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11. Knowledge Aims / C. Knowing Reality / 3. Idealism / a. Idealism

[general thoughs about reality as ideas]

19 ideas
The world is just the illusion of an appearance [Anon (Dham)]
     Full Idea: When a man considers this world as a bubble of froth, and as the illusion of an appearance, then the king of death has no power over him.
     From: Anon (Dham) (The DhammaPada [c.250 BCE], §13.170)
     A reaction: Strictly, of course, this says you can 'consider' things this way. Perhaps we could substitute 'pretends', but the world's great religions don't go in for that sort of thing. Berkeley would be shocked to learn he was approaching Buddhism.
The sun is always bright; it doesn't become bright when it emerges [Plutarch]
     Full Idea: The sun doesn't become bright when it emerges from the clouds; it always is bright.
     From: Plutarch (26: Oracles in Decline [c.85], §39)
     A reaction: Not an argument, but a nice appeal to common sense, like Russell's example of the cat that disappears behind the furniture and then reappears. To disagree with Plutarch here strikes me as the road to philosophical absurdity.
A whole is just its parts, but there are no smallest parts, so only minds and perceptions exist [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: The whole, if it is assumed to be body or matter, is nothing other than all of its parts; but this is absurd, since there aren't any smallest parts. Therefore there really exist only minds and their perceptions.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (Calculus Ratiocinator [1679], A6.4.279), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 7
     A reaction: Leibniz is sometimes labelled as an 'idealist', but this text is unusual in being so explicit, and he was mainly concerned to explain the reality of individual bodies. Monads were his final attempt to do this, not an attempt to escape into pure minds.
Leibniz said dualism of mind and body is illusion, and there is only mind [Leibniz, by Martin/Barresi]
     Full Idea: Leibniz held that dualism of mind and body is an illusion and that both are really the same thing, and that this thing is mind.
     From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by R Martin / J Barresi - Introduction to 'Personal Identity' p.22
     A reaction: I am puzzled by this, as Leibniz is famous for the view that mind and body are parallel. See idea 5038, and also 2109 and 2596. Monads are, of course, entirely mental, and are the building blocks of reality. Clearly I (and you) must read more Leibniz.
Leibniz is an idealist insofar as the basic components of his universe are all mental [Leibniz, by Jolley]
     Full Idea: To say that Leibniz is an idealist is to say that simple substances, the basic building-blocks of the universe, are all mental or at least quasi-mental in nature
     From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (works [1690]) by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz Ch.3
     A reaction: This is a bit different from the Berkelian type of idealism, which says that reality consists entirely of events within thinking minds. Is a monad the thinker or the thought?
We have no sensual experience of time and space, so they must be 'ideal' [Kant, by Pinkard]
     Full Idea: Time and space, Kant concluded, were 'ideal' since they could not be objects of direct sensory experience, and therefore had to be available only as 'pure' representations. ...Hence time and space were not 'objects' out there in the world.
     From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 01
     A reaction: Put like this it sounds like a crazy application of empiricism, but demanding that space and time are experienced by the 'senses'. Can't we way that we experience them, but not through any particular sense? Kant at his most idealist.
Objects having to be experiencable is not the same as full idealism [Gardner on Kant]
     Full Idea: Being subject to the condition of experienceability - that is, necessarily related in some manner to intuition - is not the same as being composed of experiences in any sense (and particularly Berkeley's sense).
     From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Sebastian Gardner - Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason 08 'Non-phenom'
     A reaction: This is Gardner's best explanation of why Kant is definitely not a Berkeleyan idealist (who claims objects ARE conscious experiences)
If we disappeared, then all relations of objects, and time and space themselves, disappear too [Kant]
     Full Idea: If we remove our own subject ...then all the constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.
     From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B059/A42)
     A reaction: Apart from over-cautious 'as appearances', this seems like simple Berkleyean idealism, and hence rather silly. The first commitment of realism (mine, anyway) is that at least time and space would survive our disappearance.
Mental presentation are not empirical, but concern the strivings of the self [Fichte]
     Full Idea: The intelligence has as the object of its presentation not an empirical perception, but rather only the necessary striving of the self.
     From: Johann Fichte (Review of 'Aenesidemus' [1792], Wks I:22), quoted by Ludwig Siep - Fichte p.62
     A reaction: The embodiment of Fichte's idealism. The 'striving' is the spontaneous application of concepts described the Kant. Kant looks outwards, but Fichte sees only the striving.
For Schopenhauer, material things would not exist without the mind [Schopenhauer, by Janaway]
     Full Idea: Schopenhauer is not a realist about material things, but an idealist: that is, material things would not exist, for him, without the mind.
     From: report of Arthur Schopenhauer (Fourfold Root of Princ of Sufficient Reason [1813]) by Christopher Janaway - Schopenhauer 2 'Fourfold'
     A reaction: Janaway places his views as close to Kant's, but it is not clear that Kant would agree that no mind means no world. Did Schopenhauer believe in the noumenon?
Schopenhauer can't use force/energy instead of 'will', because he is not a materialist [Lewis,PB on Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: Some say Schopenhauer would be less misunderstood if he had used 'force' or 'energy' rather than 'will' to characterise inner natures. But this would have steered his idealism towards materialism, of which he was an avowed opponent.
     From: comment on Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819]) by Peter B. Lewis - Schopenhauer 4
     A reaction: I presume therefore that Nietzsche's will to power is a commitment to materialism, since it occurs in material objects as well as minds.
The world only exists in relation to something else, as an idea of the one who conceives it [Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: The world which surrounds man exists only as idea - that is, only in relation to something else, the one who conceives the idea, which is himself. If any truth can be enunciated a priori, it is this.
     From: Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 001)
     A reaction: Yes, but the idea we have is of a real world. It is definitely not part of the idea that it is an idea (unlike my idea for a Christmas present).
We know reality because we know our own bodies and actions [Schopenhauer]
     Full Idea: The double knowledge of the nature and action of our own body is the key to the inner being of every phenomenon in nature.
     From: Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Idea [1819], I 105), quoted by Peter B. Lewis - Schopenhauer 4
     A reaction: Lewis calls this 'the heart of his philosophy'. Bodily awareness comes from acts of willing. So Lewis says 'the thing-in-itself is revealed to us in willing'. We experience Being and causation. Is he trying to combine idealism with the thing-in-itself?
'Idealism' says that everything which exists is in some sense mental [Russell]
     Full Idea: We shall understand 'idealism' to be the doctrine that whatever exists, or at any rate whatever can be known to exist, must be in some sense mental.
     From: Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 4)
     A reaction: The interesting thing here is the phrase 'in some sense', which takes on a new light when we begin once against to take seriously ideas such as panpsychism. If the boundary between mind and brain is blurred, so is that between realism and idealism.
Eliminative idealists say there are no objects; reductive idealists say objects exist as complex experiences [Dancy,J]
     Full Idea: The eliminativist idealist holds that there is no such thing as a material object; there is nothing but experience (idea, sensation). The reductive idealist holds that there are material objects, but they are nothing other than complexes of experience.
     From: Jonathan Dancy (Intro to Contemporary Epistemology [1985], 10.6)
     A reaction: Dancy says Berkeley was of the latter type. The distinction doesn't strike me as entirely clear. I can't make much sense of the words 'are' or 'exist' in the second theory. To say it is only experiences translates (to me) as 'doesn't exist'.
Idealism explains appearances by identifying appearances with reality [Heil]
     Full Idea: Idealism explains appearances by identifying appearances with reality.
     From: John Heil (Philosophy of Mind [1998], Ch.2)
     A reaction: Nicely put. There is a certain intellectual integrity about idealism, but it is still mad. The overall picture seems to me incoherent if we don't assume that appearances are bringing us close to reality (without ever quite getting there).
While space may just be appearance, time and change can't be, because the appearances change [Lowe]
     Full Idea: Although the appearance of distance and so of space may conceivably be no more than an appearance (as Berkeley held), the appearance of change and so of time cannot be no more than appearance - for the appearance of change involves change (in minds).
     From: E.J. Lowe (The Possibility of Metaphysics [1998], 7.9)
     A reaction: This would seem to place some sort of limit on idealism. Since it doesn't offer a barrier to solipsism, though, it is not much consolation. We mustn't forget that Parmenides and Zeno of Elea proved that change is just an illusion.
Idealism is the link between reason and freedom [Pinkard]
     Full Idea: Idealism was conceived as a link between reason and freedom.
     From: Terry Pinkard (German Philosophy 1760-1860 [2002], 14 Conc)
     A reaction: I'm beginning to see the Romantic era as the Age of Freedom, which followed the Age of Reason. This idea fits that picture nicely. Pinkard says that paradoxes resulted from the attemptl
Strong idealism is the sort of mess produced by a Cartesian separation of mind and world [Rowlands]
     Full Idea: Neo-Kantian idealism, and the excesses of recent versions of it, are precisely the sort of mess one can get oneself into through an uncritical acceptance of the dichotomizing of mind and world along Cartesian internalist lines.
     From: Mark Rowlands (Externalism [2003], Ch.3)
     A reaction: I am unconvinced that internalism about the mind (that its contents can be defined without reference to anything external) leads to this disastrous split. We don't have to abandon the links between an internal mind and the world.