Matter
28th installment to my philosophical system.
Matter is the basis of all experience, but it is wrongly taken as the ultimate ground of reality. Just like the idealists who mistake experience (born in the mind) as the ultimate ground, materialists take the physical composition of objects as all that there is.
The question of the fundamental constituents of reality is one of the oldest in all philosophy. One may trace it all the way back to Thales when he proclaimed, “All is water.” But why water, and what did it even mean for everything to be water? That proclamation by Thales was nothing more than the speculative conclusion of a naturalist; and since then, more or less, all ontological claims about reality ignore metaphysics by subsuming metaphysics (the fundamental nature of reality—the aboutness of things perceived in this world) into what reality is composed of.
Naturalism, as a metaphysical doctrine at least, is effectively reality made natural; it does not assume things outside of nature, and it does not seek explanations for natural phenomena outside of what lies in the natural world. In that sense, it is more a method of investigation than an actual philosophical stance which one can argue for or against. But it is just here where all this confusion comes. Almost every confusion in philosophy stems from a confusion in the terms used to describe phenomena.
When most people consider the world, they do so with all their presuppositions in mind. Very few actually attempt to understand things from an impersonal, non-biased perspective; in fact, for most, that notion is either impossible or derided as ridiculous, simply because most don’t view reality in an objective manner, but rather take their subjective experience as the ultimate reality. When people call for consensus for the sake of having a collective framework by which to rationally arrive at solutions via debate or argumentation, what they’re really calling for is an agreement on principles from which problems can be analyzed and, in so doing, reduced to whatever the collective presuppositions already are.
In that sense, consensus reality is nothing but presupposition taken as fact because all the “solutions” are arrived at in the same manner—it is a false binary taken as a true unity, and made so on behalf of what the values are already assumed to be without question. It is a very conservative way of thinking because it is not thinking at all, but rather a blind allegiance to what is assumed as good from the outset—either from tradition, or from a rejection of what is proposed as new simply because it is new, even if the new thing would be of benefit to them to adopt.
There is no historical, philosophical, or material analysis anywhere in modernity because modernity is not interested in truth as a concept, but rather as a tool to make people agree with the collective presuppositions of those who do not think. It is the death of free thought—the free thinkers are long dead—and is why ignorance is so pervasive today; until people critically examine what they mean by “objective” or “true,” there shall never be an end to dogma or nonsensical argumentation.
Questions of matter or idea fall under the metaphysical, but the common strand of thinking today does not allow for metaphysical speculation. When we observe reality, we do so with the presupposition that what we observe is in fact before us, and does in fact exist in the same manner we exist. What we are, however, or rather, what we assume ourselves to be, is largely shaped by what we have encountered in our intellectual development. Even how we objectify the world in our experience as conscious subjects is subordinate to what language and culture we were born in and indoctrinated by; America (being the exception to nearly every norm or rule) is an interesting case study on this exact thing, because it is effectively the only nation, so far in history, to have its culture bound up within an idea about itself—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—rather than an actual quality native to the geography or minds of the inhabitants.
Our culture is essentially the Yankee yeoman, European ideal which the Founding Fathers were fond of, but not fond of being subordinate to: it’s no wonder we Americans are so confused about what it means to be an American (we have always been confused on this matter); it’s deliberately ambiguous because what it means to be an American effectively comes down to whatever we as Americans freely decide to label as American; in that sense, an American is really an ambiguity, a contradiction which we must constantly strive to overcome as we sustain our life, maintain our liberty, and pursue our happiness.
But what does this have to do with matter or mind? I would say everything, for the concepts here spoken of are effectively the same. It is an issue that stems from the inability to truly understand the things being spoken of—the ambiguity of language and differing assumptions about what this world is is where we must forge our own path of sense-making. Every claim about reality is really a lie told on behalf of reality. Reality doesn’t care about us, but we have a great deal to care about within it, and that is because we live within it, and are subject to its laws regardless of whether we find them legal or not.
What matter really is is a metaphysical proposition about the nature of the world which we inhabit. It is good and fair to point to atoms and molecules and atomic physics and quantum chemistry and think the universe a done deal—that is, a wager which we humans have won because our ideas about it are “correct”—but nobody ever seems to find certainty within answers that are themselves not final; there is always more “to know” and always more “to uncover” in science, and so, we make what we think the whole of what our life is—not realizing that we are, in doing that, affirming two positions which are contradictory but which are also correct on their own terms.
You see, when we say that something is, we are making a claim about ontology (the beingness of an object that comes to us in experience), but within every assumption—especially of an ontological kind—we are carrying innumerable metaphysical implications; implications which are themselves not totally certain, and which we can only presuppose in the same way a person’s already accepted values predetermine the outcome of their vote in politics. In a sense, the matter–mind divide is really an illusion, because reality is both matter and mind: mankind is made of matter, but it has a mind capable of abstracting matter to become idea (all this stemming from the mind); and the only reason people stand ten-toes down on one or the other (materialism or idealism) is because of ignorance with respect to what it means to actually affirm a position existentially.
Nobody chooses for themselves, but rather chooses out of deference to their presuppositions, which they take as real or true, when in reality they are groundless and meaningless metaphysically and epistemologically speaking; in truth they are moral.
To speak of matter alone is to ignore the thing that processes the matter in the first place. The materialists love to point out to the idealists that the mind is also matter (nothing but a bundle of billions of neurons and glial cells, and trillions of synapses), but that in no way makes reality somehow only composed of matter as a result. All absolute claims about reality are really falsehoods because none of them are capable of being validated—they’re all non-falsifiable. This is why I’m sick of the modern adulation (obsequiousness) which we show towards truth—as if truth were something powerful or worthy of our respect.
I’m a pragmatist. Truth only matters for me. It has no power over me in the same manner, unfortunately, it seemingly has over everyone else. I don’t care if a man is unreasonable, irrational, or even stupid, so long as he is all of these things while being pragmatic—that is, is all of these things with respect to some end goal, or with respect to a goal which he strives to achieve. That is what it means to be pragmatic; and that is also why every conclusion we deduce from our reality (whatever intellectual gymnastics we’ve performed to buy into some metaphysical claptrap) is perspectival in the end.
But I feel this metaphysical quandary needs to be explicated a bit more. The problem with metaphysics is that you cannot separate it from ontology. Every ontological claim about the nature of being is necessarily tied up with claims about that being’s fundamental or ultimate nature, and once this happens there’s no end to the amount of equivocations that occur between various schools of thought that claim to have the true nature of reality understood. For me, however, claims such as these always seemed like fruitless diversions from what actually lies before us as subjects of experience; it was mere intellectual masturbation, thinking and thoughts for their own sake, rather than for furthering our understanding of reality.
When I was first studying philosophy, I was taught that you could break it up into four main areas: metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology. Having addled my mind with science and mathematics well before studying philosophy, as well as going through the American education system, which standardizes every academic discipline and makes it seem as if every question or problem has one “true” or “correct” solution, I assumed the only “true” philosophy was epistemology, for that dealt with how we know things are “true”—it was a perspective only one who still believed in objectivity could affirm.
Still stuck on that scientific mindset, that black-and-white thinking where things are either true or false and nothing in between is possible, I only considered the nature of claims as they appear in my experience. I gave the least concern to metaphysics because I assumed it was merely speculative, and impossible to actually have knowledge of; and so for three years I went my reckless way serenely, considering the world through a reductive lens, making everything an either/or, a this or that, a true or false: this is the mindset of most people today (only concerned with the epistemological), and it is for this reason why most actually assume that reality is either the totality of matter or the product of a mind which gives rise to all phenomena.
People with no knowledge of philosophy view reality in a way not unlike the Ancient Greeks—that is, in a very intuitive way—and as a result suffer all the same defects: premises asserted without ground which lead their every conclusion into the abyss of a non sequitur. The Ancient Greeks didn’t have a method of investigating existence with any certainty or objectivity, and so they were left to their own presuppositions about the world, and thus had to construct explanations on that very shaky foundation: building from “first principles” which were really guesses at best (like in the Pre-Socratic atomists), dogmas at worst (like in the sect of Pythagoreans), or rejecting the very concept of “final” explanation at all (like the Ancient Greek skeptics).
The natural assumption of most people today is, in essence, dichotomous—and I would like to add falsely so; there is very little room for speculation because the only thing that concerns people is whether the thing in question is true, not whether the thing in question could change depending on the circumstances. The world is presented to us in a deliberately myopic way because that is the simplest way to get an idea within someone’s mind, assert it for long enough until it is gradually accepted as true. “Repetition is the mother of teaching” is a very true maxim, but it also has a negative side which most are unwilling to discuss; in the same way a “truth” could be arrived at through rote, without understanding why it is so, a falsity could be presented as “true” and eventually accepted as such not on the merits of its evidence or deductive validity, but on it merely being repeated enough times to the point of it becoming ingrained enough to seem like a self-evident fact, as if it were an axiom in mathematics.
This here is the ultimate indoctrination of mankind, and is why so many refuse positions contrary to their own—because to them, whatever the other person says is self-evidently wrong, rather than being a mere variation upon the same observation. This is seen nowhere clearer than in politics, where the false dichotomy takes on a kind of sacred status that reason or evidence will never evince the other of; you cannot change their mind unless you present your own position in a manner almost identical to the way in which the other became convinced of their position—and so reason retreats back into its epistemological castle, and leaves the surrounding farmland to be pillaged by values, sentiments, and feelings.
If reason were a motte, then objective reality would be the bailey, because reason flies from the world of lived experience the moment it is confronted by a thing which defies all rationality. It is in this sense, then, why strict adherence to “objectivity” or “truth” or “agreed-upon values” is folly in an absolute sense. You cannot stand on truth if there is no ground which truth itself rests upon.