Material Being of Human Being.

Why must the human being place such importance on material objects? Why do we want things which we don't need?

To answer we must look at the fundamental nature of being human. As Sartre said, "being is the annihilation of past being". Existing as a person means that what is is constantly moving into the past, or non-existence. This means that being human entails that every part of your life which is concrete and definite does not actually exist at all- assuming a non-eternalist framework of time, which I think we can in this purely phenomenological question. The future is unsure, the past is annihilated and the present is an untrappable point. If this is the human situation, it's only rational that we feel a constant need to justify ourselves and to prove to ourselves that our identities persist over time.

Material objects exist in themselves. They persist over time, and do not change unless they are changed. If a person attaches material objects to themselves (figuratively); they have created a part of themselves which exists over time, meaning that this person can also feel as though they persist and are whole and solid. If I have a blanket from when I was a child, this proof of my childhood could justify to myself that I exist in the world in the same way. This can account for why we keep useless trinkets from our lives, so much more solid than the memories they represent, and why we are attracted to the expensive gold and platinum, which never change.

It's also interesting to wonder if this might be in a small way a reason for why we want our faces and bodies to never change. Obviously sexual selection is hugely responsible for this, but it's interesting to think that in some way we feel distress when we see that we have changed because we are losing part of what anchors us into the world. If our minds and our bodies are in constant flux, how can we feel real?

Also see: religion, cultural identity, tradition