---
title: "Materialism controversy"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism_controversy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:18:03.001865+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Even Ludwig Büchner, initially one of the most prominent advocates of materialism, eventually distanced himself from the term. In a letter to Haeckel dated 1875, he wrote:I ... have therefore never used the term 'materialism', which evokes a completely one-sided idea, for my school of thought and only accepted it here and there later out of necessity because the general public knew no other word for the whole movement ... . The term 'monism' that you suggest is very good in itself, but it is very doubtful whether it will be accepted by the general public.

=== Political and ideological impact ===
Although scientific materialism gained considerable popularity among the general public in 19th-century Germany, its proponents—Carl Vogt, Jakob Moleschott, and Ludwig Büchner—faced significant political opposition. All three lost their academic positions largely because of their outspoken advocacy of materialism. Vogt’s revolutionary materialism, in particular, failed to gain traction in the reactionary political climate following the revolutions of 1848. Scientific materialism also struggled to influence broader political movements, in part due to ideological conflicts with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx disparaged Vogt as a “small-university beer bouncer and misguided Barrot of the Reich", and personal denunciations escalated between the two camps. Marx’s circle even accused Vogt of espionage for France.
The shifting political context was reflected in the work of Ernst Haeckel, who adopted the materialists’ scientific worldview but infused it with new political meaning. Seventeen years Vogt’s junior, Haeckel became a prominent advocate of Darwinism in Germany during the 1860s. His polemical rejection of “church-wisdom and ... after-philosophy", echoed the earlier scientific materialists’ critiques. Where Vogt emphasized physiology as the foundation of a scientific worldview, Haeckel placed Darwin’s theory of evolution at the center. He famously framed the cultural conflict as:

In this spiritual battle, which now moves the whole of thinking humanity and which prepares a humane existence in the future, on the one side under the bright banner of science stand: freedom of thought and truth, reason and culture, development and progress; on the other side under the black banner of hierarchy: spiritual bondage and lies, irrationality and crudeness, superstition and regression.For Haeckel, the idea of “progress” was chiefly anti-clerical, targeting the church rather than the state. The Kulturkampf, initiated by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1871, gave Haeckel a political platform to align his anti-clerical monism with Prussian government efforts to curb ecclesiastical influence.

== Reception in the 20th century ==
In the 19th century, scientific materialism played a significant role in ideological debates, especially through discussions surrounding Darwin's theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel's monism, which gained prominence in the 1860s. Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff remained a bestseller, reflecting enduring popular interest. However, the question of a unified scientific worldview continued to provoke controversy.
The First World War and Haeckel’s death in 1919 marked critical turning points. In the subsequent Weimar Republic, the debates of the mid-19th century lost much of their relevance. Philosophical trends in the interwar period consistently criticized materialism despite differing viewpoints. This included the rise of logical positivism, which upheld the ideal of a scientific worldview but framed it in an anti-metaphysical way. Logical positivists held that only empirically verifiable propositions were meaningful, thereby dismissing materialism, monism, idealism, and dualism as speculative and philosophically misguided. Materialist theories of consciousness were largely abandoned until their revival in Anglo-Saxon philosophy in the 1950s, by which time the 19th-century materialists—Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner—had been largely forgotten. Post-war materialist philosophy instead focused on advances in contemporary neuroscience.
Scientific materialism remained largely neglected in the histories of science and philosophy until the 1970s. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Dieter Wittich was an early scholar to revisit the movement; his 1960 doctoral thesis examined the scientific materialists in detail. Wittich later edited a 1971 collection of their writings, Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner: Schriften zum kleinbürgerlichen Materialismus in Deutschland, published by Akademie Verlag. In his introduction, Wittich praised the materialists’ political, scientific, and religious critiques but also highlighted their philosophical limitations, describing them as “petty-bourgeois materialists” who clung to metaphysical materialism even as dialectical materialism had become a prevailing reality.
In 1977, Frederick Gregory, an American historian of science, published Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, now a standard reference. Gregory contended that the significance of Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner lay less in their specific materialist doctrines than in their socially impactful critique of religion, philosophy, and politics. He characterized their hallmark not as materialism, but as a form of atheism grounded in a "humanistic religion."
Modern scholarship generally recognizes the role of scientific materialism in the secularization processes of the 19th century, while its philosophical rigor remains debated. Renate Wahsner, for example, argues that it is untenable to deny these thinkers "sharpness and depth of thought". it is untenable to deny these thinkers "sharpness and depth of thought." Conversely, Kurt Bayertz defends their enduring relevance, noting that Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner developed “the first fully developed form of modern materialism” — a form that, though only one variant of materialism, remains the most influential and effective in modernity. Thus, contemporary analyses of materialism’s philosophical controversies often trace their origins back to the 19th-century scientific materialists.

== References ==

== Bibliography ==