Spiritual vs Material

The dichotomy of “spiritual” vs “material” is the broadest form of various other dichotomies that result from the primacy of consciousness. This dichotomy is represented in Plato’s Timaeus where the Demiurge is said to be unable to shape the chaotic world into a realm of beauty, hence reality is imperfect. Various other forms of this dichotomy include:¹

• “my dream vs. the actual which thwarts it;"
• "the inner vs. the outer;"
• "value vs. fact;"
• "the moral vs. the practical;“
• the mind-body conflict;
• reason vs emotion.

In due course, we will develop in detail the Objectivist position on the key aspects of the mind-body question. We will study the inner and the outer, value and fact, the moral and the practical, and several other such pairs, including reason and emotion, concepts and percepts, pure science and technology, love and sex. In every such case, Ayn Rand holds, the conventional viewpoint is wrong; man does not have to make impossible choices between the “spiritual” side of life and the “material.” The relationship between the two sides, she holds, is not clash or warfare, but integration, unity, harmony.²