Charvaka: Ancient Indian Materialism

Marchesk December 11, 2017 at 07:31 4875 views 7 comments

I was interested to learn that materialism was considered in ancient Indian philosophy, since I tend to associate Hinduism and Buddhism with a more spiritual/mental metaphysics.

Charvaka espoused direct perception, empiricism, rejection of the supernatural and the afterlife, and emphasizes the problem of induction, meaning that knowledge gained from observation is conditional and open to doubt. This also means that inference cannot be used to establish metaphysical truths.

So what you have here is basically modern naturalism, but developed sometime between 7th and 5th century BCE in India.

It's also interesting that Charvaka did distinguish between two kinds of perception: external and internal. External came from interaction between objects and our five senses. Internal came from the mind.

Chavaka also espoused hedonism: avoiding pain as much as possible and embracing pleasure, because we're going to die. So basically the eat, drink and be merry attitude that we find mentioned by Paul in the Bible (probably in response to some Greek or Roman version of hedonism), instead of wasting time on ascetic practices or worries about the afterlife.

Comments (7)

gurugeorge December 12, 2017 at 14:03 #132959 0 likes

It's sort of roughly contemporaneous with ancient Greek materialism (Leucippus was 5th century, and there are hints that Greek atomism may go back even further). And of course then there was Epicureanism, which was based on atomism and also had a hedonic ethics.

Some schools of early Buddhism were also quite materialist (IIRC there was a fully developed school of atomism in early Buddhism, which would also have been around maybe the 4th century - so it must have been in the air :) ).

Rationalist materialism is quite a venerable tradition - it's never been the majority tradition, but even during "spiritual" epochs there were always some who flew the flag (if they were allowed to - usually it was thought too corrosive of social mores, which is actually a colorable claim given the history of the past hundred years or so).

Marchesk December 12, 2017 at 17:22 #132981 0 likes

Reply to gurugeorge It's also that Chavaka espoused the problem of induction as part of it's epistemology. Hume is credited with that, and he probably stated it in more modern terms, but he wasn't the first.

I feel like almost all philosophy I've been exposed to is exclusively Western, and almost all credit is given to Westerners.

gurugeorge December 12, 2017 at 19:29 #133014 0 likes

Reply to Marchesk Ancient Chinese philosophy is also very interesting. There were fully developed systems of logic, debates very reminiscent of nominalism vs. realism, that kind of thing. But unfortunately China has been subject to occasional outright purges and mass destruction of literature in its long history, so a lot has been lost.

More accessible and fully developed systems of non-Western philosophy can be found in Tibetan Buddhism, which fortunately preserved a lot of very sophisticated stuff from the period of the great Buddhist universities (which were destroyed by Islamic invasion). Check out anything from the Gelugpa school, which is the most intellectually-oriented school. It's fully as interesting and complex as anything Western, and is quite comfortably mappable onto Western philosophy in many ways.

Wayfarer December 12, 2017 at 20:16 #133022 0 likes

There will always be materialists. In the ancient Greek world they were called 'hylectics', after 'hyle', matter or body. They were said to far outnumber the 'pneumatics', those of high spiritual attainment who see through materialism.

One infamous example in the early Buddhist texts was a Prince Payasi, who sealed convicted criminals in jars until they died, then broke the seal to see if the soul could be seen escaping the vessel, which it could not, of course. This he presented as evidence for the non-existence of the soul.

T Clark December 13, 2017 at 03:48 #133151 0 likes

Quoting Marchesk

I was interested to learn that materialism was considered in ancient Indian philosophy, since I tend to associate Hinduism and Buddhism with a more spiritual/mental metaphysics.

It has always fascinated me that people thousands of years ago were just as sophisticated intellectually as we are today. I keep expecting them to be somehow primitive, but they came up with and developed pretty much every philosophical idea we talk about here. It's as if the minute people started writing and communicating with each other, all the niches in the intellectual eco-system populated themselves almost immediately.

gurugeorge December 14, 2017 at 13:54 #133639 0 likes

Reply to T Clark I think what it shows is that people talked about stuff for far longer than they wrote about stuff. There have probably been something akin to "schools of thought" since human beings became human beings, but prior to writing they would have been purely oral traditions, and probably more mixed in with religion and ritual.

Incidentally, I think the fact that for pre-literacy schools of thought to exist at all they would have had to have been oral traditions, is what's responsible for the fact that earlier philosophies were more like "guru worship" cults (the veneration of people who retained more of what people around them were discussing, and passed it on).

But in the course of transition to writing, it became more and more obvious that the message can be detached from the messenger and looked at objectively. It became clear that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, it became clear that poisoning the well, ad hominem, etc., shared a certain quality, called "fallacious."

T Clark December 14, 2017 at 19:20 #133695 0 likes

Quoting gurugeorge

But in the course of transition to writing, it became more and more obvious that the message can be detached from the messenger and looked at objectively. It became clear that ideas stand or fall on their own merits, it became clear that poisoning the well, ad hominem, etc., shared a certain quality, called "fallacious."

I think this is sort of what I was talking about - writing being associated with the more - I'd say "abstract" rather than "objective" - approach to philosophy that reflects how we do it now.