The place of spirit in materialist philosophy
Posted by diogenes on 2025-July-3 06:20:44, ThursdayIn reply to No. posted by Sick Rose on 2025-July-3 00:31:10, Thursday
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The materialist does not deny the existence of human emotions, such as joy, love and aesthetic response. Whether he believes they can be "reduced" to material explanations depends on what you mean by "reduced". The materialist thesis is not that statements about human emotions can be rephrased without loss of semantic content as statements about neurons or physical particles. Rather, it is that human emotions have their complete causal basis in material structures that obey physical laws unvaryingly. If our mental capacities did not have their basis in the human brain then it is hard to see how brain damage could affect those capacities, or how Alzheimer's could lead to the disintegration of the human personality, which it undoubtedly does. What this thesis denies is that there could be two subjects whose brains were in exactly the same physical state (down to the minutest microphysical level) but whose mental states differed. Incidentally, materialism is not necessarily inconsistent with theism. Epicurus held that the gods resided in the interstices between the cosmic systems. Hobbes, suspected of atheism because of his materialism, held that God was corporeal and was “in” the universe. (Perhaps omnipresent, like water through moist sand – he does not say.) Guy Davenport seems to adopt a similar view: If matter was not stuff before creation, then God can be a pattern of energy rather than an oxygen breather and processor of carbohydrates. That we are in His image then means that He is and we are animations of the same energy system. Except, perhaps, His anima occupies the whole sea of neutrinos that is boundless but limited, and we each occupy bodies only, energy systems that are bounded but limitless, exchanging love and conversation, procreating both bodies and minds. …I can't help pointing out that these (and other examples I could mention) rather falsifies Laudate Agno's breezy assertion that “no theist worth his salt in the last few millennia has ever thought there was a God anywhere in the universe.” (I confess that I was also surprised by LA's claim that no theologian has ever invoked God as an explanation for the universe. What about Thomas Aquinas - see his Quinque viæ - or, to take a modern example, William Lane Craig? Perhaps he doesn't regard the latter as a serious theologian, but surely it's a bit of a stretch to deny that title to Aquinas!)  |
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