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.
Esse est percipi: “To be is to be perceived”
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.
The mystical argument
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.
The ontological argument
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.”
