Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Monistic Materialism

No matter how fruitful the introduction of the concept of the atom was for the subsequent development of natural science, dualistic materialism, as a worldview, ceased to play any significant role. It was supplanted by monistic materialism, which more readily embraced our intellect's pursuit of unity and was more in accord with the growing study of psychological phenomena. Thus, evolving not merely in contradiction to contemporary idealistic movements but also in a certain opposition to dualistic atomic materialism, monistic materialism differs from the latter primarily in its fundamental view that spiritual life is not a property of specific material elements but rather a universal trait of matter that manifests under certain conditions. Additionally, it counters two further assumptions of ancient materialism: the presupposition of empty spaces between atoms and the explanation of sensory perception through the emission of diminished images from objects. Considering the bodily essence of objects as the only thing given to our knowledge, this new materialism had to regard empty intermediate spaces as dubious metaphysical inventions. Consequently, in the seventeenth century, the corpuscular hypothesis gained significance not only in Hobbes but also in Descartes' natural philosophy. By recognizing elements of matter as tiny bodies that touch one another everywhere and can be divided infinitely, proponents of this hypothesis hoped to avoid all presuppositions while remaining true to the requirement that matter is exclusively endowed with properties that we perceive in actual things. Much later, thanks to conclusions drawn from the chemical laws of combining elements in simple weight ratios, modern materialism overcame the prejudice against atomism.

The ancient doctrine of the emission of images from objects, in light of new scientific results, has proven entirely unfounded. A new theory was prepared by Aristotle, who posited that an intermediate factor participates in the process of perception between the object and the sensory organs. To find a path to a theory of perception that satisfies the demands of monistic materialism, it was only necessary to replace qualitative representations with quantitative, mechanical ones. Hobbes had already put forth a view in this regard, preserved in essential features by contemporary materialism. External stimulation—a movement transmitted from the object to the sensory organ—acts upon the sensory nerves and is ultimately conveyed to the brain in the form of movement, thus maintaining its original material nature. Consequently, this new theory, like the old one, regards sensation as a bodily mechanical process; however, this process does not consist of the object leaving a direct imprint upon the perceiving subject. It consists of the propagation of external movement, which, before reaching the sensing organ—considered to be the brain—passes through various stages. In connection with this new theory of perception, it becomes clear that sensation and the movement process in the brain, recognized as the final act of external impression, are strictly speaking incomparable: sensation is never given to us in the form of a movement process. To eliminate this difficulty, Hobbes already employed an analogy that has persisted through further stages in the development of monistic materialism, as the latter remained committed to the ambition of reducing all actual natural processes to mechanical movements. This analogy pertains to the relationship between objectively accurate perception and illusion. Sensations and all spiritual processes arising from them are, in their true nature, movements of the minutest particles. However, we perceive these movements only vaguely. Thus, "ghosts" arise within us, among which, strictly speaking, our entire spiritual life revolves. Having accepted this analogy, it was easily extended further. Hobbes, for instance, drew a parallel between egoism and the constancy and self-preservation of the body; starting from the premise that the state is a complex artificial organism, he attempted to explain the emergence of society and the state from the natural inclination of the individual toward self-preservation.

For a long time, the most influential opponent of the mechanical form of the new materialism remained Cartesian dualism, which adhered to a mechanical worldview in the realm of inorganic and even organic phenomena, yet sought to divert it in the realm of spiritual life through the assumption of an independent substance—the soul, the essential property of which is thought. In this regard, the developed view of Descartes that matter possesses only passive properties and thereby differs from all that is spiritual, whose essential nature is activity, had a particularly strong influence. This view directly prompted the assumption that in external nature, the origin of all movements must be attributed to a transcendent intellect, and in the subsequent period, it armed both philosophy and natural science against mechanical materialism. Among its opponents were two prominent natural philosophers of the late seventeenth century, Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. This perspective led Newton to recognize the action at a distance of celestial bodies as a phenomenon whose true origin is hidden from us: matter, as a wholly passive principle, can manifest actions externally only if they have been imparted to it, after which it transmits them through mere contact. Therefore, the ultimate basis of any manifestation of force in the realm of external nature was seen by Newton as residing in a spiritual principle, which seemingly played the same role for him as "assistentia supranaturalis" in occasionalism. Leibniz emphasized this spiritual nature of forces even more strongly: in his later philosophy, he regarded matter generally as merely a means of manifesting the inner spiritual being of things.

This clearly anti-materialistic trend in natural science during the late 17th and early 18th centuries was weakened by the increasingly prevailing view that action at a distance does not simply represent, as Newton thought, a phenomenon of yet unknown forces but is itself a force inherent to matter. Consequently, the Cartesian notion of absolute passivity of matter faded from the scene: matter transformed into a universal bearer of natural forces, allowing for the potential reconciliation of teleological views with materialistic perspectives. However, the materialism of this time remained predominantly inclined toward mechanical explanations, and its chief proponents were the mechanical school of physicians aligned with Harvey and Descartes, opposed to the schools of theologians and animists who posited the existence of a specific vital force. Alongside this, at the dawn of the 18th century, a new form of monistic materialism emerged through a peculiar transformation of one of the great systems of the recent past. Although the influence of Spinoza's system on the immediately succeeding speculative philosophy was rather limited, it exerted a profound impact on individual naturalists and free thinkers educated in the natural sciences. Indeed, one of these thinkers, John Toland, first introduced pantheism, closely related to Spinoza’s thought yet deeply infused with a naturalistic spirit, and he clearly articulated the fundamental ideas of a new form of materialism, which, in contrast to the mechanical materialism of Thomas Hobbes, we may call psychophysical materialism—a term that has been attributed to it only in more recent times.

Spinoza regarded extension and thought as corresponding attributes of substance. His assertion that "the order of ideas is the same as the order of things" easily implies that the truly real consists of extended things, while ideas are merely subjective representations of those things. Should one attempt to further decompose each of these modes, the simplest form of real existence would remain as material movement, with the simplest form of idea being sensation, corresponding to that movement. Thus arose the allowance that sensation is a specific property of matter in general, which, however, becomes conscious sensation only under certain favorable conditions, and which, upon becoming such, through the combination with other sensations, forms a variety of complex ideas. In accordance with the intellectual tendencies of the psychology of this time, will, affects, and feelings were generally understood as "ideas" or representations composed of sensations. The connection between simple sensations accompanying specific movements of matter was presumed to occur autonomously, once such movements arose under the influence of certain conditions of the bodily mechanism. Therefore, in complex psychological processes, simple sensations were seen as complexes, while sensation itself was characterized exclusively as a property of matter, inherent to it in the same manner as extension and impenetrability. Just as the external mechanical properties of matter must be understood from the latter, so the internal psychological properties must be understood from sensation. This approach alleviated the difficulty posed by the theory of "ghosts." Nevertheless, in explaining spiritual life, this direction still relied on the external mechanical properties of matter: physical processes occurring in the brain were considered the causes of all connections between sensations and, hence, of all that constitutes the essence of spiritual processes. As a result, psychophysical materialism fully fell within the orbit of materialist views; this is clearly revealed in the tendency of the same writer to oscillate between the two forms of materialism or in the general characterization of spiritual processes as "reflections" of physical brain processes without a clear indication of how these reflections are conceived to arise. For instance, among the French philosophers of the 18th century, La Mettrie and Holbach generally aligned with mechanical materialism, while Diderot and Helvétius leaned toward psychophysical materialism. However, in Holbach's "System of Nature," there are passages that reflect the spirit of psychophysical materialism. In transitioning to the latter, it was natural to utilize Leibniz's concept of the monad, transforming it—an endeavor first undertaken by Maupertuis—into the "sensing atom," aiming to embrace the re-emerging atomistic ideas.

The primary tendency of later materialism, particularly the German variant, which closely aligns with Ludwig Feuerbach and contemporary physiology, distinctly embodies the characteristics of psychophysical materialism. The natural philosophers of this direction, such as Moleschott and Büchner, especially emphasize the subjectivity and relativity of sensations; the materialistic tendency in their work typically manifests in two respects: first, in the proclamation of the general dependence of psychological life on sensory and cerebral functions; and second, in the demand that due to this dependence, psychological processes should be derived from the functions of the brain. Like natural philosophical or physiological materialism, sociological materialism, which emerged around the mid-19th century and found its principal advocates in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, also reduces psychophysical materialism to an indefinite notion of the complete dependence of spiritual life on the corporeal. By considering every culture as a product of material conditions of existence, while regarding its spiritual aspect as a "superstructure" rising upon the "basis" of economic relations, sociological materialism, with its exclusive application to societal issues, effectively eliminates the metaphysical foundations of materialism. Its individual premises even stand in contradiction to the metaphysics of materialism; for example, the role attributed by social theories to technological discoveries in the transformation of economic forms. In this case, processes belonging to the spiritual side of culture are recognized as driving forces in the development of material culture, without making any effort to derive these spiritual forces directly from material conditions. This vagueness in the metaphysical foundations of sociological materialism stems from its primary focus on practical questions. As a result, it suffers from a lack of the necessary theoretical foundation, which it is evident was left to physiological materialism to establish.

This most recent development has emerged primarily under the influence of two factors: firstly, the anatomy and pathology of the brain, and secondly, the physiological orientation of psychology. The anatomy of the brain, in conjunction with the pathological localization of psychophysical disturbances related to various functions—such as language and the central senses—prompted ideas that were already utilized in the early 19th century by the phrenological system of Franz Gall. Subsequent researchers, while retaining the same foundational principles, sought to replace Gall's largely arbitrary assumptions with those more closely aligned with pathological facts and the anatomy of the nervous system. The essence of the assumptions underlying the phrenological system lay in correlating complex psychic processes with specific regions of the brain, characterizing them as "functions," yet failing to elucidate the nature of the connection between such functions and their physical components. These ideas later gained significance in two interrelated forms. In the first, an entire functional domain—such as language, visual memory, or even the so-called "intellect"—is associated with a more or less extensive brain area; in the second, individual phenomena of intellectual life, or "representations," are localized within specific elements of the cerebral cortex, in nerve cells, with the anatomical relationships of the nerves, as well as experimental and pathological evidence, serving as the basis for such localization. Although this hypothesis represents a further development of the original core idea of psychophysical materialism, it is scarcely an improvement upon it. The premise that sensation is a fundamental property of matter is a relatively straightforward assumption, yet understanding a complex psychological process—such as "representation," when considered psychologically—as a "function" of specific parts of the brain or even of brain cells is so vague that it offers no precise understanding, either physiologically or psychologically.

In contrast to this ambiguous notion put forth by phrenology, the new direction of contemporary psychology, which sees its task as providing a physiological explanation of mental processes, again attempts to return to the foundational ideas of psychophysical materialism as posited by John Toland, in search of a more reliable basis for its system. Consequently, each conscious process is understood as a "complex phenomenon," formed through the summation of a multitude of sensations. However, this premise does not provide a satisfactory explanation for psychological processes; attempts at explanation often resort to vague and undefined references to the dependence of mental facts on physical ones, or to empty analogies between them.

As the most ancient worldview, materialism, more than any other metaphysical orientation, is a fully articulated and realized doctrine. Sociological materialism, in its entirety, can be seen as a branch that, when definitively resolving the problem, leads to physiological materialism and that itself is pushed off the stage once materialism is rejected. Mechanical materialism has entirely vanished in modern times, as its assertion that mental processes are indistinctly perceived movements leads to an epistemological "asylum of ignorance." Of the two forms of new physiological materialism, phrenology, upon closer examination of its introduced concept of "brain functions," necessarily leads back to psychological materialism, which in turn is the original form of psychophysical materialism. This form considers sensation as a psychic elementary phenomenon, while each complex process of consciousness is viewed as a phenomenon derived from physiological conditions through the summation of elemental phenomena. The final judgment on materialism in this last form is necessarily dependent on the resolution of two questions: 1) Can complex spiritual processes truly be understood as simple sums of sensations? 2) Do the physiological processes of the brain provide sufficient means, either now or in the future, to explain the relationship between spiritual processes? The first of these questions is answered negatively by psychology, while the second is answered by physiology. Psychological analysis firmly establishes that mental processes—such as the formation of a representation, an affect, or a volitional process—are not merely simple sums of sensations, but processes resting upon unique combinations of elements that form according to specific psychological laws, represented by sensations or feelings. On the other hand, physiological analysis of nerve processes affirms the general scientific principle that only other physical processes can be derived from physical ones. Based on the principle of equivalence, mechanical processes can yield other mechanical processes, and specific physical energies can produce analogous energies. Thus, both in attempting to understand physiological processes as mechanical and in attempting to explain them according to the laws of energy, they will always remain within the realm of physical processes, which bear no direct causal relationship to spiritual phenomena. Therefore, psychophysical materialism loses support from both psychology and physics and physiology—disciplines that it, by its very name, sought to unite. Yet, it somehow continues to exist as long as psychological and physiological concepts remain sufficiently vague; thus, the mere notion of functional relationships continues to play a significant role, without any precise indication of their essence. However, this path ultimately leads psychophysical materialism to the same "asylum of ignorance" that mechanical materialism once encountered.