Much of modern philosophy is a deterministic fantasy world.The doctrine that most fundamentally characterizes modernity’s spiritual revolt is materialism. The fateful rediscovery of the ancient philosophers Democritus and Lucretius by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, and others in the seventeenth century led ultimately to a revolution in the way many people (especially intellectuals) conceive the nature of reality. Hobbes taught that everything is made of matter, and that even human thoughts are a result of the motion of material particles in the brain. It goes without saying that the implications of this teaching are vast, for if materialism is true, then much else will follow in its trail.
Materialism holds that all is matter. If this is true, then psychologism—the doctrine that human behavior is motivated entirely by underlying forces in the human psyche that are essentially and ultimately beyond our control—must also be true. This is the case for two reasons. First, if all is matter, the mind is matter and the laws that govern mind are the laws that govern matter. Hence mind is reducible to brain—atoms, molecules, electrical impulses and the laws that govern such things. Second, since the part of the human psyche that governs our relation to physical things is the appetite (desire and aversion), and since the part of the psyche that governs our responses to the satisfaction (or non-satisfaction) of appetite is emotion, it follows that, under materialism, human beings are necessarily governed by appetites and emotions. Since appetites and emotions are either unconscious or semi-conscious forces, the idea that a purely rational faculty exists that is capable of governing our appetites and emotions (what we want or how we feel) must be regarded as an illusion.
If materialism and psychologism are true, it follows in turn that determinism—the doctrine that all events, including human choices, are strictly determined by previous events or situations—is also necessarily true. This must be so because all matter—including the atoms, molecules, and electrical impulses that constitute the brain under materialism—is extended in space. That is, all material objects (however small) “take up” or “occupy” space. At the same time, all appetites take time (again, however small the interval) to fulfill or satisfy. So we might say that appetite is likewise extended, not only in space, but also in time. This means that human choices, which are fully motivated and constituted by desire for material objects and the emotions consequent upon satisfaction (or non-satisfaction) of such desire, are strictly determined by the character and intensity of the desires. In other words, the desires are always antecedent to their satisfaction or non-satisfaction, and the emotions are always consequent to the same. Thus Hobbesian atomism inexorably generates psychological determinism.
Epistemology
Scientific naturalism, or what I prefer to call “scientism,” is the chief epistemological complement of materialism. It is the doctrine that holds that the only route to knowledge is through the physical sciences, that we can only know what these sciences discover. Full-blown scientism involves a number of doctrinal corollaries, and all of these are rooted in materialism in one way or another. If materialism and its metaphysical complements are true, then all is matter, and it stands to reason that, since matter is all there is, then matter is all there is to know, is all that can be known, and the ways of knowing matter are the only ways of knowing anything at all.
Going hand-in-hand with the idea that the ways of knowing matter are the only ways of knowing anything, is the doctrine of empiricism, which in its general form holds that we can know things only through sense experience. This stands to reason because the five physical senses provide our only direct access to the material world. If matter is all there is, and all that can be known, then our knowing anything whatever must be wholly dependent on that part of the psyche that provides direct access to what may be known. When combined with materialism and scientism, empiricism takes a radical form that denies the existence of any knowledge not directly traceable either to sense impressions or to quantitative reasoning based on those impressions. As David Hume famously said, any other knowledge claims should be committed to the flames, for they “contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
Morals and Politics
Materialism and its epistemological complements have catastrophic implications for moral and political science. Perhaps the most obvious of these is hedonism: the doctrine that reduces human happiness to pleasure. Since human beings seek happiness, it is understandable that, if we think that all is matter, we will seek our happiness in the satisfaction of physical desire. Likewise, if we build our social science on this premise, we will seek to find a way to measure such satisfaction so that it can be made the basis for social policy. This leads straightforwardly to utilitarianism—the doctrine that happiness equals satisfaction maximized, measurable in “utiles,” and aggregable as a basis for policy decisions.
In the end, the metaphysics, epistemology, and morality of materialism generate an almost irresistible urge in some thinkers to attempt the construction of secular utopias via the employment of political power. The reason for this is clear: human beings cannot really live with the full implications of materialism and its complements, because the ultimate implication of all these doctrines is death. All such attempts are rooted in the illusion—the quintessential second reality—that Man can replace God as ruler of the world.
The insight that Rationalism is another form of faith saved us from the error of these ways, which afflicted the Continent.
