A Dictionary of Philosophy, Third Edition
. A doctrine, or set of doctrines, to the effect that reality is in some way mental. Idealism is concerned with ‘IDEA’ more closely than with ‘IDEAL’. It is not primarily concerned with ethics or conduct, though certain ethical views have sometimes been associated with it. Idealism is contrasted primarily with REALISM, though also with MATERIALISM. Rarely, it means simply that the universe is spiritual in the sense of depending on God. Sometimes, however, views are called idealist which hold that reality is outside the mind, but can only be described from some point of view—there are different ways of looking at reality, none of which is more correct that the others, rather as whether Oxford is to the right of Cambridge depends on where one is looking from. In this wide sense, such outlooks as PRAGMATISM and CONVENTIONALISM are idealist. Kant, similarly, held that reality existed independently, but that how it appeared to us was determined by the structure of the human mind. Public empirical knowledge was therefore possible, but only of appearances (‘phenomena’). He called himself an empirical realist but a transcendental idealist, meaning by this that what we perceive is in general not illusory, but as real as perceptible things could be, but that nevertheless philosophy forces us to assume that they are appearances of things which in themselves are quite unknowable by us.
Full-blooded idealism holds that reality is mental. ‘To be is to be perceived’, as Berkeley said. Matter does not exist except in the form of ideas in the mind, or as a manifestation of mental activity. The ‘mind’ in question may be one’s own mind (solipsism: see SCEPTICISM), minds in general, or the mind of God (Berkeley).
Absolute idealism developed after Kant, notably with Hegel, and was popular in Britain from about 1865 to 1925. It takes many forms, but its central point is that there is only one ultimately real thing, the Absolute, which is spiritual in nature. Other things are partial aspects of this, or illusory appearances generated by it. Here idealism becomes a form of MONISM. The Absolute is so called because it alone does not depend on or presuppose anything and does not have its properties relative to something else.
A distinction is sometimes made between subjective and objective idealism. ‘Subjective idealism’ is used mainly of views that the only reality is ideas in the mind, especially the human mind. The term is often, however, applied to Berkeley, though he himself used immaterialism. ‘Objective idealism’, like absolute idealism, applies mainly to forms of idealism which place reality outside the human mind. It is used especially when the arguments in favour of idealism say that appearances are contradictory, and therefore are mere appearances of a reality lying behind them; subjective idealism, by contrast, says that appearances and minds are the only reality (cf. also PHENOMENALISM).
Plato’s theory of IDEAS, or FORMS, is not usually called idealism now, since these Ideas, though not material, are not mental or mind-dependent. See also BEING.
A.C.Ewing, Idealism: a Critical Survey, 1934. (Sympathetic, though not himself an idealist.)
A.C.Ewing (ed.), The Idealist Tradition, Free Press, 1957. (Selections from leading idealists.)
J.Foster, The Case for Idealism, RKP, 1982. (Defence of a moderate version)
J.Hospers, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, RKP, 1956, chapter 8. (Discusses subjective idealism in relation to other theories.)
R.Le Poidevin, ‘Fables and models’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol., 1991. (See p. 73 for a distinction between idealism and phenomenalism.)
A.Quinton, Absolute Idealism, 1972. (Dawes Hicks lecture at British Academy, 1971).
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