First, about the
terms “matterialism” and “spiritwoalism”. The orthography
“matterialism” is meant to stress that, first, it is not a
question of materialism as opposed to spiritualism, a reduction of
first-person experience and interactions with second persons to
third-person events, e.g. my experience of myself and of my relation
to my friend as reduced to certain events in my nervous system,
especially brain, and to some other physical, chemical and biological
events, e.g. that my friend is a material object from which visual,
acoustic and tactile impulses reach my body, are registered and
transferred to the brain as a CPU that would process that
physico-chemical information, and produce a certain output, e.g.
certain behavior towards my friend (for instance, we shake hands, I
register a usual friendly expression on his face, and I try to
produce also a friendly expression, and perhaps utter some
accompanying words, like “To have friends arrive from afar—is
this not a joy?” Second, it is not about matter as opposed to form,
a passive material substance upon which a certain form is impressed
like an amphora is made of clay.
Instead, the
matterialism is about materials as having their inherent
articulations, tendencies and capacities. And it does not reduce the
first- and second-person experience to third-person givens, materials
themselves have a certain self-relation, and interaction with them as
well. A material can be taken in an extremely broad sense: not only
substances like wood or iron or water or air, but also the whole
environment and any being or thing in it may be treated as the
material for the present action. The whole context of my activity is
a material for it.
The orthography of
“spiritwoalism” is also meant to capture certain ideas that keep
it distinct from spiritualism. First, it is not a denial or
suppression of matter or materials; on the contrary, it finds its
expression only through certain materials, and with their help.
Second, spirit is often considered as something unitary,
undifferentiated, identical with itself. The “two” in the term
“spiritwoalism” stresses the fact that my consciousness of myself
is inseparable from my consciousness of some other (person, thing,
event, environment). It applies not only to humans, but can be stated
generally: a self-relation is necessarily also an other-relation. The
“two” does not indicate that the participants have to be
necessarily two and only two, but the relation between two is meant
to be taken as a synecdoche (“part for the whole”) for any
relation “between”, and the focus should be on the betweenness
rather than on the actualized terms between it takes place. The “two”
also refers to the matterialism as a counterpart of a spiritwoalism.
As we see later, a
matterialism naturally unfolds itself into a spiritwoalism, and
spiritwoalism is always also a matterialism.
