Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

that says there is only matter, and another that holds that there is nothing but mind. And you’re quite right. The first is called materialism, the second idealism (not mentalism), and both have plenty of history.
The earliest materialism of which we have clear record is that of the Indian Lokāyatas, often known as Cārvākas after one of their most eminent thinkers (incidentally, pronounce ‘c’ in these Sanskrit words as ‘ch’). Remember them if you find yourself slipping into the common error of imagining that all Indian philosophy is mystical, religious, and ascetic. Only perception confers knowledge, and what you can’t perceive doesn’t exist, they reckoned. The eternal soul that, as the Brahmins suppose, passes on from life to life, is a fiction. You have one life and one only—try to enjoy it. The movement appears to have survived for over a thousand years; unfortunately, just about all we now know of it comes from reports written by its opponents.
In Greece Democritus—a fairly close contemporary of Socrates—propounded a theory which, until twentieth-century physics changed the picture, sounded very modern: the universe consists of myriads of very small material particles moving in a vacuum or void. These little things are called ‘atoms’ (from the Greek for uncuttable or indivisible); they and the void they move through are literally everything there is. This rather good guess was taken over by Epicurus (we’ve seen him already) and his school, but the easiest place to read about it is in a famous work by Lucretius, a Roman admirer of Epicurus, called ‘Of the Nature of Things’ (or ‘Of the Nature of the Universe’—depending on which translation you have got hold of).
You might expect materialism to be completely incompatible with any sort of religious belief—as the case of the Lokāyatas appears to confirm. But watch out for surprises! The Epicureans believed in gods, but then held (as consistency demanded) that they had bodies made of a very refined type of matter. (They live somewhere a very long way from here in a state of divine bliss and untroubled happiness—paying not a wink of attention to human life. Opponents said this was just a way of being atheists without admitting it.)
The word ‘materialism’ as it occurs in everyday usage is rather different. A ‘material girl’ isn’t a girl who consists of matter only—though if philosophical materialists are right that is all she consists of, and so does the material world she lives in. But the everyday ‘materialism’ which some bemoan and others just enjoy isn’t wholly unrelated to the philosophers’ sort. Madonna’s material girl derives her pleasures mostly from material objects—their ownership and consumption—in preference to the pleasures of the mind. Everyday materialism is the attachment to what is—now in the philosophers’ sense—material, as opposed to what is spiritual or intellectual. The philosophy of Marx came to be called dialectical materialism, not so much because he held that there is literally nothing but matter as because he held that the most important underlying causes in human life are material: economic facts about the way in which a society produces its material goods. (What ‘dialectical’ meant we shall see in Chapter 7 when we encounter Hegel, below, pp. 82ff.)
Idealism is also a word with an everyday as well as a technical meaning. At the technical end it is applied to views that deny the existence of matter and hold that everything there is is mental or spiritual, like that of the Irish bishop George Berkeley, whom we mentioned earlier. Someone who tells us that had better explain, in the next breath, what then are these things like chairs and mountains that we keep bumping into and falling off. When he heard it said that Berkeley could not be refuted, the celebrated man of letters Dr Johnson is reputed to have answered: ‘I refute him thus’, and kicked a stone. But refuting Berkeley isn’t that easy. (I use the word ‘refute’ to mean showing that something is wrong, not just saying that it is wrong—which of course is very easy indeed and can be done by anyone, especially someone like Dr Johnson, who was rarely short either of an opinion or of a memorable way of expressing it.)
Perhaps Berkeley can be refuted, but only if we can somehow overcome the following well-worn line of thought. What I am really aware of when I look at a table is not the table itself but how the table looks to me. ‘How it looks to me’ describes not the table, but my mind—it is the state of consciousness which the object, whatever it is, produces in me when I look at it. And this goes on being true however closely, or from however many angles, I look at the table; and it goes on being true if I touch the table—except that then the object (whatever it is) produces a different kind of state of consciousness in me, tactual sensations as opposed to visual. If I kick the table (or Dr Johnson’s stone) and it hurts, that is yet another state of my consciousness. Admittedly, these states of consciousness fit together very nicely; we quickly learn from a very few of them to predict quite accurately what the rest are going to be like—one glance, and we know pretty much what to expect. But the table itself, the physical table, isn’t so much an established fact as a hypothesis that explains all these states of perceptual consciousness. So it might be wrong—some other hypothesis might be the truth. Berkeley himself thought precisely that, though partly because he believed he had proved that the very idea of a non-mental existent was incoherent. (I’m not going to trouble you with his supposed proof here.) Believing as he did in a benevolent and all-powerful god, he made His will the direct cause of our states of consciousness and declared matter redundant—as well as incoherent.
Hume—again—made a nice comment. Berkeley’s arguments, he said, ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’. However impossible we may find