Materialism

What do you think of when you hear that someone is “materialistic”? Perhaps you visualize them spending all their time in a busy mall, swiping multiple credit cards and carrying bags of clothes and accessories. Maybe that vision is all set to the soundtrack of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” Today, when we call someone ‘materialistic,’ we’re usually referring to their love of possessions or status symbols. But the original meaning of materialism is something quite different—it began as a bold philosophical claim about the nature of reality itself.

While extreme consumption may be what we associate with materialism today, the idea of materialism has a long and dynamic philosophical history, which began over 2000 years ago in the first millennium BCE. Materialism, as a philosophical theory, can be defined by two claims:

1. Material matter is the only thing in our reality that truly exists;
2. Nothing else exists apart from material matter.¹

In other words, materialism assumes that anything that actually exists can only be made up of matter or otherwise arises from material interactions. As you might expect, this stance is heavily debated. Materialism faces many criticisms from proponents of other philosophical theories, including dualism, which argues that the mind and body are separate, distinct entities. Materialism, it is said, fails to fully explain the complexities of the subjective experience. Regardless of where you stand on the “matter,” materialism remains a foundational philosophical perspective that continues to influence various fields of modern science and social discourse to this day.