We live in a materialist world, and materialism appeals so strongly to humanity, no matter where.
It seems to me that philosophers should be more relaxed about whether or not some form of materialism is true.
You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves.
Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.
All of us experience the sad effects of blind submission to consumerism. In the first place it represents crass materialism. At the same time it represents a radical dissatisfaction because one quickly learns that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.
To what faults do you feel most indulgent? To the ones that arise from urgent material needs.
Are you winning the battle against materialism?
If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.
We come from a proud tradition of people who have insisted that none of us can be truly successful until at least the barriers to such success and thriving are completely removed. I think the black narcissism that prevails, along with the stylish materialism and self-satisfied, smug attitudes among many of our upwardly mobile brothers and sisters should be identified and criticized.
Because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone - not the blind, automatic forces of nature, as philosophies like naturalism and materialism tell us.
In L. A. like there's a lot of like materialism and, you know, people who think they're better than each other because of the clothes they wear or how they dress and in Oakland it's not like that.
Who lives as a citizen, may write as a philosopher - but write as a philosopher, it is to teach materialism!
Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page.
There is one advantage to having nothing, it never needs repair.
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.
Look, Salvador Dali did not paint because he needed the money. No conversation about materialism and music makes sense. You make music and that's that, it doesn't matter why.
All that young people are promised today are the rewards of a shallow materialism and a degree that is defined primarily as a job credential, one that ironically does not even live up to its own claims of guaranteeing either decent employment or a better way of life.
There must be more to life than having everything.
We must get out of materialism.