Relation to the world· Mind and consciousness
Materialism
Axis: Nature of reality — What is reality made of: matter, mind, or both?
Everything that exists is material, including thought, which is merely a product of how matter is organized. Mind is not a separate substance: it can be fully explained by the body and the brain.
Movements 4
Epicureanismexplicit
Two sure principles govern the whole physics: nothing comes from nothing and nothing returns to nothing, and the very motion of bodies proves there is void in which they move. From this it follows that there exist only atoms, full and indivisible particles, and the void that separates them: everything else, qualities, souls, gods, is but a transient arrangement of these grains. The stake is not speculative but liberating: if the soul itself is an aggregate of atoms that dissolves at death, then the afterlife, judgment and providence collapse at a stroke, and with them the two great fears. This materialism, taken from Democritus but redirected toward happiness, stands squarely against the Stoics' cosmos animated by a and against 's world of Forms.
Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 38-44 · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book I
Marxismexplicit
The starting point is not an idea but a fact: humans must first produce their means of subsistence before they can think, pray, or legislate. From this Marx "inverts" 's dialectic, in which Spirit unfolded itself in the world: it is not the idea that begets the real, but material activity that begets ideas. Law, religion, and philosophy become superstructures, reflections of the economic base and not first causes. The target is not only but every idealism that believes it can change the world by changing ideas: for Marx, that is to mistake the reflection for the source.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846) · Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1888)
Stoicismexplicit
Stoic physics is corporealist: only what acts or is acted upon exists, and only bodies can do so. Even the soul and the divine are corporeal, made of a subtle breath, the pneuma. This is a materialism, though one infused with internal reason, which sets Stoicism apart from Platonic idealism.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VII, 134-135 · Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 65
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Taoisminferable
Taoist cosmology resists reduction to Western categories: reality is a continuous flux of qi 氣 (the breath, the energy animating all things), with no sharp break between matter and mind, which places Taoism closer to a monism of materialist coloring than to idealism or dualism. The , the undifferentiated source from which the One, then the Two, then the ten thousand things arise, is neither pure spirit set apart from matter nor an individual mind: everything proceeds from a single energetic ground.
Laozi, Dao De Jing, ch. 42 · Zhuangzi, ch. 22 (Knowledge Wandered North)
Philosophers 5
Epicurusexplicit
All that exists reduces to atoms and void: nothing comes from non-being, nothing dissolves into it, the whole is body and space. The soul itself is made of very fine atoms and dissolves at death. This is a thoroughgoing materialism, inherited from and developed by , with no room for any immaterial reality.
Letter to Herodotus, 39-44 (atoms and void, nothing comes from nothing) · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, I-II
Lucretiusexplicit
Everything begins from two principles that establishes before all else: nothing comes from nothing, nothing returns to nothing. Were it otherwise, anything could spring from anything, with no seed and no season; yet experience shows fixed natures and ordered cycles, so the real reduces to first bodies, the atoms, and the void that lets them move. Outside this pair nothing exists in itself: soul and mind themselves are aggregates of very fine atoms, and there is no room for any immaterial substance. This thoroughgoing materialism, inherited from and , Lucretius unfolds into a complete system and makes visible, from the speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam to the infinity of worlds.
On the Nature of Things, I, 146-264 (nothing from nothing, nothing to nothing) · On the Nature of Things, I, 418-448 (the all is body and void)
Marxexplicit
To explain an age, one must start not from what it says of itself but from how men produce their material life: it is this reversal of the order of explanation that governs everything. Where made the real subject of history and concrete conditions its mere manifestations, Marx claims to turn the dialectic, standing on its head, the right way up, on its feet: social being, the totality of the relations of production, is the real base of which ideas, law and religion are the superstructure. Yet this materialism is not the contemplative mechanism of earlier materialists, whom he faults precisely for ignoring human activity, hence an overwhelming weight to materialism with a residual share.
Capital, vol. I, afterword to the 2nd edition (the dialectic set on its feet) · The German Ideology, I (the materialist conception of history)
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Nietzscheinferable
The critique of "hinterworlds" and the call to remain faithful to the earth bring everything back to sensuous : the body, forces, this world. Without subscribing to a mechanistic materialism he also mocks, Nietzsche refuses any true world behind the phenomenon, which places him on the side of a this-worldly ontology rather than idealism.
Twilight of the Idols, "How the True World Finally Became a Fable" · Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §3
Senecainferable
The Stoic physics Seneca expounds in the Natural Questions is corporealist: only what acts or is acted upon exists, hence only bodies. The active principle itself, the divine reason (), is a material breath (pneuma) diffused through the world, placing his metaphysics on the materialist side, with only a slight surface soul-body dualism.
Natural Questions, II (the corporeal nature of the active principle) · Letters to Lucilius, CVI and CXVII (only bodies exist)