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Essay on Materialism

Materialism refers to a collection of personality traits. The contemporary world is full of people who possess materialistic trait. They have a belief that owning and acquisition of the right properties is the vital ingredients of happiness. These people think that success is judged by the things individual possesses. Philosophers and theologians have been complaining for long that materialism is contrary to moral life. More often the goal of gaining material wealth is regarded as empty and in result it prevents a person from being involved in a normal life. The consequences of pursuing materialistic lifestyle are the inability to reach the state of happiness in one’s life. The empirical studies, carried out to find the correlation between happiness and materialism , have confirmed negative correlation between the two.

Being materialistic is bad, as it leads to the creation of the world of difference in the way people treat other human beings. The materialistic people hardly treat others as their equals and often go extra mile to show off their wealth . They hardly care about anyone but themselves and frequently tend to exploit and trample people through the process of a dog eat dog world. It is, therefore, important for people to follow the teachings of the Bible and become moral. The little things we possess, we need to share with the poor as this will ensure equality in the society. Materialism nurtures corruption and causes the society to be impoverished.

Materialistic people use every available means to ensure that the rest of the people in the society remain poor. The aspect of materialism is more pronounced in the third world countries, where leaders are driven by greed and in the process embezzle public funds to maintain their status.

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13.7 Cosmos & Culture

Mind, matter and materialism.

Science and philosophy have a long, complicated history.

Both are human endeavors aimed at articulating the nature of the world. But where the line between them lies depends a lot on perspective and history. Questions that once lay firmly in philosophy's domain have now fully entered the realm of science. Other issues which might seem fully covered by science retain open philosophical questions that either haunt or inform ongoing research (depending on one's viewpoint).

One of the persistent fields where philosophy retains its purchase on science is the question of consciousness. What is it? What does it depend on? What, if anything, is it reducible to? These are long-standing questions that often elicit fierce partisan responses. That partisanship was, in part, why I recently wrote an essay concerning the question of mind, matter and the perspective known as materialism. The piece appeared two weeks ago in Aeon . I'm following up, now, on some responses that essay engendered.

Materialism is the idea that all phenomena in the world are ultimately reducible to the behavior of matter. In popular discussions of consciousness, materialists often take what I call the "attitude of the sober." Mind is just computing with meat, they claim, and arguing otherwise means sliding into the domains of the wooly-headed mystic, drunk on supernatural "woo."

The point of my essay is straightforward. If one wants to claim that mind rests on matter, this must include admitting just how murky our understanding of matter is at the deepest levels. The murk at those deepest levels is the multiple interpretations of quantum physics. We do not yet have an agreed upon interpretation of quantum physics. That means we do not yet have an agreed upon understanding of what is matter and our relation to it.

Just as important, pretty much all those interpretations come with some strange ontological and epistemological baggage. Thus, each interpretation comes with its weirdness, its own departure from simple common sense ideas about reality.

Materialism's claim that it alone is the obvious, the straightforward, and the sober explanation of consciousness loses a lot of its wind from this standpoint. Why is a non-reductionist, non-materialist account for consciousness considered "crazy " but an infinite number of infinitely splitting parallel universes (part of the materialist-favored Many Worlds interpretation ) considered sober, hard-nosed science? If you want to see the argument laid out explicitly I refer you back to the original article in Aeon.

As you might imagine, there have been swift and strong reactions on all sides of the debate. And, as always, I want to say that I am really thankful for good criticism when I write a piece like this since it helps me refine my own thinking.

For example, some people countered it might be possible to explain mind in terms of matter without ever invoking the weirdness of quantum mechanics. In other words, perhaps one only needs classical Newtonian physics to explain how consciousness arises via complex information processing systems. This seems to be a point the very capable philosopher of science Massimo Pigliucci made when he said mind is a biological phenomena.

In principle, I don't have a problem with this possibility. That's because I remain agnostic as to the true nature of consciousness. It is, in fact, possible that only the "higher level" classical behavior of matter is needed to explain consciousness. On the other hand, this point has yet to be demonstrated scientifically. The trouble comes when materialists claim the reduction of consciousness to matter is "what science says." Nobody needs me to point out that the relationship between mind and matter (i.e. mind and brain) remains a cutting edge and contentious topic in philosophy and science. That means you can't just state that mind is purely a biological phenomena as if it were a scientific fact. In fact, that statement is a really a metaphysical stance. It's an assumption. It's the beginning of the argument, not the end. That's why I raised the now super-famous " Hard Problem " of consciousness. People have been arguing about it first since David Chalmers introduced it a couple of decades ago and its resolution has yet to be achieved.

Also, the logical link I draw between theories of mind and theories of matter does not rely on quantum physics as an explanation for consciousness. Some folks like Rodger Penrose have argued that quantum phenomena occurring in the brain are the root of conscious experience. I am not particularly taken by these arguments (but see this for new ideas along these lines). Instead, I point out that the irreducible democracy of quantum interpretations leaves the role of agency (i.e. the observing subject) as an open issue of contention.

Any explanation of mind is an account of "being a subject." That means quantum interpretations where the epistemological aspect of quantum physics comes to the fore make simple materialist views of consciousness a whole lot less simple. Why? Well, it's simple. If your theory of being-a-subject (i.e. consciousness) relies solely on matter, but your theory of matter can't get rid of the subject's being, then you're walking on swampy ground.

The point here is that there is an entire class of quantum interpretations that take agency very seriously. In fact, the most potent developments in quantum mechanics over the last few years come in the form of Quantum Information Theory where knowledge and knowing matter. Some of the most remarkable advances in this field like the process of weak measurement , which brings the role of the agent (the experimenter) front and center.

This doesn't mean that the Copenhagen or QBist or any other "epistemological" interpretation is correct and the Many Worlds interpretation is wrong. What it does mean, however, is anyone who grounds their metaphysics on matter needs to be honest about how swampy that ground really is.

Of course, some folks claim I am straying into religious sentiment by merely raising the point. As University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne put it in a blog post : "What Frank is making here is simply a sophisticated God of the Gaps argument, except that he uses the word 'something more than materialism' rather than 'God.'

The irony is that, like Coyne, I am an atheist. I am a naturalist believing that no aspect of the world requires supernatural intervention. But Coyne's reaction demonstrates the approach I was articulating and pushing back against:

"As I said, I'm not a physicist, so some of Frank's musings are beyond my ability to judge. But I've heard plenty of respected physicists — most recently Lawrence Krauss in his new book — argue that the so-called 'observer effect' isn't what we think it is, and isn't itself part of the laws of physics."

Lawrence Krauss is a excellent cosmologist who has done really good work. But Coyne mistakes an opinion for a scientific fact — he cites someone with his same metaphysical biases. None of us know which quantum interpretation is the correct, scientifically valid one. It's been that way for 100 years now — and that's my whole point.

Many highly respected physicists working at the frontiers of the field do wonder about the observing subject's role: Anton Zellinger , David Mermin , Carl Caves , Joe Eberly , Andrew Jordan , Chris Fuchs .

It's important to realize that even the interpretations you don't like are interesting in their own right. I am not a huge fan of the Many Worlds interpretation but I still find it fascinating and elegant in its way. And, at some point, someone might find experimental proof that it's true (which might happened for any of the interpretations).

So, in the end, it's all about being upfront about our metaphysical biases and their limits. As philosopher Roberto Unger and physicist Lee Smolin put it, our job in thinking about the world is to "distinguish what science has actually found out about the world from the metaphysical commitments for which the findings of science are often mistaken."

Metaphysical commitments are fine. We all have them. But when it comes to quantum physics and what it tell us about matter and materialism, we must work hard to distinguish what's solid ground and what is swamp.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

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Real Materialism and Other Essays

Galen Strawson, Real Materialism and Other Essays , Oxford UP, 2008, 478pp., $50.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199267439.

Reviewed by Andrew Melnyk, University of Missouri

Nineteen previously published papers, with an introduction, make up Galen Strawson’s latest book; nearly all of them have been revised for republication only lightly or not at all. They address an impressively broad range of philosophical topics: the place of mind in the physical world, knowledge of the world in itself, color and color vocabulary, self-consciousness, conscious experiences, conceptions of oneself, intentionality in relation to conscious experience, freewill, causation, and Hume on causation. The papers are not all parts of a grand philosophical design, though they are thematically related to one another in various ways. The most important connecting thread is Strawson’s endorsement of what he calls realistic materialism , which, despite its name, actually denies the conventional materialism or physicalism that is widely, though by no means universally, assumed in current philosophy of mind. Perhaps half the book either defends realistic materialism or addresses issues in the philosophy of mind within the framework that it provides. The main appeal of the book, in my view, lies in the lively and undoubtedly intelligent contrarianism of its author, who provides abundant challenges to widely-held views, especially in the philosophy of mind, and in his large philosophical ambitions. He seems to me, for instance, to want to re-make contemporary philosophy of mind from scratch.

Alas, I have significant general misgivings about the book. There is needless repetition both within and across papers, even while key positions and moves are never made really clear. The book is bloated with material that should have been eliminated or ruthlessly condensed, but which was apparently included on the principle that no thought should ever go to waste. Relevant contemporary literature — I noticed this especially in the papers in the philosophy of mind — is either ignored or discussed in such general terms that it might as well have been ignored (e.g., Joe Levine’s work, the literature on representationalism, or Ruth Millikan’s work on intentionality). Rarely does the book engage in detail with the arguments of individual opponents, opponents being more likely to make an appearance, and to be dispatched, collectively. There is nothing like enough careful argumentation; indeed, Strawson’s official line is that tight arguments are over-rated (3). There is, however, a good amount of very feeble argumentation. One example: in “Real Intentionality: Why Intentionality Entails Consciousness”, Strawson objects to the view that “we need a survival-and-well-being-based normative notion of function in order to make sense of the notion of misrepresentation” as follows:

This cannot be right, for there is … no incoherence in the idea of a Pure Observer who can represent and misrepresent, and know it, in a way completely unconnected with any such notion of function. (288; emphasis in original)

As it stands, however, Strawson’s objection fails — and for a familiar reason. By saying that there is “no incoherence in the idea of a Pure Observer”, Strawson clearly means that his Pure Observer is conceivable in the sense of violating no a priori semantic constraints on the concept of representation. Those who advance the view targeted by Strawson’s objection (e.g., Millikan), however, explicitly present their view not as an analysis of the concept of representation that can be evaluated a priori by appeal to what is conceivable but instead as an a posteriori identity hypothesis as to what representation turns out to be . Indeed, they mustn’t present their view of representation as a conceptual analysis, for, given their view of what representation is, representations in general, and hence concepts, and hence the concept of representation in particular don’t have semantic analyses. The passage in which this unsuccessful objection occurs is not the only occasion on which Strawson makes what, in the current state of debate, will strike many as a very naïve use of the method of possible cases.

Despite these defects, the book still contains some very good material. I was fully persuaded, for example, by the paper arguing that Hume never held a regularity theory of causation (“David Hume: Objects and Power”), and I much enjoyed “The Impossibility of Ultimate Moral Responsibility”, as well as the acute discussion (in “Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism”) of whether it matters if determinism is true.

I was much less impressed with the work in the philosophy of mind, partly because it operates within the framework of Strawson’s realistic materialism, which I find to be an unsatisfactory basis for a philosophical research program — for reasons that I will now explain. Realistic materialism is presented in the first two papers of the book, the title essay “Real Materialism” and “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism”, and is a view of the place of the qualitative character of experiences in the wider world. 1 As I understand it, it comprises five claims:

1) Experiential phenomena are perfectly real.

2) Experiential phenomena are such that:

(i) they’re “part of fundamental reality” (35);

(ii) we know them to exist with certainty (23);

(iii) in having experience, “we are directly acquainted with certain features of the ultimate nature of reality” (25, 41);

(iv) “the having [of them] is the knowing” (25);

(v) “we can’t be radically in error about [their] nature” (55, note 7).

3) Not “all aspects” of experiential phenomena “can be described by current physics, or some non-revolutionary extension of it” (22).

4) Still, experiential phenomena are “physical in every respect” (23, 35, 37).

How can claim 4 and claim 3 be consistent? According to Strawson, we need (a) to distinguish between structural physical features and intrinsic physical features and (b) to adopt the epistemologically structuralist view that physics only gives us knowledge of the world’s structural features. Given (a) and (b), claim 3 is true if the qualitative character of an experience is not a structural physical feature of the world. Claim 4 can be true too, however, if, as Strawson holds:

5) The qualitative character of an experience is an intrinsic physical feature of the event of neurons firing (22, 37).

Real materialism, I should note, is not a novel position; as Strawson acknowledges, it is essentially the position proposed by Grover Maxwell in 1978 (51, note 126). Both are inspired by Russell, of course.

Claim 3 is a very strong claim, entailing the falsehood of every kind of conventional (non-eliminative) physicalism about experiential phenomena. Why should we accept claim 3, according to Strawson? Why, for example, should we disbelieve the type-identity view that phenomenal properties form a proper subset of neurophysiological properties? One might have expected Strawson to endorse familiar arguments for property dualism, e.g., Jackson’s knowledge argument or Kripke’s appeal to the necessity of identity, since, though they don’t establish that the qualitative characters of experience fail to be intrinsic physical features, they do (if successful) establish that they fail to be structural physical features. In fact, however, he doesn’t endorse these arguments, at least explicitly. 2 His official argument for claim 3 is that its negation amounts to eliminativism about experiential phenomena, which “is mad” (22). 3 That the negation of claim 3 amounts to eliminativism is said to follow “from the fact that current physics contains no predicates for experiential phenomena at all, and that no non-revolutionary extension of it could do so” (22, note 17; 56, note 9). Unfortunately, Strawson doesn’t here say how he knows this putative fact. In particular, he doesn’t say why he feels entitled to rule out the possibility that, exactly as type-identity physicalists suppose, certain immensely complex predicates from current physics in fact pick out the qualitative characters of experiential phenomena, even though this can’t be discovered a priori . 4 I conjecture, however, that one way he thinks he can rule out this possibility is by attending introspectively to his own experience (54-55, note 6). For, in his Introduction, he characterizes phenomenal properties as "properties whose whole and essential nature can be and is fully revealed in sensory experience " (12; my emphases). If this characterization of phenomenal properties is correct, then no phenomenal property can be such that some scientific term or concept picks out that very property in a way that represents more of the property’s essential nature, e.g., its internal structure, than is represented when we are directly acquainted with that property in experience. 5 But a complex predicate from current physics that picked out a phenomenal property would represent a great deal of the property’s internal structure that goes unrepresented when we are acquainted with that property in experience. So no complex predicate from current physics can pick out a phenomenal property.

Presumably, Strawson means the first premise of this argument — that phenomenal properties are “properties whose whole and essential nature can be and is fully revealed in sensory experience” — to follow somehow from claim 2. However, he gives no reason, at least that I could find, for believing claim 2. Nevertheless we do need a reason; claim 2 is not forced upon us as claim 1 is. For even if, as Strawson holds, introspection assures us that experiential phenomena exist and hence that claim 1 is true, claim 2 goes much further: it purports to describe experiential phenomena in philosophically sophisticated metaphysical and epistemological terms. Since introspection has evolved by natural selection, as Strawson would allow, it’s unlikely to be capable of informing us directly of claim 2 — or indeed of any claim of comparable philosophical theoreticity. Perhaps claim 2 can be inferred from weaker claims about experience more plausibly regarded as direct deliverances of introspection; if so, however, this will need to be shown. The same points apply, of course, if claim 2 is expanded to include the claim that phenomenal properties are “properties whose whole and essential nature can be and is fully revealed in sensory experience”.

Philosophers who accept claims 1, 2, and 3 usually go on to endorse some sort of dualism, of course, treating the qualitative character of an experience as something entirely non-physical, as something not even supervening on or realized by the physical, but not Strawson. Instead, in claim 5, he treats the qualitative character of an experience as an intrinsic physical feature of a neural event. On what grounds? One rationale for claim 5 is that, given claim 1, it follows, more or less, from claims 3 and 4 (see 71). I have already discussed support for claim 3. What about claim 4? Much empirical evidence exists for claim 4, in my view, but it’s evidence that experiential phenomena are structural physical phenomena, something that claim 3 actually contradicts. I know of no evidence that experiential phenomena are intrinsic physical phenomena (given Strawson’s assumption of epistemological structuralism about physics). So supporting claim 4 is problematic for a realistic materialist. Strawson’s endorsement of claim 4 seems in fact to rest on his attraction to a unified view of the world, the idea presumably being that, given claim 4, all features of the world are unified in being physical, whether structural-physical or intrinsic-physical (51). Nevertheless Strawson insists that we have no grasp of “the essential nature of the physical”, so he can’t substantiate the idea that the intrinsic features of the world that are the qualitative characters of experiences share a genuine physicality with the structural features of the world that physics reveals (46). This first rationale for claim 5 therefore fails.

A second rationale for claim 5 appeals to ontological economy (50, 59, 66). I think it can be reconstructed as follows:

Structural physical features exist, but structural physical features can’t exist unless intrinsic physical features do too, so intrinsic physical features exist. The qualitative characters of experiences exist also, but, according to claim 3, they aren’t structural physical features. So either they’re identical with intrinsic physical features, as claim 5 says, or they’re entirely non-physical features. The former option — claim 5 — is more economical, and hence, other things being equal, to be preferred.

Strawson doesn’t argue that other things are in fact equal. Are they? I don’t know, though the answer would turn in part on the relative abilities of realistic materialism and its best dualist rival to explain puzzling features of the mind. I also note that this rationale for claim 5 uses the recently-contested premise that structural physical features require intrinsic physical features, i.e., that the physical world couldn’t be purely structural. 6

The points made in the preceding paragraphs only partly explain why I’m not at all drawn to realistic materialism. There’s also the point that realistic materialism raises at least two inter-related questions to which, in its present form, it offers no answers. (i) According to Strawson, realistic materialism entails micropsychism , the view that “at least some ultimates are intrinsically experience-involving”, which he takes to imply that each ultimate involves a distinct subject of experience (71). Since human subjects of experience are not ultimates, and hence not the subjects of experience involved in ultimates, there must be some way in which the latter combine to form human subjects of experience. But how? Strawson raises this question himself, but he doesn’t try to answer it (72). This omission is serious, for so long as the question goes unanswered, realistic materialism hasn’t actually told us what my, or your, or any human subject’s experiencing of red is. Also, an answer to this question seems necessary for an answer to the second question. (ii) Realistic materialism, when joined with epistemological structuralism about physics, entails that we, i.e., human subjects of experience, can only know about the world’s structural features — except when we attend introspectively to the qualitative characters of our own experiences and thereby acquire knowledge of the intrinsic features of certain neural events in our own brains. But how is this supposed to work? Why does the epistemic handicap we labor under when we enquire scientifically disappear when instead we attend introspectively to our own experiences? What is it about introspection that gives it access to the intrinsic features of certain of our brain events? And why are the intrinsic features of only some, but not all, of our brain events accessible to introspection? These questions are not touched by realistic materialism in its present form.

A recurring theme in Strawson’s discussion of realistic materialism is that (i) we have no conception of what it is to be physical on the basis of which we might form any rational expectation at all that the mental couldn’t be physical and (ii) this point, though clearly appreciated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has been missed by contemporary students of the mind-body problem (e.g., 20, 38-40, 54). I entirely agree that we have no conception of physicality, if physicality is construed in Strawsonian fashion as a genuine property, a genuine meta-property, in fact, that is possessed by all physical properties (20). Nevertheless I strongly doubt that any student of the mind-body problem in the second half of the twentieth century has ever thought that we do have such a conception — a break with the past perhaps reflected in the terminological shift, to which Strawson attaches no importance, from “materialism” (and “matter”) to “physicalism”. Recent students formulate the mind-body problem in a way that doesn’t require a conception of physicality as a meta-property. They can do so because, unlike philosophers of earlier generations, they are able to draw upon the concrete achievements of the various branches of science over the past hundred years. Thus, pace Strawson, the mind-body problem today — our mind-body problem — is to understand how our everyday descriptions of ourselves as thinkers, feelers, and reasoners fits together with the extraordinarily rich scientific descriptions of ourselves provided by cognitive neuroscience, molecular biology, biochemistry, and, yes, even fundamental physics (54). Of course, these scientific descriptions probably don’t represent the last word, but so what? They don’t need to in order for the mind-body problem to be worth addressing. It’s interesting, at least to many of us, to contemplate our best scientific guesses as to the nature of the world and then speculate on how they hang together. Any detailed solution to the mind-body problem that we produce will naturally inherit the provisional and tentative character of the scientific descriptions with which the problem was formulated, but if scientists can tolerate fallibility, why not philosophers too?

1 And hence a view about intentional states, since Strawson holds that intentional states are experiential states.

2 He does give an argument that differs only terminologically from Joe Levine’s well known Explanatory Gap argument (63).

3 In his Introduction, Strawson compares deniers of phenomenal consciousness to psychiatric patients (6; and see note 31)!

4 On 54, note 3, he cites an argument from his own earlier work, but I won’t discuss it here.

5 Compare “element having atomic number 79” with “gold”, “NaCl” with “salt”, and so on.

6 See chs. 2 and 3 of James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Department of Philosophy

The waning of materialism: new essays on the mind-body problem.

Twenty-three philosophers examine the doctrine of materialism find it wanting. The case against materialism comprises arguments from conscious experience, from the unity and identity of the person, from intentionality, mental causation, and knowledge. The contributors include leaders in the fields of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, who respond ably to the most recent versions and defenses of materialism. The modal arguments of Kripke and Chalmers, Jackson's knowledge argument, Kim's exclusion problem, and Burge's anti-individualism all play a part in the building of a powerful cumulative case against the materialist research program. Several papers address the implications of contemporary brain and cognitive research (the psychophysics of color perception, blindsight, and the effects of commissurotomies), adding a posteriori arguments to the classical a priori critique of reductionism. All of the current versions of materialism--reductive and non-reductive, functionalist, eliminativist, and new wave materialism--come under sustained and trenchant attack. In addition, a wide variety of alternatives to the materialist conception of the person receive new and illuminating attention, including anti-materialist versions of naturalism, property dualism, Aristotelian and Thomistic hylomorphism, and non-Cartesian accounts of substance dualism.

There’s no shame in being materialistic – it could benefit society

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Materialism gets a bad press. There is an assumption that people who prioritise “things” are inherently selfish. The stereotype is that of highly materialistic people, living in a different world, where their priority is cash, possessions and status. But is the stereotype true? Our research reveals there are two sides to this story.

Highly materialistic people believe that owning and buying things are necessary means to achieve important life goals, such as happiness, success and desirability. However, in their quest to own more, they often sideline other important goals. Research shows that highly materialistic people tend to care less about the environment and other people than “non-materialists” do. These findings lead to the assumption that highly materialistic people are largely selfish and prefer to build meaningful relationships with “stuff”, as opposed to people.

But other research shows that materialism is a natural part of being human and that people develop materialistic tendencies as an adaptive response to cope with situations that make them feel anxious and insecure, such as a difficult family relationship or even our natural fear of death .

Underlying desires

Materialism is not only found in particularly materialistic people. Even referring to people as “consumers” , as opposed to using other generic terms such as citizens, can temporarily activate a materialistic mindset. As materialism researchers James Burroughs and Aric Rindfleisch said:

Telling people to be less materialistic is like telling people that they shouldn’t enjoy sex or eat fatty foods. People can learn to control their impulses, but this does not remove the underlying desires.

As such, efforts directed towards eliminating materialism (taxing or banning advertising activities ) are unlikely to be effective. These anti-materialism views also limit business activities and places considerable tension between business and policy.

The caring materialists

Our research examined how materialism is perceived across cultures and it revealed that there is more to materialism than just self-gratification. In Asia, materialism is an important part of the “collectivistic” culture (where the emphasis is on relationships with others, in particular the groups a person belongs to).

Buying aspirational brands of goods and services is a common approach in the gift-giving traditions in East Asia. Across collectivistic communities, purchasing things that mirror the identity and style of people you regard as important can also help you to conform to social expectations that in turn blanket you with a sense of belonging. These behaviours are not unique to Asian societies. It’s just that the idea of materialism in the West is more often seen in sharp contrast to community values, rather than a part of it.

We also found that materialists in general are “meaning-seekers” rather than status seekers. They believe in the symbolic and signalling powers of products, brands and price tags. Materialists who also believe in community values use these cues to shed positive light onto themselves and others they care about, to meet social expectations, demonstrate belonging and even to fulfil their perceived social responsibilities. For example, people often flaunt their green and eco-friendly purchases of Tom’s shoes and Tesla cars in public to signal desirable qualities of altruism and social concern.

Reconciling material and collective interests

So how do we get an increasingly materialistic society to care more about the greater good (such as buying more ethically-sourced products or making more charity donations) and be less conspicuous and wasteful in its consumption? The answer is to look to our culture and what sort of collectivistic values it tries to teach us.

We found that a simple reminder of the community value that resonates with who we are as a society can help reduce materialistic tendencies. That said, the Asian and Western cultures tend to teach slightly different ideals of community value. Asian communities tend to pass on values that centre around interpersonal relationships (such as family duties). Western societies tend to pass on values that are abstract and spiritual (such as kindness, equality and social justice).

Unsurprisingly, many businesses have been quick to jump onto this bandwagon. Tear-jerking commercials from Thailand reminding people to buy insurance to protect loved ones, Christmas adverts reminding viewers to be kind to one another are just two examples. But nice commercials alone won’t be enough to do the job.

Social marketers and public policymakers should tap into society’s materialistic tendencies to promote well-meaning social programmes, such as refugee settlement, financial literacy programmes and food bank donations. The key is to promote these programmes in ways that materialists can engage with – through a public display of consumption that communicates social identity.

A perfect example is the Choose Love charity pop-up store in central London, where people get to purchase real products (blankets, children’s clothing, sleeping bags, sanitary pads) in a beautifully designed retail space akin to the Apple store, which are then distributed to refugees in Greece, Iraq and Syria.

Materialism undoubtedly has an ugly face but it is here to stay. Rather than focusing efforts to diminish it, individual consumers, businesses and policymakers should focus on using it for promoting collective interests that benefit wider society.

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87 Materialism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

🏆 best materialism topic ideas & essay examples, 📝 simple & easy materialism essay titles, 👍 good essay topics on materialism, ❓ questions about materialism.

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9 New Materialisms

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Colleen Taylor, 9 New Materialisms, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory , Volume 31, Issue 1, 2023, Pages 152–173, https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad009

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The works reviewed in this year’s essay on New Materialisms raise queries about first-wave New Materialism and signal what some critics refer to as second-phase Neo-materialism. The ‘Neo’ or New Materialisms of 2022 increasingly commingle the rhetorical and the material and address the Western-centric focus of previous New Materialisms. The works reviewed here, including Rosi Braidotti’s ‘The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach’, Anne Elvey’s Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics , Nina Lykke’s Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning , and Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change a New Materialist Cosmotheology , engage new intersections between New Materialist theory and decoloniality, making deliberate gestures to integrate the idea of vibrant materiality and Indigenous cultures. This review essay is divided into five parts: 1. Introduction; 2. Neo-Materialism; 3. Literary Studies; 4. Theology; 5. Postcolonialism/Decoloniality. The essay concludes that New Materialism may indeed be on the brink of a second phase, especially if decolonial New Materialism continues to be explored.

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Maurizio Cattelan Turned a Banana Into Art. Next Up: Guns

As his bullet-riddled panels go up at Gagosian, the artist, in a rare in-person interview, tells why he turned his sardonic gaze on a violence-filled world.

By Laura Rysman

Reporting from Milan

“You should never ask an artist about their art,” Maurizio Cattelan said, immediately on arrival. “The best art raises lots and lots of questions,” he added. “Not answers.”

One of today’s foremost artists, with a reputation that pervades well beyond the art world, Cattelan, 63, has a new bullet-riddled exhibition in New York that is bound to raise even more questions — and some eyebrows.

He grants vanishingly few in-person interviews, he prefers image-making to explaining his images in words, and he’s skittish about journalists mischaracterizing him. Yet he arrived early for our appointed meeting, parking his bicycle by the bench where, on the first hot spring day in Milan, we sat in the shade of a monastery. With his trademark swoosh of silver hair and his feet up on the bench like a schoolchild, he spoke eagerly in Italian about his first major New York exhibition since his pivotal retrospective, “All,” at the Guggenheim in 2011, in which nearly his entire oeuvre was suspended like a mobile.

“I hate,” he declared, “when they call me a joker.” The artist, who notoriously created an effigy of a pope toppled by a meteorite, made a fully-functioning solid gold toilet that he named “America,” and blew the world’s collective mind when he taped a banana to the wall and sold it as art, has continually garnered variations of the joker title — jester, prankster, trickster — but his is the cosmic joke, the joke of the Stoic philosophers: death, and our illusions of self-importance before oblivion comes for us, and for him.

If Cattelan’s work is no laughing matter, it is undeniably button-pushing, and for his Gagosian show opening April 30, he turns his sardonic gaze on the unsettling subject of gun violence. His new works are pierced by bullets — steel panels plated in 24-karat gold to a mirrorlike reflection, their ammunition wounds warping the metal surfaces.

“Beauty, luxury, and violence,” as Cattelan described them — monuments to murder, though not his first effort. The artist previously collected sacks of detritus from a deadly 1993 Mafia bombing in Milan as a memorial, presented marble statues portraying sheet-covered corpses, and depicted 9/11 with a monolithic tower pierced by a plane, watched over by thousands of taxidermied pigeons haunting the site.

The shot-up panels, 64 in all and entitled “Sunday,” weigh about 80 pounds each and stretch almost 54 inches high — about the size of a 10-year-old child. Cattelan compared the assemblage, mounted together on a single wall, to the execution wall of a firing squad.

“When I read the front page of the newspapers, all they talk about is violence,” he said. “I’m completely immersed in violence.”

“We,” he went on, pointing a finger at himself, at me, at everyone sunning themselves in the monastery’s park, “we, we, we are completely immersed in violence every day, and we’ve gotten used to it. The repetition has made us accept violence as inevitable.”

Suddenly, a dense flock of pigeons whooshed threateningly close to his head — retaliation for their taxidermied brethren? — as Cattelan paused to deflect their path with his hands in the air.

He recounted an impossibly risky work he had long wished to make: a bulletproof glass wall with a gallery audience on one side, and a shooter firing a gun at them from the opposite side — a bit too terrifying even for an art world familiar with Chris Burden’s 1971 performance, in which he had himself shot (non-lethally) in a gallery — a work Cattelan cited as an influence.

With the “Sunday” panels, the audience participates instead in the aftermath of a shooting, seeing their own reflections riddled with bullet holes, with the seductive beauty of gold’s glimmer — and with competing implications of both an indictment and a glorification of violence.

“Gold and guns,” Cattelan said, “are the American dream.” The message: Violence — not fictional movie violence but the all-too-real barbarity of mass shootings, murders and wars — is now part of pop culture.

Cattelan has experimented with gunshots before, shooting up American and British flags, or rather, having them shot. The artist, who is based in Milan and New York, maintains no studio, much less a shooting range, and his works are almost always fabricated by others. With “Sunday,” Cattelan sought to universalize the symbol of violence, dropping the nationalistic imagery of flags and leaving “just the shootings.”

He has created what he calls his first abstract works — with overtones of Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases from the postwar era. The pistols, shotguns and semiautomatic weapons, he said, were “used like chisels” to carve through metal. He hired shooters at a New York City range to fire upon the panels with weapons that were easily and legally sourced thanks to America’s lax gun restrictions. “Where else in the world could you do that?” he asked with a wry laugh. (Milan, by contrast, would not even allow a poster by Cattelan depicting a gun to appear on city streets, saying it violated decency laws.)

At Gagosian, in front of the golden execution wall, Cattelan is installing another work, his first-ever fountain. Carved in marble, it depicts a supine, down-and-out man holding his exposed phallus, which spurts water. “There’s a dialogue between these two works, in their opposition and their proximity,” the artist said. The figure, modeled on a close friend and collaborator who died, evokes “the swaths of people who are invisible in society,” Cattelan added. The man is the type of discarded figure that visitors to the New York show will likely pass, and avoid, on their way to Gagosian.

“They’re works that take on a different weight being shown in New York,” the show’s curator, Francesco Bonami, commented by phone. “Maurizio is a political artist — not political in the sense that he’s presenting a position, but political in that he deals with society’s problems and current events, and he always touches a raw nerve.” He added, “We’ll see how Americans take to this show.”

The opening comes after Tennessee lawmakers passed a bill that would permit some school staff to carry concealed handguns , but as Cattelan commented, “Every moment seems like the right moment to talk about violence, because every day there’s more news about violence in the papers.”

In the monastery park, Cattelan critiqued modern materialism: “Today, sacrament has been replaced by shopping,” he said, contending that there’s greater happiness to be found in a spartan life. (He rides his bike everywhere, and takes his near-daily swims in a municipal pool.) But he isn’t afraid to play both sides. This show represents the first time he’s agreed to collaborate with the mega-gallery owned by Larry Gagosian — the dealer who has referred to art as “money on the walls,” and is probably the man most responsible for transforming the art world into the art market. But, as Bonami pointed out, who else could sponsor the production of a colossal wall of gold shootings?

Cattelan, saying the moment had arrived for a collaboration he had long evaded, noted: “I’m doing a project with Larry Gagosian but I haven’t signed anything,” and “I’m a free agent.” His previous New York gallery show, in 2000, was at the influential but less blue-chip Marian Goodman Gallery.

Gagosian gallery declined requests for information about the works’ fabrication cost or their selling price, but every piece in the show will be available for purchase. The gallery said prices will be made available upon the show’s opening.

Cattelan’s work hit its auction high price in May 2016 when “Him,” an infamous wax and resin sculpture of Hitler on his knees, sold at Sotheby’s for $17.2 million, or about $22 million today.

Gazing at the park’s Judas trees and their April magenta blossoms, Cattelan mused about his role in the Vatican pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, at the Giudecca women’s prison, where an outer wall is completely covered by his giant image of cadaverous-looking feet.

His formative childhood in the small northern city of Padua was steeped in Catholicism and provincial working-class culture, and despite his international acclaim, he still sees himself as the guy who worked as a hospital janitor and a morgue assistant.

“I grew up within working-class culture, and I’m not ashamed to be a part of it,” Cattelan said, adding “although someone pointed out that I may be dissociating from my status today.” He explained that his instantly recognizable references — from pigeons to Pinocchio, from toilets to Hitler — make works intelligible “to nonexperts as much as to experts.”

“My main audience is not the art world,” he continued. “It’s people who might not be educated in what art is supposed to be, but who relate to the work.”

Roberta Tenconi, who curated the artist’s 2021-22 exhibition at Hangar Bicocca , in Milan, with Vicente Todolí, said that “the power of Maurizio’s work is in layering familiar images to create something that resonates in a multitude of ways.” She added, “Nothing is ever singular or simple. And Maurizio loves to make people uncomfortable.”

Cattelan remarked, “The more you’re able to synthesize contrasting elements and to strip away any frills, the closer you get to something that functions like a symbol” — to create, essentially, indelible images that offer endless interpretations.

To wit: the banana, titled “Comedian,” from 2019, a phenomenon that was featured in seven articles in The New York Times alone, and on the cover of The New York Post. The banana prompted fascination and outrage, post-Duchamp discourse and art-world-gone-mad furor, as well as a head-spinning cycle of memes. At the time, Cattelan told me: “Try to think about Napoleon without his horse — it’s impossible! Now try to think about pop culture without the banana” — the banana of Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground, the banana peel of slapstick, the proverbial banana in your pocket, as he said.

But today he brushes off the craze as “just a viral moment,” he said. “Even if people know the banana, nobody knows who I am as an artist.”

Or so he would like to believe. Only a few minutes later, a ponytailed young man walking through the park interrupted us to request a selfie with him.

“People know you,” I pointed out. Had he imagined becoming an artist while growing up in Padua? A forlorn headshake. “The only thing I ever really dreamed of was independence,” he said, pushing his shirt sleeves to his elbows as he stood up. “The rest is fuffa ” — in other words, baloney. And he rode away on his bicycle, leaving me there with a lot more questions.

Maurizio Cattelan: Sunday

Opening April 30 through June 15, Gagosian gallery, 522 West 21st Street, (212) 741 1717; gagosian.com .

Laura Rysman is a Florence-based contributor to The Times. She also writes for Monocle and Konfekt. A longtime resident of Italy, she reports on fashion, art, and travel in the country. More about Laura Rysman

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of The Africa Center , will leave at the end of 2024 after guiding it through the pandemic and securing funds.

Renaissance portraits go undercover in the new Metropolitan Museum show  “Hidden Faces,” about the practice of concealing artworks behind sliding panels and reverse-side paintings.

Donna Dennis is a trailblazer of the architectural sculpture movement, and her diaries rival Frida Kahlo’s. Are we ready for the unsettling clarity of the godmother  of installation art?

The Rubin will be “reimagined” as a global museum , but our critic says its charismatic presence will be only a troubling memory.

How do you make an artwork sing? Let your unconscious mind do it . That’s the message of an alluring show at the Japan Society.

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in April .

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