Materialism, in philosophy, is the position that the physical world is what fundamentally exists. Ideas, culture, consciousness, institutions — all of these are real, but they arise from material conditions rather than the other way around. When a materialist asks why a society has the values it does, they look at how that society produces food, shelter, and goods, not at what its philosophers wrote.
This contrasts with idealism, which holds that mind, spirit, or ideas are more fundamental than matter. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the most influential idealist, argued that history is the unfolding of Spirit coming to know itself through stages of consciousness. For Hegel, ideas shape the material world. Materialism inverts this: the material world shapes ideas.
The most influential materialist framework is historical materialism, developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Historical materialism holds that the economic base of a society — who owns what, who works for whom, how goods are produced and distributed — shapes its superstructure: its laws, politics, culture, religion, and philosophy. A feudal society produces feudal ideas about honor and divine right; a capitalist society produces ideas about individual freedom and market rationality. The ideas feel natural and self-evident to the people who hold them, but they’re products of a specific arrangement of material relations.
Historical materialism is a specific form of materialism, not the whole of it. Ancient Greek atomists like Democritus were materialists in a more basic sense: they held that everything is made of atoms moving through void. Modern physicalism — the position that everything is physical or supervenes on the physical — is another form. What unites them is the claim that material reality doesn’t need ideas to explain it, but ideas need material reality to explain them.
Materialism matters to this vault because the relational ontology developed here is neither materialist nor idealist in the traditional sense. It doesn’t start from matter or mind but from relations. Material conditions and ideas are both constituted through relational processes. This is closer to what some philosophers call relational materialism — an approach that takes material conditions seriously without reducing everything to physical stuff.
Related terms
- Metaphysics — materialism is a metaphysical position about what is fundamental
- Dialectics — Marx’s dialectical materialism combines materialist metaphysics with dialectical method
- Ontology — materialism makes an ontological claim about the priority of matter
- Constructivism — constructivism about knowledge can be combined with materialism about reality
- Relational Ontology — neither materialist nor idealist, but takes material relations seriously