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3 MODERN SCHOOLS
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As a philosophical term, Idealism refers
to any view that stresses the central role of the ideal or the spiritual in
man's interpretation of experience. It may hold that the world or reality
exists essentially as spirit or consciousness, that abstractions and laws are
more fundamental in reality than sensory things, or, at least, that whatever
exists is known to man in dimensions that are chiefly mental--through and as
ideas. Thus the two basic forms of Idealism are metaphysical Idealism, which
asserts the ideality of reality, and epistemological
Idealism, which holds that in the knowledge process the mind can grasp only the
psychic or that its objects are conditioned by their perceptibility. In its
metaphysics, Idealism is thus directly opposed to Materialism,
the view that the basic substance of the world is matter
and that it is known primarily through and as material forms and processes; and
in its epistemology, it is opposed to Realism,
which holds that in human knowledge objects are grasped and seen as they really
are--in their existence outside and independently of the mind. As a philosophy
often expressed in bold and expansive syntheses, Idealism is also opposed to
various restrictive forms of thought: to Skepticism,
with occasional exceptions as in the British Hegelian F.H. Bradley (1846-1924);
to Positivism, which stresses observable facts
and relations as opposed to ultimates and therefore spurns the speculative
"pretensions" of every metaphysic; and often to atheism,
since the Idealist commonly extrapolates the concept of mind to embrace an
infinite Mind. The essential orientation of Idealism can be sensed through some
of its typical tenets: "Truth is the whole, or the Absolute"; "to
be is to be perceived"; "reality reveals its ultimate nature more
faithfully in its highest qualities (mental) than in its lowest
(material)"; "the Ego is both subject and object." |
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What Idealism is may be clarified by
approaching it in three ways: through its basic doctrines and principles,
through its central questions and answers, and through its significant
arguments. |
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Six common, basic conceptions
distinguish Idealistic philosophy: |
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Abstract universals,
such as "canineness," which express the common nature or essence
that the members of a class (e.g.,
individual dogs or wolves) share with one another, are acknowledged by all
philosophers. Many Idealists, however, emphasize the concept of a concrete
universal, one that is also a concrete reality, such as "mankind" or
"literature," which can be imagined as gatherable into one specific
thing. As opposed to the fixed, formal, abstract universal, the concrete
universal is essentially dynamic, organic, and developing. Thus universality and
individuality merge. |
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While most philosophers tend to focus on
matters of contemporary concern, Idealists always seek a much wider perspective
that embraces epochs and eras in the broad sweep of history. In the words of the
17th-century Rationalist Spinoza, they strive to
view the contemporary world "under the aspect of eternity." Thus, in
spite of the extensive formative influence of culture, Idealists claim that
their philosophy transcends the parochialism of a particular culture; and
Idealisms are found, in fact, in all of the major cultures of the world. |
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It seems natural to suppose, as
non-Idealists usually do, that the consideration of two things in their
relatedness to one another can have no effect on the things themselves--i.e.,
that a relation is something in addition to the things or terms related and
is thus external. On this basis, truth would be defined as a relation of
correspondence between a proposition and a state of affairs. The Idealist
believes, however, that reality is more subtle than this. The relationship
between a mineral deposit and the business cycle, for example, is an internal
one: the deposit changes to an ore when prices render it profitable to mine the
mineral. Similarly, it is part of the essence of a brick that it is related to a
wall or pavement. Thus terms and relations logically determine one another.
Ultimate reality is therefore a system of judgments or propositions, and truth
is defined in terms of the coherence of these propositions with one another to
form a harmonious whole. Thus a successful spy is judged either a hero or a
villain only in relation to a total system of international relations, an
accepted philosophy of history, and the moral judgments involved. There are
therefore degrees of reality and degrees of truth within a system of truth
cohering by internal relations, and the truth of
a judgment reflects its place in this system. |
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Idealism seeks to overcome
contradictions by penetrating into the overall coherent system of truth and
continually creating new knowledge to be integrated with earlier discoveries.
Idealism is thus friendly to all quests for truth, whether in the natural or
behavioral sciences or in art, religion, and philosophy. It seeks the truth in
every positive judgment and in its contradictory as well. Thus it uses the dialectical
method of reasoning to remove the contradictions characteristic of human
knowledge. Such removal leads to a new synthetic judgment that incorporates in a
higher truth the degree of truth that was present in each of the two lower
judgments. |
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Idealism is not reductive, as are
opposing philosophies that identify mind with
matter and reduce the higher level of reality to the protons and electrons of
mathematical physics. On the contrary, Idealism defends the principle that the
lower is explained by the higher--specifically, that matter can be explained by
mind but that mind cannot be explained by matter. The word spirit can be
substituted for "mind" or even placed above it; and "Spiritualism"
is often used, especially in Europe, as a synonym for Idealism. |
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Nearly all Idealists accept the
principle that the evils with which man has to deal may become ingredients in a
larger whole that overcomes them. The eminent American Hegelian Josiah
Royce (1855-1916) held that the larger whole is the Absolute Mind, which
keeps evils under control as a man might hold a viper under the sole of his
boot. Along with this doctrine of the sublimation or transmutation of evil,
Royce incorporated into his metaphysics a point from the 19th-century
irrationalism of Schopenhauer, itself a voluntaristic
form of Idealism, viz., that "the world is my idea." Schopenhauer,
however, was probably the only Idealist who defended the converse principle that
good is transmuted into evil. (see also good and evil) |
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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 these
questions there has been created an extensive literature that is the corpus of
philosophical Idealism. |
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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. This
concept compresses all of reality into a solipsistic specious present--the
momentary sense experience of one isolated percipient. At the other extreme,
followers of the 17th-century Rationalist 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. 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 will be discussed below. |
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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 this collective creative intelligence has
produced the various sciences and disciplines. This 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 the earth by its various
inhabitants; so that the moon flights portend a similar transformation of the
planetary system. An inherent part of the collective intelligence is the
spiritual force that Idealists call the spirit of philosophy. |
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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 civilized 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 is the basic moral objective of every civilized people. A useful
distinction drawn by the German philosopher Ernst
Cassier (1874-1946), a member of the late 19th- and 20th-century Marburg school
of Neo-Kantianism (see below Types
of philosophical idealism: Types classed by culture: Western types
), between the efficient energies and the formative energies of a people
emphasizes the way in which these moral forces function: the efficient energies
are the conserving, and the formative are the creative forces in society. It is
on the basis of this distinction that Idealists have made a contribution to
international ethics, which charges that no nation has a right to use its
efficient energies to exercise power over another civilized 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; economic
exploitation is wrong. |
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Modern Idealists have also created an
Idealistic philosophy of history. An eminent early 20th-century Italian
Idealist, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), expressed
it in the formula "every true history is contemporary history"; and at
the same time in France a subjective Idealist, Léon
Brunschvicg (1869-1944), agreed. There are close relations between the
philosophy of history and the philosophy of values. |
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Idealists delight in arguments. They
agree with Socrates and Plato in thinking that every philosopher should follow
the argument wherever it leads, and, like them, they believe that it will
eventually lead to some type of Idealism. Four basic arguments found in the
literature of Idealism may be briefly summarized. |
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According to this argument all of 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 holding the object in one's hand, just as blueness is a
quality of visual experience. But these qualities exist only while they are
being perceived by some subject or spirit equipped with sense organs. A
classical 18th-century British Empiricist, George
Berkeley (1685-1753), 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 has provoked an extensive and complicated
literature, and to some contemporary Idealists it seems irrefutable. |
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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, this 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. |
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In the third argument, the Idealist
holds that in man'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 reduces its
reliability as compared to the direct grasp of intuition. (see also mysticism) |
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It is significant that the claims of
this 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 Idea of the Good was mystical in nature. In Indian
Hindu Vedanta philosophy it was made by the 9th-century monistic
theologian Shánkara, by the 12th-century dualistic Brahmin theist
Ramanuja, and by the recent philosopher-president of India
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In Buddhism the claims
were made by the sometimes mystical, extreme subjectivism of the Vijñanavada
school of Mahayana (represented by Ashvaghosa in the
1st and Asanga in the 4th century) and in China by the Ch'an school and
by the 7th-century scholar Hui-neng, author of its basic classic The
Platform Scripture. In Islamic lands it was made by Sufis
(mystics)--in particular, by the 13th-century Persian writer Jalal ad-Din
ar-Rumi. And in the recent West it was made by several
distinguished Idealists: in Germany, by the seminal modern theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768-1834); in France, by the evolutionary intuitionist Henri
Bergson (1859-1941), by the philosopher of action Maurice Blondel (1861-1949),
and by the Jewish religious Existentialist Martin Buber (1878-1965); and in
English-speaking countries, by the Scottish metaphysician James Frederick
Ferrier (1808-64) and the American Hegelian William E. Hocking (1873-1966). (see
also Hinduism) |
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This famous argument originated as a
proof of the existence of God. It came to the 11th-century Augustinian, 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 he 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, this means that it is an
immaterial ideality or concrete universal. According to Hegel "the ideality
of the finite" is "the main principle of philosophy." |
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Several types of Idealism have already
been distinguished. Some modern types should now be mentioned, classified first
by cultures and then by branches of philosophy. |
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Cultural differences suggest a division
into Western and Oriental Idealisms. |
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Berkeley's Idealism is called subjective
Idealism because he reduced reality to spirits (his name for subjects)
and the ideas entertained by spirits. In Berkeley's philosophy the apparent
objectivity of the world outside the self was accommodated to his subjectivism
by claiming that its objects are ideas in the mind of God. The foundation for a
series of more objective Idealisms was laid in the late 18th century by Immanuel
Kant, whose epochal work Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (2nd ed., 1787; Critique
of Pure Reason, 1929) presented a formalistic or transcendental Idealism, so
named because Kant thought that the human self, or "transcendental
ego," constructs knowledge out of sense impressions, upon which are
imposed certain universal concepts that he called categories. Three systems
constructed in the early 19th century by, respectively, the moral Idealist J.G. Fichte, the aesthetic Idealist F.W.J.
Schelling, and the dialectical Idealist G.W.F. Hegel, all on a foundation
laid by Kant, are called objective Idealisms in contrast to Berkeley's
subjective Idealism. The designations, however, are not consistent; and when the
contrast with Berkeley is not at issue, Fichte himself is often called a
subjective Idealist, inasmuch as he exalted the subject above the object,
employing the term Ego to mean God in the two
memorable propositions: "The Ego posits itself" and "The Ego
posits the non-Ego (or nature)." And in contrast now to the subjective
Idealism of Fichte, Schelling's is called an objective Idealism and Hegel's an
absolute Idealism. |
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All of these terms form backgrounds for
contemporary Western Idealisms, most of which are based either on Kant's
transcendental Idealism or on those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Exceptions
are those based on other great Idealists of the past--Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza,
Leibniz, and others. A revised form of Spinoza's spiritual monism, for example,
which held that reality is one Substance to be identified with God, has been
formulated by the Idealist logician H.H. Joachim (1868-1938), a follower of the
British Hegelian F.H. Bradley. |
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Unwilling to accept any of the above
titles, one school of modern Idealists adopted the motto "Back to
Kant" and are thus called Kantian Idealists. Edward
Caird (1835-1908), who imported German Idealism into England, and the
German philosopher of "As If," Hans Vaihinger
(1852-1933), who held that much of man's so-called knowledge reduces to
pragmatic fictions, were Kantian Idealists or transcendentalists. On this
tradition are based the Idealism of the austerely religious essayist Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) in Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and the New England transcendentalism of Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803-82). It must be stated, however, that Kant preferred
the name critical Idealism to that of transcendental Idealism. (see also Kantianism) |
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Another group of Idealists, adopting the
motto "From Kant forward," founded the so-called Marburg
school of Neo-Kantian, or scientific, Idealism. They rejected the
Idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and the classical Newtonian dynamics
presupposed by Kant and built instead upon the new quantum and relativity
theories of modern physics. Founded by Hermann Cohen
(1842-1918), champion of a new interpretation of Kant, and his colleague, the
Platonic scholar Paul Natorp (1854-1924), who
applied Kant's critical method to humanistic as well as to scientific studies,
this school underwent a remarkable development, especially under the leadership
of Ernst Cassirer, noted for his profound analyses of man defined as that animal
that creates culture through a unique capacity for symbolic representation. The
Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, in his Autobiography,
tells of enrolling in Cohen's graduate seminar on Kant at the University of
Marburg. Undoubtedly this type of Idealism continues to wield considerable
influence on intellectuals in Soviet Russia. |
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Theistic Idealism was founded by the
medical instructor R.H. Lotze (1817-81), who
became a broadly learned metaphysician and whose theory of the world ground, in
which all things find their unity, has been widely accepted by theistic
philosophers and Protestant theologians. To Lotze, the world ground is the
transcendent synthesis of an evolutionary world process, which is both
mechanical and teleological (purposive); it is an infinite spiritual being, or
God. In England, the absolute Idealism of T.H. Green
(1836-82), a philosopher influenced chiefly by Plato and Kant, was shared by his
disciple, the more Hegelian thinker Bernard Bosanquet
(1848-1923), whose views are based upon Lotze's Idealism, and by the somewhat
skeptical metaphysician of the movement, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924). |
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Theistic absolutism is represented by a
pioneer of contemporary philosophical theology, F.R.
Tennant (1866-1957), and by the eminent German-American theologian Paul
Tillich (1886-1956). It differs from the personalistic form of absolute
Idealism in accepting the traditional theological monotheism that is essential
to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions. It revives classic
arguments for the existence of God that were rejected by Kant and uses recent
advances in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences to support these
revisions. The cosmological argument, for example, is restated as the continuing
relation of the cosmos to a world ground that is spiritual in essence; thus the
concept of God as a first cause is rejected. The concept of the fitness of the
environment to life and to human history and other recent scientific concepts
are used to modernize the teleological argument. Nevertheless, all of this
revision is kept within the framework of Idealistic metaphysics and
epistemology. A theistic spiritual pluralism, which interprets reality in terms
of a multitude of interacting psychic monads (elementary units), was developed
by the English philosopher James Ward
(1843-1925). On the other hand, an atheistic spiritual pluralism, which holds
that reality consists entirely of individual minds and their contents, was
espoused by the Cambridge Hegelian J.M. Ellis
McTaggert (1866-1925). |
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During the late 19th century a movement
known as American Hegelian Idealism arose in the United States. The movement
found vigorous early expression in the work of W.T.
Harris (1835-1909), central figure in a midwestern group of scholars
known as the St. Louis school and editor of its Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and finds current expression in
the recently organized Hegel Society of America. In its later development,
American Idealism split into two branches: one, of the aforementioned
Bradley-Bosanquet type, and a second, of the Royce-Hocking type, so called
because it was founded by one of America's most distinguished philosophers, the
absolute Idealist and personal pantheist Josiah Royce (1855-1916), and developed
by his disciple W.E. Hocking (1873-1966). The
American philosopher of religion Borden Parker Bowne
(1847-1910) founded another important American school, that of Personalism,
a Kantian- and Lotzean-based variety of theistic Idealism similar to the
spiritual pluralism of Ward. Whereas most previous Idealisms had stressed the
rational as the highest category of reality and hence as its paradigm,
Personalism saw in the centred structures of personhood, both finite and
infinite, an even higher category, displaying dimensions richer than the
rational alone. Personalism has had an influential development in America, most
notably through the Methodist philosopher E.S.
Brightman (1884-1953), known for his defense of the doctrine of a finite
God, and through The Personalist, edited
by one of Bowne's disciples, R.T. Flewelling (1871-1960). Personalism is also
found in the French philosopher C.B. Renouvier
(1815-1903) and in several Latin American philosophers. |
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To the above types should be added the
vitalism or creative evolutionism of the French anti-intellectualist Henri
Bergson (1859-1941), which first found in the apprehension of subjective
time a more valid insight into reality than in that of an objective space-time
order and then, extending this metaphysics to the cosmic level, discerned there
an Idealistic élan vital (or
vital impetus) that is more fundamental than matter, which subsequently appeared
in the role of a husk born of the mechanization of the élan.
In this same tradition, the voluntarism of Maurice
Blondel (1861-1949), a unique theory of belief in God as a live option
that must be deliberately willed by the self before it can be found to be true
in experience, is an important contribution to Idealistic philosophy. Miguel
de Unamuno y Jugo (1864-1936), a Spanish philosopher, developed a unique
type of Idealism, more literary than philosophical. He stressed the significance
of each individual and argued for personal immortality. |
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For centuries, philosophical Idealism
has dominated the philosophy of India. An Idealism that is quite influential in
Japan is that of Nishida Kitaro, a distinguished
Berlin-trained philosopher. Prior to World War II, Kitaro created a
system of absolute Idealism that employed the dialectical method of Hegel to
clarify the Zen Buddhist doctrine of nothingness, which, in his view, is that of
which all phenomenal existences are determinations and in which they all appear. |
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Some classical types of Indian and
Chinese Idealism were considered above (see The
mystical argument ). A number of
gifted Indian and Chinese scholars have restated and revitalized the principles
and arguments of classic Oriental Idealisms in an extensive literature. |
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Probably the major recent proponent of
Indian Idealism has been Radhakrishnan, who has
spent a long lifetime expounding and defending its mystical types and has
presented authoritative analyses of all of its classical systems. He saw his
modernized Idealism as destined to save civilization from exploitation by
Western commercial technology. Surendranath Dasgupta,
an outstanding Sanskrit and Pali scholar, in a monumental work, has
revived the classic systems of Indian Idealism, concluding that "Idealism
has not only been one of the most dominant phases of Indian thought in
metaphysics, epistemology, and dialectics, but it has also very largely
influenced the growth of the Indian ideal as a whole." Ghose
Aurobindo, reinterpreting the Indian Idealistic heritage in the light of
his own Western education, rejected the maya
doctrine of illusion, replacing it with the concept of evolution. Arguing that
the "illumination of individuals will lead to the emergence of a divine
community," Aurobindo founded the influential Pondicherry Ashram, a
religious and philosophical community, and
headed it until his death. Late in the 19th century, Swami Vivekananda,
a spiritual monist, promulgated the Idealistic philosophy of mystical Brahmanism
in lectures on the Vedanta delivered and published widely. |
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The inwardness of subjectivity of Indian
Idealism has been contrasted with the outwardness of Western objective Idealism,
and a synthesis of the two has been advocated in comparative studies made by
P.T. Raju, an Indian philosopher who has taught both in Indian universities and
in the U.S. |
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Prior to World War II, Sir Rabindranath
Tagore, a distinguished Hindu Idealist poet and Nobel laureate,
contributed to what Dasgupta has called the "Indian ideal as a whole."
A selection from Tagore's aphorisms will convey its spirit: |
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Let your life lightly dance on the
edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. |
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Our little heaven, where dwell only two
immortals, is too absurdly narrow. |
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Is it then true that the mystery of the
Infinite is written on this little forehead of mine? |
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Where is this hope for union except in
thee my God? |
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Raise my veil and look at my face
proudly, O Death, my Death. |
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All is done and finished in the eternal
Heaven. But Earth's flowers of illusion are kept externally fresh by death. |
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If my claims to immortal fame after
death are shattered, make me immortal while I live. |
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This I know that the moment my God has
created me he has made himself mine. |
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In addition to the Ch'an and Hui-neng
schools mentioned above (see The
mystical argument ), three other
notable Idealistic schools have flourished in China. Representing one wing of
the Neo-Confucian movement of the 11th and 12th
centuries, Ch'eng Hao and his disciple, the
rationalist Chu Hsi, developed a dualistic
philosophy that has been compared to Cartesianism. In this view, however, reason
takes precedence over matter and the two together are the primary cause of the
universe or the absolute; thus this view is essentially Idealistic. At the turn
of the 15th century, a more purely Idealistic school arose--forming the other
wing of Neo-Confucianism--under the leadership of Wang
Yang-ming, who, having had an inner experience of enlightenment, sought
to understand the cosmos within his own mind and heart. The third school is that
of the 20th-century Idealist Hsung Shih-li, who, borrowing to some extent from
Wang Yang-ming, proclaimed a "new doctrine of consciousness only," of
which the basic ideas are the unity of substance and function and the primacy of
the original Mind. To Hsung Shih-li, reality and all of its manifestations are
one, and the original Mind is will and consciousness as well as reason. (see
also Chinese philosophy) |
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Another way of classifying Idealisms is
to use branches of philosophy to distinguish the various types. Such types,
however, overlap those given above. |
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A term that covers several of the above
types (the spiritual, theistic, and Hegelian; Personalism; vitalism) is
metaphysical Idealism. A.N. Whitehead
(1861-1947), noted for his collaboration with Bertrand Russell in mathematical
logic and for his process metaphysics, who was profoundly influenced by Bradley,
created an original Idealistic philosophy of science, a highly complicated form
of metaphysical Idealism; and the leading metaphysician Charles
Hartshorne (1897- ) may be regarded as a representative of Whiteheadian
Idealism, although rightly claiming originality. Epistemological Idealism, of
which the Kantian scholar N.K. Smith's (1872-1958) Prolegomena
to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge is an excellent example, covers all
Idealistic theories of epistemology, or knowledge. Aesthetic Idealism is devoted
to philosophical theories of beauty in nature and in all forms of art. Because
Schelling claimed that art is the best approach to an understanding of
philosophy, his system is designated aesthetic Idealism. Axiological Idealism is
a name referring to such philosophies as those of Wilbur
M. Urban (1873-1952) and others who have developed Idealistic theories of
value and valuation. Ethical Idealism deals with moral values, rights, and
obligations. Several of the above-mentioned philosophers, such as Fichte and
Green, as well as the Plato scholar A.E. Taylor (1864-1945), the theistic
pluralist Hastings Rashdall (1858-1924), and the absolutist W.R. Sorley
(1855-1935), could be called ethical Idealists in the sense that they have
produced well-thought-out systems of ethics. The writings of the German
philosopher of life and action Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) provide an excellent
example of ethical Idealism. |
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These classifications are not
exhaustive. The actual existence of so many types of philosophical Idealism,
however, proves its fertility and ubiquity. |
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Obviously, some of the types of Idealism
in the above classifications conflict with one another. For example, spiritual
monism and spiritual pluralism are opposite types; Personalism rejects absolute
Idealism; and atheistic spiritual pluralism is in sharp conflict with theistic
spiritual pluralism. These and other debatable issues keep Idealists in dialogue
with each other, but each type tends to preserve itself. |
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Over against these internal disputes
stand the criticisms of the anti-Idealists. The wide-ranging Realist Ralph
Barton Perry's (1876-1957) article "The Ego-Centric
Predicament" (1910) is a widely discussed criticism. Perry admitted that
the primary approach of every philosopher to the problem of ultimate reality
must be through his own thought, using his own ideas; but this is a human
predicament that has been unjustifiably exploited by the Idealists, according to
Perry, and turned into the "fallacious" esse
est percipi argument. |
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The famous "Refutation of
Idealism" prepared by the meticulous Cambridge philosopher G.E.
Moore (1873-1958) and a similar refutation by the Realist Bertrand
Russell (1872-1970) rest upon the distinction between a subject's act of
perceiving and the perceptual object of this act, which they both called a
"sense datum." They claimed that Berkeley's esse
est percipi argument is vitiated by his failure to make this distinction. |
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Logical Positivism claims that a basic
weakness in Idealism is its rejection of the doctrine of empirical
verifiability, according to which every proposition that claims to be true must
be verified by searching out the sense experience in which its terms originated.
Linguistic philosophy attacks Idealism by making a detailed analysis of its more
technical terms in an effort to prove that they are full of ambiguities and
double meanings. Critics have also severely attacked the ontological and the
mystical arguments for Idealism. Karl Marx
(1818-83) and his followers borrowed and adapted the dialectical argument of
Hegel and used it effectively to develop dialectical
Materialism, an archenemy of all Idealisms. Buttressed by the political
endorsements of various Communist regimes, Marxism (q.v.) poses a formidable opposition to Idealism; and even in the
non-Communist countries of Europe it presents a significant cultural alternative
to spiritualism and Thomism. |
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Idealists consider all of the foregoing
criticisms to be external. Instead of answering them in detail, some Idealists
prefer to challenge the critics to make really constructive efforts to build an
adequate substitute for Idealism--a system to be reached by seriously working at
the problems from within philosophy. So far a satisfactory substitute has not
been achieved. To produce such a substitute would require careful
reconsideration of the arguments of at least some of the above Idealistic
systems. |
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In evaluating the effects of these
criticisms and attacks, the question remains: Will they succeed in eradicating
philosophical Idealism? Although it is now on the wane, at least in Western
culture, the great Idealist tradition has survived many other historic periods
of turmoil and has often been reborn in prolonged periods of settled and
peaceful social conditions. Will it rise again? Only the future holds the
answer. But Idealism shows evidence of being, perhaps, a reflection of some
permanent aspect of the human spirit, and it may then be a perennial philosophy.
In any case, it seems highly unlikely that such a rich heritage of philosophical
thought will vanish entirely. |
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(D.S.R.) |
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