Idealism

The general designation for the philosophical doctrines asserting that consciousness, thought, the psychological, and the spiritual are primary and fundamental, while matter, nature, and the physical are secondary, derivative, conditional, and dependent. Idealism is thus opposed to materialism in the way it resolves the fundamental question of philosophy-that of the relations between being and thought, between the spiritual and the material, both in the realm of existence and in the realm of knowledge. Although idealism arose more than 2 1/2 millennia ago, the term itself, as a designation for one of the two warring camps in philosophy, first appeared only at the beginning of the 18th century. In 1702 the German idealist Leibniz described the hypotheses of Epicurus and Plato as those of the greatest materialist and of the greatest idealist. In 1749 the French materialist D. Diderot called idealism “the most absurd of all systems” (Izbr. soch., vol. 1, Moscow-Leningrad, 1926, p. 28).
The philosophical term “idealism” should not be confused with the word “idealist” as used in ordinary language and in everyday discussions of moral subjects. The latter term comes from the word “ideal” and refers to an unselfish individual striving to achieve lofty goals. In its philosophical use idealism also designates, in the realm of ethics, the denial that moral consciousness is conditioned by social being and the assertion of the primacy of moral consciousness. The confusion of these two concepts has frequently been used by idealists with the aim of discrediting philosophical materialism.
While there is a basic unity within the camp of idealism in the way the fundamental question of philosophy is resolved, nevertheless two main forms within this camp should be distinguished: objective idealism and subjective idealism. Characteristic of objective idealism is the recognition of a spiritual initial cause outside and independent of our consciousness; in subjective idealism it is inadmissible to suppose any reality outside and independent of our consciousness.
We encounter a historical predecessor of objective idealism in the religious artistic images of the ancient Indian Upanishads. Here the material world is presented as the veil of Maya behind which is hidden the true reality of the divine initial cause, Brahman. The first complete expression of objective idealism in conceptual form was in the philosophy of Plato; in medieval philosophy it was represented by Scholastic realism; in the modern period its main representatives have been Leibniz, Schelling, and Hegel. Subjective idealism was most vividly expressed in the doctrines of the English idealists of the 18th century, Berkeley and Hume.
The existence of two main forms of idealism does not exhaust the multiplicity and variety of idealist philosophical systems. Within the framework of these two forms many variations have arisen during the history of philosophy, depending on how the spiritual initial cause is conceived: as universal reason (in panlo-gism) or as universal will (in voluntarism), as a single spiritual substance (in monistic idealism) or as a multiplicity of spiritual initial elements (in monadology and pluralism), as a logically comprehensible rational cause (in idealistic rationalism), as a perceptual diversity of sensations (in idealistic empiricism and sensationalism and in phenomenalism), or as an irregular, alogical “free” cause that cannot be the object of scientific knowledge (in irrationalism).
Since the idealist and materialist solutions to the fundamental question of philosophy are mutually exclusive, only one of them can be true. The materialist solution is the true one, as is confirmed by the history of science when regarded from this point of view and by the development of social praxis. That being the case, how can it be explained that idealism has lasted so long and been preserved in the social consciousness for thousands and thousands of years?
This situation has very deep roots, both epistemological and social. The sources out of which idealism arises historically are the animism and anthropomorphism inherent in the thinking of primitive man, the attribution of soul or spirit to all the world around him and the tendency to regard its motive forces as being determined by consciousness and will, on the model of and by analogy to human behavior.
In later times the capacity for abstract thinking itself became an epistemological source of idealism. The possibility of idealism is already given in the first elementary act of abstraction. The development of general concepts and an increasing degree of abstraction were necessary phases in the progress of theoretical reasoning. But when abstraction is wrongly used it results in hypostatization of qualities, relations, and actions of real things isolated by the thought process from their concrete material bearers and in the attribution of independent existence to these products of abstract thinking. To regard consciousness, thought, size, form, goodness, or beauty as separate and independent of the material objects and entities possessing these characteristics is to follow the false path of abstract thinking that leads to idealism, just as one does if one thinks of plants “in general” or man “in general,” taking them for substances or ideas embodied in things. “Rectilinearity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness— voild the epistemological roots of idealism” (Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 29, p. 322). These epistemological roots of idealism gain a foothold by virtue of certain social factors, having their origin in the division between mental and manual labor, as a result of which “consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world” (Marx and Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 3, p. 30). With the formation of slave-owning societies idealism becomes the natural historical form of consciousness of the ruling classes, inasmuch as mental labor is initially their exclusive privilege.
In its origin and at all stages of its development, idealism is closely linked with religion. In essence, idealism arose as a conceptual expression of a religious world view and subsequently, as a rule, served as a philosophical justification and support for religious faith. In Lenin’s words, philosophical idealism is “a road to clerical obscurantism” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 29, p. 322).
The centuries-old history of idealism is quite complex. In the most varied forms at different stages of history, it expressed in its own way the evolution of forms of social consciousness in accordance with the nature of sequential social formations and new levels of scientific development. The basic forms of idealism, which were developed further in the subsequent history of philosophy, had already arisen in classical Greece. Idealist philosophy reached its highest flowering in classical German philosophy in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, the school that founded and developed a new historical form of rationalism—idealist dialectics. With the transition of capitalism into its imperialist stage the turn to irrationalism in its various versions has become the dominant feature of idealist philosophy. In contemporary times the idealist currents dominant in bourgeois philosophy are neopositivism (primarily in the Anglo-Saxon countries), existentialism (in Western Europe), phenomenology (usually intertwined with existentialism), and neo-Thomism (in the Catholic countries).
Contemporary idealist philosophers rarely acknowledge their adherence to the idealist camp. “Many feel that it is a feature of past history rather than a living school of our days” (A. C. Ewing, The Idealist Tradition, Glencoe, 111., 1957, p. 3). The dominant method for classifying philosophical doctrines in contemporary idealist philosophy is most frequently based not on the juxtaposition of materialism and idealism but on the juxtaposition of idealism to realism. Thus, the neo-Thomists, who call their doctrine “realism,” distinguish it from both materialism and subjective idealism. Other idealist tendencies claim to have gone beyond the two warring schools of thought by means of various ambiguous terms, such as “neutral monism” or “elements.” In fact, such assertions are essentially misleading, for all the leading tendencies in contemporary bourgeois philosophy are actually various forms of idealism.
===REFERENCES===
Engels, F. Liudvig Feierbakh i konets klassicheskoi nemetskoi filosofii. K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 21.Lenin, V. I. Materializm i empiriokrititsizm. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 18.Lenin, V. I. “K voprosu o dialektike.” Ibid., vol. 29.Lenin, V. I. “Konspekt knigi Aristotelia ‘Metafizika.’” Ibid., vol. 29.Bykhovskii, B. E., I. Narskii, and V. Sokolov. “Idealism.” In Filosofskaia'entsiklopediia, vol. 2. Moscow, 1962.Florenskii, P. A. Smysl idealizma. Sergiev Posad, 1914.Cherkashin, P. P. Gnoseologicheskie korni idealizma. Moscow, 1961.Cornforth, M. Nauka protiv idealizma. Moscow, 1957. (Translated from English.)
Sowemennyi sub”ektivnyi idealizm. Moscow, 1957.
Sowemennyi ob”ektivnyi idealizm. Moscow, 1963.Oizerman, T. I. Glavnye filosofskie napravleniia. Moscow, 1971.Willmann, O. Geschichte des Idealismus, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1907.Ewing, A. C. Idealism. London, 1934.B. E. BYKHOVSKII
Category:Philosophy