It's no great thing to find fault with materialism in the West. Its alternative, idealism, is part of the Western tradition, with roots going back to the very beginning of Greek philosophy. Plato, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Royce, Bradley, and A.C. Ewing were all idealists.
Idealism is the view that the world is somehow mental or consciousness is somehow fundamental. Idealism was the default position in the West right up to the beginning of the 19th century and was taught at Oxford until the death of F. H. Bradley in 1924.
In the 20th century idealists have included well-known philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Norman Kemp Smith, Giovanni Gentile, and Mary Calkins. In the 20th century, idealism took on other forms such as "phenomenalism" and "phenomenology." The most famous proponents of these newly named schools were Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl.
In the U.S. David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel have famously challenged reductive materialism. But neither has offered a clear alternative.
The problem is not a lack of discovery of idealism. The problem is how to answer certain underlying questions caused by idealism.
Here are 10 questions that no idealist has ever answered, and in fact none even ask. For they have no way to address them.
If the world is somehow mental or if consciousness is somehow fundamental we must ask:
1. When ten people enter a room, why do they experience roughly the same thing? Answer the question in a way that accounts for the ways in which things appear different to them and the ways in which they appear the same.
Idealists don't try to answer this question because they don't actually have a system. Idealism is just a position statement.
2. By what process did the world we perceive (along with its millions of discernible characteristics) manifest?
No idealist has ever tried to answer this question.
3. Assuming there is a process by which the world manifested, why did it happen? What function did it serve? What was its purpose?
No idealist has ever even attempted to answer this. The best anyone has said is God did this for His own reasons we can’t know.
4. What was the catalyst that incited the process that produced our phenomenal world?
Again, no idealist has even thought of the question, let alone tried to answer it. In materialism the answer is the Big Bang, which really describes a reaction and not a catalyst.
5. How are perception and consciousness related to God and the soul?
6. What are intellect, space, time, number, and natural laws ontologically?
It's simply taken for granted that these are something and that is the starting point of both idealism and materialism. No curiosity beyond that.
7. How did the above 5 aspects form?
8. How do we come to recognize things like number, the good, etc? A question Plato asked.
9. What is the relationship between the idealist world and the evolutionary fossil record?
10. If we could answer any of the above, by what method would we test to see if we are right?
Meher Baba’s principal book God Speaks is subtitled "The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose." Theme and purpose are missing from idealism and materialism alike.
Hinduism has forms that are a kind of idealism. But it too has no answer to the above questions, except for #3. The purpose of the Universe is moksha for the individual.
Only with Baba's teaching do we have answers to all these questions. And it is only after reading and understanding what he wrote that our minds even allow us to ask these deeper questions. By ignoring these questions, because they had no way to approach them, idealists throughout history have contributed precisely nothing to our understanding of reality. They are trivial academic exercises only.
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