“One expression of the genius of Marx and Engels was that they despised pedantic playing with new words, erudite terms, and simple “isms”, and said simply and plainly: there is a materialist line and an idealist line in philosophy, and between them there are various shades of agnosticism.” V. I. Lenin
No doubt we would all agree with the sentiment: “There’s more to life than things.” Yet much of our lives seem to be spent in the acquisition, maintenance, and disposal of material goods. Certainly we cannot enjoy the basics of food, shelter, and clothing without a concern for things. The truly important things of life, however, are those which cannot be encountered by the physical senses, purchased with money, or placed on a shelf. When we take a look at what we value most in life, we generally find family, friends, health, peace, contentment, laughter, helping others, and communion with God foremost on our list of priorities.
We had come to believe that the material world was the only reality. Thus, feeling essentially lost, empty, and alone, we have continually attempted to find happiness through addition to external things, such as money, material possessions, relationships, work, fame, food or drugs. As we begin to remember our fundamental spiritual connection, we can look within for the source of our satisfaction, joy and fulfillment.
It is aptly said by Paramahansa Yogananda, “Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred. For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.”
Needless to say, materialism is the belief that matter is the only thing that exists and that all things can be reduced to matter. Therefore, materialism would state that all things in the universe, including mankind, are necessary restricted to operate within the bounds of physical laws. The human mind would cease to exist upon death because the physical brain ceases to function. Materialism would deny the continuation of the mind after death and would also deny any and all miracles.
Dr. Shariati, an Islamic intellectual, mentions the materialistic world view. As a philosophical school, it holds that there is only one fundamental reality in the universe and that is matter. It maintains that all the elements, phenomena, processes, actions and reactions in nature can be explained as manifestations of this primeval matter. Moreover, it denies any conscious intelligence and definite will of the universe. And it claims that neither the universe was created by any intelligent will or force, nor was there any reason underlying its creation in the very beginning. In this way, the universe is like an idiot-house owned by a mindless and senseless idiot in which a diversity of elements have crowded and blended together on the basis of their physical and chemical relations to make nothing. But amid these, man is the only unique element that has been able to reach the stage of self-awareness in this aimless, absurd and futile domain of nothingness.
Shariati opines that man’s alienation from the universe and his conflict with it often results from his conceiving it from the viewpoint of materialism. This type o f outlook will inevitably lead him to the rationale that he is not and cannot be compatible with this unconscious material system. This type of world view is called by Shariati “closed world view”. In such a limited, namely materialistic world view, man sees the world as insane and the sky to be devoid of any feeling, sense and divine power. He cannot find any meaning and purpose in existence, no inherent law and order in nature. So he does not seem to see any difference between an act of suicide and a feat of sacrifice, for he believes in the absence of any divined sponsoring power to meet out reward and punishment.
Contrary to materialism, immaterialism states that matter does not exist; there is no objective material world beneath or beyond our sensory experience. Because it has no objective reality, the world as we experience it may simply be a dream or illusion.
Based on immateriality, human beings have an immortal, immaterial soul and a body. The body is a tomb or prison of the soul. Bodily passions disturb the soul and reduce the clarity of its spiritual vision. The philosopher uses spiritual practices to deny the body and subdue its passions; death is welcome because it releases the soul. In the most radical forms of immaterialism, a person may be a monad, a disembodied soul outside of time and space, dreaming it is embodied in a material world.
Moreover, in the philosophy of mind, idealism is the opposite of materialism. Idealism and materialism are both theories of monism as opposed to dualism and pluralism. Idealism sometimes refers to a tradition in thought that represents things of a perfect form, as in the fields of ethics, morality, aesthetics, and value. In this way, it represents a human perfect being or circumstance.
Probably the most popular form of idealism is "free will"--the idea that individuals can do anything they set their mind too. For example, the view that "you can beat poverty if you really try hard" implicitly accepts the idea of free will. Poverty, in this view, is not a social phenomenon caused by, for example, a plant closing or a chronic illness in the family. Rather, poverty is some kind of personal choice.
Wendell Berry states his wishes as, “My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”