IDEALISM. — In general, it is the doctrine that makes the reality of thought dependent.
OUTLINE:
I. Comprehensive concept and division
II. Historical development
III. Critical judgment.I. COMPREHENSIVE CONCEPT AND DIVISION
Idealism, in every form, asserts that the idea (q.v.) constitutes the truth and reality of being, at least within the realm of the human spirit, and that the laws of thought are therefore the very laws of being. The idea is conceived by idealism as the absolute in relation to the contingent, unity in relation to the many, totality in relation to the diverse... for this reason the idea represents the reality of being, while the contingent, the varied, and the manifold are reduced to appearance, phenomenon, or moment of the idea itself. The essence of idealism does not seem to lie in the negation of the external world (nature) or in the existence and value of individuals, but rather in conceiving nature as a derivation of spirit and in subordinating the values of individuals to the absolute value of the idea itself. The essence of idealism is first and foremost in the affirmation of the unity of being and the absolute value of truth itself, which dispersed multiplicity and lawless becoming would prejudice without the possibility of orienting consciousness toward truth. In this programmatic sense, idealism attains the very essence of philosophy, as Hegel rightly observes when he states that «the aim of philosophy is to eliminate the accidental... through reason, which cannot place its interest in a particular finite end, but only in the absolute end» (Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 3rd ed., ed. G. Lasson, Leipzig 1930, p. 5). For idealism, therefore, nature is posterior to the idea or world of spirit, and for metaphysical idealism, nature becomes a derivation and production of spirit itself as its manifestation. Consequently, sensations, representations, and the entire world of perceptions, experimental sciences, technology, etc., precisely form the projection of the idea into nature, and they can relate to truth insofar as they are «subsumed» (to use the Kantian term) by the idea, or insofar as they are considered as the many, the diverse, the particular, the divisive... of that One which is the All and the Absolute, ever identical to itself and immutable in itself, yet at the same time immanent in the multitude of particulars as the reason for their being and the indivisible reality of their becoming. It is therefore understood that, from a strictly metaphysical standpoint, the principle of immanence cannot be said to be either primary or exclusive to idealism: not exclusive, because skeptical and phenomenist philosophies also defend the immanence of knowledge, and in a sense far stronger than idealism; not primary, both because in idealism the principle of immanence is invoked to satisfy a precise conception of truth and being, and because in idealism this principle intends (or at least claims) to guarantee the belonging or presence of the manifold and the diverse within the idea itself, in relation to which immanence is invoked and takes its meaning.It is therefore incorrect to restrict idealism to the post-Kantian transcendental systems (Lalande). Even Hegel himself considered his own philosophy as the fulfillment of Greek and Christian art, inasmuch as both classical thought in its most mature theoretical forms (Plato, Aristotle) and Christian Revelation already posited the truth of being in the concept, in the unity of the idea, and called men to the freedom of spirit (cf. Gesch. der Philos. [Werke, XV a], new ed. by J. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1944, p. 63). Therefore, keeping in mind the Christian doctrine according to which the world was created by God in conformity with the divine ideas present in the absolute unity of the eternal Word, every philosophy that in some way expresses such derivation and dependence of nature from the idea can be indicated as idealist: before Christ, as an attempt to approximate Christian truth, and after Christ, as an attempt to elaborate and theoretically comprehend the same. In its genetic and historical meaning, unity coincides with spiritualism: the subsequent determinations of the fundamental principle now outlined are functions of the development that the very concept of «spirit» has undergone in the various epochs of thought. Its opposite is therefore not realism, but materialism, and not objectivism but rather subjectivist phenomenism. By affirming the reality of the idea as the positive and consistent core of being, unity safeguards the objective reality of being itself, which in a materialist conception would be left at the mercy of the multiplicity of empirical determinations and the indefinite diversity of immediate perceptions or phenomena. Therefore, it is solely in reference to the Christian (or revealed) conception of an absolute origin of being that the meaning of unity has been clarified, and the problem of the development and theoretical consistency of its historical forms has been posed: all the more so since unity, as a program and as a method, presents itself as the only philosophy that claims to be a pure «theory of being», which, in a perspective of descending or ascending subordination of multiple forms of being and various activities of the spirit, tends toward the formation of the «system» or the organism — both ontological and epistemological — that offers of being its beginning, development, and actual fulfillment. One may then speak of a cosmological, a Christian or theological, and a modern or anthropological idealism.
### Historical Development
#### a) The first form of the island in Plato: above and beyond sensible reality, multiple and changeable, one must posit the “ideas” or universal and separate forms of things (ἐδὴ γνωριζόμεθα). Plato opposes the stability and truth of the idea which is “man” (and the gods, etc.), many (Rep., 507 B sqq.; 506 A sqq.), being in itself and of the genera and species, to the relativism of the Sophists who, by identifying being with the singular sensible, declared truth impossible and thus, according to Plato, remained in the obscurity of μὴ ὄν (Soph., 254 A). But from the Sophists, masters in dialectic or in considering the opposing aspects of reality, Plato learned that the idea has the task of resolving within itself the contraries present in sensible reality, and this likewise holds for the higher genera with respect to the lower (cf. Phaed., 273 D sqq.): the assertion, however, of Hegel that “in general Plato understands the absolute as the unity of being and non-being in becoming, as Heraclitus had said” (Gesch. der Philos., Italian trans., II, Florence 1932, p. 209) is an unwarranted anticipation of his own system. Hegel himself, examining the more mature analysis that Plato makes of dialectic in the later dialogues (Sophist, Philebus and especially Parmenides: cf. op. cit., p. 212 sqq.), must admit that in it there is lacking the vision of the unity of contraries. Closer, according to Hegel, to the true exigency of the ideal is the speculation of Aristotle, for whom “the ideal is not noble”: the idea is an actual synthesis of contraries, effected by the mind through abstraction, and the Absolute is indicated as “pure Thought” that thinks itself in the perfect identity of subjective and objective (cf. op. cit., p. 277, 310 sqq.). Hegel is right in valorizing the concrete dialectical aspect of Aristotle’s notion of “potency and act,” but he errs in presenting act or energy as “the negativity that refers to itself” (op. cit., p. 207), since in Aristotle act is “prior” to potency, being more worthy, and can exist pure in itself, free from potency (Met., IX, 8, 1049 b 5; XII, 6, 1071 b 3 sqq.). What Hegel says of the synthesis of Plato and Aristotle in the unity in which is realized the exigency that the universal be posited freely in itself as the universality of the principle, so that the particular is known through this universal” (op. cit., p. 392), was precisely the task of Neoplatonism, and of Proclus in particular, as Hegel himself recognizes (op. cit., III, 1, p. 88 sqq.), though he was aware of the speculative decline that marks Neoplatonism from the standpoint of the unitary conception of being as a pretender to the institution. In contrast to the empirical and immediate physicalism of the pre-Socratics, and to the explicit and polemical materialism of much of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle belong to the unity in that they affirm the “duality” of principles of being (potency and act, matter and spirit), but not because they affirm their unity in the “becoming” of the Absolute itself.
The Greek *ir.*, bound to ontological dualism, is of a cosmological nature in that the theoretical process that leads to truth is directed toward the opposition of contrary principles, hence toward an absolute separation of the same (sensible reality and ideas in Plato, nature and pure Thought in Aristotle, participants and non-participants in Proclus). Therefore, the claim of a unity that should be the mature synthesis of classical thought and Christian Revelation is excessive and unfounded.
#### b) The dualism of classical thought was not so much bound to the eternity of matter as to the fact that it was a “principle without principle,” uncaused and devoid of any participation in being: the Judeo-Christian doctrine of total creation definitively eliminated the dualism both of matter and form (spirit) and of forms and pure act. From God, absolute Spirit and pure Act, proceed at once both matter and forms, natural beings and finite pure spirits: all these beings (even “prime matter,” as St. Thomas will say, cf. De Pot., q. 3, a. 1, c. and ad 13) proceed according to an idea proper to each of them. The Christian or theological *ist.* is therefore founded on divine exemplarism (v.), which was developed systematically by the two greatest masters of the Middle Ages, St. Augustine and the Pseudo-Dionysius. For the former: “Sunt ideae principales formae quaedam vel rationes rerum stabile atque incommutabile, quae ipsae formatae non sunt, ac per hoc aeternae ac semper eodem modo se habentes, quae in divina intelligentia continentur... secundum quas formari dicitur omne quod oriri vel interire potest, et omne quod oritur vel interit” (Quaestiones 83, q. 46, De ideis: PL 40, 29). According to the Pseudo-Dionysius, all creatures have in God their “proper” reasons, which are the “productive principles of beings,” the “primordial designs” or predefinitions of the same: παραδεικνύεται δε φαίνεται τούς ἐν Θεῷ τῶν ὄντων οὐσιοποιούς καὶ ἐναίως προφεύγοντας λόγους, ὡς ἡ θεολογία προορισμός, καλεῖ, καὶ θεῖα καὶ ἀγαθὰ θελήματα τῶν ὄντων ἀφορισμῶν καὶ ποιητικῶν, καθ' οὖς ὁ ὑπερουσία πάντα καὶ προώρισε καὶ παρήγαγεν (De div. nom., cap. 5, § 8: PG 3, 824). St. Thomas, guided by these principles, constructed his *quaestio de ideis* (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 15, a. 1-3), in which he sought to deepen the new theological *ist.*, juxtaposing it with Aristotle’s doctrine of causality, to conclude with the twofold aspect assumed by the idea: a) as exemplar “inasmuch as it is the principle of the making of things... and pertains to practical knowledge... and in this respect it relates to all things that are made by God at some time”; b) as ratio “inasmuch as it is the principle of knowledge... and can also pertain to speculative knowledge... [and thus] it relates to all things that are known by God even if they are not made at any time” (loc. cit., a. 3). This theological *ist.* is further tempered by St. Thomas with the doctrine of the active intellect as the active principle for abstracting the universal from sensible particulars (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 79, 3-4; q. 84, a. 7: necessity of the “conversio ad phantasmata”), while the Augustinian school with St. Bonaventure prefers to have recourse to divine illumination in direct dependence on the Word (cf. De humanae cognitionis ratione anedocta quaedam..., Quaracchi 1883, p. 61 sgg.).
c) The complete absorption of being into thought and of the finite into the infinite is the characteristic of the modern, so-called anthropological ego, because that thought and that qualified infinite ultimately determine the being of human reason and affirm absolute immanence. A first form or stage of this is found in pre-Kantian metaphysical rationalism. First of all, Descartes: with the universal doubt that culminates in the *cogito, ergo sum* he affirms the direct conditionality of being by thought; with the criterion of the “clear and distinct idea” Descartes consolidates the autonomy of consciousness not only with respect to the entire metaphysical world (the existence of God, the nature of the soul, the origin of the world, etc.), but also regarding the content of the physical and mathematical sciences that study nature (cf. *Meditations de prima philosophia*, Med. I, ed. C. Adam – P. Tannery, VII, Paris 1904, p. 63 ff.). Thus Descartes in one stroke traversed the entire path of the rationalist ego, in a way anticipating the method of the romantic transcendental philosophy of the ego; in the *Principia* he then expressly approached that “unity of substance” which would become the starting point of Spinoza’s metaphysics and the metaphysical core of the Enlightenment (Lessing, Reimarus), of both literary and philosophical-theological Romanticism (Schleiermacher), and above all of the German transcendental ego. Leibniz’s principle of the “monad” in turn affirmed in full the productive autonomy (spontaneity or “reflection into itself”) of subjectivity: the “entelechies” as simple individual energies. Hegel openly acknowledges that with Descartes “we properly arrive at an autonomous philosophy, conscious of deriving—in an independent manner—from reason, and that self-consciousness is an essential moment of the true” (*Gesch. der Philos.*, 2nd ed. by C. L. Michelet, Berlin 1844, p. 298; Italian trans. cit., III, 11, p. 66). But the limit of Descartes’s ego is that the *ego cogito* “remains something subjective, and the determinations of being result as extrinsic to the content (if not to the act) of thought and to one another”; the limit of Spinoza’s monism is the rigid opposition of the modes and attributes of substance; the limit of Leibniz’s pluralism lies in the isolation and multiplicity of monads closed in upon themselves. The being and substance of the rationalist ego thus remain that of the Eleatics (cf. for Spinoza: Hegel, *Wissenschaft der Logik*, 2nd ed. by G. Lasson, I, Leipzig 1932, p. 69); yet the Spinozist principle “ordo et connexio rerum est ordo et connexio idearum” already announces in a confused way the creative activity of reason, and the other principle “omnis determinatio est negatio” (cf. Spinoza, *Ethica*, part II, prop. VII, ed. G. Gentile, Bari 1933, p. 5; *Ep.*, 50, II, ed. J. Van Vloten – P. Land, The Hague 1895, p. 361) touches upon that principle of negativity which is the true motor of dialectic. Wolffian rationalism hardened into the dogmatism of abstract intellect; Hegel underestimates and scornfully judges the contribution of English phenomenalism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), which fails to discover the moment of reason as constitutive of the ego (cf. *Gesch. der Philos.*, p. 445; Italian trans. cit., III, 11, p. 226).
Kant’s conception is termed the critical one: it announces the method that will be brought to completion by the absolute ego. First, the subjectivity of thought (theme of the *Critique of Pure Reason*), understood not as the inferiority of the subject to the object but as the emergence of the subject in the determination of truth; and the introduction of the “transcendental dialectic,” which is the proper sphere of the metaphysical world of God, freedom, and immortality, to be conceived as “total situations,” as postulates of theoretical activity and as principles or presuppositions of theology, morality, and religion (cf. *Kr. d. reinen Vernunft*, Elementarlehre, part 2, sect. 2, I, I; B. 394 ff., ed. Reclam, p. 290 note). The physical world itself, moreover, in its perceptual structures, is the projection of the “transcendental imagination” (*transzendentale Einbildungskraft*), which applies the schemata to the given of experience so that this may be subsumed under the categories. The moral world, likewise, has its full autonomy in the realization of moral values immanent in the freedom of the subject and in the absoluteness of the consciousness of duty. Finally, above the two formal legislations of the *Critiques of Pure Reason* and of Practical Reason, Kant introduced with the *Critique of Judgment* a doctrine that teaches how to apprehend and immediately savor the concrete as the synthesis of particular and universal (finality and beauty), thus bridging the gap between the world of phenomena of intuition and that of the freedom of practical activity (cf. *Kr. d. Urtheilskraft*, introd., ed. E. Cassirer, V, Berlin 1914, p. 239 ff.). Kant’s ego is hindered by the *caput mortuum* of the “thing in itself” (*Ding an sich*), which is being as such, while the activity of the subject is limited to “representing, thinking, and postulating.” Hegel especially reproaches Kant for having stopped at a conception of thought as a mere “instrument,” extrinsic for approaching being, rather than as the actual reality of being itself (cf. *Gesch. d. Philos.*, p. 528 ff.; Italian trans. cit., III, 11, p. 335 ff.; *Logik*, I, p. 24 ff.; *Enz.*, § 52).
The task of the transcendental ego was to resolve the Kantian dualism in order to secure for human spirit the possession of the Absolute: the new standpoint asserts that the “thing-in-itself” is consciousness itself, and that consequently the worlds of nature and of spirit are but aspects, moments and effects of the same. Thus the knowledge of the objective world of nature and of spirit is now possible precisely because it is one and the same nature (ein und dasselbe Wesen) that operates in nature and thinks in spirit, since nature and spirit in their ground are identical (philosophy of identity; v.).
The essence of the transcendental ego is the dialectical unification of contraries: Fichte applies it to the sphere of moral action (subjective idealism), Schelling shows it at work in nature (objective idealism in his first period), and Hegel unifies both viewpoints (absolute idealism). The principle is therefore that every determination of being (category: Kant) refers back to the self-consciousness that produces it; yet such self-consciousness cannot produce those determinations unless it is absolute (Fichte’s advance); but self-consciousness would not be absolute unless it were the identity of spirit and nature (Schelling’s advance); finally this identity could not become conscious unless reason, that is, spirit (Geist), represents the harmonious principle of the world (Hegel’s advance).
The transcendental ego is thus a methodical synthesis of Kant’s gnoseology and Spinoza’s metaphysics: the a priori of consciousness is raised to the absolute principle of reality and its determinations, and the Absolute is declared the sole reality which in Hegel attains the absolute identity of its moments (cf. K. Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftlehre, Stuttgart 1832, p. xiv ff.).
From Fichte Hegel took over the dialectic of negative opposition, according to which the Absolute must be posited as “result,” but reproached him for beginning with the immediate ego which is already dialectical; from Schelling he accepted the identity of nature and spirit, but criticized the latter’s immediate starting-point of “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung) which in one stroke (the “pistol-shot!”) seizes the Absolute that is instead the final term of human spirit’s labor (cf. Logik, I, p. 61 ff.).
The Hegelian ego claims to have satisfied with rigorous consistency the “principle of the immanence” of being and knowing, which find in the “concept” (Begriff) their own absolute identity and concreteness (panlogism), and this is the very essence of philosophy; its outcome is the total immanence of the Infinite in the finite, of God in the world and in history, and the consequent supremacy of “reason” (Vernunft) over “understanding” (Verstand), declared empty and abstract, and of philosophy over religion.
The post-Hegelian generation divided into a “right” and a “left”; the former sought an accord between the absolute ego and Christian religion (Marheineke, Dorner, J. Müller), the latter openly declared for radical atheism (Strauss, the Bauer brothers, Feuerbach, Marx). Schopenhauer energetically polemicized against the Hegelian ego (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ergänz., 2, III, ch. 38; Werke, II, ed. Reclam, p. 519 ff.; Hegelianism is branded “roher und platter Realismus”), and constructed in its place an idealism of representation, developing the a priority of time and space of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics.
Towards the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the present one, various neo-idealist trends developed in Italy, England, and later in Germany and France, endeavoring to strike a balance between Hegelian panlogism and the characteristic tendencies of their own national cultures. In Italy the path was opened by B. Spaventa, who probed—sometimes with unusual penetration—the metaphysical meaning and problematic of Hegelianism (e.g., the passage from being to non-being: Trendelenburg’s objection) and upheld the thesis of a literal presence in Bruno and of the idealism of Gioberti and Rosmini. Directly dependent on Spaventa are B. Croce (1866) and G. Gentile (1876–1944); the former, advocate of a historicist idealism, admits the total immaculate immanence of the Absolute Spirit in historical becoming; the latter, more sensitive to the fundamental speculative problem of idealism itself, maintained that the only logical conclusion of the principle of immanence is the suppression of every dualism—even dialectical and methodological (subject–object, nature–spirit, history–science, etc.)—through the positing of “Spirit as pure act” which mediates itself from act to act in absolute freedom.
### III. CRITICAL JUDGMENT
The essence of idealism is the affirmation that the finite is the "ideal," that true reality cannot be recognized in it (*nicht als ein wahrhaft Seiendes*: Hegel, *Logik*, ed. cit., 2a, 1, p. 145). From a strictly theoretical standpoint, therefore, transcendental idealism must resolve itself into monism and solipsism: its fundamental ambiguity lies in the attempt to surpass and deny the reality of the finite, the entire sphere of perception, immediacy, and intelligence—declaring them "abstract moments" and negative—and at the same time relying precisely on the effective presence of these contrasting moments for an idea of dialectic that should found the uniqueness of Being. Idealism then resolves itself into a dogmatism that elevates to the Absolute the human reason of Enlightenment philosophy, absorbing into itself (and thus negating) the personal freedom of individuals, the transcendence of God, the freedom of creation, the gratuity and supernatural character of Christian Revelation and the life of Grace.
To claim that modern idealism "expressly and consciously lives the religious foundations and convictions of Western Christianity" and that idealism takes from Christianity the concepts of "spirit," of the "Absolute," etc. (cf. H. Heimsoeth, *Metaphysik der Neuzeit*, in *Handb. d. Philos.*, I, Munich and Berlin 1929, pp. 4 and 109 ff.) is a consequence of the Lutheran principle of the absolute subjectivity of religious consciousness. Christian doctrine must condemn transcendental idealism because it negates all the presuppositions of the supernatural order, both in man's relationship with the world and with God: in particular, sin is reduced to the "negative moment" which is as necessary and valid as the positive for the dialectical process; the Incarnation to the full expansion of human self-consciousness as such; the Trinity to the unfolding of the three moments of dialectic... (Hegel).
It is symptomatic that precisely in the climate of Lutheranism, which asserts the absolute interiority of faith and the exclusivity of Grace, faith itself has been dissolved into the most extreme gnosticism, and Grace into Pelagianism and the most radical secularism. The same fideist directions, arising from the Kantian trunk of the *Critique of Practical Reason* (contemporaries such as Jacobi, Fries, Schleiermacher, and others), understand faith as an immediate vitality, an impression or subjective judgment of the individual who finds for himself the meaning and formulas of revealed dogmas.
The incompatibility between modern idealism and Christian doctrine is therefore the direct consequence of the principle of the "autonomy of consciousness," which makes man the arbiter of his destiny and his reason the sole principle and criterion of truth. The unleashing, in contemporary thought, of Marxist and existentialist philosophies, which proclaim Machiavellianism in political and social life and amorality in the lives of individuals, is the direct continuation of the negative legacy bequeathed to Western culture by idealism.
It must be acknowledged that, with the decline of materialist positivism, idealism has permeated every sector of human life with a force of penetration and a breadth of influence such as no other cultural principle has ever had. The reactions against idealism that are being felt in contemporary thought—from the exponents of science, of religious and social phenomenology—will have a positive outcome only if they can rest on a solid theoretical structure capable of supplanting the idealist one. This structure has been outlined, in its main lines, in the synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism achieved by St. Thomas Aquinas, not in the direction of monist immanence as idealism has done, but of causal and pluralist idealism with the ontological distinction between the Absolute and the finite. The application made by St. Thomas of the Platonic concept of "participation" to the Aristotelian structure of being and knowledge has truly overcome the antithesis between Plato and Aristotle and, by interpreting the metaphysical truth of creation as participation, has at the same time guaranteed the reality of the distinction between finite and infinite, the total dependence of the finite on the Infinite, the perfect freedom of creation in God, and the consistency—albeit limited—of the finite with respect to the Infinite. It is along this line that Christian thought will be able to respond to the theoretical demands that idealism has posed and continues to pose—often with a keen sense of the difficulty of the problems and with the exigency of pure theoreticity—in every field of the life of the spirit.
This theoreticity, however, has not been recognized as constitutive of truth by the second direction that departed from Kant, that of the "philosophy of faith" (*Glaubensphilosophie*) of Jacobi, Fries... for whom truth is not an act of knowledge but of belief and of a tendency inherent in human subjectivity, which thus affirms the Absolute in a form of immediacy: even Fichte, who assigned the sensible sphere to "doubt," saw in the *Wissen* the apprehension solely of the finite and reserved the Infinite and being in its absoluteness for faith, because every knowing is by images and therefore limited, while aspiring and the consequent action are essentially directed toward the infinite. For Fichte, this Absolute is the "totality" of the moral order and thus the "result" of the complete development of human activity and civilization (Fichte, *Die Bestimmung des Menschen* [*Werke*, 3], ed. F. Medicus, Leipzig 1934, pp. 341 ff.): this is also the position of Hegel's absolute idealism, in contrast to Schelling, who opportunely distinguishes an "objective" process of knowledge on the part of our thought—which is quite different from admitting that God Himself is subject to a development of His essence (Schelling, *Zur Gesch. der neueren Philos.*, in *Sämtl. Werke*, part 1, vol. X, Stuttgart and Augsburg 1861, pp. 123 ff.).
The meaning, therefore, of idealism—which first places itself within the epistemological sphere (the possibility of science in general: Kant)—has asserted itself as a metaphysical problem, the total resolution first of being into thought and then of the finite into the Infinite, though not so completely that human consciousness—now more vigilant about its capacities—does not seek in contemporary thought a position of equilibrium between the extrinsic cosmology of Greek thought and the critical-ontological immanentism of modern thought.
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