reformulation of the view that mental phenomena are by-products of non-purposive and unconscious physical processes, and that our common-sense beliefs about the world do not represent the true nature of objective reality.” Yes, and it is always possible also to reformulate the materialist position. It is, as noted above, quite obviously possible to hold many different philosophical views – quite regardless of their own probability and possibility.

Ward’s stress on common sense sets his case apart from that of idealism in a stricter sense. It is valid with regard to many of his points. But there is also something that could be called common-sense materialism (not just common-sense realism), common-sense of the Johnsonian variety. Stones feel so hard and heavy when people kick them that their common sense tells them there must be lumps of matter floating about out there in objective space and time, quite independently of mind. Materialism certainly holds that the common-sense beliefs about “a God”, which Ward seizes on, do not represent the true nature of objective reality. But it is idealism of Berkeley’s kind that says Johnsonian common-sense beliefs with regard to stones etc. do not represent the true nature of that other part of reality and the way it can and cannot be said to be objective.

Leaving common sense, Ward says the “very grave problems” materialism faces are “largely raised by quantum physics. This is particularly annoying for materialists, since science tends to be a major plank on which materialism is based.” Ward still belongs to the broadly analytic tradition, although he is one of the many who now use its intellectual instruments for completely different purposes than the ones intended by the founders of it as a school. One can hardly speak of a set of theoretical instruments, of modal logic etc., or, more generally, of a mere formal method, as a philosophical school. I think it must be said that when analyticism relinquished its original programme which included substantial positions in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics etc., it ceased to be a school in any sense comparable with the one used for other philosophical schools.

Even analyticists who have completely rejected the original substantial programme of the logical empiricists and positivists, which included the self-identification of philosophy as the ancilla of science, have often remained preoccupied to a greater extent than philosophers of other schools with science and the theoretical issues of science. Ward is one of them. I see no problem with this but find it rather to be a natural and obvious part of what philosophy should do. But for idealists in the stricter sense, it is not quite as large a part as for mosts formal analyticists, even such formal analyticists as Ward who takes distinctly idealistic and theistic positions.

The early analyticists were not all materialists, as Ward has already discussed; some were phenomenalists and believed in experienced reality as a construct of sense-data. But they did see science as a major plank on which to base their rejection of idealism, religion, traditional morality, the great tradition in the arts etc. And the original programme was in any case such that the step to materialism was always a comparatively short one, at least for the philosophically interested public to which the programme was communicated in popularized form and which noticed rather the campaign against idealism than the subtleties of a certain branch of empiricist epistemology.

If the early non-materialist analyticists relied on science for this campaign, today’s materialist scientists and journalists do so to an even greater extent. Meanwhile, science in general or as a whole disappointed the early analyticists by not lending support to their programme, and the same often seems to be the case with their relation to the materialist scientists and journalists today. This is what Ward seizes on, in a part of the case that is legitimate and meaningful, albeit limited in what seems to me some important and precisely identifiable ways.

“The gravest objection”, Ward rightly observes, “is that it has become increasingly hard to say just what “matter” is. If your philosophical theory is that everything that exists is composed of matter, it is frustrating to admit that you do not know what matter is.” As indicated above, this, along with the question of the nature of reason, must be taken into account in any discussion about decisions, final and other, between a spectrum of positions ranging from the supremacy of spirit to the supremacy of this ”matter”.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 7     1  2  3  4  5  6

But philosophy is “still a very diverse discipline”, Ward notes, and he proceeds to give an overview of the academic discipline of philosophy today, in order to show how very few the materialist philosophers actually are: “Idealism, the view that mind or Spirit is the only ultimate reality, is far from dead, and many American university philosophy departments have a representative Process philosopher or Personalist – both variant forms of Idealism.”

It can be added that European university philosophy departments also have representative idealist philosophers. They include Oxford’s, where my second D.Phil. supervisor was one – even, as a Bradleyan, in the specific, Victorian Oxford tradition of idealism, focusing, like most contemporary idealists both of necessity and by inclination, on the history of philosophy. Idealists are also found on the European continent, although philosophers working with the historical tradition of German idealism focus on other aspect of it than idealism in the general sense in which Ward understands it.

But Ward is right to establish here that idealism and personalism are living philosophical positions and traditions, represented in academic philosophy today. And, of course, “Phenomenology, the general view that analysis of existential, lived experience should be the basis of an analysis of reality, remains strong in European philosophy.” Phenomenology was from the beginning (in Husserl) opposed to the nineteenth-century tradition of idealism, yet its approach is not only in some central respects congruent with it, but something similar was part of idealism in some forms, as a point of departure. The term phenomenology was of course introduced and frequently used precisely by the idealists. In some respects, phenomenology is part of the broad current of irrationalism and subjectivism in modern German philosophy, and consequently its rejection of idealism in the broad sense is untenable. A revised version of Hegelian dialectics, for instance, provides the means through which precisely the irrationalism and subjectivism can be overcome.

Irrationalism and subjectivism are also found in positivism. Ward writes: “Positivists also make experience primary, though they apparently have few feelings or existential crises, and prefer to have clear, distinct and unemotional experiences (which they call sense-data). Positivists have tended to think that their sense-observations are the basic data of rigorous science, and so they place a premium on sense-verification and the provision of sense-based evidence for all assertions. But positivism actually undermines the possibility of public verification (since we cannot even verify that other minds exist), and it also undermines the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.”

This is rather a comment on the primacy of experience à propos of phenomenology, not part of the overview of contemporary philosophy. But the positivists’ theory of sense-data, phenomenalism, is, like parts of the approach of the phenomenologists, in some respects and with a certain interpretation compatible with idealism, if only, of course, with the further development and not least supplementation. that idealism provides. Sense-data are not all the data and they certainly do not have the significance in philosophy that positivists ascribed to them (“evidence for all assertions”).

Yet Ward’s main point is that logical positivism was not materialism. That is also true of general common-sense pragmatism. “Common-sense pragmatism, often in a Wittgensteinian guise, sceptical of all grand general statements about ultimate reality, and refusing to accept that philosophers are in any better position to say what reality is like than anyone else, is widespread. Such philosophers are fond of saying, ‘Reality is in order as it is’, without the help of philosophy. So their arguments are often devoted to proving that philosophical arguments in general are superfluous and misleading. The problem is that, when readers begin to believe them, they stop reading philosophy any more. This has regrettably caused a number of philosophy departments in Britain to close.” Common-sense pragmatism, as paradoxically claiming to be a philosophical position, is also regrettable in itself, on many counts, and, I think, refutable (like materialism), in the sense in which things are at all refutable by philosophy. But again, Ward’s main point is that it is not materialism.

Then, “Scepticism, too, is far from dead, and resembles common-sense, except that it even doubts whether common-sense can be trusted. Some forms of post-modernism are sceptical views, insofar as they doubt whether there is any objective truth to be found.” Ward adds that sceptics tend to get very depressed and that they too tend to give up philosophy. This position too is thus bad for philosophy. Like materialism and common-sense pragmatism, it too seems to me philosophically refutable.

Then there is critical realism, which is “quite popular. An intellectual descendent of John Locke, such realism maintains that perception and intellect do give us knowledge of objective reality, but show reality to be rather different from how things appear to the senses. Proponents disagree on just how different. For Locke a set of primary qualities – roughly, mass, position and velocity – are objectively real, while secondary qualities like smell, colour and taste are contributed by the mind. In modern physics those primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time. So sometimes critical realists are reduced to saying that there is definitely some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes. But exactly what it is we cannot be sure. It is what quantum theorist Bernard d’Espagnat calls a ‘veiled reality’, since we cannot know exactly what concepts like ‘imaginary time’ or ‘waves of probability’ correspond to, if correspondence is even an appropriate term any more. As one critical realist has said, ‘I cannot be sure just what objective reality is. But whatever it is, I most certainly believe in it.'”

Critical realists of this kind may not be far from idealism. One problem here is that few of them understand what idealism is, and what it means, and that it is possible to enter upon the intellectual path that takes them there. Critical realism is certainly not materialism: “The dogmatism of materialism is very apparent when placed alongside these other more or less widely held philosophical theses. Materialists are metaphysicians in the grand manner. They claim to know what reality is, and that their description of it is, they think, obvious, accurate and rationally undeniable. Since that claim is doubted by most of their colleagues, it can hardly be quite as obvious as they say.”

Some idealists too would clearly be described by many as metaphysicians in the grand manner. But I do not think their claim to know what reality is and their description of reality have to be set forth in a particularly dogmatic manner, or, for that matter, an arrogant or aggressive manner. Organized theistic religion, as sharing the idealist worldview in the broad sense, and certainly understood as such by Ward, of course sometimes does present it in this way, since it, or at least much of it, articulates its beliefs and teachings in the form of dogma. But not even the way in which idealism in this broad sense is taught in the partly extra-philosophical traditions, like the esoteric tradition in the West or the Vedantic tradition, need to be dogmatic in its modality, in the sense Ward has in mind here when speaking of the materialists. It can be polemical and sometimes perhaps has to, but this is not at all primary. It just sets forth the traditional truths and principles in its own modality of utterance, sometimes adjusted to time and circumstance. And within philosophy, the traditional intellectual and discursive practices of that specific Western discipline in themselves counteract and discourage dogmatism (I am not talking here about dogmatism in the specifically Kantian sense, which can be non-dogmatic in the sense in which I here use the term).

It is significant that the materialists that most influence the popular debate are not philosophers, but modern scientists writing for the general reading public. As modern scientists, they are products of the historical separation of science from philosophy, they do not have a philosophical education, and they do not fully understand philosophy and what philosophy really is. This is what produces much of their dogmatism, and lands them in hopeless contradictions and other intellectual absurdities when they try to defend their materialism against philosophers. It seems that, without the proper perspective on what they themselves are doing, they also do not quite understand what science is.

In reviewing contemporary philosophy, Ward also, in the paragraphs cited, anticipates the discussion of some main parts of the contemporary case for idealism. He has spoken of “the claim of much modern physics that the ultimate structure of matter lies in unobservable but mathematically postulated entities.” He has said that “In modern physics [Locke’s] primary qualities have disappeared, and we have to talk of force-fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time.” He has mentioned “some objective reality which the mathematics of quantum theory describes”. These parts of the case are what he will next focus on in this summary statement.

It seems there are problems viewing the video here below in this post, so go to Vimeo instead (there are some disturbing sounds the first few minutes). I wish to draw the reader’s/viewer’s attention to my general discussion, in the post ‘The Case for Idealism and Personalism’, about the kind of case Ward makes.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 6     1  2  3  4  5

“It is easy to forget how very recent and meteoric the rise of materialism has been in philosophy”, Ward further explains. “How could it get from being a joke to being a claimant to obvious truth in forty years? I think there have been two major factors at work. One is the rise of cynicism about any sort of idealistic approach to life, about all human institutions, including religious ones, and about the failures of religious people to prevent violence and hatred, and indeed their tendency to increase violence and hatred in the world.”

Here it seems important to make a distinction with regard to the “idealistic approach to life”. It is true to say that there has been a rise of cynicism about “any sort of” such approach. But I think there are nonetheless two basically different sorts that must be kept apart.

One is the strictly philosophical, metaphysical, religious and traditionalist, which may or may not express itself in moral and social concerns, but which, when it does, is allied to a proper, classical and indeed classicist humanistic view of man, based on ethical dualism and realistic discernment with regard to the nature of man, society and the world (something which does not preclude the acceptance and incorporation of the important partial truths of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, or modernity in general, which can contribute to creative renewal of tradition and beneficent change). This is the idealistic approach to life which I am inclined to defend.

The other is the modern romantic and rationalist one which Irving Babbitt calls humanitarian, an undiscerning, illusorily progressivist pseudo-idealism based on a facile, immanentizing modern pantheism and monism in its view of both man and the world. Such idealism often had no problems accepting, in practice at least, materialism as sound, and to affirm it as part of an expression of honest, emancipated, sensual life-affirmation against the bigoted metaphysical idealism and religion of the reactionaries. There is certainly cynicism today about this form of idealism too; the liberals and leftists who used to believe in it are indeed often cynics and rather nihilists in both theory and practice. (There is a third sense of idealism, namely unselfish commitment to things believed in, and various associated qualities. This sense is not really determined by what those things are, but it often merges with the second sense by the addition of the characteristics of humanitarianism.)

This disillusion is made inevitable by the illusoriness of this kind of idealism itself; it was prefigured already in the nineteenth century and has been thoroughly analysed and explained by Babbitt and others. The problem is that it affects also the understanding of and attitude towards the first, genuine form of idealism.

Ward observes that the cynicism “has been largely motivated by the Marxist ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, the accusation that all religious and moral systems are in fact ideologies, no more than sophisticated disguises for egoistic self-seeking on the part of their proponents”. Ward rightly uses the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” about Marxism, but it should be pointed out that this is not an exclusively Marxist phenomenon. As I remember it, it was introduced by Ricoeur for the purpose of describing a wider range of such hermeneutics, including those of Nietzsche and Freud. The reason Ward does not mention this is perhaps that he does not regard Nietzsche as a materialist, and it is certainly true that those other forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion are more relevant for the understanding of general non- and anti-idealism rather than for materialism specifically.

But classical philosophy “can thus be seen as a disguise for elitist social systems that privilege the sort of cultivated discussion that only leisure and wealth can bring. The realities of life lie further down, in work and physical effort. The material is the real, while the spiritual is a fictitious construct to delude the oppressed and keep them in their place.” Ward enters into the kind of extra-philosophical explanation in terms of an analysis of political and cultural history, psychology etc. which I mentioned as required. He does so both because the extra-philosophical agenda and motivation are obvious, but also because the weakness of materialism as philosophy proper calls for such explanation.

The philosophical arguments of materialism should of course not simply be reduced to and explained in terms of something else, but considered in themselves. But on the condition that they are also considered as such, other explanation is legitimate in the case where other motivation than the purely philosophical is obviously at work. Such explanation of idealism is of course attempted by materialists when they perceive other forces and interests as being involved. The problem is that they do so often inadmissibly reduce and explain away the arguments in terms of those other factors.

As we see, Ward immediately identifies the relation between the growth of materialism and its becoming part of a political ideology as central to the needed explanation: “When Karl Marx boasted that he had taken the philosophy of Hegel, and stood it on its head, so that the world is not the self-expression of Absolute Spirit, as in Hegel, but a purposeless and violent by-product of blind material forces, he described the dethronement of Spiritual reality exactly. The irony is that Capitalists as well as Marxists fell under this revolutionary spell. Capitalists may have resisted the idea of a centralised State-run economy, but they often fell completely for the idea that ‘realism’ requires that the profit-motive (the morally neutral capacity to satisfy any or all desires) is the real driving force of history, and that spiritual ideals are artificial stimulants to distract the attention of the toiling masses.”

It could of course be argued that the capitalists had this orientation even before Marx, ever since the classical liberals and classical political economy, and that it was quite as much Marx who took it over from them, as well as from others. Yet Marxism in its many forms remains a major cause of the ascendancy of materialism, even though many who consider themselves materialists are not aware that to a considerable extent this is why they do so.

Despite the incessant insistence throughout the twentieth century that materialists are often good and morally upright people while religious and metaphysically idealist people are evil, oppressive hypocrites,  and indeed the obvious truth of this insistence in many cases, what we have long seen before us is a culture continuously declining under the impact of materialism, along with public and private morality. Materialism often has very real existential consequences, both for the materialists themselves, decisively shaping their lives, their personal development and their spiritual destinies, and for the lives of others who live together with them. Although theoretical and practical materialism are different things, and although theoretical idealists can be practical materialists and theoretical materialists can be practical idealists, they are nevertheless related things.

It was obvious from the beginning that the problem of materialism had a political dimension or a dimension of political philosophy and ideology, a dimension which had to be addressed as such. Opposing materialism had to involve opposing Marxism, or Marxism as materialism, as including the affirmation of matter as what Marx considered matter to be. Understandably, and in strict accordance with Marxist ideology, idealism, in a vague sense, was always a main enemy in the rhetoric of the communist regimes, and sometimes personalism too. But opposing materialism also had to involve opposing capitalism and the main forms of liberalism, for the reason Ward mentions.

Most materialist radicals were once idealists in the second sense described above. They opposed what they perceived to be the narrow-minded, egotistical and materialistic conservatives. Needless to say, there were such conservatives, conservatives who were certainly not idealists in the first sense. There were decisive partial truths in the radicals’ criticism, truths which of course need to be affirmed and assimilated by the creative traditionalist defender of an alternative modernity. Marxists opposed idealism because it was perceived to be only an obstacle to the spread of the truths of historical and dialectical materialism. They rejected personalism because it saw the person it defended as only the bourgeois individual that was the class enemy. They turned against Christianity and the churches because they were inextricable ideological parts of the oppressive power-structures of the remaining, semi-feudal class society. But it soon turned out the whole truth was different and much more complex than the radicals thought.

There are, of course, also other reasons for the ascendancy of materialism: “In addition to this sense that the material, not the spiritual, is the driving-force of history, the incredible progress of the natural sciences is the second major factor that has contributed to the rise of materialism.” Ward gives examples of this from cosmology, genetics, and brain and computer science, examples of how developments in those fields have made materialism seem more plausible. These examples, which I will not cite here, do not make it particularly clear to me why this should necessarily be so. And Ward will soon proceed to show how other developments in science have rather made materialism seem utterly implausible.

But, Ward says, “It can look as if our increasing knowledge of physical processes is at last revealing the secrets of consciousness and thought. It is not only ideas that are ideological constructs. Now minds themselves are often seen as illusions produced by physical processes in the brain.” I have to admit I have always found it impossible to understand how people can experience themselves and reality in this way. Is it really true that there are people who see their minds, consciousness and thought as illusions? Ward’s further description hardly makes it more comprehensible:

“Classical philosophers began from what was most evident to them – their own experiences and thoughts. But now science seems to some to show that experiences are by-products of brain-processes, and brains can function very well whether or not conscious experiences exist. Thoughts are the dimly perceived epiphenomena of computational sequences in the brain-computer, which are the really effective causes of all our apparently mental behaviour. Marxism dethroned Spirit from having a primary role in how the world is. Science has dethroned consciousness from having a primary role in our understanding of the world. Thus materialism pricks the bubble of our spiritual illusions, and reveals that we are in fact computational, inefficiently designed and largely malfunctioning, physical entities without any larger purpose or meaning within the blind, pointless, freak accident of a wholly physical universe.”

From the Vedantic perspective and that of similar traditions, materialism is of course accounted for in terms of an imperfect awareness of reality caused by ignorance and illusion and a low level of development of consciousness. This, clearly, must on this view be what on the deepest level explains the contemporary materialist view of reality described by Ward, although it has spread due to distinctive historical forces and agendas. As phenomenology too attests, for philosophers to ”begin from” a ”wholly physical universe” etc. and not from ”their own experiences and thoughts”, presupposing that the former and not the latter is ”most evident to them”, involves a strange and inadmissible speculative leap. It is based on illusion.

Despite all the historical developments that have, as it were, facilitated, reinforced and promoted this illusion, Ward still finds the materialist conclusion absurd. Yet the reason some of “the ablest contemporary philosophers” are materialists is, Ward thinks, “partly because it takes a huge amount of logical ingenuity to make the materialist programme seem plausible, so that it is an interesting challenge to good philosophers”. This explanation is revealing with regard to contemporary philosophy and the general cultural and intellectual climate in which it has developed. Later, he returns to the explanation of materialism on a more fundamental and timeless level.

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“Materialism has rarely seriously been on the agenda of classical philosophy”, Ward says. Materialists are perhaps not quite as rare in European philosophy as in Indian thought (where it is necessarily represented only by those who – and I think there are, before the importation of Western scientisms and Marxism of course, only two schools – position themselves outside of the major spiritual traditions), but it is remarkable that they are not so much less rare as one might think. Before materialism became part of a political ideology, Marxism, they were in fact very few in the West.

The first philosophical formulation of materialism is still relevant to its definition or for accounts of what materialists mean: “Democritus’ theory that nothing finally exists except material particles with mass, position and velocity, interacting with one another in more and more complicated ways, did not have much appeal as a description of the value-laden, complex world of human experience, with all its depths of feeling and varieties of intellectual description.” This points to some of the experience that is part of the philosophical point of departure and basis of personalism, and to the reasons why this experience speaks against materialism. Personalism is, or should be, a form of idealism.

Ward remembers “the occasion when materialism first hit the world of Oxford philosophy”. This is remarkable. Ward was born in 1938. But he is of course not saying materialism had been unknown in Oxford philosophy. Many of the basic materialist positions became prominent in the nineteenth century and had been widely discussed since then, although materialism has certainly been further developed and radicalized in recent decades, a fact which Ward also discusses. What he means here is that materialism was not embraced and defended by Oxford philosophers – that it didn’t quite “hit” it.

Also, he is speaking only of materialism, not of atheism. It is quite possible to be an atheist without being a materialist, like Hume, and Ward notes elsewhere that there are more atheists than materialists in the history of Western philosophy. It is also possible to be a non-materialist but not an idealist. It is all a matter of various levels of experience, insight, and coherence and comprehensiveness of reasoning. But we define materialism here primarily in such a way as to make it impossible to be both a materialist and a theist, or one who affirms the spiritual view of the world – as the position that matter is all there is, the position of reductionist materialism. But the question of this kind of materialism turns out to be inseparable from a secondary definition, the one according to which materialism is merely the affirmation of the existence of such a thing as matter as understood by materialists in itself, with the exception of its quality of being that to which all reality can be reduced.

As late as the early 1960s, reductionist materialism was unknown in Oxford, Ward recounts. There were then “three main Professors of Philosophy in Oxford – Gilbert Ryle, A. J. Ayer, and R. M. Hare. Hare was an Anglican, Ryle an agnostic, and Ayer an atheist. But they all agreed that materialism was an over-dogmatic, impoverished and over-simplified form of belief that completely failed to account for the sheer diversity of the human world, the importance of human experience, and the exigencies of morality.” This is clearly important to note for those who object to other aspects of the work of those non-idealists.

Ward’s account of the “hitting” is fascinating: “I was sitting in one of Gilbert Ryle’s seminars in 1963 when a visiting Australian doctor, David Armstrong, presented a paper defending a materialist theory of mind. I still remember the sense of shock as this heretical Australian laid into Ryle’s concept of mind and insisted on the need for a purely materialist account of consciousness. It seemed so far beyond the bounds of plausibility that some of us were not sure if it was tongue-in-cheek or not.

Well, it was not. And in about forty years materialism, sometimes called ”physicalism”, has risen to a position of such prominence in philosophy that the materialist Daniel Dennett can say, quite falsely in fact, that virtually every serious philosopher is a materialist.”

Early on, I came to think that materialism was in fact philosophically refutable, in the sense in which things are at all refutable by philosophy. I.e., I came to think it was refutable not only in terms of spiritual experience and realization, but on the theoretical level, through the particular intellectual discipline of philosophy. Materialism – all possible variations of Democritus’ basic theory – always seemed unbelievable and often simply absurd to me. Therefore I could never take the materialist or physicalist development in the last forty years, which Ward mentions, quite seriously. I could hardly even really accept it as philosophical.

Not only did the materialists for the most part have an often clearly identifiable agenda and motivation, which are not in themselves of a philosophical nature. And these do require analysis in terms of political and cultural history, psychology, and other perspectives. They also made false claims of the kind Ward cites from Dennett. It is obvious, despite the recent development, not only how many serious philosophers are not materialists, but how many serious philosophers are idealists and personalists.

The exceptionality of materialism implied by the majority consensus is of course also in itself a part of the case, for the obvious reasons that follow from the ones that make the consensus such a part, although it is certainly not in itself a sufficient one.

Keith Ward on Materialism, 4     1  2  3

“That is”, Ward continues, “they have held that ultimate reality has the nature of mind or consciousness, and that the material universe is the appearance or creation of the ultimate mind.” Ward here says that this is what is meant by ”a basically spiritual view of the world”, the view on which there is a broad consensus among classical philosophers.

This is important in itself, being that for which the positive case is made. But it is also necessary for the definition of materialism, in which the decisive thing is the negation of these positions in the name of a different principle, matter. It should be noted that it is possible to define materialism and matter in a different way. All affirmation of the existence of matter does not negate these positions, i.e., is not reductionist. And, with the help of a different concept of matter, materialism too could in fact be defined in an altogether different way, a way that does not contradict idealism, not even the kind of idealism that denies the existence of matter in the ordinary sense(s).

It should also be said that the case against materialism and for the spiritual view of the world” does not imply that the experience of what materialists account for with their concept of matter is not real. Nor is there necessarily anything “wrong” with that experience as such, apart from the kind of practical and moral dimensions which Ward will discuss later. It is just that matter is not what they think it is. Or, perhaps more precisely: what they think is matter is not what they think matter is.

But we mean here by the terms materialism and matter what the philosophers Ward refers to meant by them, and also what philosophers who have regarded and today regard themselves as materialists mean by them. Inasmuch as they do not all mean precisely the same, these are broad concepts. But this does not make any difference for the basic case, as long as the definition includes the negation of the central positions here formulated by Ward.

With regard to the question of the existence and nature of a ”material universe”, Ward includes philosophers who and forms of idealism in the broad sense which accept the existence of a universe which is really material in the sense accepted here. I.e., they accept the existence of matter without being materialists. Only they do not regard it as ”ultlimate reality”. Other forms of idealism do not accept the existence of such a universe, the existence of matter.

”Appearance” is an important word in this connection and in many forms of idealism; it is appropriate also for accounts of some central Eastern traditions. But it too can mean different things. It can mean simply non-creational causality, manifestation, emanation. But in addition to this and sometimes even instead of this it can also mean – and Ward certainly has this in mind too, having used the formulation ”ultimate reality” of that which is not appearance – that which is not real or fully real, not as real as that of which it is an appearance, and in which there is an element of illusion.

“Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and many others all shared this general view”, Ward reminds us. And it can of course be noticed how many the ”many others” are: some of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, the late medieval Franciscans, the Renaissance Platonists (not just the Italian but also the Cambridge ones), the rest of the German Idealists and the nineteenth-century idealists in France, Britain, America and elsewhere. Ward soon notes how few the materialists really are.

Even Hume, “a philosopher opposed to religious belief, who denied the existence of ultimate mind, did not suppose that matter could be ultimately real. Indeed, he thought that the material universe was a construct out of ‘impressions’ or ‘ideas’, and had no objective reality, or at least not a reality that could be rationally established.” This is of course only an argument against materialism. It could perhaps be clarified that it is ”the material universe”, i.e. a universe of matter as conceived by materialists, lumps of matter, like atoms, floating about out there in objective, absolute time and space, that has ”no objective reality, or at least not a reality that could be rationally established” – not what Hume regards as ”a construct out of ’impressions’ or ’ideas’”. The latter might be a valid expression of what the universe that materialists hold to be material actually is, but contrary to the purportedly material universe it does have objective reality of a different kind, a reality which can be rationally established. This, after all, is part of what is meant when Ward says with the classical, in a broad sense idealist tradition, as he does elsewhere, that the world is intelligible.