IDEALISM.

The term idealism in its broadest sense denotes the philosophical position that ideas (mental or spiritual entities) are primary and lie at the very foundation of reality, knowledge, and morality, while non-ideal entities (such as physical or material things) are secondary and perhaps even illusory. Strands of idealistic thought can be found in ancient and medieval philosophy, but modern idealism begins in the wake of René Descartes (1596–1650), whose method of doubt problematized the relation of the mind (or spirit or ideas) to the material world and thus raised questions about how ideas "inside" the mind can be known to interact with or correspond to any material, extended thing "outside" the mind.

Early Modern Idealism: Leibniz and Berkeley

The idealism of Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz (1646–1716) arose largely in response to questions raised by Descartes about the relation between mental substances and physical substances. According to Leibniz, real substances do not and cannot interact, because to be a substance is to be independent of the influences of other substances (but no finite substance is altogether independent of God, who is the ground and cause of all finite substances, including ourselves). Furthermore, Leibniz argued that every genuine substance must be utterly non-composite or simple (i.e., not made of parts), because the ongoing unity and existence of any being made of parts depends on causes outside of the being itself (and such dependence contradicts the very definition of substance). Accordingly Leibniz held that no genuine substance can be material, because matter is essentially composite, which means that matter cannot be substantially or independently real. Leibniz thus concluded that substances must be percipient, or have perceptions, because the only way in which a substance can be utterly simple and yet reflect diversity within itself is through the undivided activity of perception. Leibniz's idealism can be summed up in the proposition that "to be is to be a substance, and to be a substance is to be percipient." For Leibniz, the real world is simply the totality of all such noninteracting ("windowless") and percipient substances (called "monads"), and our experience of the material world is to be explained idealistically: to be a substance is to be percipient, and the perceptions belonging to any one substance accurately reflect the states of all other substances, not because there is any real interaction among substances but because God has ordained a "pre-established harmony" among all finite substances and their perceptions.

If modern philosophy is divided into two main schools of thought—"rationalism" and "empiricism"—then Leibniz is a "rationalist" idealist, while George Berkeley (1685–1753) is an "empiricist" idealist. Berkeley began with John Locke's empiricist premise that the mind does not possess innate ideas but acquires ideas only through sensory experience. Like Locke, Berkeley also held that the mind has immediate or direct perception only of its own ideas. But unlike Locke, Berkeley denied that the mind's immediate perception of its own ideas can give it indirect knowledge of material things outside of it. Berkeley further insisted that "an idea can be like nothing but an idea" (Principles, part 1, section 8), and so we can never know whether the immaterial ideas in our minds resemble or accurately depict material things outside of our minds. Furthermore, Berkeley argued, there is something self-contradictory in the proposition that objects of perception can exist without being perceived. In order to avoid skeptical or altogether absurd conclusions, Berkeley argued, one must abandon belief in the independent existence of material things and become an idealist or "immaterialist." For Berkeley, the ideas that we have of sensible things are not caused in us by independently existing material things; rather, these ideas simply are the sensible things themselves. But sensible things have continued existence—even when we finite minds are not perceiving them—because they continue to exist in the mind of God, whose perception of things not only causes the sensible things to exist but also from time to time causes them to be perceived by us. Thus for Berkeley, our perception of sensible things is nothing other than our perception of ideas in God, and sensible things have an orderly, predictable, and enduring existence because of the wisdom and goodness of God. For Berkeley, then, the immaterialist view of reality not only refutes skepticism but also provides indirect theoretical support for theism. Far from seeking to reduce the real world to the status of "mere" ideas, the real aim of Berkeley's immaterialism is to elevate "mere" ideas to the status of the real world.

Kant's Transcendental Idealism

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously wrote that his "transcendental idealism" arose in response to the radical skepticism of David Hume (1711–1776; see Prolegomena, p. 260). Unlike Berkeley, Hume doubted not only the independent existence of material objects but even the objective validity of concepts that still remained central to Berkeley's immaterialist system, such as the concepts of causality and God. Kant recognized that these and other metaphysical concepts could be neither verified nor falsified by recourse to experience alone; however, Kant did not simply reject metaphysics (as Hume had done) but sought to determine the legitimacy and scope of metaphysics by asking the prior question of what reason might justifiably claim to know a priori (that is, independent of all experience).

For Kant, the question of the legitimacy and scope of metaphysics is intimately linked to the question of the possibility of "synthetic apriori judgments." As synthetic, such judgments extend our knowledge beyond our mere concepts of things, and as a priori, they have necessary and universal validity. Prior to Kant, the empiricists had argued that all synthetic judgments must be a posteriori (that is, based on experience), while Leibniz and Leibnizians had argued that even seemingly synthetic judgments are not really synthetic, because all the predicates belonging to any particular thing can in principle be discovered through an analysis of the mere concept of the thing. The Leibnizian option was unacceptable to Kant, because it entailed that human sensibility is not essentially different from (but is simply a confused form of) human understanding, and thus that human knowing is different in degree, but not in kind, from divine knowing. The empiricist option was unacceptable because, for Kant, judgments based on experience (a posteriori judgments) could never yield knowledge about what is necessarily and universally the case. Against both sides, Kant argued that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible for us, because we possess a kind of sensibility (or intuition) that is not merely empirical (a posteriori) but a priori. More specifically, we possess the a priori forms of intuition—space and time—where space is the form of all outer sense, and time is the form of all inner sense. For Kant, no object can be given to us (and thus we can have no access to objects beyond our mere concepts), except through the a priori forms of space and time, which are the "subjective conditions" of our own mode of intuiting things. Kant also argued that we possess a priori concepts or "categories" of the understanding which—like the a priori forms of intuition—are not derived from experience but rather which make our experience of objects possible in the first place. Indeed, Kant argues, there would be no such thing as "objects" for us if we did not make judgments applying our own a priori concepts (or categories) to the sensible manifold that is intuited by us through our own a priori forms of space and time. Kant concludes that the "objects" we know through the a priori forms of intuition and categories of the understanding are not "things-in-themselves" (they are not things as they might exist apart from our own a priori conditions of knowing) but only appearances.

Kant's denial that we can have knowledge of "things-in-themselves" is not meant to imply that the empirical objects of ordinary experience (what Kant calls appearances) are "un-real" or merely illusory. For Kant, the objects of ordinary experience are certainly real, for "the real" is simply that which exercises some degree of influence on our sensibility (Critique, A 165; B 208). But while objects of ordinary experience are empirically real, Kant insists that they are "transcendentally ideal" (and not transcendentally real), which is to say that they are not to be identified with anything beyond—or anything that transcends—the bounds of possible experience or the a priori subjective conditions that make such experience possible in the first place. Simultaneously embracing both "transcendental idealism" and "empirical realism," Kant claims to have shown how we are justified in making synthetic a priori knowledge claims and in employing concepts that are neither derived from nor verified through experience. But just as Kant's transcendental idealism entails the distinction between things-in-themselves and appearances, it also entails a distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate employment of pure (a priori) reason. For Kant, we can legitimately pursue a limited "metaphysics of experience," and we can legitimately make synthetic a priori knowledge claims about objects of possible experience. For example, the concept of "causality" (even though "pure" and underived from experience) remains objectively valid when applied to things that can be intuited by us under the a priori conditions of space and time. But Kant also argues that we cannot legitimately pursue metaphysics or make synthetic a priori claims regarding objects that transcend all possible experience. Furthermore, he argues that the attempt to make knowledge claims about the non-sensible objects of traditional metaphysics (for example, God, the soul, and the world as a whole) inevitably leads reason into illusion and self-contradiction. But while we cannot obtain objectively valid theoretical knowledge of such non-sensible objects, our ideas regarding such objects (for example, our idea of God) may continue to play a legitimate role in guiding our search for complete knowledge in our theoretical pursuits and the complete good in our moral pursuits.

Idealism, from Kant to Fichte and Schelling

In the years following its public promulgation, Kant's transcendental idealist philosophy was the object of widespread excitement but also much critical scrutiny. Three interrelated problems (or perceived problems) would prove to be significant for the subsequent development of German idealism. First, critics argued that Kant failed to derive or "deduce" the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding in a systematic and rigorous way, and as a result his critical system could claim only contingent or inductive (as opposed to universal and necessary) validity for itself. Second, critics claimed that Kant's inadequate derivation of the forms of intuition and categories of the understanding committed him to a series of unacceptable dualisms, all of them rooted (directly or indirectly) in the dualism between sensibility and understanding (for example, the dualisms between intuitions and concepts, activity and passivity, receptivity and spontaneity, the a priori and a posteriori, knowledge and belief, theoretical reason and practical reason). Third, critics argued, Kant's strict separation of sensibility and understanding made it impossible for him to account for the receptive character of human knowing except by reference to "things-in-themselves" that allegedly exist apart from the human knower and thus render the activity of human knowing finite, dependent, and passive; but this postulation of things-in-themselves contradicts the spirit of Kant's own transcendental idealism, according to which we cannot know anything about things-in-themselves, including what role—if any—they play in rendering human knowing finite, dependent, and passive.

In the midst of ongoing debates about Kant's transcendental idealism, the young Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) became convinced that the Kantian system was essentially correct but stood in need of a more systematic formulation and rigorous defense. First, Fichte argued that it was wrong to think of the "faculty of thinking" or the "mind" or the "self" as if these terms referred to a substrate that underlies our mental operations and persists even in the absence of actual cognitive activity. To think of the self in this way, he claimed, is to regard it as an unknown "thing in itself" that has existence even apart from its being known, and such a view is inimical to transcendental idealism. Fichte went on to argue that the self is nothing other than the free, uncoerced activity of "self-positing" or "self-awareness" and that this very activity can serve as the single, foundational principle from which one could rigorously derive all the other conditions of synthetic a priori knowing, including even the self's apparent dependence on things outside of it. More specifically, Fichte argued that the self would have no occasion to reflect back on itself, and thus it could never even be a self if it did not also take itself to be finite and partly determined by a "not-self" outside of it. In other words, Fichte held that even the apparent dependence of human knowing on supposedly independent, unknowable things-in-themselves could be explained on the basis of the necessary conditions of the self's own activity of self-positing. He went on to assert that the not-self, without which the self could not even be a self, must ultimately be understood as another free self, thereby arguing for the necessity of belief in other selves (or intersubjectivity) as a condition of the possibility of the self's own self-positing. In practical philosophy, Fichte also took a step beyond Kant, arguing that the idea of God is necessary for our moral purposes but also that this idea in fact signified nothing other than the moral order of the world itself.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) was an early follower of Fichte but eventually distanced himself from the Fichtean claim that a properly critical philosophy can begin only with the activity of the self-positing self. By 1799 Schelling was arguing (along with Fichte) that one could derive the not-self (or "nature") from the self-positing activity of the self, but also (against Fichte) that one could equally derive the self-positing activity of the self from the not-self (or "nature"). In subsequent years Schelling departed even farther from Fichte, explicitly rejecting the Fichtean claim that the distinction between subject and object (self and not-self) is a distinction that can be made only by and within subjectivity itself. In effect Schelling argued that Fichte was right to relativize Kant's rigid distinction between subject and object (or correlatively, between understanding and sensibility, or concepts and intuitions) but wrong to achieve such relativization by locating the distinction within subjectivity alone. For Schelling, the distinction between subject and object is not merely subjective but arises only from within an "absolute identity" that is neither subject nor object but both at once. Furthermore, Schelling held, this absolute identity cannot be discursively demonstrated or conceptually articulated (because demonstration and conceptualization already presuppose a subject-object split) but can only be apprehended immediately in an intellectual intuition or (according to Schelling's later thought) an aesthetic intuition. According to Fichte, Schelling's appeal to immediate intuition and his claim that unconscious nature is continuous with and provides the conditions for the emergence of conscious subjectivity could only signal a return to pre-critical, pre-Kantian metaphysics. But Schelling insisted that his "identity philosophy" incorporated the truths of transcendental idealism, while also moving beyond Kant's and Fichte's "subjective idealisms" to a more comprehensive and satisfactory "absolute idealism." This absolute idealism, Schelling argued, did not uncritically presuppose any dualisms between subject and object, freedom and nature, or human agency and God, but rather explained all such dualisms as mere moments within the absolute's own process of internal self-differentiation.

Hegelian Idealism and Its Aftermath

In 1801 the virtually unknown Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) published a short book entitled The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, in which he argued that Schelling had rightly criticized Fichte's "subjective idealism." But by 1807, with the publication of his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel had begun to criticize Schelling for reasons that were to become determinative for the development of his own version of absolute idealism. First of all, Hegel argued against Schelling that the pathway to a truly "scientific" absolute idealism could not be based merely on an immediate intuition (whether intellectual or aesthetic) but instead had to be conceptually articulated and discursively mediated. Indeed Hegel referred to his own Phenomenology as the "ladder" by means of which readers could be led discursively from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness to that scientific consciousness or "absolute knowing" (see Phenomenology, p. 14). Second, and contrary to what might be implied by Schelling's insistence on immediate intuition, Hegel argued that the discursive pathway to absolute idealism is not external to, but constitutes an integral part of, the very truth of absolute idealism. For Hegel, then, Schelling was correct to claim that previous expressions of the subject-object identity within the absolute (for example, in nature and in earlier forms of philosophy) contained the conditions of the emergence of the subjectivity that eventually grasps the truth of absolute idealism; however, Schelling was wrong to hold that his being correct about this could be ascertained through an immediate intuition. For Hegel, quite simply, one could not know that absolute idealism is true if one did not conceptually recollect the previous forms of thought leading up to it. Because of this, Hegel also held that previous forms of thought do not lead just accidentally or haphazardly to his own thought but rather find their necessary consummation only within his absolute idealism. Third, Hegel agreed with Schelling that a true idealism must not simply presuppose the traditional dualisms of subject and object, freedom and nature, or human agency and God (thus Hegel held that our own coming-to-be conscious of the truth of absolute idealism is not essentially separable from God's own coming-to-be God). But because of his commitment to conceptual rigor and discursive articulation, Hegel went on to argue that the denial of these traditional dualisms required the development of a new and "dialectical" logic, one that would demonstrate how all finite things reflect within themselves the fundamental yet contradictory identity-in-difference of Being and Nothing (Logic, p. 85). All things are in themselves contradictory, Hegel argued, and so Kant was wrong to try to eliminate or contain such contradiction by introducing his distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves (Logic, p. 237).

Hegel's idealism represents the most systematic and comprehensive version of post-Kantian idealism, for it contained within itself not only a new dialectical logic but also very detailed philosophies of nature, history, art, law, and religion. Not long after Hegel's death, however, his idealistic philosophy became the object of a sustained materialist critique and transformation, primarily at the hands of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Karl Marx (1818–1883), and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Most famously, Marx and Engels sought to transform Hegel's dialectical idealism into a form of "dialectical materialism." They agreed with Hegel that existing reality is fundamentally dialectical and in contradiction with itself, but against Hegel they argued that reality's basic contradictions are rooted not in merely conceptual determinations (such as the identity-in-difference of Being and Nothing) but rather in the material conditions underlying all forms of precommunist social and economic organization. They went on to assert that systems such as Hegel's tended to perpetuate the destructive contradictions at work in precommunist society insofar as these systems tended to regard such contradictions as merely ideal and—worse still—as necessary to the proper unfolding of the history of thought. But just as Hegel had argued that a recollective conceptual journey through incomplete forms of thought is necessary to the very truth of absolute idealism, so too Marx and Engels argued that an actual material journey through incomplete forms of social organization (feudalism, mercantilism, and capitalism) is necessary to emergence of the truly just communist society that is yet to be. In spite of this materialist critique, Hegelian idealism enjoyed an energetic revival in Anglo-American philosophy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The three most important post-Hegelian British idealists were Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882), Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), while their most important American counterpart was Josiah Royce (1855–1916).

See also Empiricism ; Epistemology ; Hegelianism ; Marxism ; Rationalism .

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——. Science of Knowledge. Translated by Peter Heath and John Lachs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Parenthetical citations refer to the pagination of Fichte's Gesamtausgabe, edited by I. H. Fichte, which is also indicated in the margins of this English translation.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy. Translated by H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977.

——. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

——. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Humanities Press, 1976.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Parenthetical citations refer to the A and/or B pagination of the Akademie edition, which is also indicated in the margins of this English translation.

——. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. New ed, translated by Paul Carus and revised by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977. Parenthetical citations refer to the pagination of the Akademie edition, which is also indicated in the margins of this English translation.

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays. Translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. The views described in this entry are to be found especially in Leibniz's "Monadology" and "Discourse on Metaphysics."

Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Edited by David McClellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. System of Transcendental Idealism. Translated by Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Ameriks, Karl, ed. Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

——. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Harris, H. S. Hegel's Development. Vol. 1: Toward the Sunlight (1770–1801). Vol. 2: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–1806). Oxford: Clarendon, 1972, 1983.

Hylton, Peter. Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.

Neuhouser, Frederick. Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760–1860. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pippin, Robert B. Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self- Consciousness. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Michael Baur

Idealism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In philosophy, idealism designates a variety of historical positions since Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 BCE). The general characteristics of idealism derive from its historical examples. In metaphysics, idealism stands for a general belief about the nature of reality. In epistemology, it represents the belief that only a certain kind of reality is intelligible to the human mind. In Plato, whose idealism is influenced by the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides (born c. 515 BCE), the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of idealism are combined in such a way that only ideas (or Forms) are fully real and only ideas are fully intelligible (compare Plato, Phaedo 65A–67B, and Republic 506B–518D). All forms of idealism hold that intelligible structures (“ideas”) are part of the world itself rather than merely interpretations or constructs of the mind. As a result, idealist philosophers assume either a partial or a complete identity between intelligible structures and reality itself. In the most extreme case—namely, that of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753)—ideas and minds are said to be the only reality there is.

Furthermore, all forms of idealism hold that intelligible structures rather than matter or physical bodies constitute the foundation of reality. In this sense, idealism is opposed to materialism and physicalism in metaphysics or ontology. Idealists also generally hold that what is known or knowable about the world are ideal entities (e.g., conceptual structures, laws, principles, values) that are either inherent in things as their essence or that function as their normative archetypes. In this sense, idealism is opposed to realism in epistemology.

Among the major idealist philosophies after Plato are the rationalist idealism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), according to whom reality consists of infinitely many ideal entities called monads (“metaphysical atoms”); Berkeley’s empirical or psychological idealism (“to be is to be perceived”); the transcendental or critical idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who in the Critique of Pure Reason (first edition, 1781) states that “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience ” (A 158); German idealism represented primarily by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831); the British idealism of Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882), Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923); and the American idealism of Josiah Royce (1855–1916).

Idealism achieved its most highly developed form and its most comprehensive and ambitious expression in post-Kantian German idealism and in Hegel’s system in particular. Although insisting that he remained perfectly true to the spirit of Kant’s philosophy, Fichte made the first decisive step beyond Kant by abandoning the thing-in-itself as well as the dualism of concept and intuition in favor of a unified first principle, the absolute ego. In this way, he very much set the agenda for post-Kantian German idealism’s drive toward a holistic system based on a monistic principle. Scholarship since the 1950S has pointed out that a rivaling realist tendency with dualistic aspects continued to be an ingredient in post-Kantian idealism, as can be seen in the philosophies of the later Fichte and Schelling.

Hegel’s strict monism conceived of the totality of reality or “the absolute” as a self-determining system exhibiting the structure of a self-referential, self-conscious subject called spirit. Spirit unfolds in human history and achieves complete self-recognition in Hegel’s speculative idealism. The conceptual structure of spirit is that of the Concept or the Idea: “The Absolute is the universal and One Idea” (Hegel 1831, §213). At the heart of Hegel’s system, for which the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) initially served as an introduction, is the three-part Science of Logic. In three books titled Being (1812), Essence (1813), and The Concept (1816), the Logic develops the categories (“thought-determinations”) that are supposed to provide the intelligible structure of spirit’s external existence as nature, subjective, objective, and absolute spirit. These forms of spirit in externality comprise a philosophy of nature, a philosophy of mind (soul, consciousness, self-consciousness), a moral and political philosophy, and a philosophy of religion, the arts, and philosophy itself. The categories of the Logic are derived by means of the dialectical method through which concepts are shown to generate an opposite that is nonetheless also their necessary complement (e.g., no ground without a grounded) and must therefore be combined in a new concept in order to capture the whole of which they are merely a part. The dialectical process continues until an all-inclusive concept (the “absolute Idea”) is reached. Hegel claims that the categories are generated autonomously by thought itself and have objective validity. His Logic is thus an epistemology just as much as it is an ontology. According to Hegel, it replaces traditional metaphysics.

Idealism is also used to characterize basic approaches in ethics, aesthetics, social ethics, and political science, where it is referred to as practical idealism. Idealism has been criticized for being inherently teleological in that it typically focuses on the consummation of the process of cognition in an ideal state of total (self-)knowledge or in the achievement or eschatological projection of an “end of history” (both tendencies are manifest primarily in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel). This seems to contradict the open-endedness of the process of cognition as well as that of history. The future seems either closed or predetermined. Both assumptions contradict our normal intuitions as well as scientific rationality. Idealism’s attempt to overcome dualisms such as appearance and reality, nature and spirit, mind and matter, concept and intuition has also been criticized for making the mind, self, thought, or spirit the only true reality, thus abandoning the realistic element that normally accounts for the content of knowledge. Thus in Hegel the object or “other” turns out to be the self in disguise and genuine otherness seems to have disappeared. All cognition becomes self-cognition and reality a self-manifestation of reason. A charitable reading of idealist philosophies will point out, however, that to the extent that all knowledge is mediated by concepts or acts of interpretation, an ideal element in all cognition remains an irreducible factor. Thus this criticism must be directed primarily at those idealist positions that leave no room for ontological otherness.

SEE ALSO Epistemology; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Materialism; Philosophy of Science

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ameriks, Karl, ed. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Ewing, Alfred Cyril, ed. 1957. The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1990. Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline, and Critical Writings, ed. Ernst Behler. New York: Continuum.

McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sandkühler, Hans Jörg, ed. 2005. Handbuch Deutscher Idealismus. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.

Vesey, Godfrey, ed. 1982. Idealism, Past and Present. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Klaus Brinkmann

Idealism

Idealism as an ontological or epistemological doctrine holds that reality, or what can count as reality for human beings, is determined by mind. The various ways of specifying the basic role of mind ontologically or epistemologically yield various forms of idealism. As an ontological doctrine idealism can hold that reality is basically mental in nature; the physical world is an expression of this mental reality. An argument for the position that what one takes to be material is actually spiritual is that what is actual is process or activity, and mind or spirit is the model of activity. In this sense, metaphysical idealism is contrasted with materialism. An example is the doctrine of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) that reality consists of active substances, or monads.

As an epistemological doctrine, idealism can hold that humans do not have access to a mind-independent reality. However, an epistemological idealism along this line can easily be transformed into an ontological one to the effect that there is no mind-independent reality. Idealism in this sense is constrasted with realism. The position of George Berkeley (1685–1753) that esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) could be read as an example of an epistemological idealism with radical antirealist claims, which amounts to an ontological immaterialism. But Berkeley also argues that sensible things exist independently of human beings in that they exist in the mind of God (theistic idealism ).

An ontological idealism can hold precisely that there is a reality beyond the physical world of sense experience, and this transcendent reality is the basic or true one in that it accords actuality to the relentlessly changing world of sense experience. Humans have access to the ultimate reality beyond the world of sense experience through higher forms of mind, but the true or divine reality transcends the human mind. This form of metaphysical idealism is thus an ontological realism (claiming that reality is independent of the human mind). The classic example of a metaphysical idealism as a transcendent idealism is the doctrine of the world of ideas in Plato (428–347 b.c.e.).

Epistemological idealism can be reformulated as transcendental idealism. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) not only attacks dogmatic metaphysical positions that imply that humans have access to things in themselves beyond the world of sense experience, but also Berkeley's subjective idealism (as Kant takes it to be), which dissolves reality into what humans experience. Instead, according to Kant, space and time, and the categories (e.g., the category of causality) are, as structures of the human mind, also conditions of possibility for the experience of the world. However, this opens the problem that reality is on the one hand "reality-for-us," while on the other hand an ultimate reality beyond this reality is postulated. This problem is dealt with by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose various positions are collectively labelled German Idealism.

Absolute idealism in Hegel seeks to overcome the Kantian split between the world of sense experience and ultimate reality (thing-in-itself) without returning to a dogmatic position. Hegel points out that in having an experience, human understanding of the world and human self-understanding can be changed. This possibility of self-transcendence implied in experience cannot be accounted for if ultimate reality is placed beyond the limits of experience. Hegel's absolute idealism solves the basic task of German Idealism left over by Kant, namely, to account for both freedom inherent in rationality (autonomy) and the embodiment of that freedom. While Fichte emphasizes the activity of the human mind as a productive activity, Schelling sets out to overcome this (as he called it) subjective idealism in Fichte by combining a transcendental philosophy and a philosophy of nature. In Hegel's absolute idealism, mind (Geist ) transcends the divide between freedom and nature by coming to itself through nature and history. Accordingly, Hegel's idealism is not to be captured by the opposition between idealism and materialism, or between realism and antirealism.

As the complex position of Hegel indicates, idealism needs to be reformulated in opposition to its traditional forms. Basically, idealism concerns the problem that human access to reality must tell something about that very reality. From the brief outline above one can extract the insight that in relating to reality human beings are doing something. Thinking is an activity. Humans only relate to reality in interpreting it. This does not imply, however, that reality is what people interpret it to be or that reality is a mental construction. If mind were basic in this sense, people would not be able to discuss the reality of the mind. Instead the crucial argument could be the following: A comprehensive theory of reality must be able to account for the reality of mind and self-consciousness that it itself presupposes. Following this line of argument, idealism could be reformulated as a response to reductive forms of naturalism in that it points to the presupposition that human beings as subjects relate to the world, and only as self-interpreting animals are they able to form theories about the world in which they live. The task is to account for both the embodiment of mind and this presupposition of mind.

The question of idealism is thus not only the basic question of science concerning the reality of interpretations and models of reality. Idealism also concerns religious questions about the place of human beings in the world. Religion need not be interpreted along the lines of an idealism that posits a second world beyond the world of sense-experience. A reformulation of idealism as outlined above can instead draw upon the understanding to be found in religion that human consciousness reflects the problem of the embodiment of consciousness itself.

See also Materialism; Naturalism; Realism

Bibliography

berkeley, george. a treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge (1710). in the principles of human knowledge with other writings, ed. g. j. warnock. london: fontana library, 1962.

hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich. the phenomenology of mind (1807), trans. j. b. baillie. london: allen and urwin; new york: humanities press, 1977. revised reprint of 1931 edition.

kant, immanuel. critique of pure reason (1781), trans. norman kemp smith. london: macmillan, 1978.

arne grØn

IDEALISM

IDEALISM. As a philosophical concept, idealism can be employed both in a broad sense and in a much narrower, more specific form. Broadly speaking, idealism encompasses any philosophy that treats ideas—rather than, for example, matter—as primary. Plato's theory of forms is perhaps the first example of this approach. When applied more specifically, idealism is the notion that the only things that exist are minds and their contents (ideas). This theory was first fully developed by Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753).

Plato drew a clear distinction between the sensory world and the intelligible world, which we can only apprehend through reason. He argued that the objects of the sensory world are mere copies of universal, ideal "forms," that make up the realm of what is intelligible. Plato's theory was subsequently taken up and developed by the Neoplatonists, especially Plotinus and St. Augustine. To some extent, Berkeley's idealism built on these earlier theories, but it also drew on and challenged scientific understandings of the world that had been developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Berkeley set out his philosophy in his Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). Three years later he published his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, a more accessible version of the theory, in which Philonous ('lover of mind') convinces and converts Hylas ('matter') to his point of view. Both works were, in part, a response to John Locke's (1632–1704) Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke's explanation of the world relied on four key elements, God, matter, ideas, and minds. While Berkeley expressed great respect for Locke, he rejected the doctrine of matter that Locke, along with many others, accepted. According to Berkeley matter in itself is unintelligible; it is impossible for us to either observe or imagine matter alone, devoid of all other qualities or characteristics. Moreover, Berkeley argued that an adequate explanation of the world could be given on the basis of the other three elements alone, in Berkeley's terminology God, finite spirits, and their ideas. Berkeley defined "ideas" as the objects of perception and "spirits" as the entities that exercise perception. Within this system the existence of an infinite spirit, God, which is both omniscient and omnipresent, is crucial.

Berkeley's theory had a mixed reception. The story is that Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) claimed to be able to refute it simply by kicking a stone, but others took it more seriously. There has been much discussion as to whether (and to what extent) Berkeley influenced Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of pure reason) Kant attacked Berkeley's traditional version of idealism and advocated a combination of "empirical realism" and "transcendental idealism." Both philosophers saw all experience as mind-dependent. However, for Berkeley there was nothing beyond or outside of mind, whereas Kant retained the regulative idea of "things-in-themselves" lying behind experience.

Idealism continued to be important beyond the early modern period. During the nineteenth century the ideas of Berkeley and especially of Kant provided a basis for the absolute idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1764–1814) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). Despite a subsequent collapse in the influence of this position, idealism continues to be advocated into the twenty-first century, though usually in forms that are closer to Kant than to Berkeley.

See also Berkeley, George ; Kant, Immanuel ; Philosophy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues. Edited by Howard Robinson. Oxford and New York, 1996.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998. Translation of Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781).

Secondary Sources

Urmson, J. O. Berkeley. Oxford and New York, 1982.

Vesey, Godfrey, ed. Idealism Past and Present. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1982. See especially the foreword and the first three chapters.

Rachel Hammersley

idealism the attitude that places special value on ideas and ideals as products of the mind, in comparison with the world as perceived through the senses. In art idealism is the tendency to represent things as aesthetic sensibility would have them rather than as they are. In ethics it implies a view of life in which the predominant forces are spiritual and the aim is perfection. In philosophy the term refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow. In modern times idealism has largely come to refer the source of ideas to man's consciousness, whereas in the earlier period ideas were assigned a reality outside and independent of man's existence. Nevertheless, modern idealism generally proposes suprahuman mental activity of some sort and ascribes independent reality to certain principles, such as creativity, a force for good, or an absolute truth. The subjective idealism of George Berkeley in the 18th cent. held that the apparently objective world has its existence in the consciousness of individuals. Immanuel Kant developed a critical or transcendental idealism in which the phenomenal world, constituted by the human understanding, stands opposed to a world of things-in-themselves. The post-Kantian German idealism of J. G. Fichte and Friedrich von Schelling, which culminated in the absolute or objective idealism of G. W. F. Hegel, began with a denial of the unknowable thing-in-itself, thereby enabling these philosophers to treat all reality as the creation of mind or spirit. Forms of post-Kantian idealism were developed in Germany by Arthur Schopenhauer and Hermann Lotze and in England by Samuel Coleridge; forms of post-Hegelian idealism were developed in England and France by T. H. Green, Victor Cousin, and C. B. Renouvier. More recent idealists include F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, Josiah Royce, Benedetto Croce, and the neo-Kantians such as Ernst Cassirer and Hermann Cohen.

Bibliography: See J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (1931, repr. 1965); A. C. Ewing, ed., The Idealist Tradition (1957); G. A. Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History (1969).

idealism A term used to refer to that position in the philosophy of the social sciences which assumes that the social world, like all other objects of external perception, consists of ideas originating from some source or other. Examples of such sources would be Hegel's ‘Geist’, Berkeley's God, or (most commonly in sociology) the minds of individual human beings. In other words, what idealism asserts ontologically is that society only exists in so far as human beings think that it exists. And what it asserts epistemologically is that the proper way to gain knowledge of society is through the investigation of this thinking.

The position set out by Peter Winch in his The idea of a Social Science (1958) comes closest to that of pure idealism in contemporary social science, although some versions of discourse analysis are also good approximations. More commonly, however, sociologists drawn to idealism have followed one of two courses: either they have based themselves on a synthetic ontology which assumes the coexistence of mental and material phenomena in the social world, and have combined this with a largely empiricist epistemology (as, some have argued, in the case of Max Weber); or, they have combined an idealist ontology with an empiricist stress on the epistemological primacy to be accorded to observation (as, perhaps, in symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology).

i·de·al·ism / īˈdē(ə)ˌlizəm/ • n. 1. the practice of forming or pursuing ideals, esp. unrealistically: the idealism of youth. Compare with realism. ∎  (in art or literature) the representation of things in ideal or idealized form. Often contrasted with realism (sense 2). 2. Philos. any of various systems of thought in which the objects of knowledge are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind. Often contrasted with realism (sense 3). DERIVATIVES: i·de·al·ist n. i·de·al·is·tic / īˌdē(ə)ˈlistik/ adj. i·de·al·is·ti·cal·ly / īˌdē(ə)ˈlistik(ə)lē/ adv.

idealism Philosophical doctrine that assigns metaphysical priority to the mental over the material. It denies the claim within realism that material things exist independently of the mind. Idealism in the West dates from the teachings of Plato. The term is also applied to artistic pursuits to denote a rendering of something ‘as it ought to be’ rather than as it actually is.

idealism, in philosophy, the view that minds or spirits are the only, or the fundamental, entities in the world, material things being unreal or in some way parasitical upon the mental. There are several varieties of idealist philosophy, and their most notable exponents include Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel.

346. Idealism

1. Stockmann, Dr. Thomas sacrifices his career to show that the public baths are a health menace. [Nor. Lit.: An Enemy of the People ; Magill II, 292]

Idealism (Buddhist school of): see VIJÑĀNAVĀDA.

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