IDEALISM and ITS TYPES In the popular mind the term idealist has a meaning which is quite different from the philosophical use of the term. Popularly, the word may mean: (1) One who accepts and lives by lofty moral, aesthetic, and religious standards. Such a man is said to be a man of ideals, or an idealist. (2) One who is able to see and to advocate some plan or program which does not yet exist. Every social reformer and prophet is an idealist in this sense because he is supporting that which has not yet come into existence. Those who work for permanent peace or for the elimination of poverty may be called idealists. The term may be used in a complimentary sense, meaning that which is excellent of its kind. It may be used as a term of reproach. For example, a person may be called a "fanatical idealist" if he stands for what other persons believe to be unattainable goals or if he seems to ignore the "facts" and practical conditions of any situation. The philosophical meaning of the term idealism is determined more by the meaning of the terms idea and mind than by the term ideal. Professor W. E. Hocking, an idealist, says that for sense the term "idea-ism would be more to the point. " The letter has been inserted for euphonious reasons. Idealism asserts that reality is akin to ideas, thought, mind, or selves rather than to material forces. WHAT IDEALISM IS Idealism is a way of interpreting human experience and the world which places emphasis on mind as in some way prior to matter. Just as materialism emphasizes matter, so idealism stresses mind. Whereas materialism says that matter is the real and mind is an accompanying phenomenon, idealism contends that mind is real and matter is in a sense a by-product. On the negative side, idealism is a denial that the world is basically a great machine to be interpreted in terms of matter and mechanism or in terms of energy and the physical sciences alone. More positively, idealism is a world view or a metaphysics which holds that the basic reality is constituted of, or closely related to, mind, ideas, thought, or selves. The real is the rational and the intelligible. The world has a meaning apart from its surface appearance. The approach to the meaning of things is through the self rather than through an objective analysis of nature. The world is interpreted by means of a study of the laws of thought and of consciousness and not exclusively by means of objective science. Since the universe has a meaning, there is a kind of inner harmony between the world and man. What is "highest in spirit" is also "deepest in nature." Man is "at home" in the universe and not an alien or a mere creature of chance, since the universe is in some sense a logical and a spiritual system. The self is not an isolated entity; it is a genuine part of the world process. This process at its high levels manifests itself as creativity, mind, and selves, or persons. Man, as a part of the cosmos, expresses its inner structure in his own life. Nature, or the objective world, is real in the sense that it exists and demands our attention and adjustment to it. Nature, however, is not sufficient in and of itself since it depends to a certain degree upon mind. In nature we find matter, life, mind, and values. Idealists believe that nature is to be interpreted in terms of its later and higher manifestations rather than in terms of its earlier and lower ones. Idealists are willing to let the physical scientists tell us what matter is providing they do not reduce everything in the world to that category. They are willing to let the biological sciences describe
1 life and its processes providing they do not reduce all other levels to the biological or the physiological. Idealists stress the organic unity of the world process. Whole and parts cannot be separated except by a dangerous abstraction. There is an inner unity, an unfolding series of levels, from matter to vegetable forms, through animals to man, mind, and spirit. Thus a central principle of idealism is that of organic wholeness. TYPES OF IDEALISM SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM This type of idealism is sometimes called mentalism or even phenomenalism. It is the least significant and prevalent type and the one most frequently attacked by opponents of idealism. Minds or spirits and their perceptions or ideas are all that exist. The "objects" of experience are not material things; they arcf merely perceptions. Things such as buildings and trees exist, butf they have no independent existence apart from a mind that per-/ ceives them. The subjective idealist does not deny the existence of what we call the "real" world; the question at issue is not its existence but how it is to be interpreted. It is not independently real apart from a knower. No one can get outside or beyond his own experience. This type of idealism is probably best represented by George Berkeley (1685-1753), an Irish philosopher. Berkeley accepted the psychology of John Locke (i 632-1 704), who said that our knowledge deals only with ideas. Locke accepted the existence of spiritual substance, ideas, and material substance. He distinguished between the primary qualities of matter (form, extension, solidity, figure, motion, number, and so on) and secondary qualities (colors, sounds, tastes, odors, and the like). The secondary qualities are not in the material substance; they are in the mind or they are the way in which the primary qualities affect the mind or knower. The secondary qualities vary from person to person. Berkeley went further than Locke and attempted to show that the primary qualities have no existence apart from minds. Berkeley insisted that the arguments used by Locke to prove the subjectivity of secondary qualities apply equally well to the primary qualities. For Berkeley, minds and ideas are therefore all that exist. Esse est percepi, "to be is to be perceived," is the center of his philosophy. An idea, according to Berkeley, is an object known. Objects exist only as they are perceived. There is no distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities, since both are in the mind. All that is real is a conscious mind or some perception or idea held by such a mind. How, he asks, could we speak of anything that was other than an idea or a perception? When we assert that we can imagine objects existing when they are not seen, and that men do believe in the independent existence of an external world, Berkeley tells us that the order and consistency of the world of nature is due to active spirit, even though I, as an individual, am not responsible for it. God is the author and the governing spirit of nature, and God's will is the Law of Nature. He determines the succession and the order of our ideas. This explains why we cannot determine what we shall .see when we open our eyes. When we say that any object exists, we mean that it is perceived by some mind. The subjectivist holds, then, that there can be no object without a knower; that the subject (mind or knower) in some way creates its object (matter, or thing known); and that all that is real must be a conscious mind or a perception by such a mind. To say that a thing exists is merely to say that it is perceived. What anything would or could be
2 apart from its being known, no one can think or say. What we see or think is a mental fact, and the world is a mental world. .Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is a phenomenalist who stands about midway between the subjective and the objective idealists. Since his world is in some sense a mind-made world, let us make the transition to objective idealism through his interpretation. For Kant there are three realms. There is the inner world of subjective states, which is a purely personal world and not a realm of knowledge. There is the outer world of ultimate reality, the noumenon, which is unknown and unknowable, Man's contact with this world is through the sense of duty or the moral law. There is also the world of nature or phenomenon, which is the realm of human knowledge. According to Kant, the mind has an innate way of working. Form and order are thrust on nature by the mind. Sensory experience merely furnishes the content. The mind is active; it forms into a system of knowledge the raw material brought in by the senses. Just as the potter takes the formless clay and fashions it into one form or another, so the mind forms or organizes the material of the senses. Thus our thoughts regarding the world are determined in large part by the structure of the mind. The understanding prescribes its laws to nature.
OBJECTIVE IDEALISM A large number of idealists, from Plato to Hegel and the present, reject subjectivism, or mentalism, and also the view that the world is in any real sense man-made. They do not accept the principle of esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived"). They regard the organization and form of the world, and hence knowledge, as determined by the nature of the world itself. The mind discovers what there is in the order of the world. They are idealists in that they interpret the universe as an intelligible order whose systematic structure is expressive of rational order and value. When they say that the ultimate nature of the universe is mind, they mean that the universe is expressive essentially of the mental or spiritual in character and that it is an organic whole. Although the term idealism has been used only in recent times to designate a school of philosophic thought, the beginnings of idealistic speculation in Western civilization are often attributed to Plato (427-347 B.C.). Plato believed that behind the empirical world of change, the phenomenal world which we see and feel, there is an ideal world of eternal essences, forms, or "Ideas." He believed in the objective reality of our ideals and values. For Plato the world is divided into two realms. There is, first, the world of sense perception, the world of sights, sounds, and individual things. This concrete, temporal, perishable world is not the real world; it is the world of appearances only. Second, there is the supersensible world of concepts, ideas, universals, or eternal essences. The concept "man" has more reality than any individual person has. We recognize individual things through our knowledge of these concepts or eternal patterns. This second realm contains the patterns, forms, or types which serve asstandards for the things of sense perception. Ideas are the original, transcendent pattern of things, the reality of which perceptions and individual things are mere copies or shadows. Reality is found in what is common to all individuals. While reality is thought of as immaterial, Plato would not say that there is nothing real except mind and its experiences. The unchanging Ideas, or essences, are known to man through his reason. The changing world of matter is known to him through his senses. To Plato, the soul of man is an immaterial essence imprisoned for a time in
3 the body. Plato's views have had a profound influence in the history of thought right down to modern times. Some idealists maintain that all parts of the world are included in one all-embracing order which finds its unity in the ideals and purposes of an Absolute Mind. Hegel (1770-1831) represents one of the best known systems of absolute or monistic idealism. His system is sometimes called evolutionary, logical idealism. Thought is the essence of the universe, and nature is the whole of mind objectified. The universe is an unfolding process of thought. Nature is the Absolute Reason expressing itself in outward form. Consequently, the laws of thought are also the laws of reality. History is the way the Absolute appears in nature and human experience. Since the world is one and since it is purposive and intelligent, it must be of the nature of thought. The world expresses itself in our thinking; our thinking does not determine the nature of the world. When we think of the total world order as embracing the inorganic, the organic, and the spiritual levels of existence in one all-inclusive order, we speak of the Absolute, or the Absolute Spirit, or God. Instead of the fixed or static reality and the separate and complete self of traditional philosophy, Hegel sets forth a dynamic conception of a self that is so interrelated with its environment that a clear-cut distinction cannot be drawn between the two. The self is in and is experiencing reality at all times; thus we have the conception of a concrete universal. The universal is present in all the experiences of the dynamic process. In such a philosophy, distinctions and differences belong to the phenomenal world and are relative. They do not affect the unity of the one purposive intelligence. Since the time of Hegel there have been many systems of objective idealism. The objective idealists do not deny the existence of an external or objective reality. In fact, they believe that their position is the only one which does justice to the objective side of experience, since they find in nature the same principles of order, reason, and purpose that men find within themselves. There is purposive intelligence at the heart of nature. This is discovered, they believe, and is not "read into" the world. Nature existed before me, the individual self, and will exist after me. Nature also existed before the present community of selves. The existence of meaning in the world, however, implies something akin to mind or thought at the core of reality. Such a significant order of reality is given man to comprehend and to participate in. This belief in meaning and intelligence in the structure of the world is a basic intuition underlying idealism. Pan-psychism is a form of idealism standing somewhere between objective idealism and personalism. Pan-psychism, which means literally "All-Soul," is the doctrine that reality is psychic in character or that everything has mind. Mind is universal throughout nature so that the world is alive. According to Leibnitz (1646-1716), the world is composed of monads, or atoms of energy, which are really psychical in nature. There are no breaks in nature and nothing is dead. The inorganic order represents the sleeping monads; in the animals they are dreaming, in man they are waking, while God is the fully conscious Monad. The monads are separate and distinct, but there is unity due to a pre-established cosmic harmony. PERSONALISM, OR PERSONAL IDEALISM Personalism is a protest against both mechanistic naturalism and monistic idealism. For the personalist the basic fact is not abstract thought or a thought process but a person, a self, or a thinker. Reality is of the nature of conscious personality. The self is an irreducible living unit
4 which can be divided only by a false , abstraction. The personalists believe that recent developments in modern science, including the theory of relativity, have added support to their position. The "standpoint of the observer" is a ! concept coming to be recognized in recent research. The knower ! or the spectator must be considered as well as the phenomena \ which he observes. What is "out there" can be understood only in relation to what is "in here." Reality is a system of personal selves, hence it is pluralistic. Personalists emphasize the reality i and the worth of individual persons, of moral values, and of '( human freedom. Nature, for the personalists, is a real objective order. However, it does not exist in and of itself. Persons transcend or rise above \ nature in interpreting it. Science transcends itself through its own theories, and the world of meaning and of values surpasses the world of nature as the final explanation. Personalists such as ! Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), Borden P. Bowne (1847- 1910), and the contemporary personalists have emphasized this point of view. Lotze attempted to reconcile the mechanical view of nature as set forth by the special sciences with the idealistic interpretation of a spiritual unity. For Bowne, self-conscious mind realizes itself through the order of nature and transcends it. Nature was created by God, who is the Supreme Self in a society of persons. The Supreme Spirit has expressed Himself in the material world of atoms and in conscious selves which emerge at distinct points in the world process. There is a society of persons, or selves, related to supreme personality. Such a supreme personality is creatively present in the on-going of the world. Ethical and spiritual values are reinforced by and gain their meaning from the Personal Creative Spirit to whom all men are related. Personalism is theistic; it furnishes both religion and ethics with metaphysical foundations. God may be thought of as finite, as a struggling hero, working for lofty moral and religious ends. At least the goodness of God must be retained, even though it may involve some limitation in his power. The goal of life is a perfect society of selves who have achieved perfect personalities through struggle. As a group, the personal idealists have shown more interest in ethics and less interest in logic than have the absolute idealists. Logically, the personal idealists hold that life is more important than any verbal forms of expression or fixed meanings. Ethically, they stress the realization of the capacities and powers of the person through freedom and self-control. Since personality is the greatest value, society must be so organized as to give each person fullness of life and of opportunity.
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