Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Dualistic Materialism

Materialism encompasses any doctrine that regards matter and the properties of bodies arising from it as the substance of all things. Everything that exists and occurs is either directly deemed corporeal by materialism or understood as phenomena originating from the material properties of bodies. Original materialism, in its general character, aligns closely with naive empiricism in its initial form, often accompanying it as a metaphysical complement. Together, materialism and naive empiricism indicate the object-oriented form of thought characteristic of early philosophical speculation. They consider the objects of the corporeal world as genuinely given; even where the rational mind seeks unity through a single principle that unifies the diversity of phenomena, that principle is conceived as corporeal. Thus, in ancient speculation, this principle manifests in the form of prime matter; when the notion of the dominance of quantitative laws arises, these laws are embodied in corporeal forms, in the regular geometric figures of elements. The essence of human existence is likewise regarded as corporeal. Spiritual processes occur within distinct organs and represent their activities. The soul itself, in the earliest teachings of physicians and philosophers, as well as in the animistic views of popular belief, is still fully identified with breath. Language conveys this understanding in terms such as spirit, anima, and φυχή. However, while opposing the spiritual as a finer matter to the corporeal world as a coarser one, this original materialism is dualistic.

Three motives contributed to the emergence of primitive dualistic materialism, which dominated the initial period of philosophy. The first lies in the overarching monistic tendency of our thought, which demands the homogeneity of things and expresses this requirement by positing a uniform prime matter or homogeneous fundamental elements. In philosophy, this first motive is clearly manifested in the assumptions of a single fundamental substance by the ancient Ionian physicists. The second motive joins this, representing the embryonic notion rooted in the animism of popular belief and later developed by the medical school: the idea that the soul is a life principle and thus a substance, easily mobile and therefore capable of moving other bodies. This idea is evident in the identification of the soul with breath and in comparisons of it to the mobile particles in sunbeams—comparisons attributed to the Pythagoreans, according to Aristotle—and in some views of later natural philosophers, notably in Heraclitus's principle of fire, which embodies the most mobile substance and simultaneously serves as the rational principle, and in Democritus's teaching that the soul, like fire, consists of round, highly mobile atoms. Finally, the third motive, the latest to emerge in philosophy, is the view developed within naive-empirical thought: that during sensory perception, the object transfers itself to the perceiving subject through separating particles. By reducing the formation of sensory perception to a corporeal process, this theory provides primitive materialism with a certain scientific foundation; it does not merely posit that the soul is a corporeal substance but seeks to explain the spiritual processes constituting the entirety of mental life through material processes of motion.

All these motives come together to clearly manifest for the first time in atomistic metaphysics. Atomism is the first scientifically articulated form of dualistic materialism. It sharply delineates the three motives that prompted the emergence of this direction. Atoms are substantively homogeneous; thus, it satisfies our rational monistic tendency to the extent that this is compatible with the diversity of phenomena. By linking the spiritual with the most mobile atoms, atomism understands it as a driving force. Finally, in atomism, the identity of sensation with the sensed object is more strictly established than in the teaching of qualitatively different elements, since impressions arising from objects are conceived as complete, albeit diminished images of the objects themselves. From the connection of these three premises arise two principles crucial for subsequent developments: the principle of the constancy of matter and the principle of the unity and immutability of causal agents. Atoms cannot arise or perish; the impetus, eternally spreading between them and producing ever-new movements, is the sole unchanging quantitative cause of all changes. The law that “nothing comes from nothing” holds significance for both substance and the changes in its states. Such a notion of strict unconditional causality simultaneously excludes any creative activity in nature; it reduces purpose to a deceptive illusion and inevitably leads to the conclusion that spiritual life, by its essence, is nothing more than mechanical movement. Thus, all views of later materialism are already contained in this initial form of consciously manifest materialism. The atheism of later materialists is also prepared in Democritus’s views, as, according to the anti-God-character of this philosophy, the gods are devoid of influence over the course of events. Even if Democritus still considers the gods to be entities between heaven and earth, this assumption is merely a result of naive-empirical thinking, which has yet to find another explanation for the representations of gods; it serves as an auxiliary means, naturally bound to disappear as soon as sensory representations undergo more rigorous critique.

In later times, the materialist atomistic system was pushed to the background from two directions: firstly, by skeptical distrust of any cosmological speculation, incited by sophistry, and secondly, more strongly and persistently—by Platonic idealism, emerging from entirely different premises and demands. To idealism within Aristotle’s system, a realistic direction is added, notably manifested in natural scientific inquiries, and already within the Aristotelian school, there appears a clear predisposition toward materialistic representations that do not sharply oppose idealism, merely due to the dominance of the teleological principle. This lays the groundwork for the transition to the last two materialistic systems of ancient philosophy: Stoicism and Epicureanism. Stoicism, by its metaphysical nature, is a teleological and theological materialism that, through a return to ancient cosmological ideas, uniquely combines opposing viewpoints and thus represents an eclectic system arising from heterogeneous sources. Epicureanism directly returns to Democritus's atomism. However, it softens the strict continuity of atomistic materialism, leaving alongside the mechanical causality of atoms a free space in the objective world for chance and, in human actions, for the autonomy of will. Thus, each of these systems is a product of its time; although they generally lean toward materialism in their worldview, they restrict it for ethical interests under certain conditions, revealing the influence of the teleological direction of Aristotelian philosophy. This character is fully preserved in subsequent systems during the transition of Greek philosophy into Christianity. Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, while considering the divine as a purely spiritual essence, are nevertheless deeply infused with materialistic ideas in their teachings about a sequential hierarchy of beings and the communion of the individual spirit with the divine in a state of enlightenment, which later, of course, becomes subordinate to the teleological and theological tendencies, as seen in Stoicism. This character of materialism, prompted not so much by natural scientific perspectives as by strongly expressed religious needs, left traces in the works of many ancient thinkers of the patristic period, such as Origen and Tertullian, whose activities predate the final triumph of Platonism within the Christian worldview. In contrast, the church philosophy of later times stands firmly under the banners of Platonic idealism, followed by Aristotelian realism. In the period of the decline of scholasticism, with the rise of nominalism, materialistic ideas again resurface, although they are sidelined by a skeptical tendency and the clearly defined religious character of this direction.

In the face of the new natural sciences, materialism acquires a powerful ally. By establishing mechanical explanations for phenomena across various domains of nature—once envisioned as the ideal of Democritus's atomism—natural science endeavors to extend this mechanical worldview to organic phenomena, and subsequently to the phenomena of spiritual life and the moral realm. In the philosophy of the seventeenth century, this materialistic current, emanating from the natural sciences, manifested in two distinct forms.

On one hand, there arose an effort to return to that ancient worldview where these ideas coexisted: to the systems of Democritus and Epicurus. In this context, Gassendi revived dualistic materialism. On the other hand, there emerged a compelling attempt to construct a unified philosophical system based on newly acquired mechanical perspectives, whose success was predominantly assured by Galileo. Thus, the endeavor to justify monistic materialism was undertaken for the first time by Thomas Hobbes.