We will start by looking at a very well-worn argument famously argued by Max Weber: the advance of science has ushered in a disenchanted world; the material world has been flattened, pronounced subject to universal physical laws. And so emptied of magic and mystery.
For Weber, there is a sense of loss, but also the thought that this is the price of progress.
Part of Weber’s thesis is that scientific advance has undermined teleology, and with it a cosmological order which, among other things, was thought to ground ethics.
Another part of Weber’s analysis—that matter is rendered inert, and as far as science is concerned, that is all there is—still finds echoes in contemporary materialist accounts. But these accounts are silent, as Wittgenstein enjoined, about many of the things–in nature, human relationships and art—which are dear to us.
If we look around us, we see that the material world is teeming, alive, creative, and is in a perpetual state of becoming. Natural, cultural and technological objects evoke an aura which brings thought and feeling alive. It isn’t hard to find enchantment in the world, what Weber called “concrete magic”. I suggest another account of materialism which is not reductively mechanical or dialectical (contra Marx). This account is delicately placed on the boundaries of physics and metaphysics.