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.