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A living organism is supposed to be fit for survival in accordance with its capacity for adaptation to its environment. But this adjustment that everyone seems to be making in respect of one’s own environment is conditioned, in its nature, by the organism’s vision of life—its understanding of the nature of the environment. The visualisation of the atmosphere of life is the philosophy of life. The history of philosophy has recorded endless varieties of such considerations—visions of life— and this enormous multitude of viewpoints can be attributed only to the manner in which one is able to probe into the structure of one’s environment, the world in which one lives.

We have a common view about things, prevalent almost everywhere, which is that our life has to be comfortable. We should have no physical pain, no social harassment and no political insecurity, all which is summed up in the attitude of a physical envisioning of life. A person who is wholly confined to this attitude of a life of continuous comfort and physical satisfaction, who thinks only in terms of property, land and money, or even in terms of social position, who thinks nothing else, whose vision of life is restricted only to this extent and cannot go above, such a person we generally call a materialistic person, identifying the materialistic view with a concept of a comfortable existence, physically and socially. But materialism is not a philosophy of comfortable living; it is a specialised vision of life in itself, and if it brings physical comfort, that is a secondary matter.

The basic issue is the vision, the concept, the notion, and the extent of the characteristic of reality that is seen to be present in that particular envisioning. We are acquainted with the word ‘materialism’. As I mentioned, it should not be identified merely with money, property and land, because materialism is a philosophy. It is a vision of life which holds that what cannot be tangible or sensible, cannot be regarded as knowable. A thing that is entirely unknowable need not be affirmed to really exist, because the existence of a particular object is connected with the extent of the knowledge one may have about that object.

The world exists, an object exists, this exists or that exists. This statement can have a value only to the extent that there is a knowledge connecting it with a perceiving unit, as a totally unknown element cannot become an issue for any kind of consideration. That which is knowable certainly does exist to the extent knowledge permits the evaluation thereof, in that manner. But how do we feel competent to affirm that something can exist if it is not at all known in any way, and cannot be known? The only thing that we can be sure of knowing is what we can see with our eyes, what we can touch, and so on, with the available apparatus of the sense organs.

The senses mentioned come in contact with something which is tangible in a special sense, and in this special sense it is that we consider a tangible or visible thing, a material object. Whatever we see is a concrete substance, whatever we hear is audible in a concrete manner, and so is the case with what we smell, or taste, or touch. A substantiality, a concreteness, or rather a materiality has to be present in anything that our senses can cognise, with which our senses can come in contact. Inasmuch as we have only these faculties of cognition and perception, and there is no possibility of even inferring the presence of any other faculty in us, limited as we are in sense perception only, we are forced to conclude that the sense world is the only world, and to posit the existence of any other material world would be an unwarranted assumption, wholly theoretical and incapable of tenability of any kind.

Now, this vision which considers substantiality as the only reality, materiality as the essence of true existence, has subtle layers of argument and methods of proof in its philosophical repertoire, and with this apparatus the materialistic doctrine attempts to make itself a complete view of life so that nothing else can be said about life in this world. The argument of a section of people that the existence of a material world has to be confirmed by a knowing subject, and matter can be said to be there only as that which is comprehended through a knowing process, thus giving some sort of an independent existence and value to the knowledge of matter, is set aside by the doctrine of materialism with a single stroke by the argument that the knowing process is within the campus of matter itself. The whole astronomical universe is material in its nature, and the process of its being known in some manner is a part and parcel of the operation of the inner constituents of matter itself. As the activity of a large sea in the form of movements through waves, etc. cannot be isolated from the body of the sea itself, any activity, even the activity of knowing, cannot be segregated and considered to be existing outside the purview of this body of the material, physical universe—there ends the matter.

This is an interesting position indeed, most satisfying to common sense, and the materialistic doctrine has reached such heights today that it has changed its designation from being known merely as materialism, and has assumed a new nomenclature—scientific materialism. The word ‘scientific’, the term ‘science’ is so enchanting because of the precision and the indubitably of its procedures that few in the world can escape its clutches. The scientific attitude of materialism is an outcome of developments through history in the direction of the probing into the inner constituents of matter, though originally it was enough for a materialist to accept that any tangible, hard substance like earth, water, fire or air would be just what matter could be.

A large section of thinkers along the lines of materialism were intelligent enough to observe the operations of the inner constituents of matter, because it does not require much time to know that every material body can be reduced to minute inner constituents like particles, and particles can be reduced to finer elements so that they may not be visible at all to the naked eye. They cannot be called sense objects in the ordinary sense of the term, but they do exist as material stuff. Here the scientific character of the material doctrine is hidden in the concept of matter. Originally, we thought that matter is anything that we can touch, taste, smell, etc., but an advance in the concept of the true nature of matter led to finer conclusions, and made materialism an advanced philosophy which was to the satisfaction of almost everybody in the world. Matter need not necessarily be a tangible, hard, concrete thing like stone; the scientific, or rather the philosophical aspect of the concept of matter, lands itself in the position that matter can be anything that is known by a knowing subject. Any known content is matter. Even conceptually known things should be regarded as matter that is not necessarily known only by means of the sense organs. Thus the present day reduction of matter to its finer elements, they say, does not in any way refute the doctrine of materialism.

Recently I had occasion to go through a little pamphlet published by a highly advanced scientific society in which the author says that there is a wrong notion among people that materialism has been exploded by the modern discoveries of higher physics and mathematics, which somehow proclaimed to the world that matter as it is presented to the sense organs does not really exist, which means to say, dangerously, that the world itself perhaps does not exist. This does not follow from even the most advanced form of physical findings, says the author, because even the finest, irreducible form of the material world, even if it be so fine as to be co-extensive and co-eternal with everything else in the world, still it remains something which can be known by a knowing principle. Therefore it stands opposed to knowing it is still an object, and therefore it is matter, nevertheless—so materialism holds up. We cannot overcome materialism, because however fine the world may be to the eye of a modern scientist or physicist, it is nevertheless matter. Even atoms are material, electrons are material, energy is material, electric force is material; there is nothing non-material in any one of these.

But reverting to the question posed earlier as to how matter is known at all to exist in any way, and the ancillary argument of the materialist that even the knowing process is part of the inner activity of the constituents of matter, we feel that this situation requires a further, deeper consideration. The materialistic principle abruptly and unhesitatingly declares that rarified matter, in its finest form, assumes the form of what we call knowing, consciousness, going even to the extent of holding that it is some sort of an exudation of matter. This is the philosophical aspect of materialism, apart from its purely scientific or technological aspect. No doctrine can stand unless it has a philosophy of its own, whatever be its utility from the point of view of its application in daily life. So the materialist has a very strong philosophy which appears to be wholly unshakable—that we, even as observers, knowers, do not stand outside the material world.

This vision is very satisfying to the world of sense satisfaction and physical security. We seem to be happy to know all these things. But, a great ‘but’ seems to be there behind this complacence that materialism seems to be offering us, namely, the status of the knower himself in the world of material perceptions. What is knowledge? And what do we mean by knowing anything at all? It is not enough if we merely make a statement that there is a knowing or a perceiving entity coming in contact with something which we call a material object. That is all right, but what is actually the process that seems to be taking place when something is known by someone?

An intricate action seems to be involved in the act of knowing. Knowledge is a state of awareness, a centre, a person. A subject who can be regarded as an observing location of an awareness of something is an intriguing element indeed, because this awareness of an object, or a material, or an external content, requires the activity of a peculiar thing called consciousness, which is usually, by the materialist, identified with a form of rarified matter. If a capacity to know, an ability to be self-conscious, can be attributed to some form of matter; if matter which is the stuff of the universe can, in its finest forms, assume the state of the light of awareness or consciousness, thus making it possible for someone to know that matter exists; if this could be possible, matter can be self-conscious, because the nature of consciousness is basically self-consciousness. Though consciousness is always a consciousness of something outside, it is prior to this act of the consciousness of something outside—a self-identical awareness of itself. The knowing entity, the subject of knowledge, knows itself to be there. This subject, being consciousness itself, has to be aware of itself. The awareness that consciousness has of itself is different from the consciousness that it has of an object outside. Granting that consciousness has the capacity to know matter as something that has emanated from matter itself, do we not feel compelled to conclude that if this is the fact, the entire world of matter, the universe of material contents hiddenly enshrining in its bosom this potentiality for knowing, would become a total centre of self-awareness? Dangerous conclusion indeed, because this would root out the very basic concept of the materialist that there is anything called matter at all. The abolition of the concept of matter being the ultimate reality arises as a consequence of it being impossible to know the existence of matter without there being consciousness and also without consciousness being self-aware.

What do you call matter if it is self-aware? The characteristic of self-awareness is non-objectivity—one does not know oneself as something other than oneself. The nature of consciousness is so very subtle, so very difficult to grasp, that it eludes the introduction of any element of objectivity into itself. Consciousness cannot be known by anybody else, because to know consciousness there should be another consciousness, and that would land us in a funny situation of there a being a series of consciousness, one being behind the other for the sake of knowing the precedent consciousness. That which knows is self-identical in the sense that it knows itself as nothing other than itself.

The material aspect of the concept of life cannot stand if this position is to be accepted. It is not possible for a confirmed materialist, who holds that the whole universe is matter, to agree that there is any possibility of matter being self-aware. If self-awareness is not to be attributed to matter, matter cannot be known to exist. But to attribute self-awareness to matter is to defeat the very purpose and the aim of the materialist doctrine. It kills itself—it would be a self-defeating doctrine.