Idealism

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IDEALISM

IDEALISM . Idealism is the metaphysical view that reality is of the nature of mind. It stands in contrast with scientific philosophies, such as naturalism, realism, and pragmatism that assume that natural life in the natural world is philosophy's appropriate point of departure. Idealism is not grounded in an empirical evaluation of fact. It is grounded in an intuitive evaluation of meaning. Because all philosophy presupposes that things have a meaning and that something, at least, of that meaning can be known, all philosophy has an idealistic element.

Idealism does not deny the reality of the physical world. It insists only that the apparent self-sufficiency of the natural world is deceptive. Nature seems to go its own way, to be self-sufficient, eternal, and operating on the basis of its own laws without need of a creator or outside force to initiate and sustain its motions, but idealism maintains that it relies on mind or spirit or idea for its forcefulness, purposiveness, and inherent meaning. Idealism therefore always distinguishes between appearance and reality, but its emphasis can either be objective or subjective. Subjective idealism sees the physical world as metaphysically insubstantial. Objective idealism regards physical substance as a necessary counterpart of mind.

Subjective Idealism

The doctrine of the world as māyā or illusion in Śaṅkāra's Advaita Vedānta philosophy in India is the most systematic statement of subjective idealism, although George Berkeley's philosophy is the best-known statement of subjective idealism in the West. Berkeley observed that one's visual perception of the physical world is that of shapes and colors, not of any substantial "thing." People project "physical substance" into the picture because they assume that there must be some "thing" that "has" these perceived qualities.

All one ever knows, however, are the perceived qualities. Reality, therefore, is a perception on the part of a perceiver. Hence Berkeley's principle esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived"). He pointed out that one seems to see distance; in fact, however, three-dimensional depth perception is a learned projection of the mind, not a physical reality that impinges directly on one's senses. He added that the physical sciences are not concerned with some "substantial" reality of a physical object, but rather with those perceptions known to mind. To test a yellow metal to see if it is gold, for example, the chemist does not test "substance," but properties—solubility in different acids, combining proportions, and weight. The "substance" of gold is only a fact of experience that these properties bring together. Berkeley concluded that the distinction between what Locke had called primary qualities and secondary qualities—real "substance" as opposed to "appearances" (of color, shape, etc.)—was mistaken. Nature is, he insisted, whole. If space is mental, then all the other qualities of the natural object must also be mental. Reality is entirely an observer's perception.

But what of objects that are alone and unobserved by any human knower, like the tree in the deserted forest or the living-room furniture in the dead of night? Berkeley argued that natural laws hold for events past as well as future because there is an eternal mind to think them. The living-room sofa exists as an object in the eternal perception of the mind of God. God alone guarantees the eternal endurance and order of nature.

The most consistent subjective idealist in modern Western philosophy was G. W. Leibniz, who held that each self is a "monad" of self-enclosed experience. He accepted a plurality of worlds—my world must be different from yours—and solipsism, the view that each person is solus ipse, a "windowless monad."

Here subjective idealism runs afoul of the "ego-centric predicament." Confined to his or her own ideas, the self-confessed solipsist nevertheless assumes that he or she knows what it might be like not to be so confined; otherwise the assertion has no significance. Each self is conscious, necessarily, of what it is not, in order to know itself as a distinct and separate entity. Solipsism, therefore, is self-refuting.

Objective Idealism

Objective idealism, mindful of this pitfall, grants to naturalism that the physical world is given from "outside" one's self, and must be received passively, but agrees with subjective idealism that one's experience of this given world is, in large part, an interpretation shaped by one's own mind. Both subjective and objective idealism are rooted in the intuition that reality is essentially mind. Objective idealism is distinguished by a nondual view in which the physical world shares metaphysical reality.

The historic relation between idealistic philosophy and religious reflection stems from this common concern for showing how an immaterial power gives the material world its reality and true being. The idealistic commitment to mind as ultimately real expresses, in the language of experience, a view that overlaps the religious commitment to spirit as the enabling power of being. This tradition in Western philosophy was first explored systematically by Plato, for whom reality lay in the eternal forms, or ideas, that were the meaning of any particular thing. These particulars, however, were always imperfect because they were necessarily material. Matter, for Plato, is an admittedly indispensable context for existence. More significantly, however, it is a hindrance to realization of the true meaning of things, which is their ideal form. Plato is unclear as to why nature should exist, and matter remains a dark and unresolved dilemma in his philosophy. Aristotle gave matter greater status by making it the counterpart of form or idea in any particular. Matter is therefore the possibility of a new form. Mind or spirit or form shapes matter, as the idea of a pot in the mind of a potter transforms a lump of clay into a utensil for human use.

Plato and Aristotle incline toward idealism but remain dualists. It was only after Immanuel Kant that idealism offered an integrated view of reality that did justice to natural fact. Beginning with the radical distinction between mind and matter with which René Descartes had first fashioned the modern mind, idealists argued that mind and matter are different but interdependent. J. G. Fichte argued that will is the essence of mind, and will requires the recalcitrant opposition of material stuff in order for work to teach the moral lessons of industry, perseverance, and devotion to factual truth. For Fichte, nature is "the material for our duty, made sensible." For Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, nature is necessary in order that mind attain full self-awareness. Hegel argued that useful knowledge is always acquired through a double movement: first one gains an intimate knowledge of the particular thing, and then one learns something of what it is not. To know one's own language for what it truly is, for example, one must know something of a different language. So, to generalize from that experience, mind must know something that is not mind. It must wander in an alien world before it can return home to know itself truly for the first time. Nature, therefore, is the "otherness of spirit," the alien land in which the mind wanders in order to gain full possession of itself. Or, to put it less metaphorically, natural objects are the necessary content of mind. There is no thought without an object; one must think something. Whereas subjective idealism, in both the monadology of Leibniz and the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara, argues that mind alone is the really real, objective idealism argues that objective nature is a necessary condition for the reality of mind. Reality is therefore not a univocal state; it is a dialectical process.

Idealist Ethics

Idealism also proposes an ethics, developed from its metaphysical view that mind or spirit constitutes an eternal and purposive transcendent order. As the metaphysical reality of any particular is derived from the idea that is its ultimate meaning, so the norms and values of human behavior are derived from the transcendent idea of love, power, justice, or so forth.

Unlike modern naturalisms, which regard ethical values as entirely relative to the social and psychological needs of natural groups, idealism holds that there are what Kant called categorical imperatives, or moral absolutes. Kant stated the foundational principle of all idealistic ethics, people always should be treated as ends in themselves and never as a means to some end; but his dogmatic categorical imperative lacks metaphysical justification. It was his successors who developed an independent metaphysics that could flesh out Kant's intuitive insight with a rational argument. Hegel supplemented the Kantian view with a dialectical interpretation of concrete freedom that seeks to ally itself with whatever is objectively rational and universal in the laws and institutions of one's community. This view turned idealism toward social realism. Josiah Royce later argued that the objective reason that Hegel sought in institutions could not be found there if, as Hegel himself noted, institutions rise and fall. Rejecting Hegel's conservatism, Royce argued that one's loyalty is not just to the institutionalized rationality of the past but to the hoped-for rationality of the future. For Royce, therefore, one's primary loyalty is not to institutions but to those creative causes that some institutions sometimes serve. There will be different interpretations as to what these causes should be, but the authentic common spirit of cause-servers everywhere will always be one of loyalty. Royce's categorical imperative is therefore that one should be loyal to loyalty wherever it is found.

Various forms of idealism were influential during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when there was confidence in reason and hope for the future. The prevailing spirit since the late twentieth century has become skeptical of rationalization and pessimistic about the future, so idealistic philosophy is less influential. However, when religious thinkers look for a rational and universal language of experience in which to articulate the dramatic, poetic, and mythological convictions of the great religions with their message of a divine Logos that assures the ultimate fulfillment of a divine purpose, that language is inescapably some form of idealism.

Bibliography

Plato's dialogues all focus on the idealist issue, and Plotinus's third-century Enneads bears resemblance to the Advaita Vedānta philosophy in India, which Śaṅkara articulates in his ninth-century Commentary on the Brahma Sutra. Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), translated by Theodore M. Greene et al. (New York, 1960), identifies mind and spirit in idealistic fashion, and Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), 3 vols., translated by E. B. Speirs and J. B. Sanderson (London, 1895), is the first systematic statement of idealistic philosophy of religion in the West. Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity, 2 vols. (New York, 1913), and William Ernest Hocking's The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven, Conn., 1912) are the best-known systematic statements in the American philosophical tradition.

The best secondary sources on idealism are in the major histories of Western philosophy. For a technical discussion of philosophical ideas and their development, Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy, translated by James H. Tufts (New York, 1893), is still unsurpassed. For idealism as an influential strand of modern intellectual culture, see John Herman Randall, Jr.'s The Making of the Modern Mind (New York, 1976) and Randall's two-volume The Career of Philosophy (New York, 1962–1965), especially volume 2, From the German Enlightenment to the Age of Darwin. The most recent significant interpretation of a major religious tradition in the light of an idealistic philosophy is Paul Tillich's three-volume Systematic Theology (Chicago, 1951–1963).