The Muddle of Materialism

Bad things happen when methodological materialism is allowed to overrun its banks.

Why did the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis lose its hold on the West? If Christian philosophy has such immense explanatory power, why did it get tossed in the attic?

Last week I argued that hylomorphism and natural law are the “Two Workhorses of Christian Philosophy,” capable of pulling the world behind them. But it’s undeniable that they were both sidelined to a considerable degree in the early modern era. If they’re so amazing, why put them out to pasture?

That question is at the center of this week’s posts, and it’s closely related to the “Who Killed Christendom?” theme from a few months ago. Historical diagnosis is tricky, forcing us into thorny discussions of free will, moral responsibility, and the workings of Divine Providence, and I don’t want to get lost in that labyrinth. So I will simply set two points on the table here, both of which seem very relevant.

First, it became quite hard to maintain the serene, holistic worldview of the Middle Ages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the world was simultaneously imploding and exploding. Christendom was consumed byinternal instabilities even as the world opened up to trade and exploration, forcing Christians to grapple with an explosion of new questions. To the brilliant minds of the early-modern period, hanging onto the Thomistic synthesis felt backwards and silly. The world was fragmenting, and philosophy chased it.

Second, though, this was not merely a question of changing fashions. Great thinkers are affected by a prevailing cultural mood, but new theories gained strength in large part because they did seem to explain certain things more effectively than medieval Aristotelian Thomism. A ten-thousand-foot Perennial Philosophy doesn’t always excel at rapid response. As modernity pushed new questions to the fore, the massive, plodding Clydesdales of Christian philosophy often lost out to sleek racehorses that outpaced it in the race towards specific destinations. These competitors were never able to capture the medieval gift for synthesis. But in the early modern era, with the whole world fragmenting, that may have seemed like a feature more than a bug. Maybe it’s just a mistake to try to integrate all the different varieties of truth onto a single map. Maybe we should start by explaining something and go from there.

A few centuries on, we have a much clearer sense of what is lost when we simply shrug our shoulders and allow the world to fragment. But the early moderns had no real sense of what would happen on the ground when traditions eroded and ties ceased to bind. They were eager to ride those new steeds off into Christendom’s sunset, exploring new horizons. This week I’ll look at two “modern horses”: materialism and postmodernism. Between them they explain a lot about how we got to our present juncture.

Think of these as the two clearest big-picture options when teleology is jettisoned. If we’re not committed to things having natures, if we don’t understand them in terms of their function and final purpose, then we find ourselves faced with two obvious alternatives. We can understand things mechanistically as part of a cold chain of material causes and effects. Or we can sideline both form and final purpose and zero in on subjective experience, analyzing the world through the lens of social constructs, political power, and cultural narrative.

It would be fun, perhaps, to create a quiz to help people determine which kind of modernist they are. But I think the truth is that most modern people are both. People today are heavily shaped by both materialism and postmodernism, marinating from childhood in anti-traditional and anti-teleological ideas. We’re fluent in both languages, and the fact that they don’t really cohere is, in fact, part of the point. It helps explain the atomization and nihilism of our time, along with the rise of political religions and shallow philosophies like expressive individualism. But I’ll return to that point next week.

For now, let’s look a little closer at materialism, which might for convenient shorthand be thought of as “what happens when the scientific method overflows its banks.” Empirical science can do some incredible things working from mechanistic premises. Galileo was fairly aggressive about pushing that envelope, stripping away qualities like color or taste (which he treated as figments of subjective human experience), and treating physical nature as a mechanistic system governed by mechanical laws. This is distasteful, or even offensive, to the Aristotelian-Thomist mind, but it opened whole new vistas for scientific discovery and engineering. Isaac Newton brought that approach to its zenith in his Principia, which dazzled the world with its clean harmony and incredible predictive power. It seemed to many that a new kind of synthesis had emerged, replacing the fusty old medieval one. Empirical science had ushered in a new reality.

Can that synthesis incorporate moral realities, though? Can it explain the rich complexity of human experience? Some early-modern thinkers were eager to try. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, constructs a moral and political philosophy that treats the human body as a machine and human experience and desire as nothing more than another form of physical motion. Hobbes flattens “good” and “evil” into nothing more than a question of physical survival, paving the way to Darwinian anthropology and evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and other materialist efforts to explain human beings as nothing more than collections of atoms, bumping around in mechanistic ways.

Hobbes’ moral psychology isn’t particularly compelling. Very few people read Leviathan and see a picture of human nature that they want to adopt or affirm. But later physicalists improved somewhat on that effort, and it should be said in fairness that even human affairs can sometimes be described, or even predicted, in helpful ways through social sciences operating on methodological materialism. These sciences have real limitations, and they’re extremely prone to “overrunning the banks,” treating methodological assumptions as established truths. Nevertheless, they aren’t entirely without value.

The limitations, however, are severe, and already visible in Hobbes. Materialism can’t really make sense of human experience as such. Suggesting that it’s really just physical motion seems like a category mistake; no one who has ever experienced anything can really agree that that reality is captured in a story about intersecting atoms or firing synapses. Even if a particular human experience (say, fear) reliably corresponds to a particular sort of brain activity, how does that in any way explain what it means to be afraid? A person who somehow lacked that capacity could spend a lifetime studying the physical process and still have no real idea what the experience is like. And doesn’t that matter? Of course it does. In their effort to incorporate everything into a beautiful, Newtonian-type science, the materialists seem to have shrugged off trivialities like love, beauty, justice, human friendship… in short, everything that actually makes human life worthwhile.

Social sciences, as mentioned above, have a strong tendency to “overflow their banks,” treating provisional metaphysical assumptions like deep metaphysical truths. When someone describes a position as “reductive,” this is what they mean. Complex human realities are being reduced to physical cause-and-effect, in ways that simply write out the truths that most matter. This is the legacy of a world shaped by materialism.

In many ways, it was precisely this glaring deficiency that gave rise to postmodernism. That’s Thursday’s topic, but already one can see the beginnings of an answer to the original question. Materialism had great appeal for the moderns because it moved speedily into a space where new questions were exploding, and produced brilliant answers to at least some of those questions. As a methodological stance it has some amazing benefits. For a considerable period after Newton, practically everyone wanted to imitate him as nearly as possible, turning their study into a science with that same level of rigor, and that same beautiful consistency. And there is a real beauty to it. Clearly, Newtonian physics has significantly advanced our appreciation of certain truths about the world.

Problems arise though when methodology becomes metaphysics. Empirical study can do amazing things, but it can’t do everything. As a metaphysical position its deficiencies are severe. It took some time for that reality to fully sink in, and when it did the response wasn’t always healthy. We’ll pick things up there on Thursday. But for now, keep that larger paradigm in view. Materialism was influential because it explained some things extremely well. It was so good that people were reluctant to accept a further truth: it explains some things very, very badly.