Idealism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Idealism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Idealism
First published Sun Aug 30, 2015; substantive revision Fri Feb 5, 2021
This entry discusses philosophical idealism as a movement chiefly in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, although anticipated by
certain aspects of seventeenth century philosophy and continuing into
the twentieth century. It revises the standard distinction between
epistemological idealism, the view that the contents of human
knowledge are ineluctably determined by the structure of human
thought, and ontological idealism, the view that epistemological
idealism delivers truth because reality itself is a form of thought
and human thought participates in it, in favor of a distinction
earlier suggested by A.C. Ewing, between epistemological and
metaphysical arguments for idealism as itself a metaphysical position.
After discussing precursors, the entry focuses on the
eighteenth-century versions of idealism due to Berkeley, Hume, and
Kant, the nineteenth-century movements of German idealism and
subsequently British and American idealism, and then concludes with an
examination of the attack upon idealism by Moore and Russell and the
late defense of idealism by Brand Blanshard.
With the possible exception of the introduction (Section 1), each of
the sections below can be read independently and readers are welcome
to focus on the section(s) of most interest.
1. Introduction
2. Idealism in Early Modern Rationalism
3. Idealism in Early Modern British philosophy
4. Kant
5. German Idealism
6. Schopenhauer
7. Nietzsche (and a glimpse beyond)
8. British and American Idealism
9. The Fate of Idealism in the Twentieth Century
Bibliography
Primary Literature
Selected Secondary Literature
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. Introduction
The terms “idealism” and “idealist” are by no
means used only within philosophy; they are used in many everyday
contexts as well. Optimists who believe that, in the long run, good
will prevail are often called “idealists”. This is not
because such people are thought to be devoted to a philosophical
doctrine but because of their outlook on life generally; indeed, they
may even be pitied, or perhaps envied, for displaying a naïve
worldview and not being philosophically critical at all. Even within
philosophy, the terms “idealism” and
“idealist” are used in different ways, which often makes
their meaning dependent on the context. However, independently of
context one can distinguish between a descriptive (or classificatory)
use of these terms and a polemical one, although sometimes these
different uses occur together. Their descriptive use is best
documented by paying attention to the large number of different
“idealisms” that appear in philosophical textbooks and
encyclopedias, ranging from metaphysical idealism through
epistemological and aesthetic to moral or ethical idealism. Within
these idealisms one can find further distinctions, such as those
between subjective, objective and absolute idealism, and even more
obscure characterizations such as speculative idealism and
transcendental idealism. It is also remarkable that the term
“idealism”, at least within philosophy, is often used in
such a way that it gets its meaning through what is taken to be its
opposite: as the meaningful use of the term “outside”
depends on a contrast with something considered to be inside, so the
meaning of the term “idealism” is often fixed by what is
taken to be its opposite. Thus, an idealist is someone who is not a
realist, not a materialist, not a dogmatist, not an empiricist, and so
on. Given the fact that many also want to distinguish between realism,
materialism, dogmatism, and empiricism, it is obvious that thinking of
the meaning of “idealism” as determined by what it is
meant to be opposed to leads to further complexity and gives rise to
the impression that underlying such characterizations lies some
polemical intent.
Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two
fundamental conceptions of idealism:
something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate
foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and
although the existence of something independent of the mind is
conceded, everything that we can
know
about this
mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by
the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of
some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered,
in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.
Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or
“ontological idealism”, while idealism in sense (2) has
been called “formal” or “epistemological
idealism”. The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be
considered to be George Berkeley’s “immaterialism”,
according to which all that exists are ideas and the minds, less than
divine or divine, that have them. (Berkeley himself did not use the
term “idealism”.) The fountainhead for idealism in sense
(2) might be the position that Immanuel Kant asserted (if not clearly
in the first edition of his
Critique of Pure Reason
(1781)
then in his
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
(1783) and
in the “Refutation of Idealism” in the second edition of
the
Critique
) according to which idealism does “not
concern the existence of things”, but asserts only that our
“modes of representation” of them, above all space and
time, are not “determinations that belong to things in
themselves” but features of our own minds. Kant called his
position “transcendental” and “critical”
idealism, and it has also been called “formal” idealism.
However, Kant’s position does not provide a clear model of
idealism at all. While Kant himself claimed that his position combined
“empirical realism” with “transcendental
idealism”, that is, combined realism about external,
spatio-temporal objects in ordinary life and science with the denial
of the reality of space and time at the level of things as they are in
themselves, it also insisted upon the reality of things as they are in
themselves existing independently from our representations of them,
thus denying their reducibility to representations or the minds that
have them. In this way, Kant’s position actually combines the
transcendental ideality of space and time with a kind of realism about
the existence of things other than minds.
So instead of using Kant as any kind of model for epistemological
idealism, in this entry we will distinguish between metaphysical and
epistemological arguments for idealism understood as a metaphysical
doctrine, namely that everything that exists is in some way mental. We
thus agree with A.C. Ewing, who wrote in 1934 that all forms of
idealism
have in common the view that there can be no physical objects existing
apart from some experience, and this might perhaps be taken as the
definition of idealism, provided that we regard thinking as part of
experience and do not imply by “experience” passivity, and
provided we include under experience not only human experience but the
so-called “Absolute Experience” or the experience of a God
such as Berkeley postulates. (Ewing 1934: 3)
in other words, while reducing all reality to some kind of perception
is one form of idealism, it is not the only form—reality may be
reduced to the mental on other conceptions of the latter. Thus Willem
deVries’s more recent definition of idealism as the general
theory that reduces reality to some form or other of the mental is
just:
Roughly, the genus comprises theories that attribute ontological
priority to the mental, especially the conceptual or ideational, over
the non-mental. (deVries 2009: 211)
We also agree with Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson
when they write that
the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is in fact … a
realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality.
(Dunham, Grant, & Watson 2011: 4)
namely mind of some kind or other: the idealist denies the
mind-independent reality of matter, but hardly denies the reality of
mind (or, on their account, which goes back to Plato, Ideas or Forms
as well as minds; we will not consider pre-modern forms of idealism in
any detail). However, following Ewing (see his chapters II,
IV–V, and VIII), we will distinguish metaphysical from
epistemological arguments for idealism. Metaphysical arguments proceed
by identifying some general constraints on existence and arguing that
only minds of some sort or other satisfy such conditions;
epistemological arguments work by identifying some conditions for
knowledge and arguing that only objects that are in some sense or
other mental can satisfy the conditions for being known. In
particular, epistemological arguments for idealism assume that there
is a
necessary
isomorphism between knowledge and its object
that can obtain only if the object of knowledge is itself mental; we
propose that this is the difference between
epistemologically-motivated idealism and a more neutral position,
which might be identified with philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap,
W.V.O. Quine, and Donald Davidson, holding that of course we always
know things from some point of view, but any “external”
question about whether or not our point of view
“corresponds” to independent reality is either meaningless
or at least not answerable on theoretical grounds. It is in order to
preserve the distinction between traditional idealism and positions
such as the latter that we recommend retaining the claim that reality
is in some way or other exclusively mental and thinking of
epistemological arguments for idealism rather than epistemological
idealism as such.
Of course these strategies can be combined by a single philosopher.
Berkeley does so, and so does Kant in arguing for the transcendental
idealist part of his complex position. Others separate them, for
example F.H. Bradley and J.McT.E. McTaggart constructed metaphysical
arguments for idealism, while Josiah Royce and Brand Blanshard offered
epistemological arguments.
In what follows, we will concentrate mainly on the discussion of
philosophical theories that either endorse or claim to endorse
idealism on ontological and/or epistemological grounds. At some points
in its complex history, however, above all in the social as well as
philosophical movement that dominated British and American
universities in the second half of the nineteenth century and through
the first World War, idealism in either of its philosophical forms was
indeed connected to idealism in the popular sense of progressive and
optimistic social thought. This was true for figures such as Bradley
and Royce and their predecessors and contemporaries such as Thomas
Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet. There has recently been considerable
interest in British or more generally Anglophone idealism as a
movement in social philosophy, or even a social movement, but we will
not pursue that here (see Mander 2011; Boucher & Vincent 2012;
Mander [ed.] 2000; and Mander & Panagakou [eds.] 2016).
Our distinctions between epistemological and ontological idealism, on
the one hand, and that between metaphysical and epistemological
arguments for idealism, on the other hand, has not always been clearly
made. However, the American philosopher Josiah Royce pointed in the
direction of our distinction at the end of the nineteenth century. On
Royce’s definitions, epistemological idealism
involves a theory of
the nature of our human knowledge
; and
various decidedly different theories are called by this name in view
of one common feature, namely, the stress that they lay upon the
“subjectivity” of a larger or smaller portion of what
pretends to be our knowledge of things. (1892: xii–xiii)
Metaphysical idealism, he says, “is a theory as to
the
nature of the real world
, however we may come to know that
nature” (1892: xiii), namely, as he says quoting from another
philosopher of the time,
the “belief in a spiritual principle at the basis of the world,
without the reduction of the physical world to a mere illusion”.
(1892: xiii; quoting Falckenberg 1886: 476).
But Royce then argued that epistemological idealism ultimately entails
a foundation of metaphysical idealism, in particular that “the
question as to how we ‘transcend’ the
‘subjective’ in our knowledge”, that is, the purely
individual, although it exists for both metaphysical realists and
idealists, can only be answered by metaphysical idealists (1892: xiv).
We will argue similarly that while epistemology can entail idealism,
on the assumption that the isomorphism between knowledge and the known
must be in some sense necessary and that this can be so only if the
known as well as knowledge is in some sense mental, this should be
distinguished from the more general and extremely widespread view that
our knowledge is always formed within our own point of view,
conceptual framework, or web of belief. This view may well be the
default position of much twentieth-century philosophy,
“continental” as well as “analytic”, but does
not by itself entail that reality is essentially mental.
Our distinction between epistemological and metaphysical arguments for
idealism can also be associated with a distinction between two major
kinds of motives for idealism: those which are grounded in
self-conceptions, i.e., in convictions about the role that the self or
the human being plays in the world, and those based on what might
correspondingly be called world-convictions, i.e., on conceptions
about the way the world is constituted objectively or at least appears
to be constituted to a human subject. Concerning motives based on
self-conceptions of human beings, idealism has seemed hard to avoid by
many who have taken freedom in one of its many guises (freedom of
choice, freedom of the will, freedom as autonomy) to be an integral
part of any conception of the self worth pursuing, because the belief
in the reality of freedom often goes together with a commitment to
some version of mental causation, and it is tempting to think that the
easiest (or at least the most economical) way to account for mental
causation consists in “mentalizing” or idealizing all of
reality, thus leading to ontological idealism, or at least to maintain
that the kind of causal determinism that seems to conflict with
freedom is only one of our ways of representing the world, thus
leading to epistemological idealism. Motives for idealism based on
world-convictions can be found in many different attitudes towards
objectivity. If one is to believe in science as the best and only way
to get an objective (subject-independent) conception of reality, one
might still turn to idealism, at least epistemological idealism,
because of the conditions supposed to be necessary in order to make
sense of the very concept of a law (of nature) or of the normativity
of logical inferences for nature itself. If one believes in the
non-conventional reality of normative facts one might also be drawn to
idealism in order to account for their non-physical
reality—Plato’s idealism, which asserts the reality of
non-physical Ideas to explain the status of norms and then reduces all
other reality to mere simulacra of the former might be considered a
forerunner of ontological idealism motivated by concern for the
reality of norms. An inclination toward idealism might even arise from
considerations pertaining to the ontological status of aesthetic
values (is beauty an objective attribute of objects?) or from the
inability or the unwillingness to think of the constitution of social
and cultural phenomena like society or religion in terms of physical
theory. In short: There are about as many motives and reasons for
endorsing idealism as there are different aspects of reality to be
known or explained.
Although we have just referred to Plato, the term
“idealism” became the name for a whole family of positions
in philosophy only in the course of the eighteenth century. Even then,
those whom critics called “idealists” did not identify
themselves as such until the time of Kant, and no sooner did the label
come into use than did those to whom it was applied or who used it
themselves attempt to escape it or refine it. As already mentioned,
Berkeley, the paradigmatic idealist in the British tradition, did not
use the name for his own position, which he called rather
immaterialism; and Leibniz, at least some versions of whose monadology
might be considered idealist, also did not call his position by that
name. Rather, in contrasting Epicurus with Plato, Leibniz called the
latter an idealist and the former a materialist, because according to
him idealists like Plato hold that “everything occurs in the
soul as if there were no body” whereas on the materialism of
Epicurus “everything occurs in the body as if there were no
soul” (“Reply to the Thoughts on the System of
Pre-established Harmony contained in the Second Edition of Mr.
Bayle’s Critical Dictionary, Article Rorarius”, 1702,
PPL
: 578), although in this text Leibniz also says that his
own view combines both of these positions. It seems to have been
Christian Wolff who first used “idealism” explicitly as a
classificatory term. Wolff, often considered the most dedicated
Leibnizian of his time (although in fact his position was more
eclectic than at least some versions of Leibniz’s) set out to
integrate the terms “idealism” and
“materialism” into his taxonomy of philosophical attitudes
of those “who strive towards the knowledge and philosophy of
things” in the
Preface to the other [second] Edition
of
his so-called
German Metaphysics
Vernünfftige
Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen
Dingen überhaupt, den Liebhabern der Wahrheit mitgetheilet
(Halle: Carl Hermann Hemmerde, 1747)]. Wolff distinguishes between two
basic attitudes, one of which he sees exemplified by the skeptic, the
other by what he calls “the dogmatist”. The skeptic doubts
the possibility of knowledge in general and thus refuses to defend any
positive claim at all. By contrast, the dogmatist puts forward
positive doctrines, and these can be divided into those which posit as
fundamental either one single kind of entities [
Art der
Dinge
] or two different kinds. Wolff names the supporters of the
first position “monists” and the adherents of the second
“dualists”. This amounts to the division of all dogmatic
doctrines, i.e., all knowledge-claims with respect to the ultimate
constitution of reality, into monistic and dualistic theories. Here is
where the term “idealist” then makes its appearance in
Wolff’s typology: he distinguishes within the monists between
idealists and materialists. Idealists “concede only spirits or
else those things that do not consist of matter”, whereas
materialists “do not accept anything in philosophy other than
the corporeal and take spirits and souls to be a corporeal
force”. Dualists, on the contrary, are happy “to accept
both bodies and spirits as real and mutually independent
things”. Wolff then goes on to distinguish within idealism
between “egoism” and “pluralism”, depending on
whether an idealist thinks just of himself as a real entity or whether
he will allow for more than one (spiritual) entity; the first of these
positions would also come to be called solipsism, so that solipsism
would be a variety of (ontological) idealism but not all idealism
would be solipsism.
Wolff’s way of classifying a philosophical system was enormously
influential in eighteenth-century Continental philosophy—for
example, it was closely followed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in
his 1739
Metaphysica
, which was in turn used by Kant as the
textbook for his metaphysics (and anthropology) lectures throughout
his career, and whose definition of dogmatic idealism, as contrasted
to his own “transcendental” or “critical”
idealism, would also be that it is the position according to which
there are only minds—and so it is no surprise that almost all
talk about idealism was heavily influenced by Wolff’s
characterization. This is so because it reflects the main metaphysical
disputes in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophy on
the Continent quite well. In terms of Wolff’s distinctions,
these disputes can be framed as disputes between (a) monists and
dualists and (b) idealists and materialists; positions in this debate
were often influenced by perplexities surrounding the (ontological)
question of the interaction of substances, although they were also
influenced by the (epistemological) debate over innatism. Although
neither dualism, whose main representative was Descartes (who asserted
the existence of both
res cogitans
and
res extensa
),
nor monism, allegedly though debatably represented by Spinoza in its
materialistic version (
substantia, deus, natura
) and by
Leibniz in its idealistic form (monad, entelechy, simple substance)
succeeded in finding satisfying answers to this and related questions,
in the early modern era these disputes shaped the conception of what
the object of metaphysics (
metaphysica generalis sive
ontologia
) was supposed to be.
2. Idealism in Early Modern Rationalism
Prior to Wolff, neither defending nor refuting idealism seems to have
been a central issue for rationalist philosophers, and none of them
called themselves idealists. Yet what are by later lights idealistic
tendencies can nevertheless be found among them.
While Descartes’s “first philosophy” clearly defends
dualism, he takes his target to be skepticism rather than idealism,
and thus is from our point of view concerned to resist the adoption of
epistemological grounds; Spinoza is often though controversially
thought to defend a form of materialism, but takes his primary target
to be pluralism as contrasted to monism; and Leibniz does not seem
overly worried about choosing between idealist and dualist forms of
his “monadology”, while his famous thesis that each monad
represents the entire universe from its own point of view might be
taken to be a form of epistemological ground for idealism, but Leibniz
does not seem to conceive of it as such. Nicolas Malebranche’s
theory of “seeing all things in God” might be the closest
we find to an explicit assertion in seventeenth-century philosophy of
an argument for idealism on both epistemological and ontological
grounds, and thus as a forerunner of the “absolute”
idealism of the nineteenth century. While from a later point of view
it may seem surprising that these rationalists were not more concerned
with explicitly asserting or refuting one or both versions of
idealism, perhaps they were more concerned with theological puzzles
about the nature and essence of God, metaphysical questions as to how
to reconcile the respective conception of God with views about the
interaction of substances of fundamentally different kinds, and
epistemological problems as to the possibility of knowledge and
cognitive certainty than they were worried about whether the ultimate
constituents of reality were mental or material elements.
However, if one were to situate their thoughts within the framework
provided by Wolff it is not that difficult to find traces of idealism
derived from both ontological and epistemological grounds in their
respective positions. With respect to their metaphysical or
ontological teachings, this claim may seem surprising. Whereas
according to Wolff idealists are representatives of a species of
metaphysical monism Descartes is one of the most outspoken
metaphysical dualists. Hence to impute idealistic tendencies to
Descartes’ metaphysics looks like a mistake. And in the case of
Spinoza one could argue that although he definitely is a (very
radical) monist and thus could count as an idealist within
Wolff’s taxonomy, he is traditionally considered to be rather a
materialist in Wolff’s sense. Consequently, it appears as if
already for conceptual reasons there is no basis to burden either
Descartes or Spinoza with idealism as defined by Wolff. Leibniz,
meanwhile, often seems unwilling to commit himself to idealism even
though that is the most natural interpretation of his monadology,
while only Malebranche, as noted, seems to come close to explicitly
asserting epistemological and perhaps ontological arguments for
idealism as well.
Nevertheless, both Descartes and Spinoza provide a starting point for
their metaphysical doctrines with their conceptions of God, a starting
point that is already infected with idealistic elements if idealism is
understood as implying a commitment to the primacy or at least the
unavoidability and irreducibility of mental items in the constitution
and order of things in general. Both agree that in order to gain
insight into the constitution of the world one has to find out what
God wants us, or maybe better: allows us to know about it (see, e.g.,
Descartes:
Meditations IV
, 7–8 and especially 13;
Spinoza:
Ethics I
, XVI). They also agree that the world is
created by God although they have different views as to what this
means. Whereas Descartes thinks of God as existing outside the world
of the existing things He created (see
Meditations III
, 13
and 22) Spinoza holds that whatever exists is just a peculiar way in
which God is present (see
Ethics I
, XXV, Corollary). Of all
existing things all that God permits us to know clearly and distinctly
is (again according to both Descartes and Spinoza) that their nature
consists either in thinking or in extension. This claim can be seen as
providing in the case of Descartes the basis for his justification of
ontological dualism. His distinction between extended and thinking
substances is not just meant to give rise to a complete classification
of all existing things in virtue of their main attributes but also to
highlight the irreducibility of mental (thinking) substances to
physical or corporeal (extended) substances because of differences
between their intrinsic natures (see, e.g.,
Meditations VI
19, and
Principles of Philosophy I
, 51–54). In the case
of Spinoza thinking and extension not only refer to attributes of
individual things but primarily to attributes of God (see
Ethics
II
, Proposition I, II, and VII, Scholium), making them the
fundamental ways in which God himself expresses his nature in each
individual thing. This move gives rise to his ontological monism
because he can claim that all individual things are just modes in
which God’s presence is expressed according to these
attributes.
Although the idea that God is the creator of the world of individual
existing things (Descartes) or that God himself is manifested in every
individual existing thing (Spinoza) might already be considered to be
sufficient as a motivating force for subsequent disputes as to the
true nature of reality and thus might have given rise to what were
then called “idealistic” positions in ontology, other
peculiarities within Descartes’ and Spinoza’s position
might well have led to the same result, i.e., to the adoption of
idealism on ontological grounds. Especially their disagreement about
God’s corporeality might have been such a motive. Whereas
Descartes vigorously denies the corporeality of God (
Principles of
Philosophy I
, 23) and hence could be seen as endorsing idealism,
Spinoza vehemently insists on God’s corporeality (
Ethics
, Proposition XV, Scholium) and thus could be taken to be in
favor of materialism.
Things are different when it comes to epistemological grounds for
idealism. It seems to be very difficult to connect Descartes’
and Spinoza’s views concerning knowledge with conceptions
according to which knowledge has something to do with a cognizing
subject actively contributing to the constitution of the object of
knowledge. This is so because both Descartes and Spinoza think of
cognition as a result of a process in which we become aware of what
really is the case independently of us both with respect to the nature
of objects and with respect to their conceptual and material
relations. Descartes and Spinoza take cognition to be a process of
grasping clear and distinct ideas of what is the true character of
existing things rather than a process of contributing to the formation
of their nature. According to Descartes the sources of our knowledge
of things are our abilities to have intuitions of the simple nature of
things and to draw conclusions from these intuitions via deduction
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
III, 4 ff.). For him the
cognitive procedure is a process of discovery (see
Discourse on
the Method
, Part 6, 6) of what already is out there as the real
nature of things created by God by finding out the clear and distinct
ideas we can have of them (
Discourse
, Part 4, 3 and 7). In a
similar vein Spinoza thinks of knowledge as an activity that in its
highest form as intuitive (or third genus of) cognition leads to an
adequate insight into the essence of things (
Ethics II
Proposition XL, Scholium II, and
Ethics V
, Propositions
XXV–XXVIII), an insight that gives rise to general concepts
notiones communes
) on which
ratiocinationes
, i.e.,
the processes of inference and deduction, are based (
Ethics
II
, Proposition XL, Scholium I) the results of which provide the
second genus of cognition (
ratio
). Thus the problem for both
Descartes and Spinoza is not so much that of the epistemologically
motivated idealist, i.e., to uncover what we contribute through our
cognitive faculties to our conception of an object, rather their
problem is to determine how it comes that we very often have a
distorted view of what there is and are accordingly led to misguided
beliefs and errors. Given what they take to be a basic fact that God
has endowed us with the capacity to know the truth (albeit within
certain limits), i.e., to know to a certain degree how or what things
really are, this interest in the possibility of error makes perfectly
good sense (
Meditations IV
, 3–17;
Principles of
Philosophy I
, 70–72;
Ethics II
, Proposition 49,
Scholium).
In his project for a “universal characteristic”, Leibniz
can be regarded as having taken great interest in a
method
for inquiry, but he does not seem to have taken much interest in the
epistemological issue of skepticism or the possibility of knowledge,
and thus did not explicitly characterize his famous
“monadology” as a form of an epistemological ground for
idealism. But he did take a great interest in the ontology of
substances, God the infinite substance and everything else as finite
substances (in contrast to Spinoza, he rejected monism). Yet while the
logic of his monadology clearly points toward idealism, Leibniz
frequently attempted to avoid this conclusion. One explicitly
ontological argument for the monadology that Leibniz often deploys is
that, on pain of infinite regress, everything composite must
ultimately consist of simples, but that since space and time are
infinitely divisible extended matter cannot be simple while thoughts,
even with complex content, do not literally have parts, nor do the
minds that have them, so minds, or monads, are the only candidates for
the ultimate constituents of reality. Thus the late text entitled
“The Monadology” begins with the assertions that
The
monad
which we are here to discuss is nothing but a
simple substance which enters into compounds,
that
There must be simple substances, since there are compounds, [and] the
compounded is but a collection or an
aggregate
of simples,
but that
where there are no parts, it is impossible to have either extension,
or figure, or divisibility
and conversely where there is simplicity there cannot be extension or
figure or divisibility (§§1–3). Yet monads must have
some qualities in order to exist (§8) and to differ from one
another, as they must (§9), and if the fundamental properties of
matter are excluded, this leaves the fundamental properties of mind,
which Leibniz holds to be perception, “The passing state which
enfolds and represents a multitude in unity” (§14) and
appetition, “the internal principle which brings about change or
the passage from one perception to another” (§15; all from
PPL
: 643–4). This argument clearly seems to imply that
all finite substances are ultimately mental in nature (and the
infinite substance, God, is obviously mental in nature), thus it seems
to be a paradigmatic ontological argument for idealism, from which an
epistemological argument for idealism would automatically follow,
since if there is knowledge of reality at all, which Leibniz hardly
seems to doubt, and reality is ultimately mental, then knowledge too
must be of the mental.
Yet Leibniz often seems to avert such a conclusion by appeal to his
idea of “pre-established harmony”, and this is possible
because he himself interprets this idea in two different ways. Early
in his career, in such texts as “Primary Truths”
(1680–84) and the “Discourse on Metaphysics” (1686)
(both texts unpublished in Leibniz’s lifetime and not known to
his immediate successors such as Wolff and Baumgarten), Leibniz
introduces the doctrine of pre-established harmony on
truth-theoretical grounds. His argument is that everything that is
true of a substance is so because the predicate of a true proposition
is contained in the complete concept of its subject and because that
complete concept reflects the properties or “traces” in
the substance that is that subject; that there are true propositions
linking every substance in the world to every other, thus the complete
concept of each substance must be a complete concept of the universe
itself and each substance must bear within itself as properties traces
of every other in the universe; and thus that each substance must
reflect, or, as mental, represent the entire universe. Yet since
(finite) substances are also defined as existing independently of one
another (although not existing independently from the infinite
substance, God), there is a question as to why each should truthfully
represent all the others, which Leibniz answers by appeal to the idea
of a pre-established harmony: although considered from the point of
view of the concept of substance it does not seem necessary that every
substance truly represent all the others, in his goodness, thus in his
preference for a maximally harmonious world, God has nevertheless made
it such that they do.
In this mood, Leibniz tends to explain the existence of body as an
artifact of the fact that each monad represents the world from its own
point of view: physical locations and the bodies that occupy them are
just the way in which the difference in the points of view of the
monads is represented by them, but have no deeper reality; or, as
Leibniz often says, space, spatiality, and bodies are just
phenomena bene fundata
, i.e., “well-founded modes of
our consideration” (
PPL
: 270).
However, sometimes Leibniz writes as if space and time are not merely
the way in which the pre-established harmony among monads presents
itself to (their) consciousness, but as if the mental and physical or
extended are two separate realms, each evolving entirely in accordance
with its own laws, but with a pre-established harmony
between
them creating the appearance of interaction. Perhaps Leibniz was
genuinely undecided between two interpretations of the pre-established
harmony and two conceptions of the reality of body, sometimes being a
committed idealism and sometimes a dualist. (As we will see later,
even among the most committed absolute idealists of the nineteenth
century it is not always clear whether they are actually denying the
existence of matter or only subordinating it to mind in one way or
another).
Leibniz’s monadology could thus be seen as a forerunner of both
epistemological and ontological arguments for idealism, and his
conception of space and time as
phenomena bene fundata
was
clearly a forerunner of Kant’s transcendental idealism. But as
we have just seen, he did not himself unequivocally affirm idealism,
and as we will shortly see subsequent Leibnizians such as Alexander
Baumgarten argued for dualism and for a corresponding interpretation
of pre-established harmony. Nicolas Malebranche was also a dualist,
committed to the existence of both mind and body, and an
occasionalist, who held that since causation is necessary connection
and the only truly necessary connection is between God’s
intentions and their effects, bodies cannot directly cause
modifications of minds (or each other) but rather there can be a
causal relation between body and mind only if God intends the mind to
undergo a certain modification upon the occasion of a certain change
in a body (hence the term “occasionalism”). This is a
metaphysical argument. His further doctrine that the mind sees all
things in God, however, can be seen as an epistemological argument,
for it depends on his particular view of what modifications the mind
undergoes in perception. He holds that
sensations
are
literally modifications in the mind, but that they are highly
indeterminate, or in later terminology lack determinate intentional
objects, and that genuine understanding occurs only when and to the
extent that the determinate
ideas
in the perfect intellect of
God are disclosed to finite, human minds, to the extent that they are.
Malebranche’s position can be considered a theological form of
Platonism: Plato held that the true Ideas or Forms of things have a
kind of perfection that neither ordinary objects nor representations
of them in human minds do, and therefore must exist someplace else;
Malebranche takes the obvious further step of supposing that perfect
ideas can exist only in the perfect intellect of God. He then supposes
that human thought is intelligible to the extent that these ideas are
disclosed to it, on the occasion of various sensations themselves
occasioned by God but not literally through those sensations. The
crucial point is that genuine understanding consists in the
apprehension of ideas, even though these are literally in the mind of
God rather than of individual human beings, rather than of physical
objects, even though the latter do exist. Malebranche had significant
influence on both Berkeley and Hume, although neither the former and
certainly not the latter accepted his position in its entirety. His
position that knowledge consists in individual minds apprehending
ideas in some greater mind would also be recreated by idealists as
late as T.H. Green and Josiah Royce in the second half of the
nineteenth century, as we will later see.
Before we turn to British or Anglophone versions of idealism, earlier
or later, one last word about idealism within pre-Kantian rationalist
philosophy is in order. As earlier mentioned, dualism rather than
idealism became the default position of the German successors to
Leibniz, the so-called “Leibnizo-Wolffians” who dominated
the teaching of philosophy in many German universities for fifty years
from the third decade of the eighteenth century until the time of Kant
and in some cases even beyond, and they correspondingly opted for the
interpretation of the pre-established harmony as a relation between
minds and bodies rather than among minds or monads alone. It may also
be noted that defending dualism by means of an explicit
“refutation of idealism” became the norm among these
philosophers. This may be seen in Alexander Gottlieb
Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica
of 1739, which would become
Kant’s textbook for his lecture courses in metaphysics and
“anthropology” (empirical psychology) until the very end
of the eighteenth century. Baumgarten accepts that the ultimate
constituents of the world must be simples, hence monads of some kind.
But he does not suppose that monads are necessarily minds or
intellects, hence a dualism of monads is at least possible. Idealism
would be the position that there are only intellectual monads; he says
that
An intellectual substance, i.e., a substance endowed with intellect,
is a spirit (an intelligence, a person)…. Whoever admits only
spirits in this world is an idealist. (
Metaphysics
§402, pp. 175–6)
Baumgarten follows Wolff in distinguishing between two possible forms
of idealism, first egoism, which admits the existence of only one
spirit, that of the person contemplating such a doctrine, and then
idealism proper, which allows the existence of multiple spirits. But
both are refuted by the same argument. This argument builds on a
Leibnizian principle not hitherto mentioned, the principle of
plenitude, or the principle that the perfection of the most perfect
world, which is the one that God created, consists in the maximal
variety of the universe compatible with its unity or coherence (e.g.,
“Monadology”, §58,
PPL
: 648), which was in
turn the basis of one of Leibniz’s arguments for the identity of
indiscernibles. Baumgarten then argues simply that a universe that
contains not only more substances but also more
kinds
of
substances rather than fewer is a more perfect universe, and
necessarily exists in preference to the other; and a universe that
contains not only multiple minds rather than a single mind but also
bodies in addition to minds is therefore a more perfect universe than
either of the former would be, and is therefore the kind of world that
actually exists. In his words,
the egotistical world, such as an egoist posits, is not the most
perfect. And even if there is only one non-intellectual monad possible
in itself that is compossible with spirits in the world, whose
perfection either subtracts nothing from the perfection of the
spirits, or does not subtract from the perfection of the spirits so
much as it adds to the perfection of the whole, then the idealistic
world, such as is posited by the idealist, is not the most perfect,
Metaphysics
, §438, [2013: 183])
and hence not the kind of world that exists. No one outside of the
immediate sphere of Leibnizianism would ever again proffer such a
refutation of idealism. But both Baumgarten’s recognition of
idealism and his refutation of it in a university textbook make it
clear that by the middle of the eighteenth century idealism had become
a standard topic for philosophical discussion, a position it would
retain for another century and a half or more.
3. Idealism in Early Modern British philosophy
The relation between ontological and epistemological arguments for
idealism is complex. Idealism can be argued for on ontological
grounds, and then bring an epistemological argument in its train. Or
an epistemological argument can be offered independently of
ontological assumptions but lead to idealism, especially in the hope
of avoiding skepticism. The first option may have been characteristic
of some rationalists, such as Leibniz in his more strictly idealist
mood. Both forms of argument are found within early modern British
philosophy. We find epistemological considerations pushing toward
idealism in both Hobbes and Locke in spite of the avowed materialism
of the first and dualism of the second, who therefore obviously did
not call themselves idealists. Berkeley argues for idealism on
epistemological grounds and then adds ontological considerations in
order to avert skepticism, although he calls his position
immaterialism rather than idealism. Berkeley’s contemporary
Arthur Collier, who explicitly denies the existence of
mind-independent matter without giving his own position a name, argues
first in an epistemological mood, then moves from epistemology to
ontology. Hume, by contrast, although calling himself neither an
immaterialist nor an idealist, nevertheless adopts epistemological
arguments for idealism similar to some of Berkeley’s, but then
uses that position as the basis for a critique of traditional
metaphysical pretensions, including those to idealism—while also
being drawn to idealism in resistance to what he regards as the
natural tendency to dualism. Hume’s critical attitude toward
metaphysics is subsequently taken up by Kant, although Kant famously
asserts on practical grounds some of the very same metaphysical theses
that he argues cannot be asserted on theoretical grounds.
The British philosophers were all hostile toward dogmatic metaphysics
in Wolff’s sense, although until the time of Hume, who had some
familiarity with Leibniz, the metaphysics with which they were
familiar were those of Descartes, Aristotelian scholasticism, and
Neo-Platonism, which had become domesticated in Britain through the
work of the Cambridge Platonists in the second half of the seventeenth
century. All of these movements fed into the general movement of
rationalism, while the British philosophers, typically lumped together
under the rubric of empiricism in spite of their own differences, all
believed, albeit for different reasons, that the doctrines put forward
by dogmatic metaphysicians rest on a totally unfounded conception of
knowledge and cannot survive rational scrutiny (empiricists might
themselves be considered critical rationalists). Thus the primary task
of philosophy for these philosophers became that of providing a theory
of knowledge based on an adequate assessment of the constitution of
human nature, for they were interested in knowledge only as a human
achievement. However, it is not human nature in general that is of
interest in this context but the workings of those human powers or
faculties that are responsible for our human ability to relate to the
world in terms of knowledge-claims. (Thus Kant’s attempt to
argue on practical grounds for metaphysical theses that could not be
justified on theoretical grounds would be a major departure from the
methods of the British empiricists.) These faculties were attributed
by the British as well as their Continental opponents to what was
called “spirit” or “mind” (
mens
consciousness,
Bewußtsein
), an attribution which
resulted in moving the “operations of the mind” into the
center of philosophical attention. Reflections on the conditions of
the possibility of knowledge led Hobbes and Locke to idealism in spite
of their ontological commitments to materialism or dualism
respectively, while Berkeley concluded that their epistemology would
lead to a skepticism that could be avoided only by his own more
radical “immaterialist” ontology. Hume’s position
remains complex and for this reason controversial. His thesis that our
beliefs in causation, external objects, and even the self are all
founded on “custom” and imagination rather than
“reason” may be considered an epistemological position
without ontological implications, thus not an argument for idealism;
but while he sometimes seems to attempt to avoid commitment on
ontological questions altogether, at other times, as in his argument
that the existence of external objects in addition to our impressions
is only a fiction, he seems to infer idealism from his epistemology.
In spite of their differences, almost all British philosophers from
Hobbes up to and including Hume insisted that the highest priority for
philosophy is to give an analysis of the conditions and the origin of
knowledge, while they gave not only somewhat different accounts of
what these conditions consist in and how they contribute to a
convincing story about the origin of knowledge but they also had to
face quite interesting “metaphysical” consequences from
their respective accounts.
This is easily confirmed by looking briefly at some of their main
convictions concerning knowledge, starting with Thomas Hobbes
(1588–1679). As Hobbes points out in the chapters
Of
Philosophy
and
Of Method
in the first part
Computation or Logic
) of the first section (
Concerning
Body
) of his
Elements of Philosophy
(1655), knowledge is
the result of the manipulation of sensory input based on the
employment of logical rules of reasoning (ratiocination) in acts of
what he calls “computation”. He describes the details of
this process most succinctly in a short passage in chapter 6 of the
first part (
Human Nature
) of his
The Elements of Law,
Natural and Politic
(1640), his first major philosophical work.
After distinguishing what he calls “sense, or knowledge
original” from “knowledge … which we call
science”, he goes on to “define” knowledge “to
be evidence of truth, from some beginning or principle of sense”
and formulates four principles that are constitutive of knowledge:
The first principle of knowledge therefore is that we have such and
such conceptions; the second, that we have thus and thus named the
things whereof they are conceptions; the third is, that we have joined
those names in such manner, as to make true propositions; the fourth
and last is, that we have joined those propositions in such manner as
they be concluding. (1640: I.6.4)
The message is straightforward with respect to both the basis and the
formation of knowledge: senses (sensations) are basic to our
acquisition of knowledge in that they lead to conceptions
(representations) to which we attach names (concepts) which we then
put together into propositions which, if true, already constitute
knowledge, and from which there arise further knowledge if we draw
conclusions in an orderly way from them.
Although the account given by Hobbes of the origin and the formation
of knowledge is rightly called empiricist because it traces all
knowledge back to the senses or sensations and their non-sensory
causes, i.e., to what he calls “things without us”, it is
by no means directly committed to either idealism or dualism; on the
contrary, Hobbes’s preferred ontological position is
materialism. Nevertheless, his account may lead to an early form of
epistemologically motivated idealism. This is so because although
Hobbes makes no claims as to either the constitution and the reality
of what causes sensations or to any specific contribution on the part
of the subject of knowledge to what we take to be the “accidents
or qualities” of objects, he states, again most explicitly in
the part on
Human Nature
in
The Elements of Law
, (1)
that there are causes of our sensations which by way of their motions
give rise to what we sense as qualities, but (2) that these qualities
only have the status of “seemings and apparitions”. In his
own words: “The things that really are in the world without us,
are those motions by which these seemings are caused”
Elements of Law
, I.2.10). While he is confident that there
are external objects, and thus has no intention of affirming idealism,
nevertheless because in Hobbes’s opinion we could have
conceptions of these seemings even if there were no objects around
Elements of Law
I.1.8) there is for him no basis on which to
found any metaphysical claims to the real existence of an external
world or any epistemological basis for claiming knowledge of the real
constitution of a subject-independent world or its real existence.
Thus, Hobbes’s epistemology allows him at most agnosticism about
the existence of objects other than our representations of them, even
if it does not force him into outright idealism. This is nicely
confirmed by a passage from part II (
The First Grounds of
Philosophy
) where he declares:
Now things may be considered, that is, be brought into account, either
as internal accidents of our mind, in which manner we consider them
when the question is about some faculty of the mind; or as species of
external things,
not as really existing, but appearing only to
exist, or to have a being without us
[emphasis added]. And in
this manner we are now to consider them. (
Elements of Law
II.7.1)
In spite of a pre-reflective disposition toward dualism, an explicit
argument for an agnostic attitude with respect to the ultimate
constitution of reality is also characteristic of John Locke
(1632–1704). Already in
The Epistle to the Reader
of
An Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1690) he denounces
rationalist metaphysics as a “Sanctuary of Vanity and
Ignorance” and declares in the first book of his
Essay
right at the outset:
I shall not at present meddle with the physical consideration of the
mind; or trouble myself to examine, wherein its essence consists, or
by what motions of our spirits, or alterations of our bodies, we come
to have any sensation by our organs, or any ideas in our
understandings; and
whether those ideas do in their formation,
any, or all of them, depend on matter or no
[emphasis added]:
These are speculations, which, however curious and entertaining, I
shall decline. (Book I, chap. I, 2; see also II.XXI.73)
Instead he restricts his investigation to the “purpose to
enquire into the original, certainty, and extent of human
knowledge” (
Essay
I.I.2). Such an investigation
presupposes an acquaintance with our own minds, and thus according to
Locke the most pressing task is to understand the mind or the
understanding itself. And because for Locke the sole material the mind
has the ability to process are ideas, the most pressing task if one
wants to understand the possibility of knowledge is to give an account
of “how he [the mind] comes by them [the ideas]”
Essay
II.I.1). There is no need to go into the details of
Locke’s conception of how the mind gets ideas and what the
understanding does with them in order to arrive at knowledge. Although
his description of these processes differs in some interesting ways
from the model Hobbes proposes, in the end both Hobbes and Locke share
the view (1) that whatever we can know depends on our having ideas
which must be somehow based in sensation, (2) that there must be some
external cause (Hobbes) or some source of affection (Locke) which
gives rise to sensory ideas, yet (3) ultimately we are ignorant about
the real constitution of these causes and these sources. What we know
is the content and structure of our own ideas, although we have no
reason to deny the existence of external objects and even assume that
in some regards external objects resemble our ideas of them (in the
case of primary qualities).
Obviously it is mainly point (3) that is of importance for the
question of whether dualism or idealism is involved in Locke’s
version of the operations of the mind. Again, as in the case of
Hobbes, it seems that Locke’s position is meant to be neutral
against and compatible with all these alternatives and that he wishes
to stay agnostic with respect to them. This is indicated especially
well by his theory of substance and his remarks concerning the limits
of knowledge. Substances, Locke famously holds,
are such combinations of simple Ideas, as are taken to represent
distinct particular things subsisting by themselves. (
Essay
II.XII.6)
If one analyzes our concept of a substance one
will find he has no other Idea of it at all, but only a Supposition of
he knows not what support of such qualities, which are capable of
producing simple Ideas in us. (
Essay
II.XXIII.2)
The reasons for this supposition are two: (1) we cannot make sense of
the concept of an unsupported quality or of ideas subsisting by
themselves, (2) we know from experience that “a certain number
of these simple Ideas go constantly together” or “exist
together” (
Essay
II.XXIII.2–3). Although Locke
thinks of these reasons as totally compelling, he sees quite well that
they do not justify any claim as to what a substance or a thing really
is, what its nature or constitution consists in. Thus he never gets
tired of emphasizing that we only have a confused idea of substance (a
claim also made by Leibniz about three-quarters of our knowledge,
although he held that we have a clear concept of what substance is),
and repeats quite often (at least three times in
Essay
book
II, chap. XXIII alone) that
Whatever therefore be the secret, abstract nature of substance in
general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of
substances, are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas,
co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes
the whole subsist of itself. (
Essay
II.XXIII.6)
He restricts this agnostic attitude not just to corporeal substances
or bodies but extends it to spiritual substances or minds as well:
It is plain then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter is as
remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual
substance or spirit; and therefore from our not having any notion of
the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its non-existence,
than we can for the same reason deny the existence of body; it being
as rational to affirm there is no body, because we have no clear and
distinct idea of the substance of matter, as to say there is no
spirit, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of
a spirit. (
Essay
II.XXIII.5)
This criticism of any metaphysical claims concerning the ultimate
constitution of reality is accompanied by a more general warning
against the overstepping of the natural limits of our cognitive
faculties. According to Locke it is just a fact about human nature
that there are limits to the powers of the understanding. These powers
are meant to be bestowed to us by God to an extent sufficient for us
to know “Whatever is necessary for the Conveniences of Life, and
Information of Virtue” (
Essay
I.I.5; see also
II.XXIII.12) but only to that extent. If therefore the nature and the
constitution of substances both corporeal and spiritual are beyond our
cognitive grasp then we should take this to be a hint that God has set
limits to what we can know because he sees no reason for us to know
everything. Even if the powers He endowed on us would be magnified
infinitely we still would remain clueless as to what substances really
are because we still would be stuck in a world of qualities (this is
one way of reading
Essay
II.XXIII.12). Thus, in the end
metaphysical knowledge of any kind is meant to be beyond our reach.
This, however, is nothing we should be concerned about:
For, though the comprehension of our understandings comes exceeding
short of the vast extent of things; yet we shall have cause enough to
magnify the bountiful author of our being, for that proportion and
degree of knowledge he has bestowed on us, so far above all the rest
of the inhabitants of this our mansion. (
Essay
I.I.5)
For Locke, ontological agnosticism is an expression of piety.
Locke’s position may be regarded as a theological expression of
the most fundamental epistemological motivation for idealism: no
matter how much we know about objects and at what level of detail, we
still know them only from our own, human point of view, but whether
objects exist beyond our experience of them is really none of our
business. But neither is Locke prepared to assert that only spirits or
minds exist; that too would exceed the bounds of human knowledge.
The agnosticism with respect to the ultimate constitution of
substances and things or of the
fundamentum in re
of
“the ideas thereof” characteristic of Hobbes and Locke is
challenged forcefully by George Berkeley (1685–1753), for whom
their agnosticism becomes a form of skepticism and even impiety. In
his
Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
(1710) he raises doubts about whether an agnostic stance along the
lines of Hobbes and Locke can be upheld consistently if one thinks
about the origin and the properties of ideas the way they do. Although
in his
Treatise
Berkeley does not mention Hobbes at all and
addresses Locke not by his name but by formulas like “esteemed
philosopher” and “learned author” (1710:
Introduction, §11) very few times, it is abundantly clear that he
wants to confront especially Locke with a painful choice: either his
conception of a substance or a thing has “no distinct meaning
annexed to” it (1710: Part I, §17) and is nonsense, or he
has to endorse not just epistemological agnosticism but full-blown
idealism or, in Berkeley’s term, immaterialism. In other words,
Berkeley’s point is that Locke cannot afford to be agnostic with
respect to the metaphysical status of substances and things if he
wants us to think of ideas as the immediate objects of human
knowledge. Arthur Collier (1680–1732) would make a similar
argument.
Berkeley offers both epistemological and metaphysical arguments for
his immaterialism. His epistemological arguments begin from the
premise that ideas and only ideas are the objects of human knowledge,
a presupposition that he at least considered uncontroversial. Although
his taxonomy of the different kinds of ideas deviate in ways that are
not of interest here from Locke’s classification, he agrees with
Locke that ideas exist only “in the mind” (1710: Part I,
§2). He takes the mind to be a “perceiving, active
being” which itself is not
any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein
they exist or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived.
(1710: Part I, §2)
From these stipulations he derives his most fundamental and famous
claim (1) that “the existence of an idea consists in being
perceived” (1710: Part I, §2) or that “their
esse
is
percipi
” (1710: Part I, §3) by
the perceiving, active mind. Already here Berkeley has the means in
place to cast into doubt the meaningfulness of the assumption that
there might exist unperceived objects or things. This is due to his
restriction of existence to what is perceivable or, even narrower, to
what is perceived: If the only objects that exist for a
mind—whether it is my own mind or the mind of other human beings
or the divine mind—are ideas because there is nothing else that
can exist for the mind, then the very concept of something that exists
but is not for the mind or is unperceived is a contradiction in terms.
Thus if, as Berkeley supposes Locke does, one thinks of things as
consisting of collections of ideas, he asks how could one take a thing
to be something other than ideas and nevertheless to exist? This
question underlies Berkeley’s confidence in what is often
referred to as his “master argument”, the argument that
one cannot conceive of anything existing unconceived because in trying
to do so one is still conceiving of the object (1710: Part I,
§23). This seems open to the obvious objection that he is
confusing the content of a proposition (for example, “The earth
may still exist after the extinction of all conscious life”)
with the act of entertaining (“conceiving”) such a
proposition, which of course cannot take place except in a conscious
being; but if he is already committed to the thought that objects of
knowledge are nothing but ideas, it is at least understandable that he
should overlook this distinction.
The second conviction, also meant to be damaging to Locke’s view
about substances, on which Berkeley rests his case in favor of
idealism is the more strictly metaphysical claim (2) that “an
idea can be like nothing but an idea” (1710: Part I, §8).
Although this claim is initially put forward in the context of his
well-known criticism of Locke’s primary-secondary-quality
distinction, it is equally relevant for his denial that there are
things “without the mind”. The reasoning on which this
claim is based seems to be the following: For two items to stand in
the relation of likeness they must have something in common. However,
if an idea is mind-dependent and if ideas are all there is for the
mind, then what is “without the mind” must be different in
every respect from an idea. Thus a relation of likeness cannot obtain
between ideas “in the mind” and things “without the
mind”. Berkeley puts this point quite bluntly by appealing to
observation:
If we look but ever so little into our thoughts, we shall find it
impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our
ideas. Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or external
things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be
themselves perceivable or no? if they are,
then they are
ideas,
and we have gained our point; but if you say they are not,
I appeal to any one whether it be sense, to assert a colour is like
something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is
intangible; and so of the rest. (1710: Part I, §8)
There is a third metaphysical claim that is essential to both
Berkeley’s criticism of Locke and the idealistic position he is
going to adopt for himself. This is the claim (3) that ideas are
passive and causally inert, i.e., they can neither produce nor alter
another idea (1710: Part I, §25). This claim he also purports to
base on observation:
whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflection,
will not perceive in them any power or activity; there is therefore no
such thing contained in them. A little attention will discover to us
that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in
it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do any thing, or,
strictly speaking, to be the cause of any thing. (1710: Part I,
§25)
Perhaps this is intended as an epistemological premise for an
ontological claim. Be that as it may, again the primary function of
this claim is to discredit a Lockean view according to which we have
to think of the primary qualities of things—which are contents
of the most fundamental ideas we have of them—as the causes of
sensations or of sensory ideas. It is, however, also meant to support
the untenability of the assumption that agnosticism with respect to
the real existence of mind-independent things is a viable option for a
believer in Locke’s model of how and by what means we acquire
knowledge of objects.
Berkeley’s criticism of Locke’s theory concerning
substances is not carried out for its own sake. On the contrary, it is
meant to establish what Berkeley thinks to be the unavoidable
metaphysical consequences of a position that takes ideas “in the
mind” to be the only material for the operations of the mind in
its acquisition of knowledge. These metaphysical consequences consist
in a thoroughgoing idealism or “immaterialism” with
respect to the nature and constitution of things or substances.
Berkeley’s way of establishing this result is open to many
questions. However, the basic outline of his overall argument can be
sketched thus: If existence is restricted to ideas (and minds) and if,
what is undoubtedly the case, things or substances exist, then things
or substances must be ideas (or minds) too. Now, as Locke has
convincingly shown, we can have ideas of particular things or
substances, e.g., gold and lead, humans and sheep, distinguished by
our ideas of their various properties, but we have only a confused or
obscure idea of substance in general, which we suppose to underlie
whatever collection of ideas we take to be a thing or a substance of
one kind or another. But if we cannot have any ideas of things or
substances other than our ideas of their properties, which clearly
exist in minds, then the only clear ideas of things that we have is as
ideas, and in that case, if they do not seem to exist in our own
individual, human minds, then things or substances must be ideas in
some other non-human, i.e., divine mind. This divine mind cannot be
itself an idea because it must be conceived as an active principle
that can be the cause of ideas, a principle of which we can have no
idea but only a “notion” (1710: Part I, §26,
§27). Therefore, the very fact that we take things or substances
to be real commits us to the claim that things are ideal entities
perceived by the mind of God. Idealism, one could say, is the only
tenable basis for a realistic stance for Berkeley, but it leads to a
realism about minds, human and divine, rather than of what he always
calls material substance. And if one is to accept his
re-interpretation of causality as a purported relation between ideas
in terms of his theory of marks and signs, in particular his theory
that what we think of as ideas of objects are signs of (God’s
plan for) future possible ideas for us (cf. 1710: Part I, §65
f.), then one also has to agree to idealism. In Berkeley’s view,
the only alternative to idealism is not materialism but
skepticism.
Up until the point at which he introduces the mind of God into his
argument, all of Berkeley’s epistemological considerations might
be thought of as expressions of the basic insight that we can only
conceive of reality from our own point of view, which are then
extended into full-blown idealism in order to avoid the whiff of
agnosticism or skepticism and supplemented with the existence of a
divine mind in order to satisfy an ineliminable tendency to believe in
the existence of something more than one’s own mind or even of
human minds in general. We will later see that the tendency to
preserve both the impulse to idealism and the conviction that there is
something more than ordinary human minds by positing a more than human
mind is characteristic of many versions of idealism until the end of
its glory days at the beginning of the twentieth century. This
tendency is decidedly absent from the philosophy of David Hume,
however.
Arthur Collier was a much more obscure clergyman than Berkeley. He
published his
Clavis Universalis: Or, A New Inquiry after Truth,
Being a Demonstration of the Non-Existence, or Impossibility, of an
External World
in 1713, the same year that Berkeley’s
Principles of Human Knowledge
appeared, and three years after
Berkeley’s
Three Dialogues
; however, he states that he
had originally conceived his position a decade earlier, so before he
could have read Berkeley. Although the work was not widely read, it
was translated into German by Johann Christian Eschenbach in 1756, and
then noticed by Thomas Reid and following him Dugald Stewart. It was
republished in English in 1837 along with Collier’s other
philosophical work,
A Specimen of True Philosophy
, in a
collection of
Metaphysical Tracts
edited by Samuel Parr, and
then again in 1909, edited with an introduction by Ethel Bowman. By
“external” Collier meant “independent, absolute, or
self-existent”, and his position is that “all matter,
body, extension, &c.” (which he also frequently calls
“expansion”) depends “on mind, thought, or
perception, and that it is not capable of an existence, which is not
thus dependent” (Collier 1713 [1909: 6]). Collier’s
position is thus full-throated idealism, which he emphasizes is
neither skepticism nor a denial that bodies exist, but the position
that
such and such bodies, which are supposed to exist, do not exist
externally; or in universal terms, that there is no such thing as an
external world. (1713 [1909: 9])
Collier argues for his idealism on both epistemological and more
purely metaphysical ground. His work, although a footnote in the
history of philosophy, is interesting precisely because it so clearly
illustrates the dual strategies for arguing for idealism,
Collier’s most purely epistemological argument is that we are
all familiar with (visual) experiences that are assumed to be of
external objects but which do not differ from similar experiences
which are clearly not of external objects, yet that there is no
discernible difference between the latter and the former, thus that if
the latter are in or entirely dependent upon the mind, then so must be
the former. He uses examples such as those of imaginary beings,
chimeras or centaurs (1713 [1909: 17]), which he supposes we
(visually) represent just as vividly (his term, anticipating Hume) as
other objects, secondary qualities (1713 [1909: 21–2]), cases of
double vision, cases of experiences which change, such as different
phases of the moon, when no one would believe that the external
objects is changing (1713 [1909: 33]), and mirror images, which
everyone believes exist in the mind, not in the piece of glass outside
us, and yet are indiscernible from other images of their objects. He
also equates being visible with being “present to the
mind”, and asks how something could be present to the mind if it
were elsewhere from the mind? (1713 [1909: 35]). He infers that to be
visible is to be in or dependent upon the mind, and thus that to be
outside of the mind would necessarily be to be invisible (1713 [1909:
56]).
This begins the more purely metaphysical part of Collier’s
argument: that to be visible is to be in the mind we can consider an
epistemological premise, but then he argues that nothing can be both
visible and invisible at the same time, which is of course quite true
independently of epistemology. A further argument he makes is that
since God can give created minds any ideas directly, it would be
needless for him to give us our ideas indirectly, by creating
independent objects to cause ideas in us, and God does nothing useless
(1713 [1909: 60–2]). This is a metaphysical, in this case
theological argument, directed against the occasionalists Nicholas
Malebranche and his English follower John Norris rather than against
Locke. The most interesting of Collier’s metaphysical arguments
for idealism, however, take the form of antinomies, and have sometimes
been held to anticipate Kant’s first and second antinomies
(Bowman in Collier [1713] 1909: xxiv). Collier argues that there are
sound arguments that an external world must be both finite and
infinite in “expanse” or extension (1713 [1909: 63]), that
it must be both finitely and infinitely divisible (1713 [1909: 68]),
and that it must both be in motion as a whole and have moveable parts,
but also cannot be either of these (1713 [1909: 78]). Since the
concept of an external world is in these ways contradictory, such a
thing cannot exist. It is striking, however, that Collier does not
actually provide the arguments for what would become the theses and
antitheses of Kant’s first two antinomies, instead providing
only a version of Zeno’s paradox to prove the impossibility of
moving parts within an extended universe, an antinomy that Kant dos
not take over.
It is not inconceivable that Kant knew of Collier’s work through
Eschenbach’s translation, although there is no direct evidence
for that. It is more likely that Collier’s argument that the
difference between what we ordinarily take to be a veridical
perception and a mere imagination or hallucination is merely a matter
of vividness, and that the latter can become as vivid as the former
and thereby undermine any use of vividness as a criterion of
externality (1713 [1909: 19–20]), could have been known to Hume
and influenced his formulation of the distinction between impressions
and ideas in his
Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–40). So
at this point we can turn to Hume.
Whether or not David Hume (1711–1776) learned from Collier, he
learned a great deal from Berkeley, above all his empiricist
epistemology, but for the most part he tried to avoid Berkeley’s
outright commitment to idealism. Hume’s view that our knowledge
consists of our ideas, our recognition of “philosophical”
relations among them, such as identity and difference, and our
recognition of “natural” relations among them such as
causation, which are established by imagination and custom, could
constitute an epistemological ground for idealism—causality, in
particular, which Hume regards as the basis of all our knowledge of
existence, is at the same time reduced to a way of feeling and
thinking, in other words a state of mind. But depending on how he is
read, Hume either accepts the skepticism about possible external
objects that Berkeley tries to avoid with his ontology that renders
any external objects other than other human or divine minds
impossible, or else holds that even if there are valid arguments for
skepticism it is psychologically impossible for human beings to remain
in a skeptical frame of mind, thus we naturally even if not rationally
believe in the existence of objects apart from our ideas of them.
However, in those passages, prominently in Book I, Part IV of his
early
Treatise of Human Nature
(1739–40), where Hume
entertains a kind of monism that sees both “minds” and
“objects” as nothing but different sets or
“bundles” of one sort of thing, namely, perceptions,
impressions and their paler copies, ideas, his position might seem
much like Berkeley’s idealism, with the difference that while he
reduces all reality to mental states like impressions and ideas he
does not see these as properties that must inhere in substantial minds
any more than in substantial bodies, both of which are fictions that
we introduce in order to explain continuities among those impressions
or ideas (although it may be difficult to explain who is introducing
those fictions without resorting to substantial minds after all).
Hume’s potentially idealist approach to causation is clearly on
view in his 1748
Enquiry concerning Human Knowledge
, which
was quickly translated into German and would eventually provide Kant
with the stimulus for his own aprioristic rather than empiricist
argument for idealism with regard not only to causation but to all of
what he called the categories of pure reason, including especially
substance and interaction as well as causation. But since Kant was not
familiar with the contents of Hume’s earlier
Treatise of
Human Nature
, he did not know that Hume too had generalized his
approach to causality to the cases of mind and body, nor did he know
that Hume may have tried to sidestep Berkeley’s commitment to
substances but not his idealism altogether by his theory of both minds
and bodies as bundles of perceptions. Kant would try to avert
Berkeley’s version of idealism by a different stratagem, but
before we come to that we must consider Hume’s position more
fully. Hume accepted from Locke and Descartes before him that the
immediate objects of consciousness are what they had called ideas,
although he reserves that word for copies or subsequently recalled
perceptions rather than the originally experienced perceptions that he
calls impressions. He also adopts the view of his predecessors that
knowledge lies in the recognition of relations among impressions,
ideas, or both, and divides those relations into two kinds,
philosophical and natural. Philosophical relations are those
immediately evident on reflection on or comparison of particular
ideas, and include resemblance, identity, spatial and temporal
relations such as above and below or before and after, number and
degree, and logical contrariety (Hume 1739–40: I.I.5), while
natural relations are those that are not immediately evident on
reflection on a single impression or idea or in a single comparison of
any number, but which instead become evident, or more properly are
formed, only through repeated experience. Hume’s best known
argument is then that causation is not a philosophical but a natural
relation: the causal relation is comprised by temporal succession,
spatial contiguity, and necessary connection, and while the first two
are philosophical relations that are immediately apparent, the
necessary connection between different ideas—those of a cause
and its separate effect—is, unlike the necessary identity of two
qualitatively similar ideas, not immediately apparent, as Hume puts
it, to reason (1739–40: I.III.2), but instead grows only out of
repeated experience, the repeated experience of qualitatively similar
pairs of impressions which causes them to become linked in the mind,
as we would ordinarily say, or at least in consciousness, as the
careful Hume should say at most (1739–40: I.III.6). In fact,
Hume’s argument is that repeated experience itself has two
effects: it creates a habit of thought such that upon the presentation
of an impression of one kind that has repeatedly been experienced in
spatial and temporal conjunction with one of another kind, a vivid
version of the idea of the kind of impression with which the first
kind of impression has been repeatedly associated immediately
occurs—this is the essence of causal inference or belief,
because a belief is nothing but an idea that is almost as vivid and
forceful as the impression of which it was once a copy (1739–40:
I.III.7–8; this is the thought Hume could have learned from
Arthur Collier)—and further, there is an actual feeling of the
mind (as we would ordinarily say) being tugged from the one impression
to the other idea—this is the basis of the idea of necessary
connection, a connection which the mind then “spreads”
upon its objects to form the idea of a necessary connection among them
or their states (1739–40: I.III.14).
Hume’s theory of causation points toward idealism by relocating
the relation of causation from the external objects where we would
ordinarily suppose it to obtain to the mind, which we would ordinarily
suppose knows but does not constitute the relation known. In
Hume’s words,
Tho’ the several resembling instances, which give rise to the
idea of power, have no influence on each other, and can never produce
any new quality
in the object
, which can be a model of that
idea [of power or causation], yet the
observation
of this
resemblance produces a new impression
in the mind
, which is
its real model…. Necessity, then, is the effect of this
observation, and is nothing but an internal impression of the mind, or
a determination to carry our thoughts from one object to another.
(1739–40: I.III.14, para. 20)
Several things may be noted about this theory. For one, if it had been
Hume’s intent to raise a general skepticism about causation,
based on the famous worry about induction that he himself raises,
especially in the subsequent
Enquiry
, namely that an
assertion of causality claims that future impressions will occur in
the same patterns as past ones but there is no basis “in
reason” for assuming that the future will resemble the past,
then the relocation of causation from the domain of objects to the
domain of the mind should make no difference, because we have no more
reason to believe that the mind will behave the same way in the future
as it has in the past than we do to believe that about anything else.
So we must either believe that Hume is very confused, not realizing
that his skepticism about induction as applied to external objects
must undermine our confidence in his application of induction to the
mind itself, or else that he is very arch, and that he means us to do
his skeptical work for him by carrying over skepticism about induction
to the case of the mind itself, or else that he is not really worrying
about issues of justification and thus of the threat of skepticism at
all, but just means to be giving a plausible
description
of
the only possible basis for causal inference, namely the mind’s
experience of itself. The last possibility may well seem to be the
most plausible, leading to the “naturalist” reading of
Hume promoted by Norman Kemp Smith, Barry Stroud, and Don Garrett
rather than the “skeptical” reading of Hume accepted by
Hume’s contemporaries such as James Beattie and Thomas Reid and
defended recently and more skillfully by Robert Fogelin.
There is a further issue with Hume’s treatment of causation that
is largely suppressed in the
Enquiry
but that was evident in
the
Treatise
, namely, that although, as we saw in the last
passage quoted, Hume sometimes describes necessary connection as being
displaced from the
object
to the
mind,
on his own
strict interpretation of empiricism there is a problem in positing the
existence of either objects or minds distinct from perceptions. This
is what pushes Hume towards his own form of idealism. That is,
although we naturally speak of perceptions as being
of
objects and
in
or
by
the mind, on the view that all
knowledge is founded on perception and that in perception we are
immediately acquainted with nothing but perceptions, it becomes
problematic how we could have knowledge either of the mind itself or
of any object of perceptions distinct from those perceptions. Hume
puts the former point succinctly by arguing that we have no perception
of the self distinct from our perception of its perceptual states:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call
myself
, I always stumble on some particular perception or
other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or
pleasure. I can never catch
myself
at any time without a
perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.
(1739–40: I.IV.6.3)
He then argues that in fact the self is
nothing but a bundle of different perceptions, which succeed each
other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and
movement. (1739–40: I.IV.6.4)
and that the idea of a continuous self is but a fiction or illusion
created by relations of resemblance and continuity among perceptions
in the bundle, just as both the idea of and belief in causal
connection were created by repetition of pairs of impressions. Without
saying that the objects of perception are also nothing but bundles of
related perceptions, Hume presents a similar account of how the idea
of objects distinct from our perceptions of them is generated by our
impression of continuity among perceptions: although only philosophers
reflect on this, in fact we know that perceptions are fleeting and
transitory; we mistake continuity among them for enduring identity;
and we then invent something other than perceptions, something not
fleeting and transitory, to which to ascribe that enduring identity
(1739–40: I.IV.2). In neither case, however, do we actually have
a clear idea of any object or substance distinct from our perceptions:
we do not have such an idea of external objects or their substance,
but neither do we have a clear idea of the mind or its substance. The
only ideas we have are copies of our impressions, or perceptions.
Hume’s attack on the supposition that we have an idea of the
mind as distinct from its impressions thus constitutes a rejection of
Berkeley’s commitment to the existence of mental substances, but
not of idealism altogether. On Hume’s account, we are not
entitled to assert the existence of both ideas and the minds, human or
divine, that have them, but only the existence of the former. At the
same time, he does not seem to think that we are forced into
skepticism about either minds or external objects by his approach,
that is, into a position that there may really be minds and external
objects but we cannot know that fact or their real qualities; yet he
still has a lingering worry that although there are psychological
mechanisms leading us to form the fictions of minds and bodies beyond
perceptions, we do not really know what we are talking about when we
talk about such things, and thus cannot even coherently doubt whether
we have knowledge of them—our talk about them is explicable but
meaningless. Hume thus seems to end up with an uneasy compromise
between idealism and agnosticism.
4. Kant
The first major philosopher actually to call himself an idealist was
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), although as soon as he did so he
labored to distinguish his position from Berkeley’s by calling
his position empirical realism combined with transcendental idealism,
by which he means that space and time are ineliminable properties of
our experience and of things as they appear to us but not real
properties of things as they are in themselves. However, since Kant
neither denies the existence of things independent from our
representations of them nor asserts that these things must be mental
in nature, the transcendental idealist part of his position cannot be
straightforwardly identified with idealism as he understood it or as
we are understanding it here, namely, as the position that reality is
ultimately mental in nature. While Kant thinks that he has given a
sound argument for the transcendental ideality of space and time, he
thinks he has given no reason at all to question the existence of
things independent from our representations of them.
The sources as well as the form of Kant’s position are complex.
Kant was deeply impressed by what he knew of Leibniz (many of the
texts that are crucial to later understandings of Leibniz, such as
“Primary Truths”, having been unknown in Kant’s
times, or others, such as the
New Essays on Human
Understanding
, having been published only when he was well into
his career) and the view that space and time are
phaenomena bene
fundata
as well as by what he knew of Hume and his view that
causation is a form of thinking that we impose upon our experience
rather than something we directly experience. He was more generally
impressed by the empiricist argument that our knowledge of objects
depends upon experience of them. However, he thought that both the
Leibnizian and the Humean approaches failed to account for the
possibility of synthetic
a priori
knowledge, that is,
knowledge that goes beyond the mere analysis of concepts, that thus
does more than merely unpack explicit or tacit definitions, but yet
legitimately claims universal and necessary validity. But, unlike
Plato, the original apriorist
avant la lettre
, he does not
see synthetic
a priori
knowledge as leading to realism about
objects having the features that we know
a priori
, nor, like
Malebranche, the theological Platonist, does he see such knowledge as
knowledge of the mind of God; rather, he sees it as providing the
conclusive argument for the idealist aspect of his position through
the premise that we can only know to be necessary and therefore
universally valid the forms that we ourselves impose upon our
experience. Thus precisely because we have
a priori
knowledge
of space and time, in his view they can be only features of our own
representations of things, not properties or relations of those things
as they are in themselves. At the same time, even though when he wrote
his main works he was not well-informed on the aporia about subjects
and objects about which Hume had ultimately thrown up his arms in the
Treatise
, which has here been characterized as the tension in
Hume between agnosticism and idealism, Kant recognized that we cannot
talk about what he called appearances without conceding the real
existence of subjects to which objects appear as well as the objects
that appear to such subjects. Kant was thus led to what he called
“transcendental idealism”, a position that combines
idealism about the main forms of objects, that is, the view that we
ourselves impose spatiality, temporality, substantiality, causality,
and other forms upon our experience and precisely because we know
these forms
a priori
cannot regard them as also the real
forms of objects independent of ourselves, with a kind of ontological
realism, the view that in some sense both our selves and our objects
really do exist independently of our representations of them. Although
he identifies his own “transcendental idealism” with
“empirical realism” he does not want to call his own
position “transcendental realism”, because for him that
would be the view that objects independent of our representations do
exist
with
the forms that we represent them as having; that
is, in Kant’s terms, transcendental realism would be the view
that things really are spatial and temporal independently of our
representing them as such. Neither would he even be happy to call this
conception of things in themselves a kind of idealism, because it is
part of his position that, at least from what he calls a theoretical
point of view, we cannot suppose that even our own
minds
are
really as they appear to us, nor can we assert that the reality that
ultimately underlies the appearance of minds is essentially different
from the reality that ultimately underlies the appearance of bodies.
Yet he remains confident that we are entitled to assert the existence
of some sort of reality underlying the appearance of both minds and
bodies. And to make matters even more complicated, he is confident
that we
can
rationally believe both ourselves and God to be
mental in nature from what he calls a “practical” point of
view, that is, as necessary presuppositions of rationally attempting
to do what morality commands. A complete characterization of
Kant’s position would thus be empirical
realism
about
space, time, causation, and the other categories, transcendental
idealism
about space and time but combined with
realism
about the
existence
of things in themselves,
and now practical
idealism
about the nature of ourselves as
things in themselves and the nature of God, as in both cases
essentially mental or spiritual.
Kant had already published a number of substantial scientific as well
as philosophical works before the “great light” of
transcendental idealism came to him in 1769, leading to his first
statement of it the following year in his inaugural dissertation,
On the Forms and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible
Worlds
(1770). But it would then take him another decade, the
so-called “silent decade”, to publish his full argument
for transcendental idealism in the first edition of the
Critique
of Pure Reason
, which appeared in 1781, and even then the
relation between the empirical realism and transcendental idealism
that he developed in that work continued to vex him: the first
substantial review of the book in 1782 charged him with Berkeleianism,
in other words, with idealism, and Kant then tried to rebut that
accusation in his attempted popularization of the
Critique
the
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
of 1783, and to
further defend that rebuttal of ordinary idealism in the
“Refutation of Idealism” that he added to the second
edition of the
Critique of Pure Reason
in 1787. Even then he
was not done with the subject, as we know from a dozen further drafts
of the “Refutation” that he composed
after
that
second edition of the
Critique
. Indeed, Kant continued to
struggle with the clarification of his own position to the end of his
life, attempting a restatement of transcendental idealism in the
uncompleted material for a final book that has come down to us under
the name of the
Opus postumum
. But since it was Kant’s
presentations of his position in the two editions of the
Critique
and the
Prolegomena
that were most
influential in his own time and have been since, we shall concentrate
on those texts here. It was in these texts that Kant attempted to
perfect his combination of empirical realism about space, time, and
the categories, transcendental idealism with regard to space and time,
and yet realism (agnosticism) about the actual existence of things
distinct from our representations of them. It was then primarily in
his writings in moral philosophy, above all the
Critique of
Practical Reason
of 1788, that he developed what we have called
his practical idealism about the real nature of the self and God. The
second half of Kant’s third and final critique, namely, the
Critique of Teleological Judgment in the
Critique of the Power of
Judgment
, uses Kant’s complex position to justify the
revival of a teleological approach to nature that would seem to have
already been outmoded in Kant’s time, but that will lie beyond
the purview of the present article (see Guyer 2005).
Kant’s arguments for his transcendental idealism are distributed
across all parts of his
Critique of Pure Reason
. He gives a
direct argument for it in the Transcendental Aesthetic, supplemented
by the Transcendental Analytic, and he gives an indirect argument for
it in the Transcendental Dialectic by arguing that only his
transcendental idealism can allow us to avoid the paradoxes or
confusions of traditional metaphysics. We will comment first on
Kant’s direct argument for transcendental idealism and then on
his indirect argument for it through the critique of traditional
metaphysics.
The direct argument is based on Kant’s claim, substantiated in
the Transcendental Aesthetic, that we necessarily represent space and
time and objects in them by means of our
a priori
representations of space and time, which are thus pure forms for the
intuition of particular objects, and that we can construct proofs of
theorems about space and time by appeal to our
a priori
representations or in “pure intuition”. But how does this
lead to any form of idealism? Kant’s chief argument is that
space and time can represent
no property at all of any things in themselves nor any relations of
them to each other, i.e., no determination of them that attaches to
objects themselves and that would remain even if one were to abstract
from all subjective conditions of intuition,
and that space and time themselves can instead be
only
our
a priori
representations of them and the spatial and temporal
features of objects in space and time
only
features of our
representations of them or of the “appearances” of
objects, because
neither absolute nor relative determinations can be intuited prior to
the existence of the things to which they pertain, thus be intuited
a priori
. (A 26/B 42)
The decisive point of this argument is the following: although because
of our forms of intuition our particular representations
necessarily
have spatio-temporal structure, any objects that
had that structure
independently
of our so representing them
would at best have such structure
contingently
, and thus the
supposedly synthetic
a priori
propositions about space, time,
and their mathematics would not be
necessarily true
throughout their domain. This argument thus exploits the key
epistemological premise for idealism, namely that any isomorphism
between knowledge and the known must be necessary. Kant is arguing
that since we have no ground to assert a necessary isomorphism between
the spatio-temporal structure of our experience and the
spatio-temporal structure in things as they are in themselves, we must
deny the latter altogether. Kant makes this key move several times. In
the
Critique
, he poses the rhetorical question,
If there did not lie in you a faculty for intuiting
a priori
if this subjective condition were not at the same time the universal
a priori
condition under which alone the object
of…intuition is possible; if the object ([e.g.,] the triangle)
were something in itself without relation to your subject: then how
could you say that what necessarily lies in your subjective conditions
for constructing a triangle must also necessarily pertain to the
triangle in itself. (A 48/B 65)
Similarly, in the
Prolegomena
he writes that
Pure mathematics, and especially pure geometry, can have objective
reality only under the single condition that it refers merely to
objects of the senses, with regard to which objects, however, the
principle remains fixed, that our sensory representation is by no
means a representation of things in themselves, but only of the way in
which they appear to us,
for on the contrary supposition
it absolutely would not follow from the representation of [e.g.]
space, a representation that serves
a priori
, with all the
various properties of space, as foundation for the geometer, that all
of this, together with what is deduced from it, must be exactly so in
nature. The space of the geometer would [or could] be taken for mere
fabrication and credited with no objective validity, because it is
simply not to be seen how things would have to agree necessarily with
the image that we form of them by ourselves and in advance. (§13,
Note I, 4:287)
So, Kant concludes, in order to be necessarily true throughout their
domain, the synthetic
a priori
propositions about space and
time—and this includes not just the specific propositions of
geometry or mathematics more generally but also the general
propositions derived in the metaphysical expositions, such as that
space and time are infinite singular wholes with parts rather than
instances—must be true only of the representations on which we
impose our own forms of intuition, and cannot be true of things as
they are in themselves. This is Kant’s chief argument for
transcendental idealism, the view that the way things appear to us
essentially reflects our cognitive capacities rather anything
intrinsic to them, combined with what we could call theoretically
indeterminate ontological realism, the view that there are things
independent of our representations of them but because our most
fundamental ways of representing things cannot be true of them we
cannot know anything about them other than this fact
itself—until, that is, Kant brings his practical argument for
our own ultimately mental nature and the mental nature of God on
board.
In a passage added to the second edition of the
Critique
Kant also points out that by arguing for the “transcendental
ideality” of spatio-temporality—that it is a necessary
feature of our representations of things but not a feature of things
as they are in themselves at all—he does not mean to degrade
space to a “mere illusion”, as did “the good
Berkeley” (B 71): his position is that it is a subjective but
necessary feature of our way of representing things, similar to
secondary qualities such as color or fragrance (B 70n) in being
subjective but unlike them in being necessary (see also A 29/B 45),
and he thinks that by failing to see that the spatiality (in
particular) of our representations is necessary, Berkeley has
unnecessarily “demoted” it to a mere illusion.
Kant’s larger objection to the charge that his position is not
different from Berkeley’s is, however, that while denying the
spatiality and temporality of things as they are in themselves, he has
provided no reason to deny that there are things distinct from our
representations of them and our own minds as representing them. But
since this larger objection is most clearly expounded and defended in
the
Prolegomena
and the “Refutation of Idealism”
added to the second edition of the
Critique
, which is
inserted into the Transcendental Analytic, discussion of it can be
deferred for now.
Kant does not need to mount a separate argument for transcendental
idealism in the Transcendental Analytic, because while that is aimed
at showing that the use of certain concepts (the categories of pure
understanding) and principles (the principles of pure understanding)
are necessary conditions of any cognition of objects at all, indeed of
self-consciousness (apperception) itself, but also yield knowledge
only when applied to intuitions, pure intuitions in the case of pure
mathematical cognition and empirical intuitions in the case of
everything else (thus Kant’s famous statement “Without
sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding
none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind”, A 51/B 75), since empirical
intuitions have already been shown to yield appearances rather than
things in themselves, it automatically follows that the categories and
principles of pure understanding will also yield cognition only of
appearances. Nevertheless, Kant reaffirms transcendental idealism
during the course of the Transcendental Analytic.
The Transcendental Dialectic, the second half of the
Critique of
Pure Reason
in which Kant provides the critique of traditional
metaphysics is explicitly intended to give an indirect proof of
transcendental idealism (B xx). Specifically, the middle section of
the Dialectic, entitled “The Antinomy of Pure Reason”, is
supposed to provide this indirect proof. All three sections of the
Dialectic, thus the preceding “Paralogisms of Pure Reason”
and the following “Ideal of Pure Reason”, are supposed to
show that the faculty of reason’s inevitable conception of the
“unconditioned”, that which is a condition for everything
else but itself has no condition, can never provide knowledge of any
object because knowledge requires intuition as well as concept, and
intuition is always conditioned—the representation of any region
of space is conditioned by more surrounding it, and that of any region
of time is likewise conditioned by the representation of more time
before and after it. Reason can form “transcendental
ideas”, more properly, “transcendent concepts” (A
327/B 384), that is, the ideas of an unconditioned subject (the self
as substance), an unconditioned whole of all things and events (a
completed world-whole), and an unconditioned ground of all possibility
(God) (A 334/B 393). These ideas, according to Kant, may be useful as
guidelines for scientific research and even necessary for the purposes
of practical reason, but they outrun the limits of intuition and
therefore theoretical cognition. This general claim itself does not
entail transcendental idealism, that is, it does not identify space
and time with our own forms of intuition. However, Kant’s claim
is that the paradoxes diagnosed in the “Antinomy of Pure
Reason” can only be resolved on the basis of transcendental
idealism. In the case of the first two antinomies he argues that both
sides essentially concern space and time or the things in them (these
are the arguments that as we saw were missing from Arthur
Collier’s anticipation of the first two antinomies), and that
since space and time as forms of intuition are
indefinitely
extendable and divisible, both sides of the debates, the theses and
the antitheses, are false: space and time and thus the totality of
things and events in them (the world) are neither bounded and finite
or unbounded and infinite but indefinite (even though particular
things within space or periods within time may have determinate
boundaries). In the case of the third and fourth antinomies, however,
Kant argues that the distinction between appearances and things in
themselves that is at the heart of transcendental idealism makes it
possible for both sides to be considered true, since they concern
different objects: in the empirical world of experience, there are
only ever indefinitely extending chains of causes and effects, each
moment of which is necessary relative to its causal laws (the third
antithesis) but contingent because no antecedent cause is absolutely
necessary or necessary considered in itself, but outside of the
empirical world there is nothing to prevent there being an absolutely
necessary thing in itself (God) nor acts of absolute spontaneity on
the part of that absolutely necessary being or even lesser beings,
such as finite agents. Thus, Kant argues that the antitheses of the
third and fourth antinomies are actually true of the world as it
appears, while the theses of these two antinomies are possibly true of
things in themselves, namely of God as the ground of the entire world
of appearance and of ourselves as spontaneous agents grounding our own
appearances of action. Again, Kant’s ultimate claim will be that
we have necessary and sufficient
practical
grounds for
affirming both our own freedom and the existence of God, but these do
not yield
theoretical
cognition (B xxx).
Kant’s antinomies led to the dialectical methods of Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel, and were thus to prove immensely influential.
But it was clearly controversial whether the antinomies in fact
required the distinction between appearances and things in themselves;
Hegel, for example, surely thought not. For the argument that only
transcendental idealism can resolve the antinomies seems to be
circular: unless one assumes that our
representations
of
space and time give us not only reliable but also complete information
about the nature of space and time and all things in them, there is no
reason to assume that the limits of our
representations
of
space and time—their indefiniteness and the contingency of any
starting- or stopping-point in them—are also in fact true of
space and time and everything in them in themselves. Kant’s
indirect proof for transcendental idealism therefore is not conclusive
(see Guyer 1987: chapter 18).
Kant himself did not think so, of course. He was utterly committed to
transcendental idealism. When confronted with the challenge that
transcendental idealism was nothing but Berkeleianism, however, that
is, the reduction of all reality to ideas and the minds that have
them, he recoiled. This objection was made in the first substantial
review of the first edition of the
Critique
, written from an
empiricist point of view by Christian Garve and then redacted by J.H.
Feder in 1782 (Garve-Feder 1782, Garve 1783, in Sassen 2000,
pp. 53–8, 59–77). Kant defended himself by a more precise
formulation of his doctrine in the
Prolegomena
(1783) and
further by the insertion of a “Refutation of Idealism”,
specifically “material idealism”, into the Transcendental
Analytic in the second edition of the
Critique
(1787). Kant’s claim in the
Prolegomena
is that his position should be called
“formal” or “critical” idealism rather than
“material” idealism because it merely identifies space and
time with our forms of intuition but does not otherwise deny the
reality of the objects in space and time. As he puts it:
There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside
us, yet we know nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are
acquainted only with their appearances, i.e., with the representations
that they produce in us because they affect our senses. Accordingly, I
by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, i.e., things
which, though completely unknown to us as to what they may be in
themselves, we know through the representations which their influence
on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of a
body—which word therefore merely signifies the appearance of
this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real. Can this be
called idealism? It is the very opposite of it. (4:288–9)
At this stage, Kant’s response to the identification of his
position with traditional ontological idealism is basically
incredulity: he cannot understand it because in his view he has only
given reasons for removing space and time from things to our
representations of them, just as earlier philosophers had given
(different) reasons for relocating properties like color from object
to subject, but has provided no arguments against the existence of
those things themselves, which he, like any other sane person, takes
for granted.
By the time of the second edition of the
Critique
, however,
Kant must have come to see the need for a positive defense of the
assumption of the existence of things in themselves that ground our
spatio-temporal representations of body (although, since those things
in themselves are not supposed to be spatio-temporal and causality is
supposed to be a spatio-temporal relation, they cannot precisely be
said to
cause
our spatio-temporal representations).
Kant’s argument—which in the following years he would
attempt to improve a dozen times (see Guyer 1983, Guyer 1987: Part IV, and Kant
2005)—is that we can only achieve “empirically determined
consciousness” of our own existence, or a determinate temporal
ordering of our own representations, by correlating them with
something enduring outside of and distinct from them:
The perception of this persistent thing is possible only through a
thing
outside me and not through the mere
representation
of a thing outside me. (B 275)
Spatiality may be acknowledged to be only my way of
representing
things outside me, but insofar as anything in
space is used to determine the order of my own representations it must
be regarded as being ontologically distinct from my representations of
it even if its phenomenology is subjective, that is, even if
spatiality is only our way of representing ontological independence
(see A 22/B 37). In this way Kant proves, contra Berkeley who denies
it and Descartes who doubts it, that our phenomenologically spatial
representations are “grounded” in something ontologically
distinct from those representations. Kant’s
“Refutation” was intended precisely to demonstrate that
transcendental idealism, the argument that our most basic forms of
knowledge in fact reflect only our own forms of intuition and
conceptualization, could and must be combined with indeterminate
ontological realism, that is, assurance of the existence of objects
independent of our representations of them combined with ignorance of
their nature, other than their non-spatio-temporality.
It may well be asked of Kant’s “Refutation of
Idealism”, as it had already been asked of his yet-to-be-named
transcendental idealism in 1770 by such distinguished contemporaries
as Johann Heinrich Lambert, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Moses
Mendelssohn, whether it is really compatible with the transcendental
ideality of
time
, that is, whether it does not presuppose the
reality of the temporality of the enduring object it proposes by means
of which to determine the sequence of our own representations as well
as of the self that has that sequence of representations (isn’t
the sequence of representations, they essentially asked, really a
sequence?). But we will not further pursue that question here, because
all of Kant’s successors were more concerned with the viability
of Kant’s general distinction between appearances and things in
themselves rather than with the specifics of Kant’s argument for
transcendental idealism from
a priori
knowledge or of
Kant’s proof that we can assert the existence of things in
themselves in spite of that distinction. This concern began with the
famous objection of F.H. Jacobi, made in the appendix to his 1787 book
on David Hume, that without the assumption of things in themselves he
could not enter into the critical system, but that with it he could
not remain within the system; that is, he felt that once the
distinction between appearances and things in themselves was made all
ground for the assumption of the existence of things other than our
own representations was removed even if Kant had made no explicit
argument against that existence. We will also not further explore what
we have called Kant’s practical transcendental realism, that is,
his argument that morality requires us to believe that we have free
wills and immortal souls and that there is an omniscient,
omni-benevolent, and all-wise God, thus that those constituents of
reality are essentially mental in nature. Rather, we now turn to
Kant’s successors to see how they tried to save Kant’s
insight into the idea that the most fundamental forms of knowledge
ultimately depend on fundamental operations of self-consciousness
without ending up with Kant’s combination of that with
indeterminate ontological realism.
5. German Idealism
Kant can thus be seen to have made two major points about
transcendental idealism. (1) Although he never questions the existence
of something independent of our representations of it, he can claim to
have shown that when it comes to the ultimate constitution of this
reality as it may be considered independently of the way it appears to
beings endowed with reason and (human) sensibility we can know nothing
on theoretical grounds; on practical grounds, as we have seen, he
insisted that we can rationally believe, for example, that we really
are free. We neither can know whether—to use a Hobbesian
expression again—“
without us”
or—to
use Kant’s own term “
in itself
”—there
are material objects that consist of substances and their attributes
standing in spatio-temporal or other (e.g., causal) relations to each
other and constituting a law-governed whole called nature. Nor can we
know whether whatever we experience as an object is in the end some
mental product of a divine mind having creative powers totally
different from those of which we can make sense. Thus we are bound to
be agnostic with regard to any metaphysical theoretical claims as to
the real constitution of the world, and this implies that there is no
way to convince us of either idealism or determinate realism about the
character of things in themselves. (2) However, whenever we talk about
objects of cognition, i.e., of objects that are addressed by us in
terms of concepts and judgments, we have to accept them as being
conceptual constructions based on our subjective forms of intuitions
and on very specific conceptual rules for bringing together or
unifying data: an object of cognition is that “in whose
concept
a manifold of what is given through sensibility is
united” (
Critique of Pure Reason
, B 137). This means,
according to Kant, that the assumption of the conceptual constitution
of objects of cognition is unavoidable. This is the part of his
position that Kant calls empirical realism.
Kant’s Solomonic verdict was not much appreciated by the main
representatives of post-Kantian German idealism. Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, as already mentioned, immediately criticized Kant’s
allowance of things in themselves of unknown determinations, and
replaced it with a straightforward fideism about external existence
(which he alleged to find in Hume’s rejection of the
psychological possibility of skepticism). However, the general
tendency of the idealists, beginning with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, was
to reject Kant’s transcendental idealism by arguing that there
is no real opposition between what is traditionally taken to be a
subject-independent world that is present to us in the mode of
“givenness” and “being” and a world that is
conceived of as subject-dependent in that it is formed by conceptual
tools or other “thought-ingredients” stemming from some
subjective activity or other. In other words, Kant’s successors
removed his restriction of a necessary isomorphism between knowledge
and the known to the case of appearances, and took it to be a general
relation between thought and being. This led to a new conception of
idealism whose distinguishing character consists in the endorsement of
the claim of the “inseparability of being and thinking”
where the term “inseparability” is meant to cover
sometimes reciprocal dependence and sometimes strict identity. This
conception was established primarily by epistemological considerations
and realized by introducing entirely new ways of thinking about what
ultimately constitutes reality based on a dynamic conception of
self-consciousness that the German idealists took to be at the heart
of Kant’s theory of the transcendental unity of apperception
(and had been arrived at by Kant on the basis of
epistemological
, not: ontological, considerations!).
According to this conception, reality has to be conceived as a result
of an activity paradigmatically manifested in the unique manner in
which consciousness of oneself arises. Reality is essentially mental,
while the mental is essentially active. In order to find out the true
nature of reality one has to gain insight into the operations of this
activity.
This approach to answering fundamental metaphysical questions by
casting into doubt the traditional distinction between ontology and
epistemology not only leads to a different conception of what idealism
is all about. Above all, it means that one has to sketch out the
difference between idealism and whatever is taken to be its opposite
(realism, naturalism, materialism, sensualism etc.) not in terms of
different kinds of “stuff” either material or mental but
to turn away from any “matter” whatsoever. Rather,
idealism is now defined in terms of the opposition between dynamic
elements like activities and forces as the primary constituents of
reality and more substantial items like material objects and
(spiritual) persons. Idealism understood in this fashion becomes the
name of a “metaphysical” (in a non-traditional sense)
world-view that is opposed to what especially Fichte and Schelling
liked to call “dogmatism” and is rooted in assumptions
about dynamic processes that are operative in the course of self- and
object-constitution. There is thus a fundamental difference between
the idealism of German idealism and the immaterialism of Berkeley:
where Berkeley’s idealism focused on ideas as the
“stuff” of existence and assumed minds, whether human or
divine, as their repository, the German idealists focused on the mind
as active and largely tried to suppress the traditional ontology of
substances and their accidents within which Berkeley still worked,
which Hume questioned but for which he supplied no alternative, and
which Kant again defended by conceiving of substance and accident as
relational categories.
Although overcoming the distinction between thought and being by
relying on self-relating activities might be seen as a common goal of
all the major German idealistic thinkers, they pursued this project in
very different directions. The first post-Kantian philosopher who
embarked explicitly on the project to elaborate a dynamic idealistic
conception of reality that was based on what he took to be conditions
of knowledge/cognition and agency and that was built on a specific
conception of self-consciousness was Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762–1814) while he was a professor at the university of
Saxe-Weimar in Jena from 1794 to 1799. In his
Doctrine of
Science
(1794/95) and in the
First
and
Second
Introduction into the Doctrine of Science
(1797) he famously set
out to demonstrate that the primordial act of self-positing lies at
the basis of all reality
as far as it is an object of
knowledge/cognition and agency
. His starting-point is an
epistemological question: how does it come that we cannot help but
experience objective reality the way we do, i.e., in terms of
spatio-temporal objects standing in determinate relations? Where do
these representations of objects, of relations and especially the
belief that they exist come from? And (most importantly): how can we
have knowledge of objective reality that is not subject to skeptical
doubts? In order to answer these questions Fichte pursues at different
times different strategies. The best known and most influential of
these attempts is documented in the first published version of his
Doctrine of Science
. In what follows we will focus primarily
on the line of thought presented in this text, although Fichte changed
his arguments considerably in the
First
and
Second
Introductions into the Doctrine of Science.
Following the early
Doctrine of Science
, we must, according
to Fichte, accept three fundamental principles
Grundsätze
) of human knowledge without which we could
not even make sense of the idea that we can know that there is
something real at all. The first states that self-consciousness or the
I is a spontaneous (unconditioned) act that in taking place creates or
posits the I as having existence or being (
ein Akt, der im Vollzug
sein eigenes Sein schafft
). The I understood as this
self-positing act that gives rise to its own being and reality Fichte
characterizes as “deed-act”, also translated as
“Act” (
Tathandlung
), and it is through this
deed-act/Act that what we take to be real or having being comes to the
fore. Fichte arrives at what he presents as his first principle of
human knowledge on the basis of two assumptions. The first is that we
can only properly be said to know assertions (judgments or
propositions) which exhibit the character of certainty
Gewissheit
], or those which thus express what is actually
and certainly the case; the second maintains that a regress in the
process of justification with regard to such assertions can only be
avoided if we are able to furnish some principle or fundamental
proposition which is “utterly unconditioned”
schlechthin unbedingt
] (as Fichte puts it), one, that is,
which cannot be derived from any other principle, and which, for its
part, is of such a kind that it alone guarantees the utter certainty,
and thus the indubitability, that is, the immunity to skeptical
objections, of a given proposition. This second assumption leads him
to the claim that the unquestionable certainty of a proposition can
never be demonstrated discursively (by appeal to purely conceptual
considerations) or intuitively (by appeal to any sensuous perception),
and that, on the contrary, the ground of unconditional certainty can
only be found in the constitution of self-consciousness itself. Fichte
identifies as an appropriate method by means of which the principle in
question can be derived a procedure which he calls “abstractive
reflection”. This kind of reflection, according to Fichte, takes
its point of departure from a proposition which everyone regards as
unquestionably certain, from a so-called “fact of empirical
consciousness”. From this fact, this indubitable proposition,
the process of reflection isolates (abstracts) the elements which
belong to the content of such a proposition, i.e., belong to that
about which the proposition asserts something. What is supposedly
left, after this abstraction, is simply the form of the proposition
which consists precisely in affirming the ascription, or
non-ascription, of a predicate to a subject. The proposition which
Fichte selects as the point of departure for his “abstractive
reflection” is the logical law of identity in the form
”, a law that is rightly regarded as
utterly certain, i.e., certain without recourse to any further grounds
and thus as intrinsically certain. This fact alone already shows that
we have the capacity (the faculty) of claiming something as certain
without reference to any further grounds, or, in Fichte’s own
terminology, of “positing” something absolutely [
etwas
schlechthin zu setzen
]. Reflection on this fact shows according
to Fichte that the utter certainty of the law of identity is grounded
in the positing activity of the I (which in this case posits
identity), an activity which consists precisely in postulating the
being of what has been posited as identical. Otherwise this activity
would not be real, would have no being.
This result, however, is not yet sufficient to give us the first
unconditioned and fundamental principle of all knowledge. This is so
because we have arrived at the I as the guarantee of the absolute
certainty of a proposition only on the basis of an empirical fact,
namely the proposition “
is
” which has
been presupposed as utterly certain. Fichte now rightly observes that
the “I am”, as the condition of the certainty of an
empirical fact, itself merely possesses the status of an empirical
fact [
Tatsache
]—if the utterly certain proposition were
not given, one would never be able to affirm the utter certainty of
the “I am”. Up to this point the “I am” has
“only been grounded on a fact, and possesses no other validity
than that attaching to a fact” (
GA
I, 2, 257). But in order to discover
the first utterly unconditioned principle of all knowledge, we must
establish not only the utter certainty of the law of identity, but
also the unconditional certainty of the “I am” in such a
way that this certainty does not depend upon the presence of a fact at
all. In other words: we must be able to answer the question how the
utterly unconditioned certainty of the proposition “I am”
is possible. It is Fichte’s reflections on this question which
lead to his conception of the I as a deed-act/Act
Tathandlung
). He reasons along the following lines: we know
from our analysis of the conditions of certainty of the law of
identity that the I has the capacity to posit something absolutely in
the I. But in order to be able to posit something absolutely in the I,
the I itself must be posited. We have also already seen that the
absolute positing of the I consists in the activity of positing being.
If this is so, and if the “I am” is to depend on nothing
else as its condition, we must think of the I as the product of its
own positing activity, since it would otherwise be quite impossible to
explain its being. Now this, in turn, is supposed to imply that we
must think the I as an activity which posits its own existence insofar
as it is active: the I
is at the same time the actor and the product of the act; the actor,
and that which the activity brings forth; act and deed are one and the
same; and the “I am” is therefore the expression of an
Act. (GA I, 2, 259)
For Fichte, a deed-act/Act is not supposed to be a fact, that is,
something which is simply already discovered as given, since the Act
is logically and ontologically prior to any facts insofar as it
ultimately constitutes (posits) everything which can be a fact for an
I. The I, understood as Act, is supposed to be something absolutely
posited precisely because it posits itself, and this self-positing
constitutes its essence and guarantees its being, its reality. Again,
as Fichte says: “That whose being (essence) merely consists in
positing itself as being, is the I, as absolute subject” (GA I,
2, 259). This means, for Fichte, that the I, so understood, displays
all the characteristics which make it an appropriate candidate for the
first utterly unconditioned principle of all knowledge. Fichte tries
out various formulations for expressing this first principle in a
really adequate fashion. His most accessible formulation is certainly
the one he furnishes at the end of section 10 of the first paragraph
of the
Doctrine of Science
: “The I originally posits
its own being absolutely” (GA I, 2, 261). This insight that the
I must be conceived as self-positing activity, an activity whose
performance consists in its self-realization is meant to make any
distinction between epistemological and metaphysical idealism
obsolete.
The second principle postulates a necessary act of counter-positing
Entgegensetzen
) to the self-positing activity of the I
resulting in what Fichte calls a Non-I, and the third focuses on an
activity that gives rise to the concept of divisibility. Fichte
attempts to justify the introduction of these two principle on
systematic grounds, although these principles can only be described as
unconditional in a qualified respect, by exploiting his own
distinction between the form and the content of a proposition.
According to Fichte, every proposition (judgment) can be treated as
either conditioned or unconditioned in relation to its content, or to
its form, or to both. If a proposition is unconditioned in either or
both of these respects, then it can be described, in Fichte’s
terminology, as a fundamental principle [
Grundsatz
]. While
the second principle is meant to establish (as a condition of
knowledge/cognition!) the possibility of the reality of
“otherness”, of something which is not the I, the third
principle shows how to mediate between the self-positing and the
counter-positing acts of the I by reciprocal limitation, thereby
introducing a subject-object opposition within the I. Both these
principles are presented as codifications of two further unconditional
acts of positing on the part of the I. According to Fichte, the I
possesses, in addition to the capacity for self-positing that is
captured in the first principle, the further capacity of positing a
non-I freely and simply (without any further ground). That is to say,
it has the ability, through what Fichte calls an “absolute
act” [
absolute Handlung
], to posit something as non-I
that is opposed to the I. Fichte’s second principle codifies this act
of “counter-positing”. Finally, the I is further
characterized by a third capacity, that of freely and simply positing
the divisibility of the I and the non-I. The third principle
specifically captures this notion of divisibility.
It is not difficult to grasp what Fichte is attempting to accomplish
with the introduction of his second principle. It is supposed to do
justice to our inexpungible everyday conviction that there is an
external world independent of ourselves, the objects of which are
outside of and distinguished from us, and to which we can relate in
terms of knowledge and action alike. But for Fichte this conviction is
justified not because an external world independent of ourselves
compels us to understand it as characterized in such and such a way.
On the contrary, it is justified because it belongs to the distinctive
structure of the I to organize its world dichotomously through the
subject-object distinction or the opposition of the I and the non-I.
It is more difficult, on the other hand, to grasp the significance
which Fichte wishes to ascribe to the third principle of divisibility.
The motivation for introducing it is obviously to present the non-I
not only as the negation of the reality which the I claims to posit in
positing its own being, but rather to ascribe independent reality,
independent being, to the non-I. In pursuing this purpose by recourse
to the concept of divisibility, Fichte appears to make the implicit
presupposition that being or reality should be regarded as a kind of
quantity, as something given in degrees (intensively considered) or
parts (extensively considered). Once we accept this presupposition,
then we cannot in fact avoid bringing something like Fichte’s third
principle into play. For the assumption that we have to conceive
reality as a distributable plurality, together with the notion that
there are real objects possessed of an existence independent of the
subject, means that it is necessary, within the Fichtean model of
positing, to identify a factor responsible for distributing reality
between the I, understood as the knowing subject (and not as absolute
self-positing ego), and the non-I, understood as the object that it is
to be known.
On the basis of these three principles and by reflecting on the
purported interplay between self-positing and counter-positing in a
highly original way, Fichte arrives at a portrait of reality in which
all “ordinary” objects, like walls, trees and people, and
their “normal” interactions and dependencies, like causal,
spatio-temporal, and physical force relations, find a place. This
portrait is claimed to be idealistic because it is the outcome of an
insight into the dynamics of these fundamental and opposed positing
acts and because in the end these activities, according to Fichte,
are, metaphysically speaking, all there is: “for the philosopher
there is acting, and nothing but acting; because, as a philosopher, he
thinks idealistically” (
Second Introduction
, section 7;
Werke
I, 498). Idealism thus starts to become what could be
called
from a traditional point of view
“hybrid” position that intimately connects epistemological
and ontological elements in that it “explains … the
determinations of consciousness”. i.e., our common sense
conception of reality as an object of knowledge/cognition and agency,
“out of the acting of the intellect
Intelligenz
]” without thinking of the intellect as
some sort of existing subject:
For idealism the intellect is an acting and absolutely nothing else;
one should not even call it something active because by this
expression one points to something substantial which is the subject of
this activity. (
First Introduction
, section 7,
Werke
I, 440)
A consequence that Fichte explicitly draws from this understanding of
idealism is that one can no longer think of realism as a position that
is opposed to idealism. Rather
realism, … i.e., the assumption that objects totally
independently of us exist outside of us, is contained in idealism
itself and becomes explained and deduced in it. (
Second
Introduction
, footnote at end of section 1,
Werke
I,
455)
Because in Fichte’s philosophical world everything is based on
the I as a pure activity, it is not that surprising that his idealism
very often was called “subjective idealism”, even though
he would resist any identification with Berkeley’s
substance-accident form of immaterialism. He avoids that conception by
introducing what could be called an ontology of pure action.
Fichte’s dynamic conception of idealism was adopted almost
immediately by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854),
who in the first period of his philosophical career became next to
Fichte the most outspoken defender of this hybrid variety of idealism.
In doing so he transformed Fichte’s I-centered approach to
reality via an analysis of the conditions of knowledge/cognition and
agency into an idealistic version of a monistic ontology. In this he
was followed by Hegel. Whereas Fichte had mainly struggled to find an
adequate expression for his activity-based conception of a
self-positing I and had referred to anything outside the I only as the
non-I posited by the I itself, in his early writings on the philosophy
of nature Schelling tries to supplement Fichte’s approach by
giving a much fuller account of nature, understood as everything that
appears to be independent of us, in terms of the I-constituting
activities. Because of Schelling’s elevation of nature to a
central topic in his presentation of an idealistic worldview his
position became characterized, although somewhat misleadingly, as
“objective idealism”. On his account, we have to think of
reality as an original unity (
ursprüngliche Einheit
) or
a primordial totality (
uranfängliche Ganzheit
) of
opposites that is internally differentiated in such a way that every
particular item within reality can be seen as a partial, incomplete,
or one-sided expression, manifestation, or interpretation of the most
basic dynamic opposition characteristic of the whole of reality. This
view of reality, which in early Schelling is quite explicitly linked
to Spinoza’s one-substance ontology, obviously does not lead
directly to any idealism whatsoever: one could just as well give it a
naturalistic reading. In order to connect a monistic ontology to
idealism, one has to somehow identify the activities at work in the
constitution of the world-whole with mental or spiritual elements that
are supposed to give conceptual structure to reality. This can be and
was done by Schelling at different stages of his philosophical career
in different ways. In the first edition (1797) of his book
Ideas
for a Philosophy of Nature
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der
Natur
), he set out to prove idealism by trying to show that
“the system of Nature is at the same time the system of our
mind” (
IP
30;
SW
1, 134). This claim is not
meant to state a reciprocal relation of dependence between nature and
mind and their characteristic features, i.e., according to Schelling,
matter and concept, thereby presupposing that nature and mind, matter
and concept nevertheless have some reality independently of each
other. He rather wants us to think of nature and mind, matter and
concept as being identical in the sense of being the same: the one is
the other and vice versa. The reason why we as finite minds have to
differentiate between them at all lies in a double perspective which
is forced on us by our natural predisposition to distinguish the
“outside us” from the “in us” (cf.
IP
39;
SW
1, 138) when looking at reality—thus Schelling
sees dualism as a psychological tendency but not a philosophical
option. If this disposition and its conditions were understood in the
right way, we would comprehend that, as he famously writes,
“Nature should be made Mind visible, Mind the invisible
Nature” (
IP
42;
SW
1, 151) thereby making room
for an idealistic conception of reality as World-Soul
On the World-Soul
is also the title of a 1798 publication by
Schelling.)
As a systematic counterpart to the construction of the phenomena of
nature out of different dynamic factors (forces, activities), in 1800
Schelling presented his
System of Transcendental Idealism
Here he set out to demonstrate the development of mental phenomena out
of these factors which he here calls the unconscious and the conscious
activity starting with sensation (
Empfindung
) and intuition
Anschauung
) until he arrives via acts of willing at the
aesthetic activity manifested in works of art. He thinks of these
transcendental idealistic demonstrations as a necessary complement to
his philosophy of nature (cf.
SW
III, 331 f.) and describes
their mutual relation thus:
As the philosophy of nature brings idealism forth out of realism, in
that it spiritualizes the laws of nature into laws of intelligence, or
adds the formal to the material, so does transcendental philosophy
bring realism out of idealism,
by materializing the laws of
intelligence into laws of nature
, or adds the material to the
form. (
SW
III, 352)
On this conception both together, philosophy of nature and
transcendental idealism, exhaust the entire scope of philosophy, which
reveals itself in the end to be nothing but a “progressive
history of self-consciousness” (
fortgehende Geschichte des
Selbstbewusstseins
) (
SW
III 331).
This early approach to establishing an idealistic monism and thereby
vindicating a Fichte-inspired dynamic version of ontological idealism
was in turn given up by Schelling a couple of years later in the
second edition of the
Ideas
and criticized by him as
providing a basis only for what he now calls “relative
idealism” (
IP
52;
SW
1, 163). It is replaced
by what he now names “absolute idealism” (
IP
50;
SW
1, 162). Both his criticism of his earlier World-Soul
conception and his endorsement of absolute idealism are at least to a
certain degree due to Hegel’s discussion of Schelling’s
philosophy in his
Difference between Fichte’s and
Schelling’s System of Philosophy
(1801). Schelling’s
new conception, which underlies what came to be known as his
“System of Identity” (
Identitätssystem
),
takes reality to be a dynamic whole which he describes as the
“undivorced” (
ungeschieden
) or undifferentiated
unity of the absolute-ideal or subjectivity and the absolute-real or
objectivity in an “eternal act of cognition” (
IP
47;
SW
1, 157). This eternal act is all there is, it is
“the absolute”. It is disclosed in two fundamentally
different forms, one of which is characterized by the prevalence of
subjectivity whereas in the other form objectivity prevails. These two
forms give rise to the distinction between an “ideal
world” and “Nature” (
IP
49;
SW
1,
161). However, according to Schelling these forms have to be
distinguished from the “eternal cognitive act” or the
absolute from which the ideal world and Nature originate. This act is
pure activity of knowing that creates its objects in the very act of
cognition by giving them a form. Because reality is conceived thus as
a dynamic self-organizing cognitive process that lies at the basis of
even the most fundamental opposition between subject and object,
Schelling thinks of his ontological monism as a version of idealism.
He writes:
If we therefore define philosophy as a whole according to that wherein
it surveys and presents everything, namely the absolute act of
cognition, of which even Nature is again only one side, the Idea of
all ideas, then it is Idealism. Idealism is and remains, therefore,
the whole of philosophy, and only under itself does the latter again
comprehend idealism and realism, save that the first absolute Idealism
is not to be confused with this other, which is of a merely relative
kind. (
IP
50;
SW
1, 162)
In the end, then, after 1800 Schelling (arguably as well as Fichte in
his post-Jena period) seems pushed toward a “non-dogmatic”
idealism that combines ontological as well as epistemological idealism
within a monistic framework.
Although Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) too embraces
a dynamical conception of idealism in the spirit of Fichte and
Schelling, he deviates from both of them by not relying on mental
activities of some subject or other or on some primordial subjectless
cognitive act as the most basic features of reality. He thus tries to
transcend any traditional form of idealism. Given his deep distrust of
irreconcilable dichotomies, of anything unmediated and one-sided, one
cannot expect Hegel to be an advocate of an idea of idealism that is
conceived of in terms of an alternative to or an opposition against
realism or materialism or whatever else. He thus shares with Fichte
and Schelling the hostility against any attempts to privilege idealism
over and against realism (or something else) or the other way round,
but avoids the suspicion of a reversion to idealism in a monistic
guise better than either of his predecessors. In the case of Hegel,
this hostility towards privileging idealism shows especially well in
his criticism of reductive programs as well as of
“bifurcating” (
entzweiend
) or separating
positions in metaphysics and epistemology. A reductive program
according to which either everything physical/material is reducible to
something mental and thus confirms idealism or everything mental can
be reduced to something physical/material and thus gives rise to
realism or materialism is, in his eyes, “ridiculous” (cf.
GW
6, 290 ff). A bifurcating or separating position results
from a project that is based on the claim that one has to distinguish
between a world “for us” and a world “in
itself”, where the former is a subject-dependent and in this
sense idealistic world while the latter is the “real”
world although it is essentially totally inaccessible by any
subjective cognitive means. It is because of its one-sidedness and its
putting “the real” outside of our grasp that such a
“subjective” idealism is for Hegel unacceptable (see his
criticism of Kant in
Faith and Knowledge
GW
4, 325
ff.). His objections to and his contempt for both idealism and realism
in their mutually exclusive forms are well documented in almost all of
his writings throughout his philosophical career.
Thus, when Hegel in the second edition of his
Science of
Logic
(1831) nevertheless claims that in the end “[e]very
philosophy is essentially idealism or at least has it as its
principle” (
GW
21, 142), he must mean by idealism
something other than traditional idealism and certainly something
other than Kant’s indeterminate ontological realism. Rather, he
must mean by idealism a philosophical outlook that is immune against
the charge of grounding a philosophical system in a conception of
reality that is committed to the acceptance of any irreconcilable
oppositions. Now, for Hegel the most fundamental opposition both from
a systematic and a historical perspective is the opposition between
thinking and being, or rather, in the preferred terms, between subject
and object. Looked at from a systematic perspective, this opposition
is fundamental because of its apparent unavoidability, already at a
descriptive level, when it comes to an assessment of the ultimate
characteristics of reality: after all, we want to be able to hold fast
to the distinction between what is only (in) our (subjective) thought
and what is (objectively) the case. Considered from a historical point
of view it shows that—at least within the tradition of
occidental philosophy—the opposition between thinking and being
lies at the bottom of the most influential attempts (with very few
exceptions like Parmenides and possibly Spinoza) to give a
philosophical account of the essence of reality and its multifarious
ways of appearing to us. The traditional conviction of the fundamental
and irreconcilable opposition between thinking and being finds
expression in many different ways. These ways include the belief that
there is being that is totally independent of or without any relation
to thinking, or the conviction that thinking is somehow external to
being in that being is just the self-standing provider of material on
which a by itself contentless (
inhaltslos
) thinking imposes a
certain conceptual form, or the assumption that even if there were no
thinking there would be being and vice versa. However, according to
Hegel it can be demonstrated that to think of thinking and being as
fundamentally opposed in any of these ways leads to inconsistencies
resulting in contradictions, antinomies and other bewildering
deficiencies. Hence an idealistic philosophical system that is to
overcome these deficiencies has to get rid of the underlying
fundamental opposition and to show that thinking and being are not
opposed but ultimately the same. This claim as to the sameness or the
identity of thinking and being (subject and object) is the cornerstone
of Hegel’s metaphysical credo and together with some other
assumptions leads relatively smoothly to a version of ontological
monism as the only convincing shape of an idealistic system.
However, a closer look at how Hegel tries to realize a monistic
idealism reveals that it proved rather complicated to establish a
philosophical system based on the identity of thinking and being or
subject and object. At the outset this project was to be realized
within the boundaries of two conditions. The first was to present an
argument in favor of the superiority of idealism that would not just
make the endorsement of idealism a question of individual character or
what a person wants to be, a move he thought to be characteristic of
both Fichte’s and Schelling’s defense of idealism. The
second was to abandon the view also, according to Hegel, sometimes to
be found in Fichte and Schelling, that one has to think of idealism as
an alternative and in opposition to dogmatism/ realism/
materialism. Not to meet these two conditions were in Hegel’s
eyes two unacceptable shortcomings of any attempt to establish a
convincing idealistic worldview. He expressed his dissatisfaction with
attempts of this kind to establish idealism as the superior approach
in philosophy quite early (
Faith and Knowledge
, 1802) by
referring to them under the title “philosophy of reflection of
subjectivity” (
Reflexionsphilosophie der
Subjektivität
). This kind of philosophy of reflection,
though favoring subjectivity and hence giving priority to the
conceptual and in this sense ideal contributions of the mind to what
shows up as reality is still according to Hegel stuck in what he later
used to call the “opposition of consciousness”
Gegensatz des Bewusstseins
) (in both the,
Phenomenology
and the
Science of Logic
). This kind
of philosophy is committed to a mode of thinking that takes place
within a framework in which the opposition of thinking and being or
subject and object is still basic, dissolved only superficially by
either abstracting from one of the opposed sides or by establishing a
relation of domination between the elements opposed, without
transcending and transforming them into a whole, his renowned
“Subject-Object”, a whole that is both constituted by
these elements, the subject and the object, and that at the same time
constitutes them as its own internal differentiations. This way of
overcoming oppositions by thinking of the elements opposed as having
significance only insofar as their mutual relation can be conceived of
as being constituted by the unity they together form led Hegel to
claim that in order to avoid the idea of self-standing or irreducible
oppositions and hence to escape the charge of one-sidedness in cases
where the prioritization of opposites is at stake, one has to follow
the methodological maxim that for every opposition there has to be a
unity in place that consists of the elements opposed. Hegel took this
principle to imply that the “absolute”, the totality of
what there is and can be, must be conceived of as what he sometimes
calls the “identity of identity and non-identity”
Difference-Writing
, beginning of Schelling chapter) or as
the “unity of unity and multiplicity/diversity”
Natural Law Essay
, section II) where the terms
“identity/unity” in each of these formulations are meant
to refer to both the whole that gives rise to what is opposed and to
one of the elements in opposition.
But does the acceptance of such a methodological recipe as a means by
which to transcend oppositions in order to solve the problem of
one-sidedness not just give rise to a justification of an idealism
that is not just a one-sided alternative to
realism/dogmatism/materialism? It appears that on the basis of this
methodological device two sensible options are available both of which
do not settle the question of superiority. However, whereas the first
option leads to a negative result regarding the alleged superiority of
idealism, the second opens up at least the chance of a positive
result. Those favoring the negative option would start from the claim
that the very idea of a “Subject-Object”, i.e., of a whole
that is prior to and constitutive of its elements, cannot be defended
by any rational means. They would end up recommending just giving up
on idealism as well as its opposites as positions whose superiority
can be defended philosophically, because there is no rational way to
decide which of them has to be favored over the other. It is in fact a
reaction Hegel himself sometimes advocates when he states, e.g., in
his
Lectures on the History of Philosophy
(chapter on later
skeptics) that both idealism and dogmatism have the status of
proclamations/assurances and thus turn out to be equipollent.
Supporters of the positive option would have to give credit to the
rationality of the strategy, sketched above, of how to overcome
oppositions in a philosophically acceptable way and thus would allow
for a “Subject-Object” as the common whole in which the
opposed sides can be united. But even such an admission would not lead
directly to an argument for the superiority of idealism. It would only
provide a reason for favoring a position that could be described as
real-idealism (
Real-Idealismus
), a synthetic product that
integrates idealism and its opposites into a unity whose elements,
though still distinguishable, are at the same time in some sense
identical or (in Hegel’s idiom) sublated (
aufgehoben
).
It is easy to show that most of the German idealists were strongly
attracted by this positive solution. At some point in their
philosophical careers both Fichte and Schelling explicitly used the
term “Real-idealism” in order to characterize their views.
Even Hegel late in life, in a review of a treatise by Ohlert
GW
16, 287 ff.), made use of this term as a name for his
metaphysical teachings.
This solution seems to have been in line with Hegel’s way of
conceiving of how to overcome oppositions in his early Jena writings.
Unsurprisingly, however, he became dissatisfied with such a tactic
because of its inherent limitations. This dissatisfaction shows
explicitly for the first time in the preface of the
Phenomenology
of Spirit
. From then onwards he tried in different ways to find a
justification of idealism
in sensu stricto
, i.e., a
justification of a view that (1) attributes priority to non-sensible
activities, especially to the activity of thinking, that (2) makes
realism/materialism/dogmatism obsolete and that (3) allows for
subject-object identity without thereby being committed to
Real-Idealism. The reasons for his dissatisfaction with attempts that
lead to Real-Idealism (among them most of his own pre-phenomenological
systematic sketches) are quite simple. In the first place, it is
rather obvious that the move to transcend oppositions by making the
opposed elements parts of an integrating unity looks like a makeshift,
a terminological stipulation that cannot do justice to what it is
meant to achieve, namely, to allow the opposed elements to develop out
of a unity that is prior to them. Instead of commencing with a
developing unity, this move, according to Hegel, remains damaged by
presupposing the opposed components as self-standing, thereby making
the unity dependent on the elements and not the other way around.
Secondly, the unity presented as resulting from a process of
integration of what is taken to be opposed cannot be conceived as
representing a real identity of opposites because of its status as a
synthetic product. Unities in order to qualify as real unities after
Hegel’s taste could be pictured in analogy to the
Kippfiguren
” of
Gestalt
psychology.
Both these reasons (together with a couple of more idiosyncratic ones)
led Hegel to believe that the method of overcoming oppositions by
stipulating unities is not ultimately feasible for the task at hand,
hence not able to solve the problem of one-sidedness and consequently
of no use in the endeavor of justifying the superiority of
idealism.
The question, then, is how to proceed in order to establish a version
of the subject-object-identity idea that is neither subject to the
charge of one-sidedness nor to that of just postulating it without any
argument as a given fact. Though this seems to be a purely technical
task, i.e., a task to conceptualize the Subject-Object unity/identity
in a different way than had been done in the real-idealism approach,
and although Hegel recognized early the insufficiencies of
Fichte’s, Schelling’s, and even his own initial
suggestions for overcoming oppositions, it took him quite a while to
come up with a proposal that both avoids the one-sidedness problem and
the suspicion that it operates with unfounded assumptions while at the
same time it supports the superiority of idealism as a metaphysical
doctrine. This is so because he had to realize that it is not just a
metaphysical/ontological question as to the status of the
Subject-Object unity/identity that is at stake, but that there is an
epistemological worry to be answered before the
metaphysical/ontological question can even be addressed. As became
increasingly clear to him, the task he had to face consists in
demonstrating two things: (1) that it is
epistemologically
warranted to claim that there are indeed unities of basic oppositions
(like subject-object, identity-nonidentity, unity-multiplicity,
thinking-being) that precede their constitutive elements/parts in that
they are at the basis of their constitution while at the same time
consisting of them and (2) that it is
metaphysically/ontologically
necessary to think of the most
basic unity/identity, i.e., that of subject and object in an
idealistic fashion, i.e., as a spiritual/mental (
geistig
item paradigmatically realized in thinking. For Hegel it is the
epistemological
task that must be solved first before the
metaphysical
task of giving an idealistic account of the
subject-object unity/identity in terms of the sameness of what is
different/opposed can be tackled. His idealism needs epistemology as
well as metaphysics.
The first task mentioned amounts to answering the question: how can
one convince what he calls in the
Phenomenology
“natural consciousness” (
natürliches
Bewusstsein
), i.e., an ordinary human being that is committed to
the common discursive/conceptual standards of reasoning—how can
one convince such a subject
by discursive means
(and not just
by appeal to some strange non-standard procedures like intellectual
intuition or revelation) of the epistemic legitimacy of the assumption
of a subject-object unity/identity that is prior to and constitutive
of its parts/elements? Because the answer to this epistemological
question is meant to ground the metaphysical/ontological claim
concerning the ultimate constitution of reality, Hegel thought fit to
address it in the form of an introduction to what subsequently had to
be elaborated in a systematic way as a metaphysical doctrine about
what there ultimately is. This epistemological task turned out to be
much more difficult than Hegel initially thought. This is documented
by the surprisingly many numbers of different sketches of what he took
to be an “introduction” to his system even before he
published the best known version of this introduction, the
Phenomenology of Spirit
in 1807. Actually, the
Phenomenology
is not just the best known, it is the only
version of an introduction Hegel ever elaborated in detail, at least
in print, that explicitly addressed the task at hand as an
epistemological problem. In the second edition of the exposition
proper of his system, the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences in Outline
published much later in 1827 (first edition
1817) he chose a different introductory path to his metaphysical
project under the title “Positions of Thought towards
Objectivity” (
Stellungen des Gedankens zur
Objektivität
) for reasons that have to do with a different
assessment of the epistemological task. However, the
Phenomenology
still remains the most straightforward attempt
to settle the question as to the metaphysical priority of the
subject-object identity as an epistemological problem.
Although looking at Hegel’s different pre-phenomenological
attempts to find a suitable introduction to his central
metaphysical/ontological doctrine is an interesting enterprise in its
own right, it cannot be dealt with here in detail. It would lead to a
discussion of why Hegel initially, i.e., from 1801 to maybe 1806,
thought of what he in this early period called “logic” as
a discipline that could function as an introduction to his
metaphysics. Of all the fragments that were passed down to us from
this period the most complete “logical” version of an
introduction is the so-called
Jena Systemdraft II
from
1804/05. This system-draft contains a so-called
Logic
as a
discipline that is meant to present the process of
“elevating” (
erheben
) an epistemic subject
equipped with traditionally accepted methodological and logical
convictions to the “standpoint of science” (
Standpunkt
der Wissenschaft
), i.e., to a standpoint that is based on the
metaphysical doctrine of Subject-Object identity. This process is
delineated by Hegel as an introductory logical process that proceeds
by means of a criticism of standard logical forms like judgments and
inferences as well as of object constituting concepts, i.e., of
Kantian categories.
In order to deal with the epistemological problem of demonstrating the
priority of unities/identities over and against their opposed
elements, in the
Phenomenology
Hegel starts with an analysis
of the conditions of knowledge where knowledge is understood as an
achievement of a subject’s activity of dealing
discursively/conceptually with the objective world or the world of
objects. For him an inquiry into the conditions of knowledge is the
right starting point because knowledge understood as the activity of
gaining conceptual access to the world is the only
discursive
attitude available to a subject towards determining what is
objectively real, i.e., towards the world. The approach Hegel is
pursuing in order to arrive at the desired result, i.e., the proof of
the priority of unity/identity, can be outlined thus: he first
introduces the conception of knowledge (
Erkennen
) that is
leading his investigation. According to this conception knowledge is
to be taken as a discursive/conceptual relation established between a
subject and an object that allows for some sort of correspondence
Entsprechung
) between them. The possibility of this
correspondence depends on getting hold of structural features that are
shared by subject and object on the basis of which a knowledge
relation can be established. This is the assumption of isomorphism
that underlies any epistemologically-motivated move toward
idealism.
With the concept of knowledge settled, Hegel chooses as the point of
departure for his analysis a configuration of this knowledge relation
between subject and object that proceeds on the assumption that the
relata of this relation, i.e., the subject and the object stand in
complete opposition to each other, each of them being self-standing
and a pure another to each other. This configuration is what Hegel
calls “sense certainty”, a configuration in which the
knowledge relation is supposed to obtain between two items, a
subject-this and an object-this, that are totally isolated from each
other, have no conceptualizable internal connection whatsoever. Such a
conception of the knowledge relation proves to be unwarranted because,
according to Hegel, it can be shown that the idea of a cognitive
relation between totally independent items makes no sense. Instead one
has to acknowledge that the very attempt to establish such a
(unreasonable) conception already presupposes that there indeed is a
structural affinity between subject and object, an affinity that
enables an object to be an object for a subject and that enables the
subject to relate to the object. Hegel wants us to think of this
mutual affinity in terms of conceptual determinations necessary to
come up both with the concept of an object of knowledge and with a
tenable account of a knowing subject. Thus in the case of e.g.,
“sense certainty” the affinity claim is expressed in the
result that in order to be an epistemic object an object of cognition
has to exhibit the
conceptual
characteristics of universality
Allgemeinheit
) and singularity (
Einzelnheit
provided by the subject and that the subject itself in order to be
thought of as an epistemic subject must have at its disposal the
conceptual resources (in this case the concepts of universality and
singularity) necessary to determine the conceptual features of
its
object. The entire process run through in the
Phenomenology
is meant to enrich the features a subject and
an object have to share in order to arrive at a complete concept of
both what a subject and an object are.
In the
Phenomenology
the initial scenario of “sense
certainty” that is based on the absolute opposition between the
knowing subject and the object known sets the stage for a long series
of configurations or models of knowledge that is aimed at
demonstrating that knowledge in a complete or absolute sense can only
take place in a setting where subject and object share
all
their respective structural features, i.e., where both, the subject
and the object, have the same conceptual determinations and thus are
identical. This amounts according to Hegel to the insight that if
knowledge is analyzed in terms of a subject-object relation there is
for knowledge
Erkennen
) in the end no difference
between the subject and the object or, as he is fond of saying, that
there is a difference that is no difference (
ein Unterschied, der
keiner ist
). Among other things this means for Hegel that
knowledge in the strict sense is ultimately self-knowledge or a state
of affairs where a subject that stands in the relation of knowing
erkennen
) to an object is “in truth” related to
itself, or, as he famously puts it, in the act of knowing
Erkenntnisakt
) the subject “is in the other (the
object) with itself (exclusively related to itself)” (
im
Anderen bei sich selbst sein
).
This epistemological account presented in the
Phenomenology
of how the very possibility of discursive/conceptual knowledge is
based in an original identity of opposites or a subject-object
unity/identity becomes metaphysical/ontological implications because
of the conviction Hegel shares with the other post-Kantian idealists
that knowledge is a real relation. By this he and his idealistic
allies mean (a) that knowledge is a relation between real relata and
(b) that knowledge is real only if the relata are real. This
conviction puts constraints on how to conceive of this unity/identity
when it comes to its content (in a metaphorically analogous way in
which, say, in propositional logic a semantics puts constraints on the
interpretation of its syntax). This unity/identity established as the
basis of knowledge has to meet (at least) two conditions. First of all
it has to be such that the subject-object split can be grounded in it
and secondly it must allow for an interpretation according to which it
is real or has being (
Sein
). These conditions function as
constraints on how to conceive of subject-object-unity/identity
because they specify what can count as an acceptable interpretation (a
semantics) of an otherwise purely structural item (a syntactic
feature). Without meeting these two conditions all we have by now
(i.e., at the end of the
Phenomenology
) is a claim as to the
grounding function of a unity/identity of subject and object structure
(a syntactic item) that is still lacking an interpretation as to the
content (the semantic element) of all the terms involved in that
structure.
It is by providing an interpretation to the unity/identity structure
that Hegel arrives at a defense of idealism in a non-oppositional
sense. Put somewhat distant from his terminology but relying heavily
on his own preliminary remarks on the question “With What must
the Beginning of Science be made?” in the
Science of
Logic,
his line of thought can be sketched roughly thus: the
Phenomenology
has demonstrated that knowledge can only be
realized if it establishes a relation between real items. These items
have to be structurally identical. Realized or “real”
knowledge (
wahres Wissen
) in contradistinction to
opinion/defective knowledge (what Hegel calls “false
knowledge”) is a discursive/conceptual relation that can only be
established by thinking. Hence if there is knowledge thinking must be
real, must have being (
Sein haben
). Now, thinking is an
objective
, a
real
activity in the sense that it
gives rise to determinations that constitute both the subject and the
object. Because it is a discursive/conceptual activity its
reality/objectivity implies that what is constituted by it, i.e., the
subject and the object have to be conceived of as
discursive/conceptual structures whose reality/being just consists in
nothing else than their
being
thought—
not
their being the object
of
thought. Conceived of that way
thinking not only fulfills the two conditions mentioned above (i.e.,
it grounds the subject-object divide and it is real, has being), it is
at the same time the
only
candidate to satisfy them (because
there is no other discursive/conceptual activity available).
Therefore, in order to account for a discursive/conceptual model of
reality one has to start from the identity of thinking and being or
from the fact that only thinking is real.
From this argument as to the sole reality of thinking, it is easy to
derive a new conception of idealism that is not subject to the
objections mentioned above that Hegel raised against (what were, in
his eyes) the one-sided attempts by his fellow post-Kantians, in
particular Fichte and Schelling. If all there is is thinking and if
thinking is taken to be not only/primarily an activity of a (human)
subject or something that can be present to the senses, but is
conceived of as self-standing discursive/conceptual and in this
respect ideal activity that opens up first and foremost a space for
opposition in the general shape of subject and object then indeed, as
he puts it, “every philosophy is essentially idealism”
GW
21, 142) as long as it shares (regardless of whether
explicitly or implicitly) this basic conviction of the reality of
thinking. This idealism is non-oppositional, for it “the
opposition between idealistic and realistic philosophy is therefore
without meaning” (
GW
21, 142). One might doubt whether
the term “idealism” is a very fitting name for the
position Hegel endorses. In a way this term is rather misleading in
that it seems to suggest that for Hegel the term
“thinking” has connotations that point in the direction of
the mental, the spiritual. Though Hegel definitely wants these
connotations to obtain in certain contexts, they play no role in his
metaphysical views. There the only relevant fact is the reality of
thinking and the consequences of this fact. Hegel himself seems not to
have been too happy with the term “idealism” as a
characterization of his philosophy. This is shown by the fact that he
very rarely uses it to this purpose. However, setting aside questions
of terminology, it is safe to say that for Hegel’s general
conception and defense of idealism three points are the most important
to acknowledge: (1) it is a metaphysical (and
not
primarily
an epistemological) conception of idealism, (2) it is a conception
that establishes idealism by relying on the sole reality of thinking
which in turn is taken to be an immediate fact, a given
Vorhandenes
, cf.
GW
21, 55f.) in an almost
Cartesian fashion, (3) however, contrary to the Cartesian “I
think” this real thinking is not conceived of as an activity of
a human or non-human subject but as an autochtonous activity that in
the process of its own determination gives rise to conceptions of both
subject and object founded in the primordial identity of thinking and
being. Hegel certainly departs from Berkeley’s substance-based
idealism, on which all that exists is finite minds and their ideas and
the infinite mind and its, although it can certainly be asked what
pure thinking not grounded in thinkers is supposed to be.
Hegel’s basic claim as to the identity of thinking and being
might be said to have some initial plausibility if one takes such a
claim to be a somewhat metaphorical expression of the view that in our
ways of thinking about objects some conceptual elements are invariably
involved. Understood along these lines, Hegel’s claim could be
considered, as it often is, as nothing but a peculiar version of
Kant’s empirical realism. Such an interpretation might even be
suggested by the impression that Hegel as well as Kant takes thinking
to be an activity that is characterized by operating on and with
concepts and that what Hegel calls “being” can easily be
identified with what within Kant’s epistemological framework is
called “reality”, that is, the empirical reality of
intuited objects rather than their transcendent grounds. Although this
impression is by no means entirely groundless, it is still misleading
because it does not do justice to the ontological connotations that
Hegel wants to connect with this claim. For Hegel’s idealism it
is indeed essential to convince us that it is a demonstrable fact that
the world ultimately has to be conceived of as a thought (and thus as
a conceptual item) that has objective existence or (in his
terminology) that the world is the unique (because all-encompassing)
Concept (written with a capital “C”) that is engaged in
the process of its own realization (its objective expression), i.e., a
realized concept. Therefore each individual object contained in the
world, be it a physical (a tree, a lemon), a social (a society, a
state) or a cultural (an artwork, a religion) object, has to be taken
to be an element in this process, thus having the status of a partial
manifestation of the all-encompassing Concept/world (subject/object,
thinking/being). Obviously this conception of what the world and the
objects it consists of really are—if it is not meant to be just
another variation of either a dogmatic idealist claim in the spirit of
Berkeley or a transcendental idealism à la Kant—has to
use the terms “concept” and “real” in a way
that is different from their traditional or normal use in the history
of modern philosophy since Descartes. And so it is. For Hegel a
concept is not a general representation in the mind of a subject nor
is the term “real” meant to be restricted to hinting at
the presence of some type of matter either physical or mental. Rather,
Hegel thinks of a concept as providing what could be called a
“structure plan” for its own realization, and he takes the
term “real” to designate the successful realization of a
structure plan or a concept; thus Hegel attempts to use these terms in
a teleological sense without any mentalistic (i.e., psychological or
representationalistic) ontological commitments. Although these
somewhat unconventional connotations of Hegel’s concepts of
“concept” and “real” (which have a certain
basis in a peculiar German use of these terms) might be confusing,
they are—at least in his eyes—by no means without
descriptive value. Thus, to use examples that Hegel mentions in the
Preface
to the
Phenomenology of Spirit
, it makes
perfectly good sense to describe a fully grown oak-tree as the
realization of its concept, i.e., what is contained as genetic
structure in the acorn out of which the tree has developed, or to
think of a political state as a realization of what belongs to the
concept of a state, making the state the realization of a concept or
an “objective thought”. However, although these examples
can throw some light on why Hegel might think of his approach as
leading to an ultimately idealistic conception of reality, the
idealistic aspect of his view strictly speaking has to do with his
theory of what he calls “the Concept” (with a
“C”) whose realization is the world. It is this theory
that commits him not just to idealism because of its radical
conceptualism but also to metaphysical monism because of the
singularity of the Concept, i.e., the world. Within the framework of
this theory the Concept is conceived of as providing something like
the master plan or the universal structure that governs not only the
conceptual structure of individual kinds of objects but the structure
of individual objects as well. This universal structure comes about by
means of a process of conceptual self-determination that results in a
complete exposition of the conceptual elements contained in the
Concept, a process that is documented in Hegel’s
Science of
Logic
. This process of self-determination is understood by Hegel
as the way in which the Concept realizes itself. After all, the
Concept, being a thought-object or an object-thought itself, must also
have reality or being and thus has to realize itself.
Although Hegel definitely wants to overcome what he takes to be
shortcomings both of Kant’s philosophy and of the positions of
his post-Kantian contemporaries Fichte and Schelling, at the same time
he does not want to give up on the post-Kantian project of
transforming Kant’s transcendental idealism, which restricts
knowledge to the subject’s own experience, into a robust new
idealism based on dynamic principles of world-constitution. He differs
from Fichte and Schelling in that he does not ground these principles
either in some activity of a subject (Fichte) or in a cognitively
inaccessible primordial unity (Schelling) but in the idea of a
thoroughly conceptual organization of reality giving rise to what he
calls in the introduction to the second edition of the
Science of
Logic
an “intellectual view of the universe”
Intellektualansicht des Universums
) (
GW
21, 34). In
this way, Hegel does try to reconcile the need for conceptual elements
constitutive of traditional epistemological idealism with (most of)
the categorical commitments characteristic of traditional ontological
idealism yet in a way that no longer requires the opposition between
epistemology and ontology.
6. Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) heaped a great deal of invective
on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For that reason, Schopenhauer is not
always included among the German idealists. And indeed, nothing could
be further from Hegel’s version of absolute idealism than
Schopenhauer’s theory on which behind the realm of appearances
constructed in accordance with our own conceptions of space, time, and
causality—his form of the empirical realism side of
transcendental idealism—there is a unitary reality that is
utterly irrational or at least arational—his form of
Kant’s ontological realism, but flipped from practical to
theoretical and from rational to arational. Nevertheless, since
Schopenhauer works within a Kantian framework, and identifies
underlying reality with pure activity, although of an arational rather
than rational kind, it is useful to think of him within the framework
of idealism.
Schopenhauer puts forward his theory in his main work
The World as
Will and Representation
Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung
), first published in December, 1818 (with an 1819
date on its title page), and then in a much-expanded second edition in
1844 and yet another expanded edition in 1857. This book had been
preceded by a doctoral dissertation
On the Fourfold Root of the
Principle of Sufficient Reason
(1813), which Schopenhauer
subsequently regarded as the introduction to his magnum opus. The
earlier work includes Schopenhauer’s main modifications to the
structure of Kant’s epistemology, while the later work accepts
Kant’s idealist interpretation of this epistemology (Book I) and
then replaces Kant’s version of the doctrine of things in
themselves with Schopenhauer’s own version of the unitary
non-rational will underlying all appearance (Book II).
Schopenhauer’s acceptance of the empirical side of Kant’s
transcendental idealism combined with his non-rational version of
Kant’s ontological realism is, however, on display
throughout
The World as Will and Representation
. Schopenhauer
accepts without reservation Kant’s argument that space, time,
and causality are forms of our own representation that we know
priori
and impose upon the appearances of objects. He does
precede this acceptance with a Fichtean argument that “The world
is my representation”, where the sheer “mineness” of
representation is supposed to be a “form…more universal
than any other form”, including space, time, and causality
WWR
, §1, p. 23). Schopenhauer holds that
no truth is more certain, no truth is more independent of all others
and no truth is less in need of proof than this one: that everything
there is for cognition (i.e., the whole world) is only an object in
relation to a subject, an intuition of a beholder. (
WWR
§1, pp. 23–4)
This simple and perhaps inescapable thought may be regarded as the
most fundamental epistemological motivation for any form of idealism.
On the basis of this proposition, Schopenhauer then tries to
distinguish his position from what he takes to be the skepticism of
Hume, that there is a real question about whether there is either a
subject or an object in addition to representations, and from the
dogmatism of Fichte, that both of these can be proved; his own view as
initially stated is rather that
the object as such always presupposes the subject as its necessary
correlate: so the subject always remains outside the jurisdiction of
the principle of sufficient reason. (
WWR
, §5, p. 35)
But, speaking of dogmatism, he simply accepts from Kant that
space and time can not only be conceived abstractly, on their own and
independently of their content, but they can also be intuited
immediately,
and that
This intuition is not some phantasm derived from repeated experience;
rather, it is something independent of experience, and to such an
extent that experience must in fact be conceived as dependent on it,
since the properties of time and space, as they are known
priori
in intuition, apply to all experience as laws that it must
always come out in accordance with. (
WWR
, §3, p. 27)
By this remark, Schopenhauer indicates his recognition that Kant
derives his epistemological idealism from his understanding of the
implications of our
a priori
cognition of space and time, but
he does not attempt to explain Kant’s inference or to add any
argument of his own. Schopenhauer also does not doubt that there is
something other than the representing subject beyond what it
represents, an underlying reality beginning with its own body as it is
rather than as it merely appears.
Schopenhauer’s fundamental departure from Kant is already
suggested in this passage:
We have immediate cognition of the thing in itself when it appears to
us as our own body; but our cognition is only indirect when the thing
in itself is objectified in other objects of intuition. (
WWR
§6, pp. 40–1)
What Schopenhauer means is that although we have an experience of our
own bodies, as it were from the outside, through the same forms of
space, time, and causality through which we experience all other
bodies, including other animate bodies, and in this regard we
experience all bodies including our own as mere appearance through the
forms we impose on experience, we also have another experience, each
of us of his or her own body, as it were from the inside, namely we
have an experience of willing an action and of our bodies as the
instruments of our wills, with no separation between will and action
and thus no relevance of spatial separation, temporal succession, or
difference between cause and effect. However—and this is the
argument of Book II—our immediate experience of our own bodies
as instruments of our wills is an experience of our actions being
immediately determined by desire rather than by reason. “To the
pure subject of cognition as such, [his] body is a representation like
any other among objects”, but
will
…and this alone gives him the key to his own
appearance, reveals to him the meaning and shows him the inner
workings of his essence, his deeds, his movements; (
WWR
§18, p. 124)
and what we discover when we look closely at our wills is that they
are governed not by reason but by impulse, at its most fundamental
level a “dark, dull driving” (
WWR
, §27, p.
174), and even at its highest, most clarified level, still desires or
apparently “creative drives” that only “seem to
perform their tasks from abstract, rational motives”
WWR
, §27, p. 182). It is not our planning and
calculating drives that best express the real nature of the will but
our genitals (
WWR
, §20, p. 133). Of course, it is well
known that following the lead of one’s genitals is a pretty good
formula for disappointment, and for Schopenhauer this reveals the
frustration to which a will driven by desire ultimately leads: either
one does not get what one wants, the object of one’s desire, and
is frustrated, or one does, but then one wants more, and either does
not get that, so is frustrated, or does, but then wants more, and so
on
ad infinitum
. Trying to truly satisfy desire is the height
of irrationality, but for Schopenhauer there is nothing else we can
will—we can at best try to escape from the clutches of will
altogether, whether through art, asceticism, or compassion.
But of course, if the underlying nature of reality, the thing in
itself, is nothing other than will, then escape from its clutches
should not really be possible but should at most be apparent. And not
only does Schopenhauer equate our experience of ourselves “from
the inside” as desire-driven will with our own ultimate reality,
our character as things in themselves; he also argues that we have no
choice but to think of the underlying reality of
all
appearance in this way, because this is our only form of insight
into—or acquaintance with—anything as a thing in itself.
We can only “take the key to the understanding of the essence in
itself of things” to be the
key provided…by the immediate cognition of our own essence, and
apply it to [the] appearances in the inorganic [and organic] world as
well,
even appearances that are more remote from us than any others.
Ultimate reality, because, Schopenhauer assumes,
it is everywhere one and the same,…must be called
will
here as well as there, a name signifying the being in itself of every
thing in the world and the sole kernel of every appearance.
WWR
, §23, pp. 142–3)
Schopenhauer devotes many pages to empirical descriptions of the
similarities between the forces at work throughout the rest of nature
and the merely apparently rational but really non-rational character
of our own behavior, but of course the character of things in
themselves cannot be inferred directly from any amount of empirical
data; Schopenhauer derives his conclusion not from all this empirical
illustration but rather from our allegedly immediate rather than
empirical insight into the character of our own wills and the very
problematic premise that at bottom everything is essentially one. His
position thus begins from an epistemological premise, namely that we
can know ultimate reality through knowing ourselves, and reaches an
ontological conclusion, that ultimate reality must be like ourselves,
but in opposition to Kant and the other German idealists he assumes
that our own nature is essentially non-rational and therefore that the
ultimate character of reality, although it is in a certain sense like
the mental, is also fundamentally non-rational.
7. Nietzsche (and a glimpse beyond)
It may seem far-fetched to think of Friedrich Nietzsche
(1844–1900) as an idealist. After all, he presented himself as
an almost fanatical anti-idealist throughout his life. In many of his
published and unpublished writings as well as in his letters he
expresses over and again his dislike and his disdain for what he calls
“idealism”. A telling summary of his position concerning
idealism is to be found in his letter to Malvida von Meysenburg (20
October 1888):
and I treat idealism as untruthfulness that has become an instinct, a
not-wanting-to-see reality at any price: every sentence of my writings
contains contempt for idealism. (Nietzsche,
eKGWB
BVN-1888, 1135
This harsh assessment is by no means easy to understand given his
known sympathies with a perspectival approach to objects of cognition,
his insistence that falsification or tampering
Verfälschung
) is at the basis of most of our cognitive
judgments, and his claims as to the dependence of knowledge on needs.
Considerations like these suggest that in spite of his protests,
idealistic modes of thinking are not alien to Nietzsche. At least some
of his beliefs are compatible with what has been called here
epistemological arguments for idealism although Nietzsche himself
would have taken these beliefs to express a form of realism. However,
before searching for and elaborating on possible idealistic tendencies
in his own thoughts, we should find out what “idealism”
meant for Nietzsche and why he was so hostile to it.
Idealism, for Nietzsche, seems to be a particularly unappealing form
of metaphysics, in other words of philosophy as it has been practiced
throughout history from the era of the ancient Greeks up to his own
time (because of his contempt for Kant’s postulates of pure
practical reason, Nietzsche gave little credence to Kant’s
theoretical critique of traditional metaphysics). Philosophy in this
traditional shape he took to be a somewhat enigmatic endeavor to
pursue the mutually excluding tasks of (culture-forming) art and
religion on the one hand and of (cognition-focused) science on the
other (see
Nachgelassene Fragmente
: Notebook 19, [47], [62], [218];
KSA
7. 434). It is doomed to failure because of two fundamental
shortcomings. The first is that it gives a privileged status to truth
in declaring truth to be the ultimate goal at which it aims. This
preoccupation with truth is based on the implicit assumption that
truth has some overriding value. This assumption has never been
justified, not even addressed by any philosopher. Nietzsche writes in
the
Genealogy of Morals
(1887: Section 24):
Turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them
lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself
needs a justification, here is a gap in every philosophy—where
does it come from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been
lord
over all philosophy, because truth was set as being, as
god, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not
allowed
to be a problem. Do you understand this
“allowed to be”?—From the very moment that faith in
the God of the ascetic ideal is denied,
there is a new problem as
well
: that of the
value
of truth.—The will to
truth needs a critique—let us hereby define our own
task—the value of truth is tentatively to be
called into
question
. (
KSA
5. 401; Third Essay)
However, it is not the problem of the value of truth but the second
shortcoming that, in Nietzsche’s eyes, leads directly to
metaphysics. It is the tendency of philosophers to deny the obvious,
to neglect surfaces in favor of what is allegedly behind them, out of
habitual weakness and anxiety to prefer the stable and immutable over
and against change and becoming. This critical sentiment Nietzsche
expresses quite often at different places in many of his published and
unpublished writings. A nice example is the following note:
On the psychology of metaphysics. This world is
apparent—consequently there is a true world. This world is
conditioned—consequently there is an unconditioned world. This
world is full of contradiction—consequently there is a world
free from contradiction. This world is becoming—consequently
there is an existing [
seiende
] world. All false inferences
(blind trust in reason: if A is, there must be its opposing concept
B). It is suffering that inspires these inferences: at bottom there
are wishes that such a world might be; similarly hatred of a world
that causes suffering expresses itself through the imagination of
another world, one full of value: the
ressentiment
of the
metaphysicians against the actual world is here creative. (Notebook 8
[2]; reprinted in
KSA
12. 327)
This tendency to “falsify” (
verfälschen
) or
to “re-evaluate/reframe” (
umdeuten
) reality out
of resentment is, according to Nietzsche, especially well documented
in the idealistic tradition in metaphysics, as is shown
paradigmatically in Plato’s idealism. It was Plato who invented
the idea of another world that is much more real, much more true than
the ever changing, always unstable world in which we live; he invented
the fiction of the supreme reality of an imperishable and everlasting
ideal world inhabited by archetypal ideas and immutable forms, a
“world in itself” in comparison to which the
Lebenswelt
” of everyday experience is just a
pale shadow. Yet Nietzsche seems undecided how to evaluate the real
motives that led Plato to his idealism. Sometimes he wants to
distinguish Plato from other idealists by crediting him with some
obscure positive reason for endorsing idealism. In section 372 of
The Gay Science
, entitled precisely “
Why we are not
idealists
”, he writes:
In sum: all philosophical idealism until now was something like an
illness, except where, as in the case of Plato, it was the caution of
an overabundant and dangerous health, the fear of overpowerful senses,
the shrewdness of a shrewd Socratic. (
KSA
3. 623)
However, there are other passages where Nietzsche is not in such a
charitable mood and where he presents the ultimate reasons for
Plato’s strong leanings towards idealism as rooted in weakness
and resentment just as with all the other idealists in the history of
philosophy (e.g.,
Ecce Homo
3; reprinted in
KSA
6.
311). His ultimate verdict on metaphysics in all its ancient and
modern forms is nicely expressed in the following note:
On the psychology of metaphysics. The influence of fearfulness. What
has been most feared, the cause of the most powerful suffering (the
lust for domination, sexual lust, etc.) has been treated by humans
most hostile and eliminated from the “true” world. Thus
they have step by step wiped out the affects—claimed God to be
the opposite of the evil, i.e., reality to consist in the negation of
desires and affects (which is to say precisely in nothingness).
Likewise they hate the irrational, the arbitrary, the accidental (as
the cause of countless physical suffering). Consequently they negate
this element in that-which-is-in-itself, they conceive it as absolute
“rationality” and “purposiveness”. In the same
way they fear change, transitoriness: therein is expressed an
oppressed soul, full of mistrust and bad experience (The case of
Spinoza: an inverted sort of person would count this change as
charming). A playful being overladen with power would call precisely
the affects, unreason and change good in an eudaimonistic sense,
together with their consequences, with danger, contrast, dissolution,
etc.. (
KSA
13. 536)
However, this thoroughly critical assessment of all forms of idealisms
as abominable expressions of intellectual weakness and vindictiveness
seems to be at odds with another of Nietzsche’s cherished
beliefs, according to which we have to take reality to be not only
dependent on but ultimately constituted by the respective perspectives
on or the respective ways of interpreting what we encounter. This
Nietzschean view can give rise to the impression that in the end he
might have been closer to endorsing some form of epistemologically
motivated idealism. This leads to the topics of perspectivism and
interpretation (
Auslegung
) in Nietzsche.
Although the details are far from clear, the general tendency of his
perspectivism is expressed quite well in aphorism 374 from
The Gay
Science
How far the perspectival character of existence extends, indeed
whether it has any other character; whether an existence without
interpretation, without “sense”, does not become
“non-sense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is
not essentially an
interpreting
existence—that cannot
be decided, as would be fair, even by the most studious and scrupulous
analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of
this analysis, the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself under
its perspectival forms, and
solely
in these.…Rather,
the world has once again become infinite to us: insofar as we cannot
reject the possibility
that it includes infinite
interpretations
. (
KSA
3. 626)
This view, according to which, further, the world each of us is
experiencing is the product of an interpretation forced on us by some
unconscious overriding drive (
Trieb
) that is the formative
mark of the individual character of each of us, might be seen as
endorsing a version of idealism if, as it is here, idealism is
understood as the claim that what appears to be known as it is
independent of the mind is in the end inescapably marked by the
creative, formative, constructive activities of human mind, whether
individual or collective. However, it is far from clear whether
Nietzsche wants us to think of this process of interpretation which
leads to a specific perspective as a mind-dependent activity.
Sometimes it seems as if he is favoring a quasi-Humean view according
to which the intellect operates in the service of some anonymous
affective and emotional drives in such a way that it just provides a
set of necessary means to consciously realize what drives force us to
do. The following note, for example, points in this direction:
Against positivism, which would stand by the position “There are
only facts”, I would say: no, there are precisely no facts, only
interpretations. We can establish no fact “in itself”: it
is perhaps nonsense to want such a thing. You say “Everything is
subjective”: but that is already an interpretation, the
“subject” is not anything given, but something invented
and added, something stuck behind…To the extent that the word
“knowledge” [
Erkenntnis
] has any sense, the world
is knowable: but it is interpretable differently, it has no sense
behind it, but innumerable senses, “perspectivism”. It is
our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their to and fro.
Every drive is a kind of domination, every one has its perspective,
which it would force on all other drives as a norm. (Notebook 7 [60].
KSA
12. 315)
In other passages Nietzsche seems to be more in line with a by and
large Kantian view according to which the intellect provides some
rules of transformation of what is given by the senses as individual
and discrete data into more general representations. Thus we find him
claiming in section 354 of
The Gay Science
This is what
understand to be true phenomenalism and
perspectivism: that due to the nature of
animal
consciousness
, the world of which we can become conscious is
merely a surface- and sign-world, a world turned into generalities and
thereby debased to its lowest common denominator,—that
everything that enters consciousness thereby becomes superficial,
thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a mark of the herd, that all
becoming-conscious involves a vast and fundamental corruption,
falsification, superficialization, and generalization. (
KSA
3. 593)
Be this as it may, at least as far as epistemological idealism is
concerned it is by no means obvious that either his explicit criticism
of idealism or his remarks on the ways we make up epistemic worlds
prevent Nietzsche from coming close to an idealist position himself.
This is so because in epistemology his main enemy does not seem to be
idealism but all forms of realism.
Although his epistemology does not explicitly imply any ontological
claims, one could be tempted to see Nietzsche as toying with some
ontologically idealistic fantasies. His speculations concerning the
will to power as the ultimate dynamic foundation of all reality fall
into this category. For example,
Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity[.] My idea is,
that every specific body strives to become lord over all of space and
to expand its force (—its will to power) and to repel everything
that resists its own expansion. But it perpetually collides with the
equal efforts of other bodies, and ends by making an arrangement
(“unifying”) with those that are closely enough related to
it:—thus they conspire together to power. And the process goes
on…. (Notebook 14 [186].
KSA
13. 373 f.)
This idea of conspiring forces as the supreme world-constituting
entities can look like an allusion to Kant’s physics of
attraction and repulsion, but also to a version of ontological
idealism like those of Fichte and Schelling because it too invites us
to conceive of dynamic processes as ontologically prior to (physical
or mental) objects and events. Thus, in the end there are no real
obstacles to thinking of Nietzsche as an idealist on ontological as
well as epistemological grounds, although the speculations that lead
him in the former direction may be separable from the latter.
However, even after the heyday of German idealism that ended with
Hegel’s death, it is not just the work of Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche that show traces of idealistic thinking in the German
speaking world. Although it goes beyond the scope of this article,
some hints about the fate of idealism in Germany might be appropriate.
Interest especially in metaphysical versions of idealism waned in
Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first
decades of the twentieth (although it remained lively in other parts
of Europe, e.g., in Italy, in the person of Benedetto Croce), but
engagement with idealist positions and points of view did not entirely
vanish. The decline of interest in idealism during this period had to
do primarily with a certain aversion against what was taken to have
been an excessive and extravagant usurpation of all fields of
intellectual discourse by the classical German philosophers under the
pretext of idealism. This line of criticism was voiced most forcefully
by influential natural scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz.
Marginalization of idealism in these years also was an effect of the
rise of Neo-Kantianism, which at least partly came into being both in
its Marburg-school (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer) and in
its Southwest(Heidelberg)-school (Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich
Rickert, Emil Lask) version as a reaction against the German
idealists. Although insofar as Neo-Kantianism was a reaction mainly to
absolute idealism it could not entirely reject epistemological
arguments of the kind that had traditionally led to idealism,
especially in its Kantian variety. Hence idealistic tendencies can be
found in Neo-Kantianism too, and Martin Heidegger’s later
version of realism can be interpreted as a response to the idealism in
Neo-Kantianism.
Despite these critical attitudes towards idealism, which contributed
to its decline as a major philosophical position in the German
intellectual milieu before the first World War, idealistic claims
based on metaphysical and/or epistemological arguments can still be
found in the works of some of the (at least at that time) better known
philosophers. In particular, the writings of Friedrich Adolf
Trendelenburg (1802–1872) and Rudolf Hermann Lotze
(1817–1881) are documents of a lasting influence of idealistic
figures and practices of thought, as was highlighted in detail by
Beiser (2013). Trendelenburg’s interpretation of his central
concept of motion (
Bewegung
) and Lotze’s vindication of
his theory of value (
Wert
) reveal quite tellingly their
efforts to preserve essential idealistic features of both
Hegel’s metaphysics (Trendelenburg) and Kant’s
epistemology (Lotze). It also has to be kept in mind that during this
period there were still active right (old) and left (new) Hegelians
who were either critically or apologetically committed to a broadly
Hegelian or idealistic framework in philosophy. There were also those
around who sympathized with certain aspects of Hegel’s
philosophy. All these voices had some impact on philosophical
discussions mainly about religion (e.g., Immanuel Hermann Fichte,
Christian Hermann Weisse) and politics (e.g., Bruno Bauer, Ludwig
Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss). A similar observation can be made
with respect to Karl Marx and the Marxists: although they were
outspoken opponents of an idealism in Hegel’s sense, their
anti-idealism did not stop them from entertaining idealistic notions
of the development of history or the unavoidability of social
progress, with eventually profound consequences for twentieth-century
history. In spite of all this, it is fair to say that idealism fell
out of fashion in the German speaking world, and has stayed that
way.
8. British and American Idealism
Things were different in the English-speaking world, where idealism
became an important topic in a wide spectrum of philosophical
discussions ranging from metaphysics via aesthetics to moral and
social theories. In England, Scotland, and Wales an idealism that was
ultimately both epistemological and ontological in motivation became
the dominant approach to philosophy for several decades, while in the
United States idealism could not monopolize philosophy, having to
share the stage with and ultimately reach an accommodation with
pragmatism, but it nevertheless also flourished for several decades.
The best known and most outspoken spokesmen in favor of idealistic
conceptions in metaphysics and elsewhere in Britain in these years
were Thomas Hill Green and Francis Herbert Bradley at Oxford and John
McTaggart Ellis McTaggart at Cambridge, while in the United States the
most prominent idealist was Josiah Royce at Harvard, where
idealism’s having to share the stage with pragmatism was
personified in Royce’s friendly rivalry with William James and
in Royce’s ultimate attempt to synthesize his view with that of
Charles Sanders Peirce. Although all of these figures are frequently
characterized as being indebted to Hegel’s writings and
advocating a Hegelian view of reality, their various positions are at
best in a somewhat indirect, almost only metaphorical, sense informed
by Hegel’s philosophy. In fact, these philosophers were more
willing to call themselves idealists than had been the earlier German
idealists who supposedly inspired them, but who as has been argued
were just as interested in escaping as in accepting the label. This is
shown most tellingly insofar as their approach to a defense of
idealism goes back to a state of the discussion characteristic of the
period prior to Hegel and German idealism in general, rather
connecting more directly to an understanding of idealism influenced by
eighteenth-century disputes in the wake of Berkeley. None of these
figures except perhaps Royce continued to explore a dynamic conception
of idealism distinctive of Hegel and the other German
idealists—Royce in fact wrote more extensively and insightfully
on Hegel and his immediate predecessors than any of the others with
the exception of McTaggart. In general, the late nineteenth-century
idealists were more inclined to think of idealism or, maybe more
accurately, spiritualism again as a genuine alternative to materialism
and embark again on the controversy whether matter or mind/spirit is
the ultimate “stuff” of reality. These philosophers were
thus more willing to identify themselves as idealists than had been
their predecessors. However, these philosophers were not all equally
monists. Both Bradley and McTaggart, for whom a defense of idealism
consists mainly in establishing the ontological point that reality is
exclusively spirit, were, and thus their idealism could also be called
“spiritual monism”. But both Green at the beginning of the
movement and Royce towards its end strove for more nuanced positions,
not excluding the existence of matter from their idealisms, and thus
resisted monism. But all their efforts to establish a convincing form
of idealism, whether in the form of spiritualism or in a form that
allowed some role for matter as well, became rapidly unfashionable
even during the lifetimes of all these philosophers (except for Green,
who died young) due to what was called “the revolt against
idealism” staged at the turn of the twentieth century in Britain
by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore and a decade later in the United
States by a group of “New Realists”. However, as we will
suggest at least Russell was himself pushed back in the direction of
some form of idealism, perhaps only on epistemological grounds, by the
time his own thought reached the stage of his “logical
atomism”. For the most part, however, after the attacks on
Bradley and Royce, explicit avowal of idealism became rare, with a few
exceptions such as the prominent defense of idealism by Brand
Blanshard in the 1930s and less prominent defenses by Timothy Sprigge
and John Foster in the early 1980s
Thomas Hill Green (1836–82) was the first of the great Oxford
idealists. He is best remembered for a lengthy polemic with Hume that
he published in the form of an introduction to a collected edition of
Hume that he co-edited and for his posthumously published
Prolegomena to Ethics
, which is a polemic against
utilitarianism from the point of view of a perfectionism inspired by
Kant as well as by Hegel. But the first of the four books of the
Prolegomena
is a “Metaphysics of Knowledge”,
beginning with a statement of “The Spiritual Principle in
Knowledge and in Nature” (1893: 13), which argues for a form of
idealism on both epistemological and ontological grounds, and
Green’s posthumous works also included a set of lectures on Kant
in which he engaged quite directly with Kant’s form of idealism.
Green also left behind a set of
Lectures on the Principles of
Political Obligation
that form one of the crucial documents of
the political and social philosophy of British idealism and of
idealism in the broadest sense mentioned at the outset of this
entry.
Green’s motivation in arguing for idealism in the
Prolegomena
is to prepare the way for a conception of the
will as free and creative as the foundation of his ethics—in
this regard Green’s view is as much in the spirit of
Kant’s practical idealism as it is Hegelian. Green’s
idealism is expounded in three main steps. First, and here also much
influenced by Kant, he argues that knowledge never consists in the
mere apprehension of discrete items, but in the recognition of order
or relation, and that such order or relation is not given but is
constituted by and in consciousness. Thus,
The terms “real” and “objective”…have
no meaning except for a consciousness which presents its experiences
to itself as determined by relations, and at the same time conceives a
single and unalterable order of relations determining them, with which
its temporary presentation, as each experience occurs, of the
relations determining it may be contrasted. (
Prolegomena
1893: 17)
From this he infers that
experience, in the sense of a consciousness of events as a related
series—and in no other sense can it help to account for the
knowledge of an order of nature—cannot be explained by any
natural history, properly so called, (1893: 21–22)
but must instead be constituted by mind itself, or,
the understanding which presents an order of nature to us is in
principle one with an understanding which constitutes that order
itself. (1893: 23)
Thus far, Green’s position could be considered an
epistemological argument for idealism. However, he quickly moves
beyond a merely epistemological argument, because his next move is to
argue that since the order of which any individual human being is in
various ways and to various degrees aware obviously extends beyond
what could plausibly be thought to be constituted just by that
individual, the order of which we are each aware must be constituted
by a mind or intelligence greater than that of any of us, thus there
must be “an eternal intelligence realized in the related facts
of the world”, and the world must be “a system of related
facts rendered possible by such an intelligence”, which
intelligence “partially and gradually reproduces itself in us,
communicating piece-meal but in inseparable correlation” aspects
of that order to each of us if not complete knowledge of it to any of
us (1893: 38). Green’s insistence on a supra-individual
intelligence as the source of cosmic order in which individual
intelligences in some way participate is a decided move beyond
epistemology, and in his own view it is also a significant departure
from Kant, whose agnosticism about the real nature of things in
themselves, at least in the theoretical mood, “would at once
withhold us” from such an inference to the “spirituality
of the real world” (1893: 43). However, and here is the third
main thesis of Green’s form of idealism, the participation of
individual human beings in the supra-individual intelligence which
constitutes the comprehensive system of relations can be seen as an
apprehension of some portion of that order by
animal
organisms
in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to
know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time,
gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness;
(1893: 72)
it is the eternal consciousness,
as so far realized in or communicated to us through modification of
the animal organism, that constitutes our knowledge, with the
relations, characteristic of knowledge, into which time does not
enter, which are not in becoming but are once for all what they are.
(1893: 73)
Green’s form of spiritualism is thus not incompatible with
ontological dualism: the object of all knowledge is the complete and
eternal order of things, which must be constituted by an intelligence
greater than that of any individual human being, but individual human
beings are in fact organisms, thus matter, to which some aspect of
that intelligence is communicated. The epistemological aspect of
Green’s idealism is complete, because knowledge on the part of
an individual is understood as consisting in a grasp of an order that
is itself mental, but his ontology is not exclusively mentalistic, for
while it includes the necessary existence of a supra-individual
intelligence or spirit but allows the existence of animal organisms
(and thus presumably of other forms of matter as well).
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924), however, argued for a more
exclusive spiritualism, or an idealist ontology. Bradley presents his
metaphysical views on the constitution and the main characteristics of
reality most explicitly in
Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical
Essay,
which was first published in 1893 and reprinted many times
during his lifetime. He famously proceeds from the claim that the
traditional and received “ideas by which we try to understand
the universe” are contradictory (1893: 11 [1897: 9]). He
substantiates this claim by examining a range of central concepts from
metaphysics and epistemology, among them the concepts of primary and
secondary qualities, of substance and attribute, of quality and
relation, space and time, of causality as well as the concept of a
thing and that of the self. The best known of his destructive
arguments against these conceptions is that against qualities and
relations because it played a role in the discussion that arose at the
turn of the twentieth century between Bradley, Russell and Moore
(among others) about the logical and ontological status of relations,
i.e., whether they are “internal’’ or
“external” to their terms. As to qualities and relations
Bradley claims:
The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be
necessary in practice, but it is theoretically unintelligible. The
reality, so characterized, is not true reality, but is appearance.
(1893: 25 [1897: 21])
He starts with pointing out that “[q]ualities are nothing
without relations” (ibid.). This is so because in order to be
qualities they have to differ from other qualities and hence have to
be distinct. However, without relations they could not be distinct.
But distinctiveness presupposes plurality and plurality relations.
Their plurality depends on relation, and, without that relation, they
are not distinct. But, if not distinct, then not different, and
therefore not qualities. (1893: 28 [1897: 24])
Not only without relations are qualities nothing,
“[u]nfortunately, taken together with them, they are equally
unintelligible” (1893: 30 [1897: 25]). The reason is that one
cannot account for their distinctiveness if their distinctiveness is
based on their being different: “In short, qualities in a
relation have turned out as unintelligible as were qualities without
one” (1893: 31–32 [1897: 27]). The same holds, according
to Bradley, from the side of relations. “They are nothing
intelligible, either with or without their qualities” (1893: 32
[1897: 27]). They are nothing intelligible without qualities because
“a relation without terms seems mere verbiage” (ibid.).
They are nothing intelligible with qualities either for in order for a
relation to relate it must stand in a relation to what it relates
which makes it into a quality that requires “a
new
connecting relation” (ibid.) if it is to relate to that quality.
Bradley summarizes as the result:
The conclusion to which I am brought is that a relational way of
thought—any one that moves by the machinery of terms and
relations—must give appearance, and not truth. (1893: 33 [1897:
28])
The result of his examination not just of the concepts of quality and
relation but of all the other concepts he deals with consists in the
verdict that all attempts to capture the true nature of reality in
terms of these categories are futile because all these concepts are
unintelligible, inconsistent and in the end self-contradictory. This
means that what is designated by means of them cannot be real, but can
only reflect the way the world appears to us, not the way it really
is. This diagnosis is based on Bradley’s fundamental conviction
that “ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict
itself” (1893: 136 [1897: 120]). He takes this to be “an
absolute criterion” (ibid.). However, to be just appearance is
not to be unreal in the sense of an illusion. On the contrary,
although appearance is “inconsistent with itself”, one
cannot deny its existence or “divorce it from reality”
because “reality, set on one side and apart from all appearance,
would assuredly be nothing” (1893: 132 [1897: 114]).
But does this ontological argument for idealism exclude epistemology
altogether? That is, since appearance always proves to be an
inadequate way in which reality is present to us, is it beyond our
means ever to become acquainted with the true essence of ultimate
reality or can we avoid skepticism and claim that it is indeed
possible for us to have access to the constitutive nature of reality?
Bradley emphatically endorses the latter possibility. According to
him, the self-contradictoriness of what is appearance already implies
that there is positive knowledge of reality: reality has to be One in
the sense that it does not allow discord and it must be such that it
can include diversity (cf. 1893: 140 [1897: 123]), i.e., “the Absolute is … an
individual and a system” (1893: 144 [1897: 127]). This character
of reality as an internally diversified individual system is revealed
to us in sentient experience. “Sentient experience … is
reality, and what is not this is not real” (ibid.). According to
Bradley it is this sentient experience that “is commonly called
psychical existence” (ibid.). The material basis of sentient
experience is exhausted in feeling, thought, and volition. Thus
reality consists in what has to be taken as the undifferentiated unity
of these modes of sentient experience before these modes make their
appearance as different aspects of experience. This leads Bradley to
assume that what is ultimately real is just what gives rise to
appearances where appearances have to be understood as specific forms
under which the underlying undifferentiated unity appears in each of
these different aspects of experience. In his words:
… there is no way of qualifying the Real except by appearances,
and outside the Real there remains no space in which appearances could
live. (1893: 551 [1897: 489])
Although he concedes “our complete inability to understand this
concrete unity in detail” he insists that this inability
“is no good ground for our declining to entertain it”
(1894: 160 [1897: 141]). And although he claims at the end of his
metaphysical essay that he does not know whether his
“conclusions” are to be called Realism or Idealism (1893:
547 [1897: 485]), at the very end he nevertheless abruptly states:
“We may fairly close this work then by insisting that Reality is
spiritual” (1893: 552 [1897: 489). This might lead us to
assume that, “in the end” (a favorite phrase of
Bradley’s), it was primarily his search for a basis for
spiritualism and not so much a defense of idealism understood as
opposed to realism that motivated him to explore the true nature of
reality; in other words, he was ultimately driven by an impulse toward
idealism by ontological premises even though he had developed powerful
arguments epistemological arguments for idealism.
The identification of idealism with spiritualism, thus again an
ontological interpretation of idealism, is most explicit in the works
of John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925). His earliest
work, “The Further Determination of the Absolute” (first published as a pamphlet in 1893, then as Chapter IX of
Studies in Hegelian Cosmology
[1901] and in
Philosophical Studies
[1934]), starts
with the following proclamation:
The progress of an idealistic philosophy may, from some points of
view, be divided into three stages. The problem of the first is to
prove that reality is not exclusively matter. The problem of the
second is to prove that reality is exclusively spirit. The problem of
the third is to determine what is the fundamental nature of spirit.
(1901 [1934: 210 f.])
And the last of his writings published in his lifetime (“An
Ontological Idealism”) starts with the confession, explicitly
employing the same terminology that we have used here:
“Ontologically I am an Idealist, since I believe that all that
exists is spiritual” (1924 [1934: 273]). He takes spirit to be
the sum total of individual spirits or selves connected by the
relation of love and bases this conviction on the claim that only this
conception of what ultimate reality consists in allows us to overcome
unavoidable contradictions connected with all other attempts to
reconcile unity and diversity as the distinguishing marks of reality.
Harmony between unity and diversity can be established only on the
basis of an all-encompassing relation of love between all the
characteristic elements of reality, which in turn presupposes thinking
of ultimate reality as a community of spirits or as Spirit.
These—as McTaggart himself admits (1924 [1934: 271
f.])—rather mystical-sounding assertions, which he adhered to
all his life, he tries to back up by a number of different
considerations. In his earliest writing he relies heavily on views
held by Bradley to the effect that we have to accept that
contradictions are a criterion for non-reality. However, he does not
employ this criterion as a logical maxim but transforms it into an
ontological principle according to which everything that prevents
harmony cannot be real. In his last work, his attempt to present an
argument for his ontological idealism is based mainly on (1)
mereological considerations concerning the structure of substances
which aim to show that only spirits can claim the status of a
substance, and on (2) his theory of time, the unreality of which he
famously had proven in his magnum opus
The Nature of
Existence
(1921/27). In the first volume of this work he attempts
to prove by
a priori
reasoning (
NE
§43) that
all that really exists are substances. Substances according to
McTaggart are infinitely divisible and therefore cannot have simple
parts. Between substances and their individual features there obtains
a relation of determining correspondence such that each feature
determines and is determined by all the other. Given these
priori
characteristics of what can exist the task McTaggart
tackles in the second volume is to
consider various characteristics as to which our experience gives us
… a prima facie suggestion that they are possessed either by
all that exists, or by some existent things (
NE
§295)
and to ask
“which of these characteristics can really be possessed by
what is existent” and
“of those which are found to be possible characteristics of
the existent, whether any of them can be known to be actual
characteristics of it” (
NE
§295).
This double task cannot be settled by
a priori
means but has
to be approached by starting from empirical assumptions based on
experience. If one has to acknowledge that the ways we are bound to
conceive of all these experiential or phenomenal characteristics lead
to contradictions then these characteristics cannot be true of
reality. McTaggart’s strategy here is strongly reminiscent of
Bradley’s procedure to downgrade many phenomena to appearances
and to deny them the status of constitutive elements of reality. The
empirically given characteristics McTaggart discusses primarily are
(a) time, (b) matter, (c) sensa, (d) spirit and (e) cogitation. As to
(a) time he denies that “anything existent [can] possess the
characteristic of being in time” (
NE
§303) where
time is understood as an ordering relation between events. He
distinguishes between two ways of ordering in time. The first gives
rise to what he calls the “A-series” according to which
every state of affairs (event, thing) is either past or present or
future. The second, the so-called “B-series”, relates
transitively and asymmetrically states of affairs in terms of earlier
and later (cf.
NE
§306). He claims that the A-series is
more fundamental than the B-series because only the A-series can
account for change (
NE
§317) and goes on to demonstrate
that (a) the A-series and the B-series contradict each other in the
sense that they belong together though they are incompatible (cf.
NE
§333) and that (b) the (more fundamental) A-series
leads to time determinations of a state of affairs that are
contradictory. The result:
We conclude that the distinctions of past, present and future are
essential to time, and that, if the distinctions are never true of
reality, then no reality is in time. (
NE
§324)
Though never true of reality these distinctions are not empty because
according to McTaggart they have to be taken as appearances of a third
series, the C-series, “a series which is not a time series, but
under certain conditions appears to us to be one”. This C-series
“does actually exist in every case in which there is the
appearance of a time-series” (
NE
§347). McTaggart
thinks of the C-series (at least in
The Nature of Existence
as an “Inclusion Series” (
NE
§575)
whose members are connected by the relations “inclusive
of” and “inclusive in”, so that of any two terms one
will be inclusive of the other, and the other will be included in it.
NE
§575)
Concerning (b) matter which he characterizes as “something which
possesses the primary qualities” (
NE
§355) he also
wants to prove that it does not exist (
NE
§364). This is
so because all that exists are substances that have to be infinitely
divisible. Matter, however,
cannot be divided into parts of parts to infinity either in respect of
its spatial dimensions, or of that dimension which appears as
temporal. And matter, as usually defines, and as we have defined it,
has no other dimensions. … And therefore it cannot exist.
NE
§362)
The existence of matter can also not be inferred on the basis of the
prima facie existence of what I perceive “by means of the sense
organs of our bodies”, i.e., of what he calls
“sensa” (
NE
§373), because it is erroneous
to believe that matter as the presumed outside cause of a sensum has
the same qualities as a sensum and thus has to exist (
NE
§365). He conjectures that if there are outside causes of sensa
they must be substances which are “of a spiritual nature”
NE
§371). When it comes to (c) sensa McTaggart holds
that one has to distinguish between two classes of percepta, those
perceived by introspection (mental states, spiritual data) and those
that are given by means of sense organs (sensa). The latter do not
really exist, they just lead to the illusion that they exist. This is
so because of a confusion between a perception that is part of the
percipient and therefore spiritual or mental in character and what is
perceived, i.e., the object of a perception or the perceptum
NE
§373). However, a perceptum as a sensum cannot,
according to McTaggart, have parts within parts to infinity and thus
cannot really exist because what exists has no simple parts (cf. 355).
Having disposed of matter and sensa this way, he then discusses the
ontological status of (d) spirit or spirituality. He declares that
“the quality of spirituality … is the quality of having
content, all of which is the content of one or more selves”
NE
§381) and states that “nothing can have this
quality except substances, and so nothing but substances are
spiritual” and exist or are real (ibid.). A self or an I he
takes to be a simple quality of a substance which is known to me to be
myself by direct perception, i.e., is known by acquaintance, not by
description. The distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and
knowledge by description he explicitly takes up from Russell
NE
§382). He then surmises that it is very likely that
the I, i.e., the substance that possesses the quality of being a self,
persists through time because “I perceive myself as persisting
through time, or the real series which appears as a time-series”
NE
§395). He also holds that selves are conscious
without having to be self-conscious (
NE
§397) and that
no experience is possible “which is not part of a self”
NE
§400) though it cannot belong to more than one self
NE
§401). He concludes:
As all the content of spirit falls within some self, and none of it
falls within more than one self, it follows that all existent selves
form a set of parts of that whole which consists of all existent
spirits. (
NE
§404)
Although written more than twenty years after G. E. Moore’s
“The Refutation of Idealism” (see below) and without
mentioning him at all, McTaggart thus arrives at the exact opposite to
the conclusion that Moore defended. Regarding (e) cogitations which
comprise perceptions, awarenesses of characteristics, judgments,
assumptions, imaginings, only perceptions can form an infinite series
required for existence (
NE
§406). Perception he
characterizes as awareness of a substance
as having
such and
such qualities (
NE
§407). The outcome he wants to have
reached so far is this:
… spirit, unlike matter and sense, can really exist. But it can
do so only if it contains no parts except perceptions and groups of
perceptions. (
NE
§426)
All these considerations as to the character or the nature of time,
matter, sensa, spirit and cogitations are meant to establish two
results. The first is “that nothing which is spiritual is also
“material or sensal” (
sic
) [although this result]
leaves it possible that what is really spiritual may
appear
as being material or sensal” (
NE
§431). The second
is McTaggart’s version of idealism:
No substance has material or sensal qualities, and all reality is
spirit. This conclusion I propose … to call by the name of
Idealism (
NE
§432)
in an ontological sense though, as he remarks, the terms
“Spiritualism” or “Psychism” might be
“intrinsically better” to characterize his point of view
NE
§432). It is interesting to note that McTaggart does
not believe that his metaphysical (ontological) spiritual idealism
excludes a realistic stance in epistemology. This is so because he
characterizes epistemological realism as a position that is based on a
correspondence theory of truth according to which a belief is true if
it corresponds to a fact. Because everything that is real is a fact
and (according to McTaggart) nothing is unreal (although it may not
exist), all beliefs about something are beliefs about facts and
consequently about something that is epistemologically real. Although
this concept of epistemological realism is vague, it suggests that
McTaggart thought of idealism not primarily in opposition to realism
but much more in terms of a doctrine that is opposed to materialism,
that is, as an ontological rather than epistemological doctrine.
However, since McTaggart makes clear that since matter and mind are
the only candidates for genuine substantiality
of which we
know
, and thus that while only mind or spirit satisfies the
ontological conditions for substantiality,
for all we know
there might be some other alternative, so his argument for idealism is
not conclusive. His argument is predominantly ontological, but does
presuppose one crucial epistemological premise.
Idealism was also a prominent mode of philosophy in the United States
during the late nineteenth century, alongside pragmatism, but while
pragmatism remained prominent throughout the twentieth century,
whether under that name or not, the reputation of idealism was
permanently damaged by a movement toward “realism” early
in the century (which also attacked pragmatism, although without the
same effect). Earlier in the nineteenth century, the popular essayist
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most philosophical of the New England
“Transcendentalists”, had struck many idealist themes, and
after the Civil War a school of “St. Louis Hegelians”
emerged, whose efforts were primarily exegetical. But the leading
American idealist was Josiah Royce (1855–1916). Deeply
influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, particularly the lectures that
Peirce gave in Cambridge in 1898, Royce incorporated aspects of
Peirce’s pragmatism into his version of idealism, giving an
idealist spin to Peirce’s conception of truth as what would be
known at the end of inquiry were that ever to be reached. But
Royce’s argument always remained that epistemology must
ultimately lead to what he himself called metaphysical idealism.
A prolific author who published fifteen books before his early death
at sixty, Royce launched his defense of idealism in his first book,
The Religious Aspect of Philosophy
(1885). In this work he
introduced his first novel argument, for idealism, what he called the
argument from error. Royce’s claim is that skepticism begins
with insistence upon the possibility of error, but that recognition of
that possibility presupposes not just that
there is
“absolute truth” (1885: 385) but that in some sense we
have to
know
that absolute truth, or at least some aspect of
it, in order to have an object even for our erroneous claims, thus
that we must have some access to a “higher inclusive
thought” even to make an erroneous knowledge claim. In his
words,
Either then there is no error, or else judgments are true and false
only in reference to a higher inclusive thought, which they
presuppose, and which must, in the last analysis, be assumed as
Infinite and all-inclusive. (1885: 393)
Royce holds that we must have some sort of apprehension of the
“higher inclusive thought” in order to be able even to
make our errors, and then that the growth of human knowledge over time
consists in increasing apprehension of this all-inclusive truth
without any limit being prescribed by our subordinate status. This is
the epistemological optimism that pervades all Royce’s work and
his subsequent debate with Bradley.
This account does not yet make clear why Royce thought that
epistemology must lead to ontological idealism; that becomes clearer
in his subsequent works. Royce’s next major statement of his
idealism came in
The Spirit of Modern Philosophy
(1892). The
second part of the book more fully develops Royce’s own
arguments for idealism. Here Royce gives a clear definition of his
conception of idealism and adds to the previous argument from error a
second argument, from meaning. The core of this argument is that the
intended object of an expression or thought must itself be conceived
or understood in some way, so that we always mean what are in some
sense our own ideas, although of course at any particular moment we
hardly know or understand everything about the object to which we
refer; that is why the idea that is the ultimate object of reference
may be much greater than the idea that refers. In Royce’s
words,
The self that is doubting or asserting, or that is even feeling its
private ignorance about an object, and that still, even in consequence
of all this, is
meaning
, is
aiming at
such an
object, is in essence identical with the self for which this object
exists in its complete and consciously known truth. (1892:
370–1)
By means of this argument, any restriction of Royce’s position
to a purely epistemological one is eliminated: the possibility of
meaning requires an identity between what means and what is meant, and
since anything might be meant, anything at all must in some way be
identical with what means, subjects and their ideas and expressions,
even though that identity can hardly be absolute, and the ordinary
conscious subject may seem very different and more limited than the
one
Self” (1892: 373) that underlies the
appearances of both ordinary subjects and ordinary objects.
Royce develops an even more systematic argument for an idealism that
is both epistemological and ontological in his
magnum opus
the two volumes of his 1899–1900 Gifford lectures published as
The World and the Individual
. As the title suggests, a major
theme of this work is explicating in detail the relationship between
underlying reality and ordinary individual, conscious human selves. In
this book, Royce expounds his idealism as the last of the four
possible “conceptions of being”. The first is the
“realistic conception of Being”, which is defined by the
conception of being as completely
independent
of thought, so
that whatever is true of it is true quite independently of what may be
thought about it. The second conception of being is the mystical
conception. As the defining notion of the realist conception was
independence, the defining notion of mysticism is the opposite, namely
immediacy, the idea that thought and its object must be one. The third
conception of being, which Royce sometimes calls the theory of
“validity”, is that “To be real now means,
primarily,
to be valid, to be true, to be in essence the standard
for ideas
” (I:202). This conception of being tries to
retain realism’s recognition of independence through the thought
that “some of my ideas are already, and apart from my private
experience, valid, true, well-grounded” (I:204) and
mysticism’s identification of subject and object through the
thought that reality is itself possible experience, but adds structure
to the now unified realms of thought and being instead of eliminating
structure.
The fourth conception of being is a fuller development of the
conception of meaning that Royce had introduced in
The Spirit of
Modern Philosophy
(1892). He now links meaning to purpose, and
his thought is that the meaning of a term is an intended purpose, a
problem to be solved, for example a mathematical problem to be solved
or object to be constructed, and that in using a term the user already
has some approach to solving the problem in mind but the full solution
remains to be developed, may never be fully developed in the life of a
particular individual, but is in some sense already included in the
larger thought that constitutes reality. Reaching back to both Hegel
and Kant, Royce conceives of the progress of knowledge as making the
meaning of our ideas more determinate. In this he is also influenced
by Peirce, and his notion of meaning is clearly a version of
Peirce’s approach to truth, on which a proposition is true if it
would be affirmed at the final stage of human inquiry, with the
difference that while for Peirce the final stage of human enquiry is
essentially a regulative ideal without ontological commitment, for
Royce, the comprehensive meaning in which all ideas would be fully
determinate is actually thought, although by a sort of super-self, not
by any particular finite human self or even by all the selves thinking
at any one time. Royce makes the transition from thought to being by
stating that
In its wholeness the world of Being is the world of individually
expressed meanings, an individual life, consisting of the individual
embodiments of the wills represented by all finite ideas. (1892:
I:341–2)
Royce’s arguments for idealism collectively, which in many ways
return to the basic form of modern idealism pioneered by Green, whose
Prolegomena
had been published just a couple of years before
Royce’s own career began, illustrate the pressure that often
forced a move from epistemology to an idealist ontology. The
epistemological argument begins with the insight that our knowledge in
some way or another always reflects the structure of our own
consciousness and thought. But the difference between what any
particular individual believes or even knows at any particular time
and what may be true and be known as a whole, at a time or over time,
is too great to ignore, and must be resolved. But once it has been
assumed that thought or mind itself is the proper object of knowledge,
the only way to do this is to make a contrast between individual
thought and some sort of supra-individual thought. At the outset of
modern idealism, in Berkeley, that takes the form of the infinite
mind, God, contrasted to individual, human minds; in later forms, such
as those of Green and Royce, the supra-individual mind is not always
identified with God, but plays the same role. In the cases of both
Green and Royce, the union of epistemology and ontology also provided
the basis for a moral idealism based on an insistence upon the
underlying commonality of individual human selves in the larger self
that Royce called the Absolute. But we will not be able to trace that
line of thought here, and will instead conclude with the suggestion
that many subsequent philosophers drew back from the full-blooded
idealism offered by Green, Bradley, McTaggart, and Royce in favor of
what was supposed to be an ontological realism, but which nevertheless
continued to harbor at least epistemological grounds for idealism.
This might seem a surprising claim, since the immediate response both
to the British idealists and to Royce in the U.S. came from
philosophers who identified themselves as realists. A case in point
would be Bertrand Russell.
Before we turn to Russell, however, we will pause for a look at
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who, as already suggested,
was a considerable influence on the later work of Royce. Whereas Royce
was convinced that epistemology must ultimately lead to metaphysical
idealism, Peirce was led in his philosophical development from
metaphysical realism to metaphysical idealism while supporting all the
way what has here been characterized as an epistemological ground for
idealism. Peirce, definitely the most original American philosopher of
his era, was the son of a famous Harvard mathematician. He was a fired
from a teaching post at Johns Hopkins because he had the temerity to
begin residence with the woman who would become his second wife before
his divorce from his first wife had been finalized, and was never able
to get another academic position. He thus had to spend much of his
career as an employee of United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, and
then lived his final years in independent but dire circumstances,
supported in part by subscription lecture series that William James
arranged for him to give in Cambridge. Although he was highly
recognized and even supported by many of his academically much more
successful philosophical contemporaries, among them Royce and James,
and although he produced an impressive amount of writing (the Peirce
Edition Project that is in charge of publishing his writings will, if
ever finished, contain more than twenty volumes) he never succeeded in
elaborating his ideas in book form. Instead he published most of his
work in intellectual and learned journals (
Proceedings der
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, The Nation, Popular Science, The Monist, The Open
Court
) and encyclopedias (Baldwin’s
The Century
Dictionary and Cyclopedia
). There are also quite a number of
manuscripts he wrote for different lecture series but never published.
They comprise the early Harvard lectures on
The Logic of
Science
(1865) and the early Lowell Lectures on the same topic
(1866) as well as the Cambridge Lectures on
Reasoning and the
Logic of Things
(1898) and the later Harvard lectures on
Pragmatism
(1903).
Peirce’s metaphysical view are intimately connected with his
claim “that logic is the science of representations in general,
whether mental or material” (
Chronological Edition
CE
1.169) and with his stipulations concerning the structure
and status of what he calls “representation”. In his early
writings, while trying to answer the question as to the grounds of the
objective validity of synthetic inferences (a question which he takes
to be at the center of Kant’s theoretical philosophy), he
develops a notion of representation according to which
[A] representation is anything which is supposed to stand for another
and which might express that other to a mind which truly could
understand it. (
CE
1.257)
This characterization of a representation is supposed to make the
representation “mind-independent”, so to speak:
instead of being restricted to something within the mind, [the
representation] is extended to things which do not even address the
mind. (
CE
1.323)
Peirce might have come to this conception of a representation by
relying on a phenomenological analysis of what he takes to be
constitutive of every experience. For him
experience has three determinations—three different references
to a substratum or substrata, lying behind it and determining it.
CE
1.168)
This is so because every experience is determined (1) by an external
object, (2) by our soul and (3) by “the idea of a universal
mind” (an “archetypal idea”). Within representations
he distinguishes in the early writings between a copy (“a
representation whose agreement with its object depends merely upon
sameness of predicates”,
CE
1.257), a sign (“a
representation whose reference to its object is fixed by
convention”,
CE
1.257) and a symbol (“a
representation whose correspondence with its object is of the same
immaterial kind as a sign but is founded nevertheless in its very
nature”
CE
1.323). Later he changed the terminology and
used instead of “copy” and “sign” the terms
“Icon” and “Index”, which led to his better
known distinction between Icon, Index and Symbol as different kinds of
representations. Each of these different kinds is determined by a
difference in its way of denoting and/or connoting its object while
all of them share the characteristics of having to have (1) a relation
to an object (2) under a specific form (e.g., similarity, by
convention) and (3) a relation to an interpretant, i.e., to a
“consciousness” (cf.
CE
1.272 f.). From his
analysis of the nature of a representation Peirce draws the
metaphysical conclusion that “[w]hatever is is a
representation” (
CE
1.324) or “all is
representation” (
CE
1.326). He arrives at this
conclusion in a somewhat obscure way that seems to be based on the
conviction that everything there is represents itself or is a
representation of itself
under an interpretation
. Peirce does
not immediately recognize his position as a form of idealism. Rather,
because representations are neutral with respect to their status of
being material or mental he can think of material objects as
representations whose interpretant is either the representation itself
or some (non-human) consciousness for which the representation can
function as a symbol, and he can think of mental items like general
terms or concepts as universals that exist “out there” in
a world that comprises next to copies and conventional signs what he
calls ideas (cf.
CE
1.168). However, it is obvious that this
view commits Peirce to a position that implies the (metaphysical)
reality of universals, a position he explicitly and happily endorses
(cf.
CE
1.358 ff.). And the very fact that every
representation has both a denotative and a connotative function makes
the basic epistemological premise for idealism, namely the necessary
isomorphism between knowledge and the known, an element of his
view.
Whereas in his earlier writings Peirce is very explicit about the
metaphysical/ontological implications of his representational
position, he is reluctant to go into metaphysical discussions in his
later writings, where he is primarily concerned with formulating and
defending his conception of Pragmatism. Instead he urges that his
Pragmatism is not a metaphysical doctrine and is in fact
metaphysically neutral. In a draft of a popular article on Pragmatism
(1907), never published in his lifetime, he writes
that pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt
to determine any truth of things. It is merely a method of
ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts.
The Essential Peirce
EP
2.400)
He proclaims, most unambiguously in his Harvard lectures on
Pragmatism
(1903), that one can establish Pragmatism as a
methodological maxim on the basis of epistemological (in later years:
semiotic) considerations that have to start from a phenomenological
analysis of experience. To provide this analysis is the task of what
he calls Phenomenology (used explicitly in allusion to Hegel, cf.
EP
2.143 f.) which is in Peirce’s taxonomy the first of
the main branches of philosophy because on it rest what he takes to be
the other branches of philosophy, i.e., normative science and
metaphysics (cf.
EP
2.146 f.). Phenomenology is the
discipline
whose task is to make out what are the elements of appearance that
present themselves to us every hour and every minute whether we are
pursuing earnest investigations, or are undergoing the strangest
vicissitudes of experience, or are dreamily listening to the tales of
Scheherazade. (
EP
2.147)
According to Peirce, phenomenological considerations, i.e.,
considerations spelled out in the Phenomenology, show that in whatever
can be experienced there are at least two distinct series of
categories involved that make this experience possible. Some of them
are universal, i.e., are constitutive of every phenomenon, others
particular, i.e., belong to a phenomenon if looked at under a specific
aspect (cf.
EP
2.148) like its quantitative, qualitative,
relational etc. determinations. As universal categories he identifies
three which he names Firstness/Category the First/First,
Secondness/Category the Second/Second, and Thirdness/Category the
Third/Third respectively. He defines them thus:
Category the First is the Idea of that which is such as it is
regardless of anything else. That is to say, it is a
Quality
of Feeling. Category the Second is the Idea of that which is such as
it is as being Second to some First, regardless of anything else and
in particular regardless of any
law
, although it may conform
to a law. That is to say, it is
Reaction
as an element of the
Phenomenon. Category the Third is the Idea of that which is such as it
is as being a Third, or Medium, between a Second and its First. That
is to say, it is
Representation
as an element of the
Phenomenon. (
EP
2.160)
These definitions are meant to capture what is essential to every
phenomenon. They are interpreted in more familiar terms by Peirce as
attributing to every phenomenon the characteristics of presentness or
immediacy (Firstness), struggle or resistance (Secondness) and what
may be described as general openness to conceptual interpretation
(Thirdness) as fundamental and irreducible features. Peirce is ready
to credit Hegel with a similar view (“I consider Hegel’s
three stages as being, roughly speaking, the correct list of Universal
Categories”,
EP
2.148). However, he criticizes Hegel
for mistakenly not allowing these categories to be independent of each
other. He believes that the reason for this failure on Hegel’s
part lies in his being
possessed with the idea that the Absolute is One. …
Consequently, he wishes to make out that the three categories have not
their several independent and irrefutable standings in thought.
Firstness and Secondness must somehow be
aufgehoben
EP
2.177)
Although this criticism might be justified from a Peircean
phenomenological point of view it poses at the same time a problem for
him because he now has to give an account of how the professed
independence of his universal categories can be integrated into his
general representational picture of reality, a picture according to
which everything that is real has to have the character of Thirdness
and therefore is somehow related to everything else in virtue of its
interpretative or representational character, i.e., in virtue of its
status as an interpretant.
It looks as if Peirce in his later years (after ca. 1905) tried to
solve this problem by giving his phenomenological claims a
metaphysical underpinning. For him metaphysics is that part of
philosophy that gives an account of the
results
of what
philosophy in the form of Phenomenology and as a normative science has
accomplished. Here Peirce exploits the fundamental idealist premise
that there is a necessary isomorphism between thought and being:
according to him,
[m]etaphysics consists in the results of the absolute acceptance of
logical principles not merely as regulatively valid, but as truths of
being. Accordingly, it is to be assumed that the universe has an
explanation, the function of which, like that of every logical
explanation, is to unify its observed variety. It follows that the
root of all being is One; and so far as different subjects have a
common character they partake of an identical being. This, or
something like this, is the monadic clause of the law. Second, drawing
a general induction from all observed facts, we find all realization
of existence lies in opposition, such as attractions, repulsions,
visibilities, and centres of potentiality generally…. This is,
or is a part of, a dyadic clause of the law. Under the third clause,
we have, as a deduction from the principle that thought is the mirror
of being, the law that the end of being and highest reality is the
living impersonation of the idea that evolution generates.
CP
1.487)
The term “law” in this characterization is equivalent to
what he terms “regularity” “in the universe of
representations
” (cf.
CP
1.480). The specific
version of metaphysics he is advocating shows up in his writings in
the shape of what he calls his doctrine of
Synechism
. He
defines Synechism as
that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of
continuity as of prime importance in philosophy and, in particular,
upon the necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity. (Collected
Papers =
CP
6.169)
This synechistic doctrine, he declares,
gives room for explanations of many facts which without it are
absolutely and hopelessly inexplicable; and further that it carries
along with it the following doctrines: first, a logical realism of the
most pronounced type; second, objective idealism; third, tychism, with
its consequent thorough-going evolutionism. We also notice that the
doctrine presents no hindrances to spiritual influences, such as some
philosophies are felt to do. (
CP
6.163)
Tychism “or the doctrine that absolute chance is a factor of the
universe” (
CP
6.201) he takes to be an essential
element of synechistic philosophy because it
must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the
regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth,
and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere
specialized and partially deadened mind. (
CP
5.102)
He is committed to objective idealism as well as to logical realism
because of his view that (to use a phrase favored very much by
Bradley) “in the end” everything there is is a
representation. It is within this synechistic framework based on
tychism that, according to Peirce, the independence of Firstness and
Secondness can be shown to be a necessary condition for Thirdness.
This is so because continuity (which he identifies with Thirdness) and
chance (as the organizing principle of evolution) could not be
accounted for if there were no independence of the three universal
categories. He is very explicit about this connection between his
metaphysical and his representational views when he writes:
Permit me further to say that I object to having my metaphysical
system as a whole called Tychism. For although tychism does enter into
it, it only enters as subsidiary to that which is really, as I regard
it, the characteristic of my doctrine, namely, that I chiefly insist
upon continuity, or Thirdness, and, in order to secure to Thirdness
its really commanding function, I find it indispensable fully [to]
recognize that it is a third, and that Firstness, or chance, and
Secondness, or Brute reaction, are other elements, without the
independence of which Thirdness would not have anything upon which to
operate. Accordingly, I like to call my theory Synechism, because it
rests on the study of continuity. (
CP
6.202)
In virtue of the robust idealistic elements contained in his synechism
it is safe to say that Peirce’s final philosophy exhibits all
the traits that are characteristic of metaphysical idealism prevalent
in Anglo-American philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.
9. The Fate of Idealism in the Twentieth Century
Both epistemological and ontological idealism came under massive
attack in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century by George
Edward Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970),
while in the United States Royce’s position was attacked by a
school of younger “New Realists”, to some extent inspired
by his life-long interlocutor William James, who included E.B. Holt
and his younger Harvard colleague Ralph Barton Perry, and later Roy
Wood Sellars (the father of Wilfrid Sellars, who later moved back to a
form of Kantianism), and Arthur Lovejoy. Both Moore and Russell had
more of an enduring influence on the course of analytic philosophy
than did the American New Realists, but also reveal the continuing
impulse to idealism in spite of their own efforts, so we will focus on
them. Both of them take idealism to be spiritualism in the spirit of
Berkeley and Bradley (neither of them mentions their own Cambridge
tutor McTaggart!), i.e., they think of idealism as a position
characterized by the claim that the universe (Moore) or whatever
exists or whatever can be known to exist (Russell) is spiritual
(Moore) or in some sense mental (Russell). Although their attack was
so influential that even more than a hundred years later, any
acknowledgment of idealistic tendencies is viewed in the
English-speaking world with reservation, it is by no means obvious
that they actually thought they had disproved idealism. On the
contrary, neither Moore nor Russell claimed to have demonstrated that
the universe or what exists or can be known to exist is not spiritual
or mental. All that they take themselves to have shown is that there
are no good philosophical (in contradistinction to, e.g., theological
or psychological) arguments available to support such a claim. Moore
especially is very explicit about this point. He devotes the first
five pages of his famous piece from 1903, “The Refutation of
Idealism”, to assuring the reader over and over that
I do not suppose that anything I shall say has the smallest tendency
to prove that reality is not spiritual. … Reality may be
spiritual, for all I know; and I devoutly hope it is. … It is,
therefore, only with idealistic
arguments
that I am
concerned; … I shall have proved that Idealists have
no
reason whatever
for their conclusion. (
Philosophical
Studies
, pp. 2 f.)
And Russell in his
The Problems of Philosophy
(1912), in a
similar vein, warns the reader, after emphasizing the strangeness of
an idealistic position from a common sense point of view:
[I]f there were good reasons to regard them [viz. physical objects] as
mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because
it strikes us as strange. (1912 [1974: 38])
Moore and Russell found two main arguments for idealism to be
fallacious. The first concerns Berkeley’s idealistic principle
that being consists in being perceived, the second the converse claim,
attributed to Bradley, that thought entails being. Their criticism of
the first as well as their rebuttal of the second argument stems from
certain convictions they share as to the nature of knowledge. The
assault on Berkeley is staged by Moore most extensively in “The
Refutation of Idealism” (1903). Here he holds that if there is
an argument to prove the idealistic claim that the universe is
spiritual (1903: 433) then this reasoning must rely either at the
beginning or at some point later in the argument on the premise
esse est percipi
I believe that every argument ever used to show that reality is
spiritual has inferred this (validly or invalidly) from
esse
is
percipere
” as one of its
premisses; and that this again has never been pretended to be proved
except by use of the premiss that
esse
is
percipi
(1903: 437)
According to Moore the proposition
esse is percipi
does
at least
assert that whatever is, is
experienced
” (1903: 437) which is meant in turn to
assert
that wherever you have
[esse] you also have
percipi
; that whatever has the property
also has
the property that it is
experienced
. (1903: 440)
After a lengthy analysis of this proposition he points out that the
conception of the connection between an experience and what is
experienced that the idealist is entertaining has tenuous consequences
that give rise to the question:
if we never experience anything but what is not an inseparable aspect
of
that
experience, how can we infer that anything whatever,
let alone
everything
is an inseparable aspect of
any
experience? (1903: 451)
An inference to such a conclusion cannot be justified. He concludes
that in order to avoid an idealistic position one is better off to
endorse a view according to which
I am as directly aware of the existence of material things in space as
of my own sensations, and
what
I am aware of with regard to
each is exactly the same—namely that in one case the material
thing, and in the other case my sensation does really exist (1903:
453)
This line of reasoning, remarkably similar to what Kant had argued in
the Fourth Antinomy in the first edition of the
Critique of Pure
Reason
but rejected as an inadequate refutation of idealism in
the second edition, was picked up in an abbreviated form by Russell
ten years later in the chapter on idealism in his
The Problems of
Philosophy
, while the attack on Bradley, although foreshadowed in
Russell’s
Problems
, is spelled out rather lengthily
(and a bit nastily) by Moore in “The Conception of
Reality” from 1917–18. Their main objection against the
two idealistic arguments seems to be that they rely on unjustly
presupposing that the mental act of relating to an object (perceiving,
thinking, knowing, experiencing) is a necessary condition for the
existence of this object. The fallacy involved here consists in
failing to make “the distinction between act and object in our
apprehending of things”, as Russell (1912 [1974: 42]) puts it,
or, in Moore’s terminology of
The Refutation
, in
wrongfully identifying the content of “consciousness” with
its object (1912 [1974: 19 ff.]). As soon as this identification is given up and that
distinction is made it is at least an open question whether things
exist independently of the mind, and idealism
insofar it neglects
this distinction and holds fast to that identification
is refuted
because based on an invalid argument.
Whether this line of criticism of idealistic positions is indeed
successful might be controversial, and even if it strikes home against
Berkeley the charge that they simply conflate knowledge and object
hardly seems to do justice to the elaborate arguments of the late
nineteenth-century idealists. However, if one is convinced of the
correctness of this criticism (as no doubt Moore and Russell were)
then it makes way for interesting new perspectives in epistemology and
metaphysics. This is so because if this criticism is taken to be
successful it permits us to explore the possibility of a theory of
knowledge that starts from the assumptions (a) that objects exist
independently of us and (b) that to know an object means to be
immediately related to the object as it is in itself (i.e., as it is
undistorted by and independent from any mental activity). Both Moore
and Russell can be understood to have embarked on this exploration in
the course of which they came to conceive a position which is aptly
called by Peter Hylton “Platonic Atomism” (2013: 329).
The basic idea of this Platonic atomism seems to be the following:
Knowledge consists in standing in an immediate relation to an
independent individual object (assumption b). This immediate relation
to individual objects is best known under Russell’s term
“acquaintance”. If, by stipulation, knowledge is
ultimately knowledge “by acquaintance”, then knowledge is
restricted to knowledge of individual objects. Knowledge basically is
knowledge
of
something or non-propositional knowledge.
However, although this rather frugal conception of knowledge might be
sufficient to give an account of the possibility of non-propositional
knowledge, it is not that easy to see how such a conception can give a
sensible explanation of propositional knowledge, i.e., of knowledge
that
something is so-and-so. Moore and Russell seem to have
been acutely aware of this difficulty as is documented in their very
explicit efforts to avoid it. It might have been their different
reactions to this difficulty which in the years to come led them to
proceed on diverging routes in philosophy. As is easy to imagine,
there are two obvious reactions to the problem of propositional
knowledge provided that assumption (b) is agreed upon. The first is to
claim that propositions (Moore prefers the term “judgment”
in this context) are individual objects with which the subject is
acquainted (if he or she claims to know
that
something is
so-and-so). The second is to broaden the concept of knowledge by not
restricting knowledge to knowledge by acquaintance but to allow for
other forms of
knowledge
as well. The first reaction
apparently was the reaction of Moore and is formulated most
prominently in his early piece “The Nature of Judgment”
(1899), while the second can be attributed to Russell and is
documented most vividly in his
The Problems of
Philosophy
According to Moore a proposition is composed out of concepts. If we
are to be acquainted with propositions we have to take their elements,
i.e., concepts, to have independent existence (because of assumption
a). Moore points out:
… we have approached the nature of a proposition or judgment. A
proposition is composed not of words, nor yet of thoughts, but of
concepts. Concepts are possible objects of thought; but that is no
definition of them. It merely states that they may come into relation
with a thinker; and in order that they
may
do anything, they
must already
be
something. It is indifferent to their nature
whether anyone thinks them or not. They are incapable of change; and
the relation into which they enter with the knowing subject implies no
action or reaction. It is a unique relation which can begin to cease
with a change in the subject; but the concept is neither cause nor
effect of such a change. The occurrence of the relation has, no doubt,
its causes and effects, but these are to be found only in the subject.
(1899: para. 9)
Moore is well aware that this analysis of the nature of a proposition
leads to some version of what could be called “conceptual
realism”, according to which that what is “really”
real are concepts because they are the ultimate objects of
acquaintance. He explicitly states:
It would seem, in fact, …that a proposition is nothing other
than a complex concept. The difference between a concept and a
proposition, in virtue of which the latter alone can be called true or
false, would seem to lie merely in the simplicity of the former. A
proposition is a synthesis of concepts; and, just as concepts are
themselves immutably what they are, so they stand in infinite
relations to one another equally immutable. A proposition is
constituted by any number of concepts, together with a specific
relation between them; and according to the nature of this relation
the proposition may be either true or false. What kind of relation
makes a proposition true, what false, cannot be further defined, but
must be immediately recognized (1899: para. 12)
Moore also is very well aware that his view of the nature of concepts
commits him to the claim that the world
insofar as it is an object
of propositional knowledge
consists of concepts because these are
the only things one can be acquainted with if acquaintance is a
condition of knowledge. Thus he writes:
It seems necessary, then, to regard the world as formed of concepts.
These are the only objects of knowledge. They cannot be regarded
fundamentally as abstractions either from things or from ideas; since
both alike can, if anything is to be true of them, composed of nothing
but concepts. A thing becomes intelligible first when it is analyzed
into its constituent concepts. The material diversity of things, which
is generally taken as starting-point, is only derived; and the
identity of the concept, in several different things, which appears on
that assumption as the problem of philosophy, will now, if it instead
be taken as the starting-point, render the derivation easy. Two things
are then seen to be differentiated by the different relations in which
their common concepts stand to other concepts. The opposition of
concepts to existents disappears, since an existent is seen to be
nothing but a concept or complex of concepts standing in a unique
relation to the concept of existence. (1899: para. 16).
Moore confesses that “I am fully aware of how paradoxical this
theory must appear, and even how contemptible” (1899: para. 14).
And indeed one wonders whether such an account does not raise more
problems than it answers. Fortunately we do not have to be concerned
with this question here. However, if we ask whether Moore’s
theory really manages to avoid idealism, it is hard not to conclude
that its metaphysical commitments are precisely a form of idealism,
even if he has been led to his theory by an attempt to maintain
epistemological realism! After all, to claim that only concepts are
real, that they have a mode of being outside of space and time, that
they are non-physical and completely unaffected by any activity of a
thinking subject, does not sound very different from statements that
can rightly be attributed to, e.g., Hegel, or even ultimately Plato,
and that are meant to assert idealism. The main difference in this
case is that Moore’s conception of what a concept is has
virtually nothing to do with what Hegel means by
“concept”, but this does not suffice to establish
ontological anti-idealism. Although Moore might avoid identifying
concepts with the mental states of subjects by his insistence upon the
metaphysical independence of concepts, he comes dangerously close to
the point where the difference between ontological idealism and
ontological realism vanishes and this distinction becomes a question
of terminology.
Russell chooses a different path in the attempt to somehow reconcile
the idea that knowledge has to be understood as a relation of
acquaintance with objects with the phenomenon of propositional
knowledge. He is more flexible both with respect to kinds of knowledge
and with respect to kinds of objects with which we can be acquainted
than Moore is. First of all, he distinguishes between knowledge of
things and knowledge of truths. He recognizes two kinds of knowledge
of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.
Knowledge by acquaintance obtains whenever
we have
acquaintance
with anything of which we are directly
aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any
knowledge of truths. (1912 [1974: 46])
Knowledge by (definite) description obtains
when we know that it [i.e., the object] is “the
so-and-so”, i.e., when we know that there is one object, and no
more, having a certain property. (1912 [1974: 53])
The relation between these two kinds of knowledge is the
following:
[K]nowledge concerning what is known by description is ultimately
reducible to knowledge concerning what is known by acquaintance. (1912
[1974: 58])
Knowledge of
truths
is distinguished from these two kinds of
knowledge of
things
. Knowledge of truths consists in pieces
of knowledge that although they cannot be proven by experience are
such that we nevertheless “see” their truth (1912 [1974:
74]). Examples of truths that can be known this way are logical
principles, the principle of induction, and everything we know
priori
. This taxonomy of kinds of knowledge, Russell believes,
can account both for the possibility of non-propositional and
propositional knowledge and at the same time retain the claim as to
the primacy of the acquaintance-relation for knowledge.
The obvious question now is: if all knowledge is ultimately based on
acquaintance, what is it we can be acquainted with, i.e., what are the
legitimate objects of acquaintance? Because, according to Russell, the
acquaintance relation is a relation to individual things this question
translates into “what are the individual things we can be
acquainted with?” Russell’s answer to this question is
that there are exactly two kinds of things we can be acquainted with,
namely particulars, i.e., things that exist, and universals, i.e.,
things that subsist (cf. 1912 [1974: 100]). Particulars comprise
sense-data, thoughts, feelings, desires and memories of “things
which have been data either of the outer senses or of the inner
sense” (1912 [1974: 51]). Universals are
opposed to the particular things that are given in sensation. We speak
of whatever is given in sensation, or is of the same nature as things
given in sensation, as a
particular
; by opposition to this, a
universal
will be anything which may be shared by many
particulars. (1912 [1974: 93])
Universals are conceptual entities: “These entities are such as
can be named by parts of speech which are not substantives; they are
such entities as qualities or relations” (1912 [1974: 90]).
Because universals and particulars alike are possible objects of
acquaintance both have to be real. However, according to Russell they
are real in a different sense. Particulars have existence in time
whereas universals have timeless being. The first ones exist, the
other subsist. They form two different worlds in that the world of
particulars consists of items that are “fleeting, vague, without
sharp boundaries” whereas the world of universals “is
unchangeable, rigid, exact” (1912 [1974: 100]).
This rough outline of Russell’s epistemic universe is meant to
emphasize only those aspects of his position that are of relevance for
an assessment of idealistic tendencies in his approach to knowledge.
As in the case of Moore it is tempting to interpret his commitment to
a timeless world of universals as pointing if not to an endorsement at
least to a toleration of a position that is difficult to distinguish
from some version of an ontological idealism. But again one has to
acknowledge that such a verdict is not very significant because one
could as well describe this position as a version of ontological
realism. It just depends on what is claimed to be the distinctive
feature of idealism. If idealism is a position characterized by taking
for granted the reality of conceptual entities that are not
mind-dependent then both Moore and Russell endorse it. If idealism is
meant to be a position which takes conceptual items to be
mind-dependent, that is, dependent on particular minds, then both are
realists with respect to concepts. However, it is hard to see how
Russell can avoid the epistemological path to idealism given his views
about physical objects. This is so because of his sense-datum theory,
according to which what is immediately present to us, i.e., what we
are acquainted with when we are acquainted with particulars, are just
sense-data and not objects in the sense of individual things with
qualities standing in relations to each other. For him “among
the objects with which we are acquainted are not included physical
objects (as opposed to sense-data)” (1912 [1974: 52]). Physical
objects are constructions we form out of sense-data together with some
descriptive devices, and only with respect to these constructions can
we have knowledge by description, i.e., propositional knowledge. If
idealism is understood (as has been done here) as involving the claim
that what we take to be objects of knowledge are heavily dependent on
some activity of the knowing subject, then the very idea of an object
as a construction guarantees the endorsement of idealism. Thus, in
contrast to their self-proclaimed revolt against the idealism of
Berkeley and Bradley, the positions of both Moore and Russell are by
no means free of traits that connect them rather closely to well known
currents in modern idealism; and these features, above all the
supposition that knowers may be immediately presented with some sorts
of informational atoms, whether properties, sense-data, or whatever,
but that all further knowledge, or all knowledge beyond immediate
acquaintance, involves constructive activities of the mind, are common
throughout a great deal of recent philosophy.
To trace the subterranean presence of at least epistemological
idealism throughout the remainder of twentieth-century philosophy
would exceed the brief for this entry. There is room here for just a
few hints of how such an account would go. At Oxford, some influence
of idealism continued until World War II in the person of Robin George
Collingwood, who was influenced by Hegel and the Italian philosopher
Benedetto Croce but was a very original thinker. Collingwood’s
most characteristic position might be his claim that metaphysics is
the study of the presuppositions of human knowledge, at various
historical periods, rather than of independently existing entities;
thus he might be considered as adopting a fundamental epistemological
premise for idealism, although he does not seem to have drawn an
ontological conclusion from it—perhaps as a practicing
archaeologist as well as a philosopher, the physical world was just
too real to him for that. In Germany, Neo-Kantianism, especially of
the Marburg school, from Hermann Cohen to Ernst Cassirer, thus from
the 1870s to the 1940s, stressed human conceptualization, in
Cassirer’s case in the guise of “symbolic forms”,
while trying to steer clear of traditional metaphysical questions;
their position might thus also be considered a form of epistemological
rather than ontological premise for but not outright acceptance of
metaphysical idealism. Neo-Kantianism in turn influenced the broader
stream of analytic philosophy through the person of Rudolf Carnap,
whose
Logical Construction of the World
(1928) analyzes
knowledge in terms of relations constructed on perceived similarities
in qualities of objects, thus taking a subjectivist starting-point and
then adding constructive activities of the mind to it—a form of
epistemological idealism. Nelson Goodman’s
Structure of
Appearance
(1951) undertook a similar project. Subsequent to the
Logical Construction
, Carnap distinguished between questions
“internal” to a conceptual framework or system and
“external” questions about which conceptual framework to
adopt, which can be decided only on pragmatic or even aesthetic
grounds, and this too might be considered a form of epistemological
idealism. Thomas Kuhn’s famous conception of
“paradigms” of science which are not automatically
rejected because of refractory evidence but are given up only when an
alternative paradigm comes to seem preferable can be seen as being in
the Carnapian tradition, as can Hilary Putnam’s “internal
realism” of the 1980s, and both these positions thus reflect
some of the motives for epistemological idealism. Even W.V. Quine, who
was a committed physicalist in the sense of believing that other
sciences are in principle reducible to physics, nevertheless shared an
aspect of idealist epistemology in his conception of the “web of
belief”, that is, the idea that knowledge consists in a body of
beliefs, from particular observation statements down to logical
principles, which faces experience only as a whole and which can be
modified at any point within it in order to accommodate refractory
experience, as seems best. A similar idea was already to be found in
Cassirer’s early work
Substance and Function
(1912),
which points to the underlying impulse to epistemological idealism.
Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of the “space of
reasons”, taken up in Robert Brandom’s inferentialism,
also reflects this impulse, although Sellars always considered
himself, like his father, a scientific realist, and his most
explicitly Kantian work,
Science and Metaphysics
(1968),
gives what might be regarded as a pragmatist rather than idealist spin
to Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, interpreting the
noumenal as what would be known if science were complete, an idea
clearly inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce rather than by
Kant—although not completely different in spirit from
Royce’s idea that the error of our particular beliefs can be
understood only by comparison to a body of complete and completely
true beliefs, not to some independent, non-belief reality. These are
just a few examples of how some of the most prominent paradigms, to
borrow Kuhn’s term, of analytic philosophy still reflect the
impulse to epistemological idealism even though the name
“idealism” was anathematized by Moore, Russell, and the
New Realists.
However, one mid-twentieth century philosopher who had no qualms about
identifying himself as an idealist was Brand Blanshard
(1892–1987). The difference between Blanshard and many of the
mid-twentieth century analytic philosophers is precisely that
Blanshard accepted the assumption that there must be a necessary
isomorphism between knowledge and its object, and so was not content
to posit something real outside of the web of belief or space of
reasons, but brought reality into the realm of thought.
Blanshard was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then won
a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, where his tutor was
H.W.B. Joseph and he also met Bradley, a lifelong research fellow at
Merton. After earning an MA at Columbia, where he participated in a
research project under John Dewey, and then World War I service in
France, he completed his Oxford BA and then a PhD at Harvard under the
supervision of C.I. Lewis—so he had a very diverse philosophical
education. He taught at Swarthmore College from 1925 to 1944 and at
Yale from 1944 until 1961. Remarkably, Blanshard was at different
points in this career in the same department as each of the
Sellarses—he was an undergraduate at Michigan when Roy Wood
Sellars was a young teacher there, and was then Wilfrid
Sellars’s colleague during the latter’s tenure at Yale
from 1958 to 1963. There are affinities between his views and theirs,
especially with Wilfrid Sellars’s conception of
conceptually-informed perception; but they differ decidedly on the
issue of idealism vs. material realism. Blanshard’s idealism was
at full-strength in the two volumes of
The Nature of Thought
(1939), which was dedicated to the Oxford idealists H.H. Joachim and
E.F. Carritt; many arguments remained the same but the inference to
idealism was somewhat toned-down in his later trilogy,
Reason and
Goodness
(1961),
Reason and Analysis
(1962), and
Reason and Belief
(1974).
The affinity with Wilfrid Sellars lies in Book I of
The Nature of
Thought
, “Thought in Perception”, in which Blanshard
argues that we always perceive something “as this rather than
that”, thus that “the recognition of the universal and the
placing it in relation to other universals” are always
inseparable from perception (1939: volume I, p. 65). This recognition
of the conceptually-infused character of perception, the position
adopted by such Sellarsians as John McDowell (McDowell 1994) and
currently known as “conceptualism”, does not by itself
entail idealism. Rather, Blanshard’s idealism is on display in
Volume II, Book III of his work, “The Movement of
Reflection”, where he offers his theory of truth. Here he argues
that coherence rather than correspondence is not only the
“test” but also the “nature” of truth:
It is hard to see … how anyone could consistently take
coherence as the test of truth unless he also took it as a character
of reality. (1939: vol. II, p. 267)
Here Blanshard evinces the premise that knowledge must be isomorphic
with the known that underlies many arguments for idealism. His next
move, the characterization of coherence as a character of reality in
terms of systematicity, seems sufficiently abstract to remain neutral
about the ontology of reality. But he also argues that knowledge or
thought must be part of a
single
system with its object, the
world, (1939: vol. II, p. 292), which, since knowledge is
incontrovertibly mental, pushes the whole system in that direction.
His idealism becomes even clearer in his defense of the Bradleian
doctrine that all relations are internal relations, and as such
necessary relations, so that
These old sharp lines of mutual exclusion between essence, property,
and accident are like the lines of a surveyor, of great convenience,
no doubt, to ourselves, but misleading when taken as divisions marked
out by nature. (1939: vol. II, p. 480)
and when he further asserts
(i) that all things are
causally
related, directly or
indirectly; (ii) that being causally related involves being
logically
related. (1939: vol. II, p. 492)
This makes sense if the character of reality is ultimately either
conceptual or mental in nature, subject to logical relations, and not
purely physical, subject merely to causal relations. Blanshard’s
statement that the “old sharp lines” between essence and
accident are not so sharp after all might sound like W.V.O.
Quine’s thesis that there is no sharp distinction between the
analytic and the synthetic (Quine 1951), but while this leads Quine to treat all our
beliefs as if they are synthetic, ultimately dependent upon our total
response (the web of belief) to observation of external reality,
Blanshard’s position is more that all our beliefs are ultimately
analytic, that is, analyses of the conceptual structure of reality, or
of reality as a conceptual structure. Blanshard concludes his lengthy
argument with claims reminiscent of Hegel:
The aim of thought from its very beginning … was at
understanding. The ideal of complete understanding would be achieved
only when this system that rendered it necessary was not a system that
itself was fragmentary and contingent, but one that was all-inclusive
and so organized internally that every part was linked to every other
by intelligible necessity… . If our account of the end is
accepted, it will be found to throw light backward alone the whole
course of the inquiry. For it presents the goal which thought, from
its first stirrings in perception, has more or less unknowingly been
seeking, the end potential in every idea, the whole implicitly at work
at every stage in the movement of reflection, exercising its steady
pressure against irrelevant excursions and toward the completion of
fragmental knowledge into stable system. (1939: vol. II, p. 518)
Knowledge must be knowledge of necessary connections, and reality
itself must be an intrinsically intelligible system of connections or
internal relations. Blanshard’s combination of the premise of
the necessary isomorphism of knowledge and the known with the doctrine
of internal relations exemplifies both an epistemological and an
ontological argument for idealism.
Since the work of Blanshard in the 1930s, very few Anglophone
philosophers have attempted an explicit defense of idealism. Both John
Foster, in
The Case for Idealism
(1982) and Timothy Sprigge
in
The Vindication of Absolute Idealism
(1983) constructed
defenses of what Foster defined by the three theses
(1) Ultimate contingent reality is wholly mental. (2) Ultimate
contingent reality is wholly non-physical. (3) The physical world is
the logical product of facts about human sense-experience (Foster
1982: 3)
and what Sprigge called “panpsychism”. In both cases their
defenses were based on the epistemological premise that the object of
perception is fully present in the
act
of perception; Sprigge
added the argument that we must presuppose some noumenal ground for
our phenomenal objects; but unlike Kant, who after he stripped things
in themselves of their spatiality and/or temporality, insisted that we
remain otherwise agnostic about their nature, Sprigge argued that
the noumenal backing or “in itself” of the physical by
saying that it consists in innumerable mutually interacting centres of
experience, or, what comes to the same, of pulses and flows of
experience. (Sprigge 1983: 85)
In other words, the noumenal “backing” of the phenomenal
is nothing but the sum total of actual and possible human experience,
which Sprigge considers, in terms going back to Bradley, a
“concrete universal”. One could argue that this confused
the sum total of experience or thought about reality with reality
itself, but Sprigge rejects that kind of distinction from the
beginning of his argument; basically, he holds all knowledge to be
knowledge by acquaintance, and what we have when we subsume any
experience under a concept or universal is an immediate relation to
part of a concrete universal—so all of reality is itself mental
in nature.
These arguments have remained outliers, for analytical philosophy has
been overwhelmingly influenced by the paradigm of the natural
sciences, and often committed to some form of naturalism. Or so it
would seem; however, as the examples of Green and Royce as well as
earlier idealists such as Schelling make clear, there is no necessary
incompatibility between idealism and some forms of naturalism. In
particular, naturalism, especially broadly understood as a methodology
rather than ontology, is not automatically committed to the kinds of
realism, especially the naïve realism of assuming that our
representations reproduce the physical constitution of external
objects, that were initially opposed to idealism. One might even get
the impression that in contemporary scientifically-oriented philosophy
idealism is no longer considered a threat. The way in which in current
discussions in the philosophy of mind some idealistic conceptions
under the general name of “Panpsychism”, already used by
Sprigge, are taken seriously (Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers) seems to
be a good indicator of this tendency.
In so-called “continental” philosophy, we might suggest,
the main alternative to the idealism of the nineteenth century and
lingering tendencies to idealism in both Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian
phenomenology has not been any straightforward form of realism, but
rather the “life philosophy” (
Lebensphilosophie
pioneered by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1916), then extensively
developed by Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and, without
Heidegger’s political baggage, by the French philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). The central idea of this approach to
philosophy is that the starting-point of thought and knowledge is
neither anything “subjective” like sense-data or ideas nor
anything simply objective like the objects of science, but the lived
experience of “being-in-the-world”, from which both the
“subjective” such as sense-data and the
“objective” such as objects theorized by science are
abstractions or constructions made for specific purposes, but which
should not be reified in any way that creates a problem of getting
from one side to the other, let alone any possibility of reducing one
side to the other and thus ending up with a choice between idealism
and realism. Apart from all issues of style, and whether this has been
clear to the two parties or not, perhaps the deepest reason for the
on-going divide between “analytical” and
“continental” philosophy is the on-going tension between
the impulse to epistemological idealism and the attraction of the idea
that “being-in-the-world” precedes the very distinction
between subjective and objective. But then again, this underlying idea
of the Heideggerian approach to philosophy may already be suggested in
the work of Schelling, so perhaps the fundamental debate within
twentieth-century philosophy has taken place within a framework itself
inspired by a form of idealism, namely phenomenology. But this would
be a long story, for another day.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, idealism,
understood as a philosophical program, may be sharing the fate of many
other projects in the history of modern philosophy. Originally
conceived in the middle of the eighteenth century as a real
alternative to materialistic and naturalistic perspectives, it may now
become sublated and integrated into views about the nature of reality
that ignore metaphysical oppositions or epistemological questions
connected with the assumption of the priority of mind over matter or
the other way round. Instead the focus may be shifting to establishing
a “neutral” view according to which “anything
goes” (Feyerabend) as long as it does not contradict or at least
is not incompatible with our favored metaphysical, epistemological and
scientific (both natural and social) methods and practices.
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Spinoza, Baruch, 1677,
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Selected Secondary Literature
Allison, Henry E., 1983,
Kant’s Transcendental Idealism:
An Interpretation and Defense
, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press. Second edition, 2004.
Altmann, Matthew C. (ed.), 2014,
The Palgrave Handbook of
German Idealism
, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ameriks, Karl, 2000a,
Kant and the Fate of Autonomy: Problems
in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy
, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139173346
––– (ed.), 2000b,
The Cambridge Companion to
German Idealism
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
doi:10.1017/CCOL0521651786
–––, 2012,
Kant’s Elliptical
Path
, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693689.001.0001
Anscombe, G. E. M., 1976, “The Question of Linguistic
Idealism”,
Acta Fennica Philosophica
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188–215. Reprinted in her
Collected Papers, Volume I: From
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, Oxford: Blackwell, 1981,
pp.112–33.
Barrett, Clifford, 1932,
Contemporary Idealism in
America
, New York: Macmillan.
Baugh, Bruce, 2003,
The French Hegel: From Surrealism to
Postmodernism
, London: Routledge.
Beiser, Frederick C., 1987,
The Fate of Reason: German
Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
–––, 2002,
German Idealism: The Struggle
against Subjectivism, 1791–1801
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
–––, 2014,
Late German Idealism:
Trendelenburg and Lotze
, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682959.001.0001
Boucher, David and Andrew Vincent, 2012,
British Idealism: A
Guide for the Perplexed
, London: Continuum.
Boyle, Nicholas and Liz Dizley (eds), 2013,
The Impact of
Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought
, 4 volumes,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See especially Volume I,
Volume 1:
Philosophy and Natural Sciences
, Karl Ameriks
(volume ed.).
Volume 2:
Historical, Social and Political Thought
, John
Walker (volume ed.)
Volume 3:
Aesthetics and Literature
, Christoph Jamme and
Ian Cooper (volume eds)
Volume 4:
Religion
, Nicholas Adams (volume ed.)
Brandom, Robert B., 2000,
Articulating Reasons: An
Introduction to Inferentialism
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
–––, 2002,
Tales of the Mighty Dead:
Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality
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Reason in Philosophy: Animating
Ideas
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
–––, 2019,
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of
Hegel’s Phenomenology
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Breazeale, Daniel, 2013,
Thinking Through the
“Wissenschaftslehre”: Themes from Fichte’s Early
Philosophy
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Bubner, Rüdiger, 2003,
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Butler, Judith, 1987,
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Acknowledgments
The authors owe thanks to a group that met in Berlin in July, 2014, to
discuss a draft of the original version of this entry, including Dina
Emundts, Eckart Förster, Gunnar Hindrichs, Charles Larmore, Paul
Redding, Robert Stern, and Tobias Rosefeldt; we owe special thanks to
Larmore for his numerous and detailed comments on that draft and to
Stern for his generous assistance with the bibliography. We also owe
thanks to Justin Broackes for his participation in the seminar we gave
at Brown University in Spring and Fall 2013 where we also discussed
much of this material. This revised version owes thanks to the
participants of another seminar we gave at Brown in Spring 2020 and to
helpful comments by Allen Wood.
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Rolf-Peter Horstmann
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