materialism Like other schools of thought, materialism has occupied a wide range of forms, common to which is the central assertion of the primacy of matter over mind or spirit in any explanation of the world. Strong materialism holds that reality consists exclusively of material things and their varying combinations. Weaker forms of materialism acknowledge the importance, albeit secondary to matter, of mental operations, viewing reality as an interaction between matter and mind. Given this insistence on a materially based interpretation of reality, the history of materialism from earliest times until the present day has exhibited a persistent antagonism towards religion and explanation of events in terms of spiritual or supernatural agency. In recent times, this orientation towards explanation by physical causes has both inspired, and drawn confirmation from, the development of the natural sciences.
 

Though it has roots stretching back through the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. to Thales and Parmenides, materialism proper begins with the fifth century thinker Democritus (on whom Marx was to write his doctoral dissertation) and his teacher Leucippus. They viewed the world as consisting exclusively of an infinite number of material atoms whose interaction unceasingly yielded new combinations. King Lear's warning to Cordelia that "Nothing will come out of nothing" derives from this materialist philosophy which holds equally that nothing can be destroyed. Hence the notions of a created world and supernatural agency are precluded. In the same century Empedocles attempted a materialistic explanation of organic life, constructing for the first time the influential theory of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Empedocles believed that through the cyclical interaction of two forces, harmony and discord, the universe evolves from an initial separation of atoms (discord) through an increasing harmonisation which eventually gives way to discord once again.
 

The anti-religious motivation of materialism resurged strongly in the philosophy of Epicurus (342-270 B.C.) who, notwithstanding his vulgarised reputation, preached an ethics based on material reality and free from superstition. The Roman poet Lucretius (c.100-c.55 B.C.) in fact saw Epicurus as the precursory champion of his own cause in De Rerum Natura which began from the tenet: "Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing" (Lucretius, 1951, 31). Lucretius thus attempted a "scientific" materialistic explanation of sensation, mental life, society and cosmology, denying both human immortality and the existence of the soul.
 

Apart from its sporadic and partial emergence in figures such as the scholastic Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308), materialism was largely held in abeyance from Classical times through the Middle Ages, by the Church-sanctioned domination of the theology of Augustine and the Aristotelian-Christian synthesis of Aquinas. While the French materialist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) sought to displace Aristotle by Epicurus in this synthesis, he was still working within a Christian providential framework. It was in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) that materialism found a genuine rebirth. Hobbes applied the assumptions of seventeenth century science -- in particular those of Galileo and Newton -- to all areas of inquiry. His view of

the universe as corporeal and in motion extended also to man, who was effectively a machine in movement. Elevated to paramount importance in Hobbes' materialism was the operation of causality; while he accepted the Final Causality of the "Supreme Being", his conception of God as corporeal was a far cry from the God of Christianity. It was on a materialist, as opposed to the prevailing theological, basis that Hobbes constructed his political theory. Hobbes' "pure" materialism was motivated in part by his rejection of Descartes' dualism between mind and body. The contemporaneous emergence of two such polarised contextualisations of materialism, one in which it reigned supreme and the other opposing it to consciousness, opened up avenues of ideological significance which would be explored later by Marx and Engels.
 

French materialism appeared on the world-historical stage during the epoch of Enlightenment, articulated by such figures as Denis Diderot, Julien de La Mettrie and Paul Heinrich Dietrich d'Holbach whose prototypical work Systeme de la nature appeared in 1770. While Diderot's eventual materialistic and atheistic outlook was the result of his intellectual journey through Deism and immanent pantheism, La Mettrie and d'Holbach were less equivocal in grounding explanations of nature, including human behaviour, in physical causes and undermining the theological paraphernalia of the immortal soul and spiritual agency. The increasing definition of Physics, Chemistry and Biology as empirical sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as as the historical success of Darwinism gave materialistic explanations of the world an increasingly authoritative basis to which their claims could be referred. Even thinkers who were not strictly classifiable as materialist, such as Voltaire, Locke and Hume, owed the possibility of their respective emphases on reason, sensation, impressions and ideas to the same emerging intellectual hegemony of science which had stood in dialectical relationship with the rise into prominence of the materialistic tendencies it had sanctioned. Even Kant's idealism, premised on his distinction between phenomena (things as conditioned by a universal human sensibility and understanding) and noumena (things as they might be apart from such collective subjective conditioning) was informed by an historically unavoidable respect for science. In Kant's phenomenal world, causality is as universally operative as in the world of the materialist.
 

Ironically, materialism found its most sophisticated treatment in Hegel, the father of modern Absolute Idealism, as well as in Marx and Engels whose title to materialism in its traditional philosophical sense is fraught with considerable qualification. Hegel did not reject materialism outright; he saw it, rather, as one-sided, and as merely a stage in the dialectical apprehension of reality. Like empiricism, of which it is the systematic expression, it divides the world by analysis into discrete material entities but fails to see the unity underlying these, a unity which does not inhere in the entities themselves. This philosophical attitude, Hegel says in his Logic, remains in bondage to the world as immediately given; whereas reality is not a random collection of entities but a rational, historically interrelated, system. Moreover, "matter" is an abstraction, which is never itself perceived or given. What is perceived are its particular manifestations (Hegel, 1873, 62-4). Hegel also historically situates materialism, along with empiricism, rationalism and utilitarianism, as one of the shapes of bourgeois thought.
 

These insights crucially moulded the materialism of both Marx and Engels. It was Engels who coined the phrase "historical materialism" and the Russian Marxist Plekhanov who termed the Marxist philosophy "dialectical materialism". Both terms cover the same materialist disposition peculiar to Marxism though the former stresses materialism both an historical phenomenon and as the primary basis of historical development while the latter indicates a methodological emphasis in the apprehension of reality. The dialectical method views reality not as a conglomerate of fixed entities but as a changing totality of related parts at whose core is a dynamic interaction between human labour and the natural world. Marx's own reflections on materialism, both traditional and dialectical, are focused primarily in his writings of 1844-46. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx views Feuerbach as the "true conqueror" of the Hegelian idealist philosophy and praises his achievement in establsihing "true materialism" and "real science" by making the social relation of "man to man" the principle of his theory. Marx stresses that his own analysis of political economy is "wholly empirical". While Marx views Hegel's dialectic as abstract insofar as it reinstates religion in philosophical form as the Absolute Idea, he commends his recognition that the objective world is the product of man's own labour. Viewing the entire discipline of "pure" philosophy as the latest expression of an alienated religious consciousness which ultimately justifies social injustice, Marx offers a parallel: atheism, being the supersession of God, marks the advent of theoretical humanism while communism, as the supersession of private property, signals the advent of practical humanism. According to Marx, his own doctrine of naturalism or humanism, which combines theory and practice, is the "unifying truth" of both idealism and materialism (Marx, 1959, 14, 127-136, 142). What is encapsulated in these statements is Marx's two-sided polemic against both idealism and previous forms of materialism, a polemic which works towards the dialectical harmony of their one-sided truths. This procedure receives further clarification in The Holy Family (1844) where Marx deals in some detail with previous traditions of materialism. He sees eighteenth century French materialism as engaged in a two-pronged onslaught: against contemporary religion and theology and against the seventeenth century metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza and Liebniz. Marx thus identifies two broad strands of French materialism. The first is "mechanical" materialism which, developed through Le Roy, Cabanis, La Mettrie and d'Holbach, has its roots in Descartes physics (while rejecting his metaphysics) and leads to natural sciences as autonomous disciplines. The second line of development is what interests Marx more as that which leads to socialism and communism: with its roots ultimately in Democritus and Epicurus, its modern development is heralded by Gassendi and Bayle. But it owes its contemporary effectiveness to English materialism of which Marx sees Bacon as the seminal figure. Bacon's empirical methodology and his insistence on the infallibility of the senses was systematised by Hobbes and furnished with a more cogent sanction by Locke whose immediate influence on the French materialists was profound. Condillac (Locke's translator) argued, as against metaphysical explanations, that man's development depended on external circumstances. Helevetius, also developing Locke's views, stressed the significance of sensory qualities and correctly understood personal interest in the constuction of morality and argued for the essential goodness of man, the importance of education and the need to transform consciousness before the accomplishment of social change. This line of thought leads to Bentham's moral and political formulations as well to those of Robert Owen, the founder of English communism and the French communists Dezamy and Gay. The essential point linking this second line of materialism with Marx's own thought is the recognition that, if knowledge is indeed derived from sensation and experience, the empirical world must be re-arranged so that man experiences what is truly human in it. Moreover, as stressed by some of these thinkers, man's nature is not to be found in individuals but in its social relations (Marx, Engels, 1956, 154-166). This account is an index of Marx's dialectical impulse to situate his own thought historically, to see it as a product, as well as a supersession, of bourgeois thought. This dialectical development at the level of thought, as yet incomplete, will express a similar process at the economic level: socialism will arise out of bourgeois society, maintaining some of its features while transcending its general economic basis.
 

In The German Ideology (1845) and particularly in the concentrated "Theses on Feuerbach" Marx identifies the distinctive features of his materialism. The premise of the materialistic conception of history, says Marx, is the empirically verifiable set of conditions determining man's production of his material life. It is this material economic activity, as embodied in productive forces and social relations, which determines the nature of individuals, society and historical development. Hence consciousness, ideas, morality and religion have no independent existence or history but are dialectically (as opposed to one-sidedly) dependent upon the economic substructure. This means that consciousness itself is a social product and that the "individual" of bourgeois society is a result, not the starting point, of history. Hence Marx decries (a) the materialism of Feuerbach who fails to see the sensuous world as an historical product; (b) traditional empiricism which views history as a collection of dead facts, and (c) idealism which reduces history to an "imagined activity". The historical materialist conception of history means that human emancipation must be an historical and practical, not a mental act (Marx, Engels, 1970, 25, 42-47, 58-61).
 

Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845) offer a focused expression of his materialism: the highest point reached by previous materialism, says Marx, is "the contemplation of single individuals in `civil society'". But for Marx, reality is not an inert collection of material entities to be grasped by detached contemplation, but an interaction between a collective historical human subjectivity and the material world it generates through its material activity or labour. Truth is hence not a theoretical but a practical question and human nature is never fixed but "the ensemble of social relations". Finally, historical materialism represents the point at which philosophy re-establishes its connections with practice: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" (Marx, Engels, 1973, 92-95).
 

Engels perpetuated Marx's insistence that materialism must be dialectical, particularly in his Anti-Duhring (1878) where he defended the Hegelian aspects of Marxism against attacks from Eugen Duhring. In this work he formulated, drawing upon Hegel's Philosophy of Nature certain dialectical laws of nature: the law that quantitative changes abruptly become qualitative (which Engels also saw happening in terms of economic and political history); the law of interpenetration of opposites, whose tension generates change; and the law of the negation of the negation, which Engels held to apply not only through the nature but also in history and philosophy. Marx had already viewed socialism as the negation of capitalist society which itself had negated feudalism. But, even more than Marx himself, Engels stressed the importance of an organic connection between the natural sciences and philosophy. Hence in his manuscripts posthumously published as Dialectics of Nature (1925) he saw Hegel as anticipating the development of the nineteenth century sciences which viewed things as part of a larger process of change and evolution rather than as static and isolated atoms. In "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" (1886) Engels criticised the vulgar, "metaphysical" and ahistorical materialism of Buchner, Vogt and Moleschott who based their thought upon eighteenth century mechanistic models of natural science which investigated both dead and living things as finished objects. Engels saw the nineteenth century dvelopment of the natural sciences as increasingly confirming the dialectical method as well as expressing the dialectical operation of nature. He drew particular attention to "three great discoveries": the cell as the basic unit of development, the transformation of energy which showed that the forces in nature were mutually transforming manifestations of universal motion and the Darwinian view of man as the result of a long process of evolution. All of these pointed to the dialectical character of the interconnections of nature, which was also true, on a conscious level, of the history of human society (Marx, Engels, 1968, 597-99, 610-612). Engels' aspiration to a "scientific" view of the world has led to many commentators, notably LUKACS, identifying this strand of his thought as positivistic. But while Engels accepted that mind's ultimate origin was matter, he was far from holding that it is reducible to matter. And while he states that the influences of the external world are reflected in the human brain as feelings, thoughts and volitions, he refers to these as "ideal tendencies" (600) and his writings generally suggest a mutual interaction between mind and the world. His ambivalent treatment of Hegel's dialectic is of the utmost importance here: he views Hegel's system as "a materialism idealistically turned upside down", one which regards nature as expressing merely the alienation of the Absolute Idea and one which advances beyond crude materialism in seeing causes wider than individual motives as the driving forces of history but seeking these causes in philosophy rather than in history itself (596, 613). Historical materialism identifies the actual historical motives of entire people's and classes. But Engels vehemently denies that Hegel can be discarded; rather, his dialectic must be transformed into a materially based science of "the general laws of motion", both of the external world and of human thought (593, 609). Engels does indeed view the materialistic conception of history as scientific; but it should be recalled that he is implying a conception of science itself as flexible and dialectical.
 

In the twentieth century LENIN further developed dialectical materialism to include the notion of partinost or partisanship. Developing Marx's and Engel's view that "detached" philosophical speculation was an illusion, Lenin affirmed that socialist commitment was part of the definition of genuine materialism which was essentially a philosophy of action. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), designed to counter the spread of dangerous idealistic views, Lenin adopted Engels' "theory" of reflection and attacked phenomenalism, which reduced physical entities to complexes of sensation, insisting that science revealed matter as ontologically prior to mind. But Lenin drew a distinction between his own "philosophical" materialism which held matter to be independent and "scientific materialism" whose definition varied according to scientific development. Despite his earlier onslaught against idealism, in his Philosophical Notebooks (1933) Lenin's rereading of Hegel led to some revaluations of his idealism which perhaps come nearer to the heart of the German thinker than the analyses of Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin saw, for example, that idealism itself was a reductive category as applied to Hegel. Marxist thinkers have continued to expound and extend Marx's materialism, some in the tradition of Lukacs emphasising its dialectical nature while others such as Althusser have stressed its scientific claims.
 

The continued success and prestige of the natural sciences in the twnetieth century has led also to a proliferation and arguable predominance of Non-Marxist forms of materialism. The attack on theology and metaphysics was continued by logical positivism, initially centred around the "Vienna Circle" including Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. Also numbered among its adherents are the early Russell and early Wittgenstein. Working in the tradition of Hume and Comte, these new positivists sought to reshape empiricism in the light of modern logic and mathematics, adopting a criterion of empirical verifiability and thereby dismissing "metaphysical" claims as meaningless. The philosopher's prime concern was to clarify meanings of statements.
 

This concern for linguistic clarity centrally motivated Wittgenstein's friend Gilbert Ryle who explored analytical behaviourism which was materialistic inasmuch as it displaced analysis from psychology itself to the behaviour expressing it. Some commentators have viewed Wittgenstein also as a behaviourist. But perhaps what lies at the core of his "materialism", if indeed the term is applicable, is the idea that language itself is social and material, and while its relation with the world is determined by convention rather than any absolute correspondence, scepticism as to the reality of the external world is pre-empted by the unavoidably social character of the language which must articulate it.
 

Even Freud's work might be placed in a materialist tradition insofar as it excludes metaphysical explanations of the mind and world, seeking instead to account for psychological traits by tracing their causes in material conditions. The materialism of uch modern literary and cultural theory has in fact initiated from Freudian and Marxist insights: a unifying characteristic of the varieties of Feminism is their insistence on the material conditions of gender relations, including the treatment of the female body itself, as explanatory vehicles. Jacques Derrida, the father of "deconstruction", has centralised the Hegelian notion of difference in viewing the entire Western philosophical tradition as a disguised expression of material interests and insitutionally grounded imperatives. In this respect, and to the extent that he attempts to expose and articulate various forms of transcendentalism, Derrida might be viewed as a materialist. The so-called "New Historicism", stemming partly from Foucault, also attempts to view given texts as ensigns of a broader cultural history. Materialism in general might be viewed as a series of historical attempts to harmonise with the findings of contemporary science, to reject transcendent explanations of man and the world, and to paint a moral, political and cosmological picture which contains humanity at its centre.