Idealism

IDEALISM. - In general it is the doctrine that makes reality depend on thought.

I. OVERALL CONCEPT AND DIVISION

Idealism, in every one of its forms, affirms that the idea (v.) constitutes the truth and the reality of being, at least within the sphere 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 contingent things, unity in relation to the many, totality in relation to the diverse... for this reason the idea represents the reality of being, and the contingent, the varied and the multiple is reduced to appearance, to phenomenon, or to a moment of the idea itself. The essence of idealism, therefore, does not seem to lie in the negation of the external world (nature) or of the existence and value of individuals, so much as 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 lies first of all in the affirmation of the unity of being and of the absolute value of truth itself, which dispersed multiplicity and a lawless becoming would compromise, with no possibility of an orientation of consciousness toward truth. In this programmatic sense idealism draws upon the very essence of philosophy, in accordance with what Hegel, from this point of view, rightly observes: 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 one» (Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, 3rd ed. edited by G. Lasson, Leipzig 1930, p. 5). For idealism, therefore, nature is a posterius with respect 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 too, representations, and the entire world of perceptions, of the experimental sciences, of technology, etc., form precisely the projection of the idea into nature, and can be related to truth only insofar as they are «subsumed» (to use the Kantian term) by the idea, that is, insofar as they are considered as the many, the diverse, the particular, the becoming... of that One which is the Whole and the Absolute, always identical with itself and in itself immutable, but which at the same time is immanent in the multitude of particulars as the reason for their being and the indivisible reality of their becoming. One understands therefore how, from the strictly metaphysical point of view, the principle of immanence cannot be called either primary or exclusive to idealism: not exclusive, because skeptical and phenomenalist philosophies also defend the immanence of knowing, and in a much stronger sense than idealism; not primary, both because in idealism the principle of immanence is invoked to satisfy a precise conception of truth and of being, and because in idealism this principle intends (or at least claims) to guarantee the belonging or presence of the multiple and the diverse within the idea itself, with respect to which immanence is invoked and takes its meaning.

It is not accurate, therefore, to restrict idealism to the post-Kantian transcendental systems (Lalande): Hegel himself considered his own philosophy as the fulfillment of Greek idealism
and of Christian idealism, insofar as both classical thought
in its theoretically most mature forms (Plato, Aristotle) and Christian Revelation already placed in the concept,
in the unity of the idea, the truth of being, and called men to the freedom of the spirit (cf. *Gesch. der
Philos.*, [Werke, XV a], new ed. by J. Hoffmeister,
Leipzig 1944, p. 63). Therefore, bearing 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, idealism may be taken to designate every philosophy
that in some way expresses this derivation and dependence
of nature on the idea: before Christ, as an attempt at approximation to Christian truth, and after Christ, as an attempt at theoretical elaboration and comprehension of
the same. In its genetic and historical meaning, idealism
therefore coincides with spiritualism: the successive determinations of the fundamental principle just outlined are
a function 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 phenomenalist subjectivism;
for in affirming the reality of the idea as the positive
and consistent nucleus of being, idealism seeks to guarantee against every
skepticism the objective reality of being itself, which in a
materialist conception must be left at the mercy of the
multiplicity of empirical determinations and of the indefinite becoming
of immediate perceptions or phenomena. Hence
it is solely with reference to the Christian (or revealed) conception
of an absolute origin of being that the meaning of idealism has been clarified,
and that the problem of the development
and theoretical consistency of its historical forms arises: all the more
so since idealism, as a program and as a method, presents itself
as the only philosophy that claims to be a pure «theory»
of being — one which, namely, in a perspective of the subordination, descending or ascending, of multiple forms of
being and of various activities of the spirit, tends toward the formation of the «system», that is, of the organism — ontological
and epistemological at once — that offers of being
both the beginning and the development and the effective completion. One may speak, then, of a Greek or cosmological idealism, of a Christian or theological idealism, and of a modern or anthropological idealism.

II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

a) The first form of idealism goes back to Plato: above and outside sensible reality, which is manifold and changing, one must place the "ideas" or universal and separate forms of things (εἴδη χωριστά). Plato opposes the stability and truth of the idea, which is the "one" of [and from, in...] the many (Rep., 507 B ff.; 596 A ff.), the "being in itself" of genera and species, to the relativism of the Sophists who, identifying being with the singular sensible thing, declared truth impossible and therefore remained, according to Plato, in the darkness of μὴ ὄν (Soph., 254 A). But from the Sophists, masters in dialectic, that is, in considering the opposite aspects of reality, Plato learned that the idea has the task of resolving within itself the contraries present in sensible reality, and the same may be said of the higher genera in relation to the lower (cf. Phaed., 273 D ff.): Hegel's assertion, however, that "in general Plato understands the absolute as the unity of being and non-being in becoming, as Heraclitus had said" (Gesch. der Philos., Ital. trans., II, Florence 1932, p. 209) is a gratuitous anticipation of his own thought. Hegel himself, examining the more mature analysis that Plato makes of dialectic in the last dialogues (Sophist, Philebus and especially Parmenides: cf. op. cit., p. 212 ff.), must admit that the vision of the unity of contraries is lacking in it. Closer, according to Hegel, to the true exigency of idealism is the speculation of Aristotle, who "knew idealism and adhered to it": the idea is the synthesis in act of contraries, brought about 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., pp. 277, 310 ff.). Hegel is right in emphasizing the concrete dialectical aspect that the Aristotelian notion of "potency and act" has, but he errs in presenting act or energy as "the negativity that refers to itself" (op. cit., p. 297), because in Aristotle act is "prior" to potency, because it is more worthy, and can free itself from the latter and exist pure for itself (Met., IX, 8, 1049 b 5; XII, 6, 1071 b 3 ff.). What Hegel says of the synthesis of Plato and Aristotle in idealism, in which "the exigency that the universal be brought into relief freely of itself as the universality of the principle, so that the particular be 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 f.), who nevertheless has noticed the speculative decadence that marks Neoplatonism from the point of view of the unitary conception of being as idealism claims. With respect to the empirical and immediate physicalism of the Presocratics, as with respect to the explicit and polemical materialism of a large part of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle belong to idealism insofar as it affirms the "duality" of the principles of being (potency and act, matter and spirit), but not because it affirms their unity in the "becoming" of the Absolute itself.

Greek idealism, bound to ontological dualism, is cosmological in nature insofar as the theoretical process that leads to truth relies on the opposition of contrary principles, and therefore moves in the direction of an absolute separation of the same (sensible reality and ideas in Plato, nature and Pure Thought in Aristotle, participants and Unparticipated in Proclus). Hence the claim of German idealism to 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 has definitively eliminated the dualism both of matter and form (spirit), and of forms and the Pure Act. From God, absolute spirit and Pure Act, proceed at one and the same time both matter and forms, natural beings and finite pure spirits: all these beings (even "prime matter," as St. Thomas will say, cf. De Pol., q. 3, a. 1, c. and ad 13) proceed according to an idea proper to each of them. Christian or theological idealism is therefore founded on divine exemplarism (v.), which was developed systematically by the two greatest masters of the Middle Ages, St. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius. For the former: "Sunt ideae principales formae quaedam vel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommutabiles, 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 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: παραδείγματα δὲ φαμεν εἶναι τοὺς ἐν Θεῷ τῶν ὄντων οὐσινόμοις καὶ ἐνιαίως προφησθῶτας λόγους, οὓς ἡ θεολογία προφησθῶς καλεῖ, καὶ θεῖα καὶ ἀγαθὰ θελήματα τῶν ὄντων ἀφοριστικὰ καὶ ποιητικὰ, καθ' οὓς ὁ ὑπερούσιος [= God] τὰ ὄντα 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, aa. 1-3), in which he sought to deepen the new theological idealism by bringing it close to the Aristotelian doctrine of causality, in order to conclude with the twofold aspect that the idea assumes: a) as exemplar "secundum quod est principium factionis rerum... et ad practicam cognitionem pertinet... et secundum hoc se habet ad omnia quae a Deo fiunt secundum aliquod tempus"; b) as ratio "secundum quod principium cognoscitivum est... et potest etiam ad scientiam speculativam pertinere... [et sic] se habet ad omnia quae cognoscuntur a Deo etiamsi nullo tempore fiant" (loc. cit., s. 3). This theological idealism is further tempered by St. Thomas with the doctrine of the agent 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 aneducta quaedam..., Quaracchi 1883, p. 61 ff.).

c) The complete absorption of being into thought and of the finite into the infinite is the characteristic of modern idealism, which has been called anthropological because that thought and that infinite ultimately qualify the being of human reason and therefore affirm absolute immanence. A first form or stage is found in pre-Kantian metaphysical rationalism. First of all Descartes: with universal doubt that issues in the "cogito, ergo sum," the direct conditionality of being upon thought is affirmed; with the criterion of the "clear and distinct idea" Descartes consolidates the autonomy of consciousness not only with respect to the entire metaphysical world (existence of God, nature of the soul, origin of the world...), but also regarding the content of the physical and mathematical sciences that study nature (cf. Meditaciones de prima philosophia, Med. I, ed. C. Adam - P. Tannery, VII, Paris 1904, p. 63 ff.). Thus Descartes traversed at a single stroke the entire path of rationalist idealism, in some way anticipating the method of the physics of romantic transcendental idealism; in the Principia he then drew expressly close to that "unity of substance" which would be the starting point of Spinoza's metaphysics and the metaphysical nucleus of the Enlightenment (Lessing, Reimarus), of Romanticism both literary and philosophical and theological (Schleiermacher), and above all of German transcendental idealism. Finally, the principle of the Leibnizian "monad" fully affirmed the productive autonomy (spontaneity or "reflection in 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—independently—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; Ital. trans. cit., III, II, p. 66). But the limitation of Descartes's idealism is that the "I think" remains something subjective and the determinations of being turn out to be extrinsic to the content (if not to the act) of thought as well as to one another; the limitation of Spinoza's monism is the rigid opposition of the modes and attributes of substance; the limitation of Leibnizian pluralism lies in the isolation and multiplicity of monads closed in upon themselves. Being and substance in rationalist idealism remain, in short, the 6v of the Eleatics (cf. for Spinoza: Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 2nd ed. by G. Lasson, I, Leipzig 1932, p. 69); but the Spinozian 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 2, prop. VII, ed. G. Gentile, Bari 1933, p. 5; Ep., 50, II, ed. J. Van Vloten-Land, The Hague 1895, p. 361) touches that principle of negativity which is the true motor of dialectic. The rationalism of the Wolffians hardened into the dogmatism of the abstract intellect; Hegel undervalues and judges with disdain the contribution of English phenomenalism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), which fails to discover the moment of reason as constitutive of idealism (Gesch. der Philos., p. 445; Ital. trans. cit., III, II, p. 226).

Kant's conception passes under the term critical idealism: it announces the method that will be brought to completion by absolute idealism. First of all, the subjectivity of thinking (the theme of the Critique of Pure Reason), understood not as an inferiority of the subject with respect 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 terms (postulates) of theoretical activity and principles or presuppositions of theology, morality and religion (cf. Kr. d. reinen Vernunft, Elementarlehre, part 2, sec. 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" (transcendentale Einbildungskraft), which applies the schemata to the datum of experience so that it may be subsumed under the categories. The moral world likewise has immanent in the freedom of the subject and in the absoluteness of the consciousness of duty its full autonomy in the realization of moral values. Finally Kant, above the two formal legislations of the Critiques of theoretical and practical reason, introduced with the Critique of Judgment, which teaches us to apprehend and savor the concrete immediately as a synthesis of particular and universal (purposiveness and beauty), and thus bridges the hiatus between the world of the 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 idealism is held back 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, postulating": Hegel above all reproaches Kant for having stopped at a conception of thought as a mere extrinsic "instrument" for approaching being and not as its actual reality (cf. Gesch. d. Philos., p. 528 f.; Ital. trans., III, II, p. 335 ff.; Logik, I, p. 24 f.; Enz., § 52).

The task of transcendental i. was to resolve the Kantian dualism in order to secure the possession of the Absolute on the part of the human spirit: the new point of view affirms that the "thing in itself" is consciousness itself and that, consequently, the worlds of nature and of spirit are nothing but aspects, moments and effects of that same consciousness. Thus knowledge of the objective world of nature and of spirit is now possible insofar as it is one and the same nature (ein und dasselbe Wesen) that operates in nature and that thinks in spirit, because nature and spirit in their foundation are the identical thing (philosophy of identity; v.). The essence of transcendental i. is the dialectical unification of opposites: Fichte applies it to the sphere of moral action (subjective i.). Schelling shows it at work in nature (objective i. of the first period), Hegel unified the two points of view (absolute i.). The principle is therefore that every determination of being (category: Kant) refers back to the self-consciousness that produces it: but such self-consciousness cannot produce those determinations if it is not absolute (progress of Fichte); but self-consciousness would not be absolute if it were not the identity of spirit and nature (progress of Schelling); finally this identity could not become conscious if self-conscious reason, that is, spirit (Geist), did not represent the concordant principle of the world (progress of Hegel). Transcendental i. is therefore a methodical synthesis of Kant's epistemology and Spinoza's metaphysics; the a priori of consciousness which is elevated to the absolute principle of reality and of its determinations, and the Absolute declared to be the sole reality which in Hegel reaches the absolute identity of its moments (cf. K. Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, Stuttgart 1852, p. xiv f.). From Fichte Hegel learned the dialectic of negative opposition, according to which the Absolute must be posited as a "result," but he reproaches him for beginning from the immediate I which is dialectical; from Schelling he accepted the identity of nature and spirit, but he criticized in him the immediate beginning of "intellectual intuition" (intellektuelle Anschauung) which at one stroke (the "pistol shot") takes possession of the Absolute, which is instead the final term of the labor of the human spirit (cf. Logik, I, p. 61 ff.). The Hegelian i. claims to have satisfied with rigorous coherence the "principle of immanence" of being and of knowing, which find in the "concept" (Begriff) their own absolute identity and concreteness (pan-logism), in which consists the very essence of philosophy; its result 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 the intellect (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 absolute i. and the Christian religion (Marheineke, Dorner, J. Müller), the latter declared itself openly for radical atheism (Strauss, the brothers Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx). Schopenhauer polemicized energetically against the Hegelian i. (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ergänz. 2, I, III, ch. 38; Werke, II, ed. Reclam, p. 519 ff.: Hegelianism is described as a "roher und platter Realismus"), and constructed on his own account an i. of representation by developing the apriority of time and space of Kant's transcendental aesthetic. Toward the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the present one, various neo-idealist currents developed in Italy, England and then also in Germany and France, which attempted preferably a synthesis between Hegelian pan-logism and the characteristic tendencies of the culture of their own country. In Italy B. Spaventa opened the way, examining thoroughly, at times with unusual acumen, the metaphysical significance and the problematic of Hegelianism (for example, the passage from being to non-being: the objection of Trendelenburg) and maintaining the thesis of an i. ante litteram in Bruno and of the i. of Gioberti and Rosmini. B. Croce (1866) and G. Gentile (1876-1944) depend directly on Spaventa; the former, a proponent of a historicist i., admits the total immanence of the absolute Spirit in the historical becoming; the latter, more sensitive to the fundamental speculative problem of i. itself, affirmed that the only logical conclusion of the principle of immanence is the suppression of any dualism, even dialectical or methodological (subject-object, nature-spirit, history-science, etc.), for the positing of the "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 no true reality can be recognized in it (nicht als ein wahrhaft Seiendes: Hegel, Logik, ed. cit., 2nd, I, p. 145). From the strictly theoretical point of view, transcendental idealism must therefore resolve itself into monism and solipsism: its fundamental ambiguity is the intention of wanting to overcome and deny the reality of the finite, the entire sphere of perception, of immediacy and of intelligence... to declare them "abstract" and negative moments and at the same time to leverage precisely the actual presence of such conflicting moments in order to press the dialectic that should ground the uniqueness of Being. Idealism then resolves itself into a dogmatism that elevates to Absolute the human Reason of Enlightenment philosophy, absorbing into itself (and therefore denying) the personal freedom of individuals, the transcendence of God, the freedom of creation, the gratuitousness and supernatural character of Christian Revelation and of the life of Grace. The claim that modern idealism "lives expressly and consciously the religious foundations and convictions of the Christian West" and that from Christianity idealism takes the concept of "spirit," of "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 denies all the presuppositions of the supernatural order, both in man's relations with the world and with God: in particular, sin is reduced to the "negative moment" that 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 the dialectic... (Hegel). It is symptomatic that precisely in the climate of Lutheranism, the assertor of the absolute interiority of faith and of the exclusivity of Grace, faith itself was made to vanish into the most extreme gnosticism and Grace into the most radical Pelagianism and laicism. The same fideistic tendencies, arisen from the Kantian trunk of the Critique of Practical Reason (the contemporary Jacobi, Fries, Schleiermacher and others) understand by faith an immediate vitality, the impression or subjective judgment of the individual who finds on his own the meaning and the formulas of the revealed dogmas. The incompatibility between modern idealism and Christian doctrine is therefore the direct consequence of the principle of "autonomy of consciousness" that 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 life of individuals, is the direct continuation of the negative legacy left to Western culture by idealism. It must be recognized that, with the decline of materialist positivism, idealism has permeated every sector of human life with a force of penetration and a vastness of influence such as no cultural principle has ever had. The reactions against idealism that make themselves felt, in contemporary thought, on the part of cultivators of science, of religious and social phenomenology... will have a positive outcome only if they can stand on a solid theoretical structure capable of supplanting the idealist one. This has been outlined, in its master lines, in the synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism carried out by St. Thomas, not in the direction of monist immanence as idealism has done, but of causal and pluralist idealism with the ontological distinction of the Absolute and the finite: St. Thomas's application of the Platonic concept of "participation" to the Aristotelian structure of being and of knowing truly accomplished the overcoming of the antithesis between Plato and Aristotle and, interpreting the metaphysical truth of creation as participation, guaranteed at one and the same time 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 on this line that Christian thought will be able to respond to the theoretical demands that idealism has posed and is continually renewing — often with a keen sense of the difficulty of the problems and with the requirement of pure theory — in all fields of the life of the spirit.

Such a theory, however, has not been recognized as constitutive of truth by the second direction that branched off 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 "knowledge" (Wissen) the apprehension solely of the finite and reserved the Infinite and being in its absoluteness to faith, because all knowing is by images and therefore limited, while aspiring and the action that follows from it are essentially directed toward the infinite. For Fichte this Absolute is the "totality" of the moral order and therefore the "result" of the complete development of human activity and civilization (Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen [Werke, 3], ed. F. Medicus, Leipzig 1934, p. 341 ff.): this is also the position of Hegel's absolute idealism, in contrast with Schelling, who opportunely distinguishes an "objective" process of knowledge on the part of our thought, which is something 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, p. 123 f.).

The significance therefore of idealism, which places itself first of all in the gnoseological sphere (possibility of science in general: Kant), has asserted itself as a metaphysical problem, of the total resolution first of all of being into thought and therefore of the finite into the Infinite, but not so total, however, that human consciousness — made more vigilant about its capacities — does not seek in contemporary thought a position of equilibrium between the cosmological extrinsicism of Greek thought and the critical-ontological immanentism of modern thought.

Cornelio Fabro