The Birth of the Material World

From ancient animism to substance dualism

All seeing is seeing-as — G. Vesey

Every explanation of the natural world, whether grounded in evidence or not, is represented as an analogy that connects two ideas. Consider the following analogies that have ruled a scientific community at some point in history:

• The sun is a giant ball of gas.
• The sun is a giant ball of fire.
• Atoms hit each other like billiard balls.
• Electrons orbit protons like a cloud.
• Electrons orbit protons like a moon orbits a planet.
• The path through which planets orbit the sun is an ellipse.

As an investigator of the natural world you can only understand a given thing by referring to something else. That second thing may be an object, a human being, a number, a shape, a line on a graph, or anything else you know of.

As you may have observed in the list above, there are two ways you can frame this understanding: as a simile (the orbit is “like” a cloud), or as an actual instance (the orbit “is” a cloud). But why are there two different ways of expressing a piece of knowledge?

Consider an example: If I were to say to you that our mutual friend Andy was “like a human”, you would say that was wrong since Andy is a human, not just “like” one. Similarly, if a classical Greek philosopher told his peers that the sun was like a ball of fire, they would correct him and say the sun is a ball of fire, not just like one.

Only now that you and I better understand how the sun produces heat do you say it is like a ball of fire, since it actually is a fusion reaction. The difference between being “like” something, and actually being that thing comes from having better information about the subject. As we learn more about the sun, you may one day correct yourself and say the sun is “like” a fusion reaction, because it “is” something else.

This distinction between an explanation that is a literal description (“the sun is a fusion reaction”) as opposed to a helpful analogy (“the sun is like a ball of fire”) is a blurry one. For instance, you may feel comfortable saying the orbit of the Earth around the sun is an ellipse, even though you know it isn’t an absolutely perfect ellipse, down to the nanometer. This is only because as of yet you don’t have a better analogy. When you do, the ellipse analogy will gradually turn into a simile.

All this leads to a curious question: how exactly do humans learn about the natural world?

Animism

Modern science aims as its primary objective to understand the natural, that is material world. It may surprise you to learn that the idea that there exists a “material world” — defined as a soulless world driven by physics and chemistry — is a relatively recent notion.

During the longest stretch of human prehistory (about 100,000 to 4000 years ago) the entire world was considered to be animated with spirit and agency. This was not the result of blinkered superstition or fear, at least no more than our current scientific knowledge is. Ancient man¹ did not add anything to the world by claiming it was moved by spirits. He was simply understanding the world using the only analogy he had.

Animism is often misunderstood as inserting spiritual agency into physical objects. That assumes there exists both a physical world and a spiritual world, with the latter being overlaid onto the former. In fact, spiritual agency was the set of categories into which animists classified all experiences without exception.

What was useful to them in terms of survival was different from what is useful to us. Those were dangerous times, very unlike the comfortable, controllable, and safe world in which most of us live today. There were few obvious patterns to be found in the world that man could learn and use to keep safe. As a result, the natural world was seen as capricious; an unpredictable series of events and entities.

Seeing this, and observing also that humans were capricious and unpredictable, man understood the world by relating his experiences to the only relevant things he knew, or could claim to understand: himself, his mind, and other people. Unlike the later atomists, he had no billiard balls to compare objects to, nor even any basic mathematical shapes like ellipses with which to describe the trajectories of rocks.

He reasoned thus: “the sea is capricious and potentially deadly. Similarly, a ruler or king is capricious and potentially deadly.” If he had to explain how the sea works to someone else, this character of arbitrary sway was the best and most useful analogy he had. Using it, he would guard his friends from undue arrogance, or to accept their fate if the tides turned against them. He had no gravitational formulas by which to describe the movements of the tides. So, without any better analogy, the sea god has the property of “king-ness”, he is a king without a human body. The sea is not just “like” a king, it is one. This was ancient man’s best understanding, and his best science.

An African jungle dweller, for instance, sees a nocturnal creature by daylight and knows it to be a medicine man who has temporarily taken its shape. Or he may regard it as the bush soul or ancestral spirit of one of his tribe. …

For in the primitive’s world things do not have the same sharp boundaries they do in our “rational” societies.

— Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols

Carl Jung observed these associations as humanity’s most basic, i.e. default understanding of the world. He explicitly used the language of “is” vs “like”. He recognized that these were not metaphors but specific ‘identities’, ones that have been pushed out of our own societies by more rational ones.

[A picture of] a witch doctor from Cameroon wearing a lion mask. He isn’t pretending to be a lion; he is convinced that he is a lion. Like the Nyanga tribesman and his bird mask, he shares a “psychic identity”’ with the animal

— Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols

These days we prefer to use numbers and shapes to describe the forces of nature. The goal is the same; to use an analogy that best and most concisely communicates to others the behaviour of the subject in question. When you do this, you assume that the person you are speaking to understands the mathematical terms you are using; if she doesn’t, due to her age or education, you will likely fall back to a simpler analogy. “The sea is angry” you might say to a child.

The Invention of the Material World

The rise of the “material world”, in contrast to a spiritually animated one and as a frame for interpreting reality, arose alongside an increasing understanding of cause and effect. Until quite late in homo-sapiens’ history (about 5,000 years ago), almost everything in his daily life was experienced as a special event. The world was erratic, and by analogy to human volition it was self-motivated. Plagues struck crops without warning; therefore they animated themselves with their own inexorable wills.

Over time, one by one, some things became predictable, and their causes known. Someone might notice that a rock always fell the same way when dropped. Or it fell a certain distance when thrown a particular way. A few rare objects and events started to have near-perfect predictability, their causes became known, and in many cases controllable.

This last point is the key to understanding the idea of a material world: the ability to control the world was what made it “material”. When an object became predictable and controllable, the animism got pulled right out of it. It was no longer alive, but dead. It was a “thing”, it was material stuff.

Here man was expressing another analogy: just as a living human moves under his own power and agency, a dead body is only moved when pushed. So a living human is seen as his or her own cause, but a dead body has to be caused to move externally. Matter, then, is “dead”, and ceases to be self-animated.

A rock or stick thrown from an atlatl was now no longer a spirit — even though certain aspects of it, such as its material quality, precision, or the success you had throwing it still remained unpredictable, and therefore still in the realm of arbitrary spirits. E.g. from the Illiad:

When crimes provoke us, Heaven success denies;
The dart falls harmless, and the falchion flies

or

He spoke, and rising hurl’d his forceful dart,
Which, driven by Pallas [a god], pierced a vital part;

For the greatest part of prehistory, predictable things have been few and rare. Over time they began to accumulate. There have been a handful of turning points in the last three millennia, when enough of the world was predictable that certain cultures began to change their views of it. One such turning point was the development of the objective, logical approach to natural science detailed by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. Another happened in the 1600s in Europe when a growing trend coalesced into a notion called substance dualism. This philosophy cleanly separated the known, predictable, lifeless stuff — which could be analogized to “dead things” — from unknown capricious events that could best be compared to humans and to human will.

That substance dualism was a novel idea for the time is difficult for you and I to wrap our minds around. These days we tend to assume that this split always existed. As a result, you may be perplexed when you hear that even though ancient Egyptians believed their souls persisted after death, they also believed that a person’s soul and his body were both made of the same material. For these people, there was no dualist distinction between a spiritual soul and physical body, there was only one type of stuff, and soul and body were both made of it.²

By the turn of the 20th century, enough of the world was predictable that some people began to see the writing on the wall. The trajectory of scientific knowledge suggested that predictability would completely overtake unpredictability, the controllable would outnumber the uncontrollable. There was enough confidence in this future for people to take a strong materialist stance; that material stuff, i.e. predictable stuff, was all there was. The other side of the dualist scales would soon be empty. It was only a matter of time.

This Transitional Phase

Today, of course, the old animist notions aren’t completely gone. We are in a transitional stage, and have been for three thousand years. You may still find it plausible to make analogies between events in the world and human souls. Consider the song lyrics “Luck, be a lady tonight”. Luck, as part of our experience of reality, has almost always been symbolized as a woman, and not a man. From the perspective of the men who came up with the analogy, women are unpredictable, and can be a source of joy as much as of anguish. “Luck, be a gentleman tonight” felt wrong to them, and therefore it “must be the wrong analogy”.

Of course, in the case of the above song lyrics, the expression is only a metaphor, and not literal. Luck is said to be “like” a female, it isn’t actually one. This is because we understand more than past ages did about material causes, randomness and probability. But if you remove this materialist understanding, it’s easier to see why people framed Luck as an actual disembodied “female”. There are female animals, and even female plants, so ancient man had every reason to separate the idea of “female-ness” from actual human women. Female-ness was an attribute, like the colour blue, that could be applied to all types of objects, even to the Earth itself. The analogy made sense, and without any better ideas, Luck, for all intents and purposes “was” female, not just “like” one.

Despite faint remnants of our animist past, it is almost impossible for you or I, as modern people to see the world in the same way ancient man saw it. The materialist attitudes and practices with which you deal with life’s problems, and their accompanying perspective shifts have so embedded themselves into your everyday experiences — into your language and words, social interactions, education, work, play — that it is impossible to even imagine a world where such predictability doesn’t exist, and as such, that the idea of a material world doesn’t exist. Today, you may write off ancient man’s animist notions as superstition inspired by fear or credulity, when in truth this was just his best science, because it was his best analogy.

This brings us back to the original point. Understanding, even scientific understanding, is a series of analogies, and you can only ever make analogies to other things you know about. The lines between “hard science” and what is derisively labelled “superstition” or “animism” are blurry. This should temper any arrogance when you presume ancient man to have lacked intelligence or to have been over-credulous.

It should also humble our estimation of our own knowledge a little. Science is forever in a state of imperfection. It is no more than a set of our best and most useful analogies. It is easy to imagine future generations derisively re-interpreting our own scientific explanations, which refer to numbers and shapes, as our own idiosyncratic psychological projections, or as closed-minded superstition; analogies made to the only things we knew about in our time.

¹ The use of “man” as opposed to “human” here is intentional.

² Compare this stance to the modern materialist philosophy which also argues that there is only one type of “thing” — this time by denying the existence of the spiritual soul.