STEPHEN MILLER
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we call someone materialistic, we mean they are excessively devoted to
getting and spending, to acquiring things. This, however, is a relatively
late usage, one that became commonplace only after the mid-nineteenth
century.
This notion of materialism, which I'll call ordinary materialism,
carries a good deal of emotional weight. It is a strongly pejorative term,
so pejorative that even the most ardently acquisitive person would dislike
being called a materialist or materialistic. ("We are not the sum of our
possessions," George Bush said in his inaugural address, but has anyone
ever said that we were?) Students of philosophy know that materialism
has another meaning altogether - that it refers to a philosophical
outlook that assumes there is ultimately a material explanation for all
phenomena, including supposedly spiritual phenomena.
The Dictionary oj
Cultural Literacy
defines materialism in the foHowing way: "In philoso–
phy, the position that nothing exists except matter - things that can be
known or measured through the senses."
Philosophical materialism has a long and respectable history - from
Democritus and Lucretius to Hobbes and Locke. Moreover, the nature
of philosophical materialism remains very much a living issue in philoso–
phy. In
Philosophy and the Mirror oj Nature
(1979), the American philoso–
pher Richard Rorty devotes many pages to clarifying various types of
"materialist" positions. If contemporary moralists usually decry vulgar or
shallow materialism, contemporary philosophers usually speak of
"eliminative" or "reductive" materialism. Used in its philosophical sense,
materialism is a word that carries no moral or emotional weight. A
philosophical materialist will be praised or criticized for the quality of his
argument, not his morality or lack thereof. Moreover, philosophical
materialism does not logically entail a particular political position. We
tend
to
assume that philosophical materialists are antispiritual and there–
fore politically "progressive," but Hobbes was a defender of absolute
monarchy, and George Santayana, a self-described materialist, was a po–
litical conservative with a strong sympathy for Roman Catholicism.
Yet
to
say that philosophical materialists never had a political
agenda would be misleading. In the eighteenth century, philosophical
materialists, especially in France, were on the side of the Enlightenment.
Not only were they strongly anticlerical - so was the monarchist Hobbes
- but many also were strongly in favor of political change. Some writers
- both critics and defenders of the social and political status quo - found
the French materialists disturbing because they thought that philosophical
materialism inevitably undermined traditional morality, turning man into
a mere plaything of impersonal forces. In his
Life oj Johnson,
James
Boswell speaks of "the groveling belief of materialism" and praises
