Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is
the diverse group of metaphysical philosophies
which asserts that "reality" is in
some way indistinguishable or inseparable from human understanding and/or
perception; that it is in some sense mentally constituted, or otherwise closely
connected to ideas.
Platonic Idealism
It refers to Plato's theory of forms or
doctrine of ideas. It holds that only ideas encapsulate the true and essential
nature of things, in a way that the physical form cannot. We recognize a tree,
for instance, even though its physical form may be most untree-like. The
treelike nature of a tree is therefore independent of its physical form.
Plato's idealism evolved from Pythagorean philosophy, which held that
mathematical formulas and proofs accurately describe the essential nature of
all things, and these truths are eternal. Plato believed that because knowledge
is innate and not discovered through experience, we must somehow arrive at the
truth through introspection and logical analysis, stripping away false ideas to
reveal the truth.
Religious Idealism
Augustine (350-430) was the
main proponent of religious idealism. He argued that what is real is the
spiritual world and the flesh is only temporary. Augustine believed that the
senses were unreliable and that belief in God rests ultimately on faith. We must
first believe, in order that we may know. He also believed that people do not
create knowledge; God has already created it and it is already there, but
people can discover it through trying to find God. Learning must come from
within and all true knowledge comes from God.
Modern Idealism
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
He was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the
advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to
as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects
like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived.
Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804 C.E.)
He was an influential German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment. In his
doctrine of transcendental idealism, he argued
that space, time, and causation are
mere sensibilities; "things-in-themselves" exist,
but their nature is unknowable.[25][26] In his
view, the mind shapes and structures experience, with all human experience
sharing certain structural features.
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831
C.E.)
Hegel was a German idealist
philosopher of the 19th century. It is Hegel's
account of how being is
ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole (das Absolute). Hegel
asserted that in order for the thinking subject (human
reason or consciousness) to be able to know its object (the world) at all,
there must be in some sense an identity of thought
and being. Otherwise, the subject would never have access to the object and we
would have no certainty about any of our knowledge of the world. To account for
the differences between thought and being, however, as well as the richness and
diversity of each, the unity of thought and being cannot be expressed as the
abstract identity.
Approaches to Understanding Idealism
What idealism is may be clarified by approaching it in
three ways: through its basic doctrines and principles, through its central
questions and answers, and through its significant arguments.
Basic
doctrines and principles
Six common basic conceptions distinguish
idealistic philosophy:
The union of
individuality and universality
Abstract universals—such as
“canniness,” which expresses the common nature or essence that
the members of a class (e.g., individual dogs or wolves) share with one
another—are acknowledged by many philosophers. Many idealists, however,
emphasize the concept of a concrete universal,
one that is also a concrete reality, such as “humankind” or “literature,” that
can be imagined as gatherable into one specific thing. As opposed to the fixed
formal abstract universal, the concrete universal is essentially dynamic,
organic, and developing. Thus, universality and individuality merge.
The contrast
between contemporaneity and eternity
Whereas most philosophers tend to focus on matters of
contemporary concern, idealists always seek a much wider perspective that
embraces epochs and eras in the broad sweep of history. In the words of the
17th-century rationalist philosopher Benedict de Spinoza,
they strive to view the contemporary world “under the aspect of eternity.”
Thus, in spite of the extensive formative influence of culture,
idealists claim that their philosophy transcends the
parochialism of a particular culture; and idealisms are found, in fact, in all
the major cultures of
the world.
The doctrine
of internal
relations and the coherence
theory of truth
It seems natural to suppose, as non-idealists usually do,
that the consideration of two things in their relatedness to one another can
have no effect on the things themselves—i.e., that a relation is something in
addition to the things or terms related and is thus external. On that
basis, truth would
be defined as a relation of correspondence between a proposition and a state of
affairs. The idealist believes, however, that reality is subtler than that. The
relationship between a mineral deposit and
the business cycle,
for example, is an internal one: the deposit of an ore changes when prices
render it profitable to mine the mineral. Similarly, it is part of the essence
of a brick that it is related to a wall or pavement. Thus, terms and relations
logically determine one another. Ultimate reality is therefore a system of
judgments or propositions, and truth is defined in terms of the coherence of
those propositions with one another to form a harmonious whole. Thus, a
successful spy is judged either a hero or a villain only in relation to a total
system of international relations,
an accepted philosophy of history,
and the moral judgments
involved. There are therefore degrees of reality and degrees of truth within a
system of truth cohering by internal relations, and the truth of a judgment
reflects its place in that system.
The dialectical method
Idealism seeks to overcome contradictions by penetrating
into the overall coherent system
of truth and continually creating new knowledge to be integrated with
earlier discoveries. Idealism is thus friendly to all quests for truth, whether
in the natural or behavioral sciences or in art, religion,
and philosophy. It seeks the truth in every positive judgment and in its
contradictory as well. Thus, it traditionally uses the dialectical method
of reasoning to
remove the contradictions characteristic of human knowledge. Such removal leads
to a new synthetic judgment
that incorporates in a higher truth the degree of truth that was present in
each of the two lower judgments.
The
centrality of mind in
knowledge and being
Idealism is not reductive, as are opposing philosophies
that identify mind with matter and reduce the higher level of reality to
the protons and electrons of
mathematical physics.
On the contrary, idealism defends the principle that the lower is explained by
the higher—specifically, that matter can be explained by mind but that mind
cannot be explained by matter. The word spirit can be
substituted for mind or even placed above it, and at one time
“spiritualism”
was used, especially in Europe, as a synonym for idealism.
The
transmutation of evil into good
Nearly all idealists accept the principle that the evils
with which humankind has to deal may become ingredients in a larger whole that
overcomes them. The American Hegelian Josiah Royce held
that the larger whole is the Absolute Mind, which keeps evils under control as
a person might hold a viper under the sole of his boot. Along with that
doctrine of the sublimation or transmutation of evil, Royce incorporated into
his metaphysics a
point from the irrationalism of Arthur Schopenhauer,
itself a voluntaristic form of idealism, that is to say that “the
world is my idea.” Schopenhauer, however, was probably the only idealist who
defended the converse principle that good is transmuted into evil.
Basic questions and answers
In defining philosophical idealism in its historical
development as a technical metaphysical doctrine,
three most-difficult and irreducible questions arise. From the efforts to
answer those questions there has been created an extensive literature that is
the corpus of philosophical idealism.
Ultimate
reality
The first of the three questions is metaphysical: What is
the ultimate reality that is given in human experience? Historically, answers
to this question have fallen between two extremes. On the one hand is the skepticism of the
18th-century empiricist David Hume, who held
that the ultimate reality given in experience is the moment-by-moment flow of
events in the consciousness of each
individual. That concept compresses all of reality into a solipsistic specious present—the
momentary sense experience of one isolated percipient. At the other extreme,
followers of Spinoza adopted his definition of ultimate substance as
that which can exist and can be conceived only by itself. According to the
first principle of his system of pantheistic idealism, God (or Nature or
Substance) is the ultimate reality given in human experience. In the early 19th
century the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said
that this dogmatic absolutism
was the lion’s den into which all tracks enter and from which none ever
returns. In answering the first question, most philosophical idealists steer
between Hume and Spinoza and in so doing create a number of types of idealism,
which are discussed below.
The given
The second question to arise in defining idealism is:
What is given? What results can be obtained from a logical interpretation and
elaboration of the given? According to idealists, the result, though it is
frequently something external to individual experience, is, nevertheless,
a concrete universal,
an order system (like the invisible lattice structure of a crystal), or an
ideality in the sense explained earlier. In Hegel’s words: “What is real is
rational, and what is rational is real.” Idealists believe that the collective human
spirit of intellectual inquiry
has discovered innumerable order systems that are present in external nonhuman
reality, or nature, and that that collective creative intelligence has produced
the various sciences and disciplines.
That production has required a long period of time called history. But history
was antedated by the achievements of ancestors who created languages and
religions and other primitive institutions. Consequently, the logical
interpretation and elaboration of the given is actually the complete
transformation of Earth by its various inhabitants. An inherent part
of the collective intelligence is the spiritual force that idealists call the
spirit of philosophy.
Change
The third
question is: What position or attitude is a thinker to take toward temporal
becoming and change and toward the presence of ends and values within the
given? According to idealists, reason not
only discovers a coherent order
in nature but also creates the state and
other cultural institutions, which together constitute the
cultural order of a modern society. Idealistic political philosophers recognize
the primacy of this cultural order over the private order or family and over
the public order—the governing agencies and economic institutions. The
conservation and enhancement of the values of all three orders constitute the
basic moral objective
of every people. A useful distinction drawn by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer,
a member of the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism (see
below Types of philosophical idealism:
Western types), between the efficient and the formative energies of a
people emphasizes the way in which those moral forces function: the efficient
energies are the conserving, and the formative are the creative forces in
society. It is on the basis of that distinction that idealists have made a
contribution to international ethics,
which charges that no country has a right to use its efficient energies to
exercise power over another people except to further the formative energies of
that people, to enrich their cultural order. Ethically, then, there can be no
power over without power for; i.e., economic exploitation is wrong.
Modern idealists have also created an idealistic philosophy of history.
The 20th-century Italian idealist Benedetto Croce expressed
it in the formula “every true history is contemporary history”; and at the same
time in France, the subjective idealist Léon Brunschvicg agreed.
There are close relations between the philosophy of history and the philosophy
of values.
Basic arguments
Four basic
arguments found in the literature of idealism may be briefly summarized.
According to this argument, all the qualities attributed to
objects are sense qualities. Thus, hardness is the sensing of a resistance to a
striking action, and heaviness is a sensation of muscular effort when, for
example, holding an object in one’s hand, just as blueness is a quality of
visual experience. But those qualities exist only while they are being
perceived by some subject or spirit equipped with sense organs. The
18th-century Anglo-Irish empiricist George
Berkeley rejected the idea that
sense perceptions are caused by material substance, the existence of which he
denied. Intuitively he grasped the truth that
“to be is to be perceived.” The argument is a simple one, but it provoked an
extensive and complicated literature, and modern idealists considered it
irrefutable.
The reciprocity argument
Closely related to the esse est percipi argument is the contention that
subject and object are reciprocally dependent upon each other. It is impossible
to conceive of a subject without an object, since the essential meaning of
being a subject is being aware of an object and that of being an object is
being an object to a subject, that relation being absolutely and
universally reciprocal.
Consequently, every complete reality is always a unity of subject and
object—i.e., an immaterial ideality, a concrete universal.
In the third argument, the idealist holds that in the individual’s
most-immediate experience, that of his own subjective awareness, the intuitive
self can achieve a direct apprehension of
ultimate reality, which reveals it to be spiritual. Thus, the mystic bypasses
normal cognition,
feeling that, for metaphysical probings,
the elaborate processes of mediation interposed between sense objects and their
perceptions reduce its reliability as compared with the direct grasp of intuition.
It is significant that the claims of that argument have been made
by numerous thinkers, in varying degrees idealistic and mystical, living in
different periods and in different cultures.
In ancient
Greece, for example, it was made by Plato,
to whom the final leap to the form of
the Good was mystical in nature. In Indian Hindu Vedanta philosophy,
it was made by the 8th-century monistic theologian Shankara and by
the 11th-century dualistic Brahmin theist Ramanuja. In Buddhism the
claims were made by the sometimes mystical extreme subjectivism of the
Vijnanavada school of Mahayana (represented
by Ashvaghosha in
the 1st and Asanga in
the 4th century) and in China by
the Zen school
and by the 7th-century scholar Hui-neng,
author of its basic classic Liu-Tsu t’an-ch’ing (“Platform Scripture of the
Sixth Patriarch”). In Islamic lands it was made by Sufis (mystics)—in
particular, by the 13th-century Persian writer Jalal al-Din Rumi. And in the
West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was made by several
distinguished idealists: in Germany, by the seminal modern
theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher; in France, by the evolutionary intuitionist Henri
Bergson, by the philosopher of action Maurice
Blondel, and by the Jewish religious existentialist Martin
Buber; and in English-speaking countries, by the Scottish
metaphysician James
Frederick Ferrier and the American Hegelian William E. Hocking.
This famous argument originated as a proof of the existence of
God. It occurred to the 11th-century thinker St.
Anselm of Canterbury, as an intuitive insight from his personal religious experience,
that a being conceived to be perfect must necessarily exist, for otherwise that
being would lack one of the essentials of perfection. God’s perfection requires
his existence. Some idealist philosophers have generalized the argument to
prove idealism. They distinguish conceptual essences
that exist only in the intellect from categorial essences that actually exist
in re (in the thing). Every actual reality, therefore, is a unity of one or
more categorial essences and existence; and again, that means that it is an immaterial
ideality or concrete universal. According to Hegel, “the ideality of the
finite” is “the main principle of philosophy.”
Comments
Post a Comment