Apr 21, 2025 06:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 21, 2025 06:47 PM by C C.)
https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/after-...ialist-age
EXCERPTS: When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. [...] The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality...
[...] to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion. But do any of them really believe it?
Certainly, they don’t act as though they do... [...] If that sounds harsh, take it from Alexander Rosenberg, a materialist philosopher with a penchant for bad news.
[...] Now, most materialists would not, I assume, take quite this line. They would maintain, without having thought about it too much, that there is a weaker version of materialism on offer, one that eliminates frippery like spirits and souls but still allows us a bit of wiggle room for things such as meaning and morality, even if, in some sense, we have to create them for ourselves.
The great hope is that there exists, buried somewhere in the philosophical fine print, some technical loophole by which the nihilistic implications of materialism can be avoided. Rosenberg argues—and I agree—that this is wishful thinking. As we both see it, all weaker forms of materialism, if they were really followed through consistently, ought to end up more or less where his does.
And yet even Rosenberg cannot go all the way. He (by his own terms, a nonexistent nonperson) still evidently feels (whatever that means) that convincing us (nonexistent nonpeople) of what he (un-freely) considers to be the truth matters. He might be the most honest reductionist on Earth, but even he cannot quite take his own claims literally.
This is why the oft-repeated claim that we’re living in a materialist age strikes me as suspect. If we were to study some historic civilization that considered itself good, yet which delighted in torture, rape, and murder, we would hardly conclude that they were good just because they thought they were.
They will not see ours as a materialist culture. What they will see is something much messier: a culture torn in two directions at once, roughly between what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image.” These are undeniably ugly terms, but they are crucial for what comes later.... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. [...] The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality...
[...] to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion. But do any of them really believe it?
Certainly, they don’t act as though they do... [...] If that sounds harsh, take it from Alexander Rosenberg, a materialist philosopher with a penchant for bad news.
[...] Now, most materialists would not, I assume, take quite this line. They would maintain, without having thought about it too much, that there is a weaker version of materialism on offer, one that eliminates frippery like spirits and souls but still allows us a bit of wiggle room for things such as meaning and morality, even if, in some sense, we have to create them for ourselves.
The great hope is that there exists, buried somewhere in the philosophical fine print, some technical loophole by which the nihilistic implications of materialism can be avoided. Rosenberg argues—and I agree—that this is wishful thinking. As we both see it, all weaker forms of materialism, if they were really followed through consistently, ought to end up more or less where his does.
And yet even Rosenberg cannot go all the way. He (by his own terms, a nonexistent nonperson) still evidently feels (whatever that means) that convincing us (nonexistent nonpeople) of what he (un-freely) considers to be the truth matters. He might be the most honest reductionist on Earth, but even he cannot quite take his own claims literally.
This is why the oft-repeated claim that we’re living in a materialist age strikes me as suspect. If we were to study some historic civilization that considered itself good, yet which delighted in torture, rape, and murder, we would hardly conclude that they were good just because they thought they were.
They will not see ours as a materialist culture. What they will see is something much messier: a culture torn in two directions at once, roughly between what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image.” These are undeniably ugly terms, but they are crucial for what comes later.... (MORE - details)
