Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought
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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought
408
Ultimate Reality
The first of the three questions is metaphysical: What is the ultimate
reality that is given in human experience? Historically, answers to this
question have fallen between two extremes. On the one hand is the Scepticism
of the 18th-century Empiricist David Hume, who held that the ultimate reality
given in experience is the moment by moment flow of events in the
consciousness of each individual. This concept compresses all of reality into a
solipsistic specious present – the momentary sense experience of one isolated
percipient. At the other extreme, followers of the 17th-century Rationalist
Spinoza adopted his definition of ultimate substance as that which can exist
and can be conceived only by itself. According to the first principle of his
system of pantheistic Idealism, God, or Nature, or Substance is the ultimate
reality given in human experience. Hegel said that this dogmatic absolutism
was the lion’s den into which all tracks enter and from which none ever
returns. In answering the first question, most philosophical Idealists steer
between Hume and Spinoza and in so doing create a number of types of
Idealism, which will be discussed below.
The Given
The second question to arise in defining Idealism is: What is given?
What results can be obtained from a logical interpretation and elaboration of
the given? According to Idealists the result, though it is frequently something
external to individual experience, is, nevertheless, a concrete universal, an
order system (like the invisible lattice structure of a crystal), or an ideality in
the sense explained earlier. In Hegel’s words: “What is real is rational, and
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what is rational is real.” Idealists believe that the collective human spirit of
intellectual inquiry has discovered innumerable order systems that are present
in external, nonhuman reality, or nature, and that this collective creative
intelligence has produced the various sciences and disciplines. This
production has required a long period of time called history. But history was
antedated by the achievements of ancestors who created languages and
religions and other primitive institutions. Consequently, the logical
interpretation and elaboration of the given is actually the complete
transformation of the earth by its various inhabitants; so that the moon flights
portend a similar transformation of the planetary system. An inherent part of
the collective intelligence is the spiritual force that Idealists call the spirit of
philosophy.
Change
The third question is: What position or attitude is a thinker to take
toward temporal becoming and change, and toward the presence of ends and
values within the given? According to Idealists, reason not only discovers a
coherent order in nature but also creates the state and other cultural
institutions, which together constitute the cultural order of a civilized society.
Idealistic political philosophers recognize the primacy of this cultural order
over the private order or family and over the public order – the governing
agencies and economic institutions. The conservation and enhancement of the
values of all three orders is the basic moral objective of every civilized people.
A useful distinction drawn by the German philosopher Ernst Cassier (1874-
1946), a member of the late 19th- and 20th-century Marburg school of Neo-
Kantianism, between the efficient energies and the formative energies of a
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people emphasizes the way in which these moral forces function: the efficient
energies are the conserving, and the formative are the creative forces in
society. It is on the basis of this distinction that Idealists have made a
contribution to international ethics, which charges that no nation has a right to
use its efficient energies to exercise power over another civilized people
except to further the formative energies of that people, to enrich their cultural
order. Ethically, then, there can be no power over without power for;
economic exploitation is wrong.
Modern Idealists have also created an Idealistic philosophy of history.
An eminent early 20th-century Italian Idealist, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952),
expressed it in the formula “every true history is contemporary history”; and
at the same time in France a subjective Idealist, Léon Brunschvicg (1869-
1944), agreed. There are close relations between the philosophy of history and
the philosophy of values.
Basic Arguments
Idealists delight in arguments. They agree with Socrates and Plato in
thinking that every philosopher should follow the argument wherever it leads,
and, like them, they believe that it will eventually lead to some type of
Idealism. Four basic arguments found in the literature of Idealism may be
briefly summarized.
The esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) argument of Berkeley.
According to this argument all of the qualities attributed to objects are sense
qualities. Thus hardness is the sensing of a resistance to a striking action, and
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heaviness is a sensation of muscular effort when holding the object in one’s
hand, just as blueness is a quality of visual experience. But these qualities
exist only while they are being perceived by some subject or spirit equipped
with sense organs. A classical 18th-century British Empiricist, George
Berkeley (1685-1753), rejected the idea that sense perceptions are caused by
material substance, the existence of which he denied. Intuitively he grasped
the truth that “to be is to be perceived.” The argument is a simple one, but it
has provoked an extensive and complicated literature, and to some
contemporary Idealists it seems irrefutable.
The Reciprocity Argument
Closely related to the esse est percipi argument is the contention that
subject and object are reciprocally dependent upon each other. It is impossible
to conceive of a subject without an object, since the essential meaning of
being a subject is being aware of an object and that of being an object is being
an object to a subject, this relation being absolutely and universally reciprocal.
Consequently, every complete reality is always a unity of subject and object –
i.e., an immaterial ideality, a concrete universal.
The Mystical Argument
In the third argument, the Idealist holds that in man’s most immediate
experience, that of his own subjective awareness, the intuitive self can achieve
a direct apprehension of ultimate reality, which reveals it to be spiritual. Thus
the mystic bypasses normal cognition, feeling that, for metaphysical probings,
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the elaborate processes of mediation interposed between sense objects and
their perceptions reduces its reliability as compared to the direct grasp of
intuition.
It is significant that the claims of this argument have been made by
numerous thinkers, in varying degrees Idealistic and mystical, living in
different periods and in different cultures. In ancient Greece, for example, it
was made by Plato, to whom the final leap to the Idea of the Good was
mystical in nature. In Indian Hindu Vedanta philosophy it was made by the
9th-century monistic theologian Shánkara, by the 12th-century dualistic
Brahmin theist Ramanuja, and by the recent philosopher-president of India
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. In Buddhism the claims were made by the
sometimes mystical, extreme subjectivism of the Vijñanavada school of
Mahayana (represented by Ashvaghosa in the 1st and Asanga in the 4th
century) and in China by the Ch’an school and by the 7th-century scholar Hui-
neng, author of its basic classic The Platform Scripture. In Islamic lands it
was made by Sufis (mystics) – in particular, by the 13th-century Persian
writer Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi. And in the recent West it was made by several
distinguished Idealists: in Germany, by the seminal modern theologian
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834); in France, by the evolutionary
intuitionist Henri Bergson (1859-1941), by the philosopher of action Maurice
Blondel (1861-1949), and by the Jewish religious Existentialist Martin Buber
(1878-1965); and in English-speaking countries, by the Scottish
metaphysician James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64) and the American Hegelian
William E. Hocking (1873-1966).
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The Ontological Argument
This famous argument originated as a proof of the existence of God. It
came to the 11th-century Augustinian, St. Anselm of Canterbury, as an
intuitive insight from his personal religious experience that a being conceived
to be perfect must necessarily exist, for otherwise he would lack one of the
essentials of perfection. God’s perfection requires his existence. Some Idealist
philosophers have generalized the argument to prove Idealism. They
distinguish conceptual essences that exist only in the intellect from categorial
essences that actually exist in re (in the thing). Every actual reality, therefore,
is a unity of one or more categorial essences and existence; and again, this
means that it is an immaterial ideality or concrete universal. According to
Hegel “the ideality of the finite” is “the main principle of philosophy.”
Types of Philosophical Idealism
Several types of Idealism have already been distinguished. Some
modern types should now be mentioned, classified first by cultures and then
by branches of philosophy.
Types Classed by Culture
Cultural differences suggest a division into Western and Oriental
Idealisms.
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Western Types
Berkeley’s Idealism is called subjective Idealism because he reduced
reality to spirits (his name for subjects) and the ideas entertained by spirits. In
Berkeley’s philosophy the apparent objectivity of the world outside the self
was accommodated to his subjectivism by claiming that its objects are ideas in
the mind of God. The foundation for a series of more objective Idealisms was
laid in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose epochal work Kritik
der reinen Vernunft (2nd ed., 1787; Critique of Pure Reason, 1929) presented
a formalistic or transcendental Idealism, so named because Kant thought that
the human self, or “transcendental ego,” constructs knowledge out of sense
impressions, upon which are imposed certain universal concepts that he called
categories. Three systems constructed in the early 19th century by,
respectively, the moral Idealist J.G. Fichte, the aesthetic Idealist F.W.J.
Schelling, and the dialectical Idealist G.W.F. Hegel, all on a foundation laid
by Kant, are called objective Idealisms in contrast to Berkeley’s subjective
Idealism. The designations, however, are not consistent; and when the contrast
with Berkeley is not at issue, Fichte himself is often called a subjective
Idealist, inasmuch as he exalted the subject above the object, employing the
term Ego to mean God in the two memorable propositions: “The Ego posits
itself” and “The Ego posits the non-Ego (or nature).” And in contrast now to
the subjective Idealism of Fichte, Schelling’s is called an objective Idealism
and Hegel’s an absolute Idealism.
All of these terms form backgrounds for contemporary Western
Idealisms, most of which are based either on Kant’s transcendental Idealism
or on those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Exceptions are those based on
other great Idealists of the past – Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Leibniz, and others.
A revised form of Spinoza’s spiritual monism, for example, which held that
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reality is one Substance to be identified with God, has been formulated by the
Idealist logician H.H. Joachim (1868-1938), a follower of the British Hegelian
F.H. Bradley.
Unwilling to accept any of the above titles, one school of modern
Idealists adopted the motto “Back to Kant” and are thus called Kantian
Idealists. Edward Caird (1835-1908), who imported German Idealism into
England, and the German philosopher of “As If,” Hans Vaihinger (1852-
1933), who held that much of man’s so-called knowledge reduces to
pragmatic fictions, were Kantian Idealists or transcendentalists. On this
tradition are based the Idealism of the austerely religious essayist Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) in Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and the New England
transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). It must be stated,
however, that Kant preferred the name critical Idealism to that of
transcendental Idealism.
Another group of Idealists, adopting the motto “From Kant forward,”
founded the so-called Marburg school of Neo-Kantian, or scientific, Idealism.
They rejected the Idealisms of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and the classical
Newtonian dynamics presupposed by Kant and built instead upon the new
quantum and relativity theories of modern physics. Founded by Hermann
Cohen (1842-1918), champion of a new interpretation of Kant, and his
colleague, the Platonic scholar Paul Natorp (1854-1924), who applied Kant’s
critical method to humanistic as well as to scientific studies, this school
underwent a remarkable development, especially under the leadership of Ernst
Cassirer, noted for his profound analyses of man defined as that animal that
creates culture through a unique capacity for symbolic representation. The
Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, in his Autobiography, tells of enrolling in
Cohen’s graduate seminar on Kant at the University of Marburg. Undoubtedly
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this type of Idealism continues to wield considerable influence on intellectuals
in Soviet Russia.
Theistic Idealism was founded by the medical instructor R.H. Lotze
(1817-81), who became a broadly learned metaphysician and whose theory of
the world ground, in which all things find their unity, has been widely
accepted by theistic philosophers and Protestant theologians. To Lotze, the
world ground is the transcendent synthesis of an evolutionary world process,
which is both mechanical and teleological (purposive); it is an infinite
spiritual being, or God. In England, the absolute Idealism of T.H. Green
(1836-82), a philosopher influenced chiefly by Plato and Kant, was shared by
his disciple, the more Hegelian thinker Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923),
whose views are based upon Lotze’s Idealism, and by the somewhat sceptical
metaphysician of the movement, F.H. Bradley (1846-1924).
Theistic absolutism is represented by a pioneer of contemporary
philosophical theology, F.R. Tennant (1866-1957), and by the eminent
German-American theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1956). It differs from the
personalistic form of absolute Idealism in accepting the traditional theological
monotheism that is essential to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions. It
revives classic arguments for the existence of God that were rejected by Kant
and uses recent advances in the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences
to support these revisions. The cosmological argument, for example, is
restated as the continuing relation of the cosmos to a world ground that is
spiritual in essence; thus the concept of God as a first cause is rejected. The
concept of the fitness of the environment to life and to human history and
other recent scientific concepts are used to modernize the teleological
argument. Nevertheless, all of this revision is kept within the framework of
Idealistic metaphysics and epistemology. A theistic spiritual pluralism, which
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interprets reality in terms of a multitude of interacting psychic monads
(elementary units), was developed by the English philosopher James Ward
(1843-1925). On the other hand, an atheistic spiritual pluralism, which holds
that reality consists entirely of individual minds and their contents, was
espoused by the Cambridge Hegelian J.M. Ellis McTaggert (1866-1925).
During the late 19th century a movement known as American Hegelian
Idealism arose in the United States. The movement found vigorous early
expression in the work of W.T. Harris (1835-1909), central figure in a
midwestern group of scholars known as the St. Louis school and editor of its
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and finds current expression in the
recently organized Hegel Society of America. In its later development,
American Idealism split into two branches: one, of the aforementioned
Bradley-Bosanquet type, and a second, of the Royce-Hocking type, so called
because it was founded by one of America’s most distinguished philosophers,
the absolute Idealist and personal pantheist Josiah Royce (1855-1916), and
developed by his disciple W.E. Hocking (1873-1966). The American
philosopher of religion Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) founded another
important American school, that of Personalism, a Kantian- and Lotzean-
based variety of theistic Idealism similar to the spiritual pluralism of Ward.
Whereas most previous Idealisms had stressed the rational as the highest
category of reality and hence as its paradigm, Personalism saw in the centred
structures of personhood, both finite and infinite, an even higher category,
displaying dimensions richer than the rational alone. Personalism has had an
influential development in America, most notably through the Methodist
philosopher E.S. Brightman (1884-1953), known for his defense of the
doctrine of a finite God, and through The Personalist, edited by one of
Bowne’s disciples, R.T. Flewelling (1871-1960). Personalism is also found in