Matter

Yesterday I discussed how language antagonistic to the Philosophical doctrine Materialism infiltrates everyday discourse, e. g. in the derogatory term 'materialistic'. On the other hand, other common language perhaps unwittingly advocates it. 'Matter', which comes from the same root as 'material', generally has a positive connotation, not merely insofar as it is taken as synonomous with the positive term 'substance', but given that the expression 'it matters' is indicative of importance. Indeed, the very earliest Philosophers can be classified as 'Materialist', in a formal sense. For example, Thales, generally accepted as the first, believed that the fundamental ingredient of existence is Water, while some of his immediate successors countered that it is Fire, or Air, all of which are types of Matter. But Philosophers tend to not take things at face value, so anti-Materialists began to argue that sheerly Intellectual or Spiritual Being or Beings are principles that underly those superficial substances. Aristotle did not as drastically relegate Matter, but he perhaps did more damage to its status, by treating it as a mere passive receptor of Form, thereby completely stripping it of the dynamism that Thales and the others had attributed to it. Modern Science has helped to revive Materialism, not because, as might be commonly thought, it is so antagonistic to Spiritualism, but because it recovers the innate dynamism of Matter, e. g. Water is molecules possessing a certain type of motion; atoms have electromagnetic potency, etc. Accordingly, Materialism, e. g. Marx, Nietzsche, has been revitalized in the past few centuries, and ordinary language is sometimes the unwitting arena of the Philosophical battleground over it.