Now we agree
That those trees outside the window,
which probably exist,
Only pretend to greenness and treeness
And that the language loses
when it tries to cope
With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here:
A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,
Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last—and so strongly
It is hard not to believe in their lastingness.—Czesław Miłosz
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”11xFrancis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1994), 3.
The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality. The problem with this argument—that it means eliminating not just angels and ghosts but also the very things on which scientific knowledge itself depends, such as reason, free will, and abstract thought—appears not to have occurred to the reductive materialists until too late.
For this reason, to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion.22xRichard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, England: Penguin, 2006); Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (London, England: Penguin, 2024); Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012). But do any of them really believe it?
Certainly, they don’t act as though they do. Dawkins, for instance, claims that “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” in the universe, and then complains, in the next breath, that “faith is one of the world’s great evils” (although he has, admittedly, in recent years backed away from such hysterical rhetoric). Sapolsky tells us that we have no free will, but then implores us still to act morally. Crick seems unusually passionate about explaining a form of reductionism that views nerve cells as the fundamental origin of human experience and behavior.
There’s something of the high-school bully in the way they swagger around, seemingly getting away with whatever they like. So frequent and egregious are the contradictions they spout that the rest of us assume we must have just missed something. But we shouldn’t be cowed. The only way to reconcile “there is no evil” with “that thing is evil”—or “there is no free will” with “this is how you should act”—is to engage, as David Bentley Hart put it, in “pure magical thinking.”33xDavid Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 17.
If that sounds harsh, take it from Alexander Rosenberg, a materialist philosopher with a penchant for bad news. In an article titled “Disenchanted Naturalism,” he writes:
Most scientists are reluctant to admit science’s answers to the persistent questions are obvious…. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values.44xAlex Rosenberg, “Disenchanted Naturalism,” Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications, eds. Bana Bashour and Hans Muller (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 18, 22.
No fluff here. In his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, he delivers more bad news:
What is the purpose of the universe?
There is none.
What is the meaning of life?
Ditto.
Why am I here?
Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work?
Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal?
Are you kidding?
Is there free will?
Not a chance!
What happens when we die?
Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?
There is no moral difference between them.Why should I be moral?
Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory?
Anything goes.55xAlex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 2–3.
Now, most materialists would not, I assume, take quite this line. They would maintain, without having thought about it too much, that there is a weaker version of materialism on offer, one that eliminates frippery like spirits and souls but still allows us a bit of wiggle room for things such as meaning and morality, even if, in some sense, we have to create them for ourselves. The great hope is that there exists, buried somewhere in the philosophical fine print, some technical loophole by which the nihilistic implications of materialism can be avoided. Rosenberg argues—and I agree—that this is wishful thinking. As we both see it, all weaker forms of materialism, if they were really followed through consistently, ought to end up more or less where his does.
And yet even Rosenberg cannot go all the way. He (by his own terms, a nonexistent nonperson) still evidently feels (whatever that means) that convincing us (nonexistent nonpeople) of what he (un-freely) considers to be the truth matters. He might be the most honest reductionist on Earth, but even he cannot quite take his own claims literally.
This is why the oft-repeated claim that we’re living in a materialist age strikes me as suspect. If we were to study some historic civilization that considered itself good, yet which delighted in torture, rape, and murder, we would hardly conclude that they were good just because they thought they were.
They will not see ours as a materialist culture. What they will see is something much messier: a culture torn in two directions at once, roughly between what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image.”66xWilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert Colodny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962). These are undeniably ugly terms, but they are crucial for what comes later.
The manifest image describes the full-blown, rich world as we actually experience it: bursting with values, colors, morals, ordinary objects such tables and trees and coffee mugs, as well as hope, suffering, and joy. The scientific image describes the minimalist, Galilean world of quantities that we imagine supplies the underlying scaffold: microphysical particles, forces, mathematical laws, and not much else.
Sellars thought our inability to reconcile the two was one of the defining predicaments—if not the defining predicament—of our age. Our hypothetical future historians will surely agree. Indeed, I think they will observe that much of what we called the “culture wars” arose from our trying to do battle with a billion different, constantly morphing hybrids of scientific and manifest—each one incompatible with the next. To attempt to hold, consciously, that none of this is really real while still, of course, harboring the ineliminable sense that life is flush with meaning suggests all manner of incoherent, mangled belief systems—amalgams of doubt and zeal. The result is a bit like a game of Whac-a-Mole: No matter how many times you use the skeptical scientific mallet to hammer down our manifest beliefs, they just keep popping up elsewhere. None of this is really real, except my beliefs about gender. None of this is really real, except my racial identity. None of this is really real, except mankind’s unstoppable march toward justice.
Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic. But I genuinely think, my rudeness about materialism aside, someone like Rosenberg would agree with a lot of what I’ve said. He would certainly accept the Sellarsian distinction between scientific and manifest, and indeed consider our ability to separate the two to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. He would accept, with some regret, that the manifest image is, for us humans, inescapable: “All of us” he says, “are victims of a vast range of illusions foisted upon us” (we’ll set aside for now the question of what a “victim” or “illusion” is).77xAlex Rosenberg, interviewed by Ard Louis and David Malone in Why Are We Here?, Tern Television Productions; https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/alex-rosenberg/#. And I suspect he would agree that our inability to switch off our common-sense intuitions will lead us to adopt some odd, half-formed ideologies.
Where he would differ is in still maintaining that, even from within the illusion, we can distinguish rationally between science and common sense, and simply set the latter aside. Other materialists display a similar level of confidence. The biologist Lewis Wolpert writes, for instance: “[If] something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science…. [The] way in which the universe works is not the way in which common sense works: the two are not congruent.”88xLewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London, England: Faber and Faber, 1992), 11.
But can science and common sense really be teased apart so easily?
Can You Have an Isolated Belief?
Imagine one day some strange chap approaches you in the street and says, “I have one belief, and one belief only.” Naturally, you reply, “Oh yeah? What’s that, then?” And he says, “Well, obviously that I only have one belief.”
Are you a smart aleck? Yes, you are. You retort: “Well, if you think it’s obvious, then you must believe, more generally, that things can be obvious. And things can only be obvious if there are people who find them obvious. So you must believe in people. Indeed, it sounds like you believe that I exist, that I can understand you, that you are the person who has only one thought, that—”
The odd man just storms off mid-sentence, fuming.
The point of this admittedly silly story is, of course, that holding a single belief in isolation is impossible. We can highlight a particular thought with a discrete propositional sentence. But this does no more to isolate it from other beliefs than painting a single strand of a spider’s web separates it from those holding it up. Any thought, for it to make sense, depends on a vast constellation of prior assumptions, conscious, unconscious, and even—if we can extend the notion of belief this far—preconscious. I don’t think it’s absurd to say that my sense of balance, for instance, is a pre-rational belief system about what will happen if I lean this way or that. Between this and the uppermost crust of my conscious thoughts lies a vast mantle of beliefs—including that the world around me persists in time, that I am the person having my thoughts, and that if I say something, you can understand me.
This is why asserting something like “our common-sense beliefs are all wrong,” while denying the many thousands of commonsensical beliefs that got you there, is pure hubris. It is, to use the materialists’ favored mind-as-a-computer analogy, like expecting a dodgy motherboard—one that regularly sends ones when it should be sending zeros, and vice versa—to pop up with the right answer a thousand mistakes later. As the philosopher Donald Davidson put it, for any one of our beliefs to be correct, most of our beliefs must be correct.99xDonald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973): 5–20; https://doi.org/10.2307/3129898.
Materialists might counter that we’ve already dispensed with many erroneous but once widely held beliefs—such as, for instance, that the Sun orbits the Earth. But it takes only the tiniest bit of reflection to see that this is not remotely “commonsensical” in the way that, say, “I exist,” “my feelings are real,” or “I am having a conscious experience” is. These beliefs form the foundation for all our subsequent rational thoughts. We cannot coherently deny them without denying our capacity to say anything.
Indeed, it isn’t even obvious what science is without common sense. Clearly, scientific, Galilean reality, if it is there, is something we only ever perceive indirectly. Nobody directly observes the speed of light in and of itself, nor the number of electrons in a zinc atom. These are things we infer about reality, by, as it were, frisking the manifest image and feeling for the skeleton underneath. We notice patterns in the world around us and seek a deeper explanation for them.
The materialist, though, wishes to retain the explanation while abandoning that which it is intended to explain. To argue that physical science is all there is, is a bit like uttering a half-formed, nonsensical sentence such as “because E = mc2” or “because one additional electron.” As the philosopher Andrea Staiti says: “[S]cientific theories are about something, and that something is not itself the product of scientific theorizing. Rather, it is presupposed by all theorizing: It is the world of human experience.”1010xAndrea Staiti, “Husserlian Phenomenology and Liberal Naturalism,” The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, eds. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Oxford, England: Routledge, 2022), 63. Emphasis in the original.
Without theories, predictions, experiments, experimenters, laboratories, telescopes, microscopes, and human curiosity, science wouldn’t function. There is simply no way of neatly extricating the manifest image, nor our common-sense beliefs, from the scientific method without destroying it. If we were to schematize how everything fits together, it would look something like this: Scientific Reality underpins the Manifest Image, which gives rise to our Common-Sense Beliefs, which provide the conceptual foundations for our Scientific Beliefs.
The materialist wants to eliminate the central two elements and leave us with a direct line from the first to the last. This is delusional. You can be a total skeptic about everything, if you so wish—but you cannot be a skeptic about the manifest and still be a realist about science.
No doubt these arguments won’t move the materialist. And, in a sense, how could they? If he has already established that he has no free will—no capacity for reason—then pointing out his rational limitations is irrelevant. There is nothing he can or cannot do to reach a right or a wrong answer: The truth has just landed fortuitously in his head as if planted there by God.
Indeed, in an important sense, the consistent materialist will be compelled to conclude that his thoughts are not actually his own. This is why he can pronounce on his own metaphysical annihilation from without, like a soul floating above the lifeless corpse it has just departed. But this out-of-body hubris comes not just from materialism but from something much simpler—something we all do, all day long, every single day.
The Temptations of Abstraction
In his 1918 essay “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” the German philosopher Gottlob Frege divides reality into three realms.1111xGottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind 65, no. 259 (1956): 289–311; http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251513. Originally published in 1918. The first, the “outer world,” describes the physical, spatiotemporal world that lies all around us. The second, the “inner world,” refers to our subjective, private, first-person experiences. The last, the “third realm,” consists of what Frege calls “thoughts.”
Quite what these “thoughts” are is a little confusing—not helped, in my view, by a poor choice of word on Frege’s part. The key thing to note is that Frege makes a strict distinction between thinking and thought. Thinking is the subjective, psychological act we all perform all day long. Thought, on the other hand, is the “objective content” our thinking is aimed at: effectively, anything that can be put into propositional form. A better word than thoughts, I think, would have been meanings.
“A hydrogen atom has only one electron,” “all circles have seven sides,” and “stealing is wrong” are thus all, in a Fregean sense, thoughts. What Frege wants to stress is that the meaning of each of these propositions is neither part of the physical world nor part of our subjective inner world—it belongs to a third, abstract, public realm. Indeed, we assume—although this isn’t entirely without controversy—that even if humans never existed, the meaning of “a hydrogen atom has only one electron” would in some sense still exist as something truthful, and the meaning of “all circles have seven sides” would still exist as something false.
Of course, in a human-free universe, these thoughts wouldn’t be expressed by the cosmos in English or French or Swahili. Language is simply the means by which we rational beings hook onto them: “The thought, in itself immaterial,” Frege writes, “clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us. We say a sentence expresses a thought.”1212xIbid., 292.
Just to think linguistically, then, is to step outside of our own immediate, first-person experience and enter the impersonal realm of meanings—an invisible arena where ideas, theories, and arguments do battle with one another, whether there’s any mind to think them at all. The first-person sensation of pain is a necessarily subjective experience: It cannot exist without its being felt by somebody. A thought, though, can in principle exist without anybody ever thinking it.
I’m not so much interested in the metaphysical pros and cons of Frege’s view here, but rather in the insight that it gives into the way the materialist—probably without realizing it—conceptualizes reality. He takes Frege’s distinction between thinker and thought literally and believes he can eliminate the thinker—himself—without losing the thought: the scientific fact of his own nonexistence.
Friedrich Nietzsche died eighteen years before “The Thought” was published. Had he lived to read it, though, he might have argued that Frege got everything back to front. Our ability to think linguistically does not, he would say, give us access to some previously unperceived realm of meaning. Our ability to think linguistically creates the illusion of such a place. “The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this,” Nietzsche once wrote, “that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it.”1313xFriedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16. Originally published in 1878.
For Nietzsche, when we think linguistically, we transplant ourselves mentally into a fictitious parallel world. Strictly speaking, we don’t even imagine ourselves there at all: We imagine only our disembodied thoughts, which join the infinite spreadsheet of all other possible disembodied thoughts, subsequently sorted by the impersonal universe into objective categories such as true or false and meaningful or meaningless. Because this abstract world is, in a sense, the only one we can think about, at least consciously, we mistakenly take it to be more real than the one we inhabited before we gained language. This, for Nietzsche, is the root of all—as he would see it, misguided—metaphysical speculation. We draw a map of our language and take it to be a map of the world. Indeed, he would see reductive materialism as metaphysics writ large: a hubristic-enough faith in the imaginary linguistic grid we project onto reality that we sacrifice reality itself.
You don’t have to be a full-fledged Nietzschean to see his point. So certain are we of the power of our language that we believe, in thinking a sentence such as “I don’t really exist,” we are doing nothing other than dispassionately transmitting some fact encoded into the universe, whose meaning would hold whether or not we were thinking it. No other animal, we can assume, has developed an imaginary second world of language from within which it schemes about the elimination of the first.
If, with the advent of language, we began abstracting ourselves away from subjective experience, the process has only intensified ever since. Think of the written word, which fixes thoughts and preserves them independent of their original thinker many centuries after she has gone. Think of our attempts, more recently, to mathematize language: Leibniz’s ideal universal language, Boole’s “mathematics of the human intellect,” formal logic. Think, more mundanely, of the increased amount of time we all spend immersed in abstract, linguistic—as opposed to physical, non-linguistic—tasks every day.
Schopenhauer once quipped that materialism is the philosophy of the subject who has forgotten himself. If even to think is to forget ourselves—to get lost in our thoughts, not our thinking—then it’s no wonder we trick ourselves into imagining the world around us doesn’t exist.
Saving Appearances
It’s no surprise that much philosophy of the past 150 years has attempted, in a variety of ways, to defend the manifest image. But this informal movement—if we can call it that—has often gone unnoticed because it includes thinkers as otherwise diverse as Nietzsche, Husserl, Ryle, Wittgenstein, Strawson, McDowell, Stroud, and, in our day, Jennifer Hornsby, Bas van Fraassen, and Mario De Caro. If we were to give it an unofficial mantra, we could do a lot worse than: Don’t forget what is immediately in front of you.
Some approaches have been more “positive” than others. Husserl, for instance, thought that a full science of reality must start with a detailed analysis of the very first thing we encounter: our immediate conscious experiences. This is echoed today by Bas van Fraassen, whose “constructive empiricism” takes as its starting point that, almost by definition, we can be more epistemologically certain of the world we find immediately in front of us than we can the postulated, unobservable entities of science.
Others’ approaches are more critical—or even “therapeutic,” aimed at simply reminding us of what we already knew but have tried to trick ourselves into forgetting. Wittgenstein argued that language sets strict grammatical and conceptual boundaries around what we can think, and that it is hubristic to imagine we can somehow “get outside” of language and dismantle the world of language-users from without. P.F. Strawson argued that rationality depends on a basic core of common-sense concepts being broadly correct, and that skepticism or reductionism about these concepts undermines the foundations of all thought. Nancy Cartwright asserts that science must be, by definition, “about” something, and that it descends into meaningless incoherence when we fully deny the thing it is supposed to be studying.
I personally tend toward a middle way—toward a kind of “quietist realism.” This starts with the observation that skepticism about manifest reality always undermines itself—that we have no option but to be realists about things like consciousness, meaning, and morality. But it recognizes that when philosophy attempts what the contemporary philosopher Thomas Spiegel calls “quasi-scientific” arguments—a final explanation of the most fundamental, unobservable workings of the universe—it betrays a hubristic faith in the human mind to comprehend reality in its full detail. An animal is not “wrong” to see an apple as a desirable bit of food, even if it does not understand the fruit’s chemical composition. Similarly, we are not “wrong” to observe that morality is self-evidently as real as biology, even if we cannot fully see how they might slot together.
No doubt some ultimate explanation exists—and, whether we will ever be able fully to sign them off, some metaphysical beliefs will thus get closer to that ultimate explanation than others. But it seems to me quite probable that we will never understand how, say, consciousness fits into the physical picture of things. Still, a broad, modest outline of the truth—an imperfect but clear-eyed description of what we find immediately in front of us—is better than nothing. Whereas reductive materialism, having undercut all basis for our saying anything, ends up unable to give us any answer at all.