Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.
Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.
Science, it is said, no doubt has ameliorated the material conditions of human life, but is powerless to solve those moral and philosophical questions that interest cultured people so deeply.
We are such materialists that all our metaphors are going to be material.
To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.
Humanism: an exaltation of freedom, but one limited by our need to exercise it as an integral part of nature and society.
I've never been a materialist; I've never been somebody who believes in only what we can see and measure. I continue to be a student of religious philosophy, and I continue to take those ideas very seriously.
Materialism is an identity crisis.
The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.
We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.