by Daniel Troit

Created on: February 10, 2009

When many people hear the word, "Materialism", they envision a desire for the finite, a preference for touchable things such as money and property over emotions and events. A materialist is viewed as shortsighted, and greedy. Having no understanding that true value resides in experience over mater, those who subscribe to Materialism, as a philosophy must be at best misguided about the nature of the world. Far from eschewing the essence of living, the materialist in fact seeks it out in its truest form. Materialism does not believe that the material and spiritual world are separate in any degree.

In fact, all that is claimed by Materialism is that mater is the only thing in existence. As such, all emotions, events and energies are merely processes and interactions of material bodies. This is not to say that intangible experiences are of any less worth than the physical world, only less reality. Even a materialist may argue that the whole of the physical universe and its interactions serves only to create personality and its experience. By stating that thoughts and emotions are not real, all that the materialist means to explain is that some components of reality are processes rather than objects; verbs rather than nouns. The assertions maintained by Materialism address only the presence of certain nouns in the universe, not their significance.

The main contrast between Materialism and other beliefs such as Dualism, Spiritualism and Idealism is the belief in a monist ontology. This is the assertion that being, existence and reality are of a singular nature. Materialism rejects the notion that there are other realms of existence in which the immaterial forms reality. In such a belief, the materialist finds the universe to be a self-contained field, upon which material objects interact according to their inherent laws and abilities. In seeing the intangible experiences of life as physical processes, Materialism has no need to appeal to immaterial forces from immaterial domains for intervention in their matters. All that they know and experience are a part of the same domain.

An understanding of Materialism as an interpretation of the universe as a physical phenomenon enables one to see its contributions to philosophy without confounding it with avarice. Even a brief overview of materialist thoughts can help to shape a worldview based more upon whole systems and less upon "other world-ness". This may free the individual to approach their environment in a more solid,

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