Idealism

IDEALISMO. — In general, it is the doctrine that makes reality depend on thought.

SUMMARY:

I. Overall concept and division

II. Historical development

III. Critical judgment.

I. OVERALL CONCEPT AND DIVISION. — Idealism, in all its forms, idea (v.) constitutes the truth and 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. Idealism conceives the idea as the absolute in relation to contingents, unity in relation to multiplicity, totality in relation to differences... for this reason, the idea represents the reality of being, while the contingent, the varied, and the multiple are 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 from the spirit and in subordinating the values of individuals to the absolute value of the idea itself: the essence of idealism lies above 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, leaving consciousness without the possibility of orienting itself toward truth. In this programmatic sense, idealism draws upon the very essence of philosophy, according to what Hegel, in this respect, rightly observes: “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 in relation to the idea or world of the spirit, and for metaphysical idealism nature becomes a derivation and production of the spirit itself as its manifestation. Consequently, sensations, representations, and the entire world of perceptions, the experimental sciences, technology, etc., constitute precisely the projection of the idea into nature, and they can relate to truth only insofar as they are “subsumed” (to use the Kantian term) by the idea, or insofar as they are considered as the many, the different, the particular, the things that become... of that One which is the Whole and the Absolute, always identical with 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 can therefore be understood how, from the strictly metaphysical standpoint, the principle of immanence cannot be said to be either primary or exclusive to idealism: not exclusive, because sceptical and phenomenalist philosophies also defend the immanence of cognition, and in a much stronger sense than idealism; not primary, both because in idealism the principle of immanence is invoked in order 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 multiple and the different within the idea itself, with respect to which immanence is invoked and from which it derives its meaning.

It is therefore incorrect to restrict idealism to the post-Kantian transcendental systems (Lalande): Hegel himself considered his philosophy the fulfilment of Greek idealism and Christian idealism, insofar as both classical thought in its theoretically most mature forms (Plato, Aristotle) and Christian Revelation already placed the truth of being in the concept, in the unity of the idea, and called human beings to the freedom of the spirit (cf. Gesch. der Philos, [Verke, 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, any philosophy that in some way expresses this derivation and dependence of nature upon the idea may be designated as idealism: before Christ, as an attempt to approximate Christian truth, and after Christ, as an attempt to elaborate and understand it theoretically. In its genetic and historical meaning, idealism therefore coincides with spiritualism: the successive determinations of the fundamental principle outlined above depend upon the development that the very concept of “spirit” underwent in the various epochs of thought. Its opposite is therefore not realism, but materialism, and not objectivism, but rather phenomenalist subjectivism; by affirming the reality of the idea as the positive and substantial nucleus of being, idealism seeks to safeguard the objective reality of being itself from every form of scepticism—being which, in a materialist conception, must be left at the mercy of the multiplicity of empirical determinations and the indefinite becoming of immediate perceptions or phenomena. Accordingly, it is only 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 has been posed: all the more so because idealism, as a programme and as a method, presents itself as the only philosophy that claims to offer a pure “theory” of being, that is, one which, from the perspective of the subordination—descending or ascending—of the multiple forms of being and of the various activities of the spirit, tends toward the formation of the “system,” or rather of the organism—ontological and epistemological at the same time—that offers the beginning, development, and effective fulfilment of being. One may then speak of a Greek or cosmological idealism, a Christian or theological idealism, and a modern or anthropological idealism.

II. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

a) The first form of i. goes back to Plato: above and beyond sensible, manifold, and changing reality, one must posit 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 the [and from, in...] 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 sensible singular, 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, or in the consideration of the opposed 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 ones (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 Eraclitus had said” (Gesch. der Philos., Italian trans., II, Florence 1932, p. 209), is a gratuitous anticipation of his own thought. Hegel himself, when examining Plato’s more mature analysis of dialectic in the later dialogues (Sophist, Philebus, and especially Parmenides: cf. op. cit., p. 212 ff.), must admit that it lacks the vision of the unity of contraries. According to Hegel, closer to the true requirement of i. is the speculation of Aristotle, who “knew i. 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,” thinking itself in the perfect identity of subject and object (cf. op. cit., pp. 277, 310 ff.). Hegel is right to emphasize the concrete dialectical aspect of the Aristotelian notion of “potency and act,” 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 disengage itself from the latter and exist purely by itself (Met., IX, 8, 1049 b 5; XII, 6, 1071 b 3 ff.). What Hegel says about the synthesis of Plato and Aristotle in i., in which “the requirement is fulfilled that the universal be freely brought forth in itself as the universality of the principle, so that the particular may be known through this universal” (op. cit., p. 392), was precisely the task of Neoplatonism, and of Proclò in particular, as Hegel himself acknowledges (op. cit., III, 1, p. 88 f.), although he recognized the speculative decline marking Neoplatonism from the standpoint of the unitary conception of being demanded by i. In contrast to the empirical and immediate physicalism of the pre-Socratics, and likewise to the explicit and polemical materialism of much of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle belong to i. insofar as it affirms the “duality” of principles of being (potency and act, matter and spirit), but not because it affirms their unity in the “becoming” of the Absolute itself.

Greek i., linked to ontological dualism, is cosmological in nature, insofar as the theoretical process leading to truth relies upon the opposition of contrary principles, and thus proceeds toward their absolute separation (sensible reality and ideas in Plato, nature and Pure Thought in Aristotle, participants and the Unparticipated in Proclò). The claim of German i. to be the mature synthesis of classical thought and Christian Revelation is therefore excessive and unfounded.

b) The dualism of classical thought was linked not so much to the eternity of matter as to the fact that matter was a “principle without a principle,” uncaused and lacking 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 simultaneously both matter and forms, natural beings and finite pure spirits: all these beings (including “prime matter,” as s. 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 i. exemplarism (v.), which was developed systematically by the two greatest masters of the Middle Ages, s. Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius. For the former: “Sunt ideae principales formae quaedam vel rationes rerum stabiles atque incommutabiles, quae ipae formatae non sunt, ac per hoc aeternae ac semper eodem modo se habentes, quae in divina intelligentia continetur... 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,” their “primordial designs” or predefinitions: 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). Following these principles, s. Thomas constructed his quaestia de ideis (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 15, aa. 1–3), in which he sought to deepen the new theological i. by bringing it into relation with the Aristotelian doctrine of causality, concluding with the twofold aspect assumed by the idea: a) as exemplar, “secundum quod est principium factionis rerum... et ad practicam cognitionem pertinet... et secundum hoc se habet ad omnia quae a Deo finet 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 i. is further tempered by s. Thomas through the doctrine of the agent intellect as an active principle for abstracting the universal from sensible particulars (Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 79, 3–4; q. 84, a. 7: the necessity of the “conversio ad phantasmata”), whereas the Augustinian school, with s. Bonaventure, prefers to invoke divine illumination in direct dependence upon 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 feature of modern i., which has been called anthropological because that thought and that infinite ultimately qualify the being of human reason and thus affirm absolute immanence. A first form or stage is found in pre-Kantian metaphysical rationalism. First of all, Descartes: through universal doubt, culminating in the «cogito, ergo sum», the direct dependence 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 (the existence of God, the nature of the soul, the origin of the world...), but also with regard to 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 in a single stroke the entire path of rationalist i., anticipating in some way the method of the physics of romantic transcendental i.; in the Principia, moreover, he explicitly approached 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 i. Finally, the Leibnizian principle of the «monad» fully asserted 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. cited, III, II, p. 66). But the limitation of Descartes’s i. is that the «I think» remains something subjective, and the determinations of being prove extrinsic to the content (if not to the act) of thought, as they are also extrinsic 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 the monads closed in upon themselves. The being and substance of rationalist i., in short, remain the ὄν 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 an obscure form, the creative activity of reason, while 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 upon that principle of negativity which is the true driving force of dialectic. The rationalism of the Wolffians hardened into the dogmatism of the abstract intellect; Hegel underestimates and disdainfully judges the contribution of English phenomenalism (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), which fails to discover the moment of reason as constitutive of i. (Gesch. der Philos., p. 445; Italian trans. cited, III, II, p. 226).

Kant’s conception is designated by the term critical i.; it announces the method that would be brought to completion by absolute i. First of all, the subjectivity of thinking (the 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 «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 as principles or presuppositions of theology, morality, and religion (cf. Kr. d. reinen Vernunft, Elementarlehre, part 2, section 2, I, I, B. 394 ff., Reclam ed., p. 290 note). The physical world itself, then, in its perceptual structures, is the projection of the «transcendental imagination» (transcendentale Einbildungskraft), which applies the schemata to the datum of experience so that the latter may be subsumed under the categories. The moral world likewise has its full autonomy immanent in the freedom of the subject and in the absoluteness of the consciousness of duty, through the realization of moral values. Finally, above the two formal legislations of the Critiques of theoretical and practical reason, Kant introduced, with the Critique of Judgment, a teaching that enables one to apprehend and enjoy the concrete immediately as a synthesis of particular and universal (purposiveness and beauty), and thus bridges the hiatus between the world of phenomena of intuition and that of the freedom of practical activity (cf. Kr. d. Urtheithkraft, introduction, ed. E. Cassirer, V, Berlin 1914, p. 239 ff.). Kant’s i. is restrained 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, rather than as the latter’s actual reality (cf. Gesch. d. Philos., p. 528 ff.; Italian trans., III, II, p. 335 ff.; Logik, I, p. 24 ff.; Enz., § 52).

The task of transcendental idealism was to resolve the Kantian dualism in order to secure the human spirit’s possession of the Absolute: the new point of view asserts that the “thing in itself” is consciousness itself and that, consequently, the worlds of nature and spirit are nothing but aspects, moments, and effects of that same reality. Thus knowledge of the objective world of nature and spirit is now possible, insofar as it is one and the same nature (ein und dasselbe Wesen) that operates in nature and thinks in spirit, because nature and spirit are, in their foundation, identical (philosophy of identity; v.). The essence of transcendental idealism is the dialectical unification of opposites: Fichte applies it to the sphere of moral action (subjective idealism). Schelling shows it operating in nature (objective idealism of his first period), while Hegel unified the two points of view (absolute idealism). The principle is therefore that every determination of being (category: Kant) refers back to self-consciousness, which produces it; but such self-consciousness cannot produce those determinations unless it is absolute (Fichte’s advance); yet 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 self-conscious reason, that is, spirit (Geist), represented the world’s harmonious principle (Hegel’s advance). Transcendental idealism is therefore a methodical synthesis of Kant’s theory of knowledge and Spinoza’s metaphysics: the a priori of consciousness elevated to the absolute principle of reality and its determinations, and the Absolute declared to be the sole reality, which in Hegel attains the absolute identity of its moments (cf. K. Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik oder Wissenschaftslehre, Stuttgart 1852, p. xiv ff.). From Fichte, Hegel learned the dialectic of negative opposition, according to which the Absolute must be posited as the “result”; but he reproaches Fichte for beginning from the immediate I, which is dialectical. From Schelling he accepted the identity of nature and spirit, but criticized his immediate beginning with “intellectual intuition” (intellektuelle Anschauung), which at one stroke (the “pistol shot”) seizes the Absolute, whereas the Absolute is instead the final term of the human spirit’s labor (cf. Logik, I, p. 61 ff.). Hegelian idealism claims to have satisfied, with rigorous consistency, the “principle of the immanence” of being and knowing, which find in the “concept” (Begriff) their absolute identity and concreteness (pan-logism), in which philosophy’s very essence consists; 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 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 absolute idealism and the Christian religion (Marheineke, Dorner, J. Müller), while the latter openly declared itself for radical atheism (Strauss, the Bauer brothers, Feuerbach, Marx). Schopenhauer energetically polemicized against Hegelian idealism (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Ergänz. 2, I, III, chap. 38; Werke, II, ed. Reclam, p. 519 ff.: Hegelianism is characterized as a “roher und platter Realismus”), and independently constructed an idealism of representation by developing the a priori character of time and space in Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. Toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the present one, various neo-idealist tendencies developed in Italy, England, and subsequently also in Germany and France; these preferentially attempted a synthesis between Hegelian pan-logism and the characteristic tendencies of their respective national cultures. In Italy, B. Spaventa opened the way by examining, at times with unusual acuity, the metaphysical meaning and the problematic of Hegelianism (for example, the passage from being to non-being: Trendelenburg’s objection), and by maintaining the thesis of an idealism ante litteram in Bruno and of the idealism of Gioberti and Rosmini. B. Croce (1866) and G. Gentile (1876–1944) depend directly on Spaventa; the former, champion of a historicist idealism, admits the total immanence of the Absolute Spirit in historical becoming; the latter, more sensitive to idealism’s fundamental speculative problem, affirmed that the sole logical conclusion of the principle of immanence is the suppression of every dualism, including dialectical or methodological dualism (subject-object, nature-spirit, history-science, etc.), through the positing of “Spirit as pure act,” mediating 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 a true reality cannot be acknowledged for it (nicht als ein wahrhaft Seiendes: Hegel, Logik, cited edition, 2nd ed., I, p. 145). From a strictly theoretical point of view, transcendental idealism must therefore resolve itself into monism and solipsism: its fundamental ambiguity lies in its intention to overcome and deny the reality of the finite, the entire sphere of perception, immediacy, and intelligence... to declare them “abstract” and negative “moments” while at the same time relying precisely on the effective presence of these contrasting moments in order to drive forward the dialectic that should ground the uniqueness of Being. Idealism thus resolves itself into a dogmatism that elevates to the Absolute the human Reason of Enlightenment philosophy, absorbing within itself—and hence denying—the personal freedom of individuals, the transcendence of God, the freedom of creation, and the gratuitous and supernatural character of Christian Revelation and the life of Grace. To maintain that modern idealism “expressly and consciously lives the religious foundations and convictions of the Christian West” and that from Christianity idealism derives the concept 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 denies all the presuppositions of the supernatural order, both in man’s relations with the world and in his relations 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 the dialectic... (Hegel). It is symptomatic that, precisely in the climate of Lutheranism, which asserts the absolute inwardness of faith and the exclusivity of Grace, faith itself should have been made to vanish into the most extreme Gnosticism, and Grace into the most radical Pelagianism and secularism. The same fideist movements, arising from the Kantian trunk of the Critique of Practical Reason (the contemporary Jacobi, Fries, Schleiermacher, and others), understand faith as an immediate vitality, the impression or subjective judgment of the individual who independently discovers 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 emergence 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 left 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 power of penetration and a breadth of influence such as no cultural principle has ever possessed. The reactions against idealism that are making themselves felt in contemporary thought, among scholars of science and of religious and social phenomenology... will have a positive outcome only if they can rest upon a solid theoretical structure capable of displacing the idealist one. Its principal lines were outlined in the synthesis of Platonism and Aristotelianism carried out by s. Tommaso, not in the direction of monistic immanence, as idealism has done, but of causal and pluralist idealism, with the ontological distinction between the Absolute and the finite: s. Tommaso’s application of the Platonic concept of “participation” to the Aristotelian structure of being and knowing truly effected the overcoming of the antithesis between Plato and Aristotle and, by interpreting the metaphysical truth of creation as participation, at once guaranteed the reality of the distinction between the finite and the Infinite, the total dependence of the finite upon the Infinite, the perfect freedom of creation in God, and the consistency—albeit limited—of the finite in relation to the Infinite. It is along this line that Christian thought will be able to respond to the theoretical demands that idealism has raised and continues constantly to renew—often with an acute sense of the difficulty of the problems and with a demand for pure theory—in every field of the life of the spirit.

This theory, however, was not recognized as constitutive of truth by the second direction that departed from Kant, namely, Jacobi’s, Fries’s... “philosophy of faith” (Glaubensphilosophie), for which 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: Fichte himself, 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 every act of knowing is through images and therefore limited, whereas aspiration 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 appropriately distinguishes an “objective” process of knowledge on the part of our thought from the quite different assertion 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 first arises within the gnoseological sphere (the possibility of science in general: Kant)—asserted itself as a metaphysical problem: first and foremost, that of the total resolution of being into thought and consequently of the finite into the Infinite, though not so totally, nevertheless, that human consciousness—made more vigilant regarding its own 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.