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"Whereas materialist writings previously had to be published clandestinely and, if discovered, were censored, in some cases even publicly burned by the executioner, it became increasingly possible to avow one’s materialism and publish corresponding writings, despite the fact that it remained impossible throughout the nineteenth century to hold a professorship at a university as a materialist.
(b)Materialist thought gained a growing audience and, at the latest, in the second half of the century gave rise to controversial public debates. Even though it never became a mainstream position, it could now significantly influence philosophical debate as well as public awareness.
(c)At the same time it got rid of its parochialism and achieved a European level. The corresponding writings were received internationally. A literary document of this development is to be found in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons (1862), the main protagonist of which advises against reading Pushkin and instead recommends reading Ludwig Büchner’s materialist bestseller1 Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter)."
"The decisive author for this ‘break-through’ was Ludwig Feuerbach, who in the 1830s had freed himself of Hegel’s influence and published his epoch-making book Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) in 1841. The book was written in the context of the critique of religion by the Young Hegelians and the Biblical criticism by the protestant theologian David Friedrich Strauß and led this movement to a theoretical climax. [...]
All predicates applied to God such as love, justice, omnipotence, or omniscience are idealized human properties and that, in consequence, theology is merely idealized anthropology. Even though, in articulating this idea, Feuerbach performed an inversion typical of materialist thought, that is, he attempted to disclose the earthly ‘material’ core of heavenly or spiritual phenomena, Das Wesen des Christentums did not contain an explicit commitment to materialism. This was only made explicit in a number of texts published shortly afterwards which were written in the form of theses and sketched a programme for a new type of philosophy.
These texts are carried by a sense of an epochal change. Feuerbach sees himself as a witness to the end of a long historical phase and as at the brink of a dawning new one."
"Hegel spoke of an identity of philosophy and religion. Now philosophy would have to emancipate itself from religion and take its place. But since it was not prepared for this, a completely new kind of philosophy had to be created."
"Feuerbach marks a significant change in the tradition of materialist thought. In this tradition reaching back to Antiquity the ‘real’ had always been identified with matter; and matter, in turn, with nature. Materialism had primarily been natural philosophy. Feuerbach did not part with this tradition, but made a shift of emphasis: ‘The new philosophy makes man, including nature, as the basis of man, the sole, universal and highest object of philosophy, that is, anthropology including physiology becomes the universal science.’ (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft: §54). Feuerbach’s materialism was not a natural philosophy (‘physiology’) that included an anthropology, but an anthropology that viewed man as a part of nature. So the relative weight of ‘man’ and ‘nature’, of ‘anthropology’ and ‘natural philosophy’ were switched. This is confirmed by the notion of ‘Sinnlichkeit’ (sensuousness) central to Feuerbach’s philosophy: ‘What is real in its reality is the real as the object of the senses. Truth, reality and sensuousness are identical. Only a sensuous creature is a true, a real creature. Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense—not by thinking alone.’ (Grundsätze: §32). Accordingly, he was not concerned with the real, with matter itself, but with the real, with matter insofar as they are the objects of human senses. This had already been negatively sketched in his analysis of religion. For if man is the essence of religion and if theology is merely idealized anthropology, then that suggests a case for revising this inversion and for demanding that man become the focus of theorizing. For this reason, a philosophy that wants to do justice to the ‘spirit of a new age’ has to see the ‘real’ in man and devote its entire attention to it. As such, Feuerbach’s materialism has been characterized as an anthropological materialism.
Just as Feuerbach’s materialism is anthropological, so his anthropology is materialist. He sets his position on man off from all religious and idealist philosophical positions according to which man is first and foremost a spiritual, mental, and thinking creature. For the ‘philosophy of the future’, by contrast, man is primarily a natural, embodied and sensuous creature with corresponding natural, embodied, and sensuous desires. The notion of ‘sensuousness’ (Sinnlichkeit) thus not only marks a specific conception of reality in general, but also a specific conception of man. (a) Sensuousness first characterizes the ‘essence of man’: man is an embodied and therefore also a needy creature. (b) Furthermore, man’s relation to nature is thus also denoted. Man lives in nature and he needs it to sustain his life in and by this nature. (c) But as a sensuous creature man is not only situated amid an external material nature, but always also among other sensuous human creatures: ‘individual man has the essence of man in him neither as a moral nor as a thinking creature. The essence of man is only contained in community, in the unity of man with man—a unity that is solely based on the reality of the difference between me and you.’ (Grundsätze: §60). Here Feuerbach is primarily thinking of natural relations between individuals, not least of erotic relations and reproduction. In this sense his anthropology is non-individualist: for him, man is essentially a ‘Gattungswesen’ (species-being), that is, a creature necessarily standing in natural relations to other human beings.
Against this background Feuerbach developed his conception of politics. Having turned away from the heavenly beyond and towards the earthly here and now, it has to be in the interest of human beings to shape this earthly world optimally. As an embodied, material creature, man has to tend to his embodied, material interests: first and foremost he has to ensure a sufficient supply of food."
"For Feuerbach the sciences were the paradigm of the materialist, empiricist, or realist way of thinking, which should also gain ground in philosophy. A group of scientifically trained authors sought to spell out what had only been generally postulated in Feuerbach’s programme. This group was mainly represented by Carl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, became the epitome of materialism in Germany and beyond. Some of them had already gained prominence by publications towards the end of the 1840s; but it was only in 1854 that they received significant public attention when the Christian physiologist Rudolph Wagner directly attacked materialism and made it out to be a danger to Christianity and also to the ‘moral foundation of social order.’ (Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz 1854: 80). This speech was received widely and provoked a polemical response by Carl Vogt, followed by a whole flood of publications pro and (mostly) contra materialism. The dispute was fuelled further in the 1860s when Darwin’s theory became known in Germany. The materialists welcomed this theory as a solid confirmation of their claims, whereas the antimaterialists rejected it for that very reason. In the 1870s direct as well as indirect criticism of materialism grew stronger, not least on the part of academic philosophy. In the fin-de-siècle finally, neo-idealist, partly also irrationalist philosophical tendencies had a hegemonic status."
"Like their French precursors in the eighteenth century, in characterizing the key notion ‘matter’, the German materialists closely followed what, at the time, was the best developed physical theory, that is, classical mechanics. So matter was to consist in atoms and their interactions. Although this physicalist interpretation of ‘matter’ was never revised, it was overshadowed by a different, biologically influenced, understanding. The reason for this was, on the one hand, that the main proponents of scientific materialism were what we today might call life scientists: Vogt was a zoologist, Moleschott a physiologist, and Büchner a physician. They were inclined, therefore, to think about matter in biological terms. Furthermore, this was attractive, as life sciences, in contrast to mechanics, also deal with developmental processes in nature. As early as 1847 Carl Vogt had spoken of a ‘principle of a revolution of inorganic and organic nature’ (Über den heutigen Stand der beschreibenden Naturwissenschaften 1847: 41) and Büchner had in 1855 speculated on a ‘law of gradual development’ in nature (Force and Matter: 75). It is no surprise that notions of ‘matter’ and ‘reality’ were increasingly shaped by evolutionary ideas when in the 1860s Darwin’s theory was received by the materialists.
If the world is purely material and regulated by immutable laws of nature, then it forms a causally closed material unity. In the disputes about worldview throughout the nineteenth century, this conclusion was significant for three reasons. (a) If the world forms a causally closed nexus, there can be no intervention from anything external. The world can thus not be created by a supernatural being, nor can it be governed by any such being. The anti-religious implications of this conclusion are obvious and that was what mattered to the proponents of materialism: in a material world there is no place for gods and miracles. (b) If the world forms a unity, there cannot be different segments of nature which radically differ from one another. Animate and inanimate, terrestrial and stellar nature were seen as subject to the same laws of nature and were thus part of the same nature. This claim was particularly relevant for understanding animate nature, which was, at the time, still seen by many as a field with a special set of laws and principles (teleology, vitalism). Such laws and principles had a certain affinity with religious or idealist thought and were thus rejected by the materialists. (c) A causally closed world of course also includes humans. Humans are not supernatural or otherworldly, but natural creatures that are subject to the laws of nature just like any other natural creature. This is true of all their properties and abilities, especially their intellectual properties and abilities. This view was, on the one hand, directed against the Christian doctrine of an immortal soul independent of the body given by God exclusively to man; on the other, it was directed against philosophical theories that assumed some sort of independence of the mind, for instance, against Cartesian substance dualism or the Kantian idea of moral autonomy. While older materialism had already assumed that matter is independent of thought while thought is not independent of matter, the scientific materialists sought to corroborate this view with the results of contemporary science. In their opinion, the then still inchoate research into the brain and neurophysiology confirmed the view that all ideational feats are tied to matter, especially to the brain. In this vein, Moleschott reports results of contemporary nutritional physiology, according to which the brain cannot subsist and function without phosphorous fat. From this he draws the conclusion: ‘No thought without phosphor.’ (Lehre der Nahrungsmittel, für das Volk 1850: 115). A great uproar was provoked by the following statement of Carl Vogt: ‘Thinking consistently, any naturalist will, I believe, come to the conclusion that those abilities which we consider activities of the soul are merely functions of brain substance, or to put it coarsely, that thoughts stand in the same relation to the brain in which bile stands to the liver or urine to the kidneys.’ (Physiologische Briefe 1847: 6). Here we leave aside the olfactory associations that this comparison gave rise to and which motivated indignation and satire. Instead, let us here highlight the effort undertaken to support the materialist axiom of the mind’s dependence on matter with the results of contemporary science.
The closeness to the sciences was a strength of this type of materialism; it could make the claim not merely to postulate opinions but to offer the best knowledge of the time. But this closeness was also one of its weaknesses, for even if it might have been the ‘best’ knowledge at the time, it was by no means certain. The sciences are a dynamic project, the results of which are continuously challenged and replaced by more advanced knowledge. By tying itself to such an intellectual process the substantial claims of materialism are undermined by being drawn into a vortex of a research project that is constantly reinventing itself. An assertion like ‘No phosphor, no thought’ does not today so much appear to be false as naïve and uninformative. And when in the last third of the nineteenth century classical mechanics was questioned from within physics and replaced by other conceptions, scientific materialism, too, was put on the defensive. On the basis of new physical and chemical theories, Wilhelm Ostwald in 1895, for instance, proclaimed the Emancipation from Scientific Materialism. The reduction of the philosophical concept of matter to the statements of a certain scientific paradigm, that is, the identification of ‘matter’ with ‘palpable material’ had led scientific materialism into a dead end."
"In antiquity, materialism had been a programme of privately pursuing one’s own happiness. The decidedly anti-political nature of this programme was aptly reflected in the Epicurean slogan ‘Live in seclusion!’ Throughout modernity, however, materialism became increasingly political. In eighteenth century France it included an agenda for overcoming social hindrances to individual happiness; feudal power structures and their religious justification were seen as such hindrances. The materialist authors in Germany, too, had a political agenda from the very beginning and their critique of religion was motivated both politically and practically (Bröker 1973). Its growing influence in the 1850s can be seen as a result of the revolution of 1848, in which the governing feudal powers had been victorious over the rather weak democratic and liberal movement; any hope of political reform in the near future had been dashed. Members of the liberal bourgeoisie who clung to the ideals of the revolution saw industrialisation as a force that would first bring about economic and later inevitably social and political progress too. In the natural sciences they saw a force that would counteract the spiritual hindrances to this progress, that is, the reigning feudal forces and their allies, religion, and idealist philosophy. Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner were protagonists of the bourgeois democratic reform movement in Germany and in the sciences they saw a decisive weapon, with the aid of which their aspirations would prevail. Thus, in its specific shape and effect, scientific materialism was a product of the historical situation in Germany after the failed revolution of 1848: a situation in which parts of the bourgeoisie sought an invincible ally in fighting for the modernization and democratization of Germany. They believed that they had found it in science and technology.
The hope was that science would perform three feats. (a) It was to be a repository for arguments against superstition, religion, and idealism as well as promulgating a modern and rational way of thinking. (b) It was to give the idea of progress a foundation. Part of the aforementioned attractiveness of a biological understanding of matter can be explained by political motives: reality was seen as modifiable. In one of his earliest public statements on Darwin’s theory, Ernst Haeckel claimed that it offered an unshakable foundation for an all-encompassing worldview and, at the same time, a guarantee of social progress. The same ‘law of progress’ that Darwin had proven for organic nature was also to be found in the history of mankind, for here too the same principles of struggle for survival and natural selection applied. Haeckel makes an obvious allusion to the revolution of 1848:
regression in political, social, in moral and scientific life such as has been the aim of the joint efforts by priests and despots in all periods of world history may temporarily hold back or even suppress this general progress, but the more unnatural, the more anachronistic these attempts at regression are, the faster and more energetically the progress following in its wake is brought about. For this progress is a law of nature which no human force, no tyrant’s weapons, no priest’s curses will ever be able to permanently suppress.
(Über die Entwicklungstheorie Darwins: 27 et seq.)
(c) Finally, the results of science were also to be utilized as tools for solving social problems."
"In 1866 Friedrich Albert Lange published his Geschichte des Materialismus (History of Materialism) in which he argued against the materialist tendency to synthesize scientific results into a metaphysical system, but at the same time defended materialism as the appropriate maxim for studying nature and even claimed that it is an ‘integral part of the Kantian system, without the latter losing its idealistic character’ (Vol. II: 594). Thus he saw Kantian philosophy and materialism as closer to one another than some believed. This friendly but critical approach was superseded by the strict rejection of materialism by other neo-Kantians in the 1870s. Together with empiricism, positivism, and naturalism, materialism was now seen as the main adversary, against which Kantian transcendental idealism had to take a stand. In the 1880s, 1880 then, an ‘idealist turn’ [...] took place and the emphasis of neo-Kantian theorizing shifted to ethics. The world of ‘values’ was now construed as a separate world, completely independent of the natural world. In this manner the ethical Indifferentism or even Nihilism promoted as a consequence of the sciences, industry and socialism was to be counteracted. Materialism, therefore, remained present throughout the history (not only) of neo-Kantian thought: albeit as an enemy."
"The materialists of the nineteenth century had seen in the sciences a great and constantly growing stock of true assertions about nature, that is, a stash of epistemic products. For the logical empiricists, by contrast, the sciences were first and foremost an innovating project, an attitude to the world and a method. Thus the interest in summarizing, systematizing, generalizing, and popularizing scientific results, which had been the mark of the older materialism, was done away with. Under the impression of fundamental changes in physics around 1900, hopes had to be abandoned that the ultimate particles of reality could be identified and a final model of the world given. Against this background, Moritz Schlick pledged allegiance to a methodical monism that declares the scientific type of knowledge as general and without alternative. Such a way of thinking contains ‘all the useful features that made nineteenth century materialism so successful with a public which, unburdened by epistemological scruples, found satisfaction in materialism’s strong drive toward a unified, closed world picture’ (General Theory of Knowledge: 326), but no longer pursues a substantial image of the world or a normatively contentful worldview. Rudolf Carnap two decades later argues similarly when he strictly distinguishes between the metaphysical claims of materialism and the logical and methodological properties of science:
From the logical viewpoint of construction theory, no objection can be made against scientific materialism. Its claim, namely, that all psychological (and other) objects are reducible to physical objects is justified. Construction theory and, more generally, (rational) science neither maintain nor deny the additional claim of metaphysical materialism that all psychological processes are essentially physical, and nothing but the physical exists.
(The Logical Structure of the World: 95)
Logical empiricism replaced substantial scientism that claimed to be able to construct a positive image of the world with a methodological scientism that focuses on the methods of science and makes its rationality the yardstick for an appropriate attitude to the world. Logical empiricism and subsequent analytic philosophy bridge the historical gap between nineteenth-century scientific materialism and the different variants of naturalist thought in contemporary philosophy."
-Kurt Bayertz, "Materialism", chapitre 31 in Michael N. Forster & Kristin Gjesdal (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford University Press, 2015.
