Materialistic
self-fulfillment
Within
the view of materialism, our most obvious human potential
is to be as self-fulfilled as
possible (via the available materialistic means) while we
are still alive. Fulfillment is in human (not Spiritual) terms:
bodily pleasure and emotional contentment.
Because
nothing significant can be said about what happens after one
dies within this viewpoint, no consideration is given to what
consequence living solely to fulfill oneself has on one’s
destiny after death. Rather, it is generally presumed that
"when you're dead, you're dead"; so "after
death" is thus assumed to be a non-issue. There is no
absolute address to the problem of human suffering or unhappiness;
but it is presumed that increasingly greater understanding
of (and control over) material reality corresponds to a lessening
of human suffering (at least to the degree that that suffering
takes a material form).
Materialistic self-transcendence:
the attainment of higher, material purposes
To
be a scientific materialist —
an atheist and a naive realist —
does not necessarily mean one automatically presumes there
is no meaning to life, and no morality in how one relates
to others and the world altogether. For instance, Freud, the
epitome of a scientific materialist, made famous the view
that civilization (looked at purely from the material viewpoint)
was founded on an interesting
tradeoff. The banding together of the many and the
adoption of civil agreements among them —
from the cavemen to ourselves —
could accomplish far greater things than the individual alone:
allowing the possibility of security from the saber-toothed
tiger of neolithic times, and from the overweening aggression
of Nazism in the last century. But this banding together has
a price: the “discontent” that occurs when the desires and
impulses of the individual run counter to the agreements,
laws, or impulses of his or her society.
Despite
such discontent, extraordinary accomplishments of creativity,
leadership, nobility, legacy, and self-transcendence on a
human scale —
for instance, giving of, or even sacrificing, oneself for
one’s family, one’s neighbor, or one’s country —
are possible and often praiseworthy, and in the materialistic
viewpoint, these —
rather than any kind of Spiritual Realization —
represent the epitome of human potential within the materialistic
view.
However,
self-transcendence is limited to a material form here: one
may be capable of things one was not capable of before, and
in this sense, be “transcending oneself”, but one’s fundamental
sense of reality remains material, rather than psycho-physical,
Spiritual, Transcendental, or Divine.
