What is idealism and realism

His idealism needs epistemology as well as metaphysics. This epistemological task turned out to be much more difficult than Hegel initially thought.

Actually, the Phenomenology is not just the best known, it is the only version of an introduction Hegel ever elaborated in detail, at least in print, that explicitly addressed the task at hand as an epistemological problem. However, the Phenomenology still remains the most straightforward attempt to settle the question as to the metaphysical priority of the subject-object identity as an epistemological problem.

It would lead to a discussion of why Hegel initially, i. This process is delineated by Hegel as an introductory logical process that proceeds by means of a criticism of standard logical forms like judgments and inferences as well as of object constituting concepts, i. For him an inquiry into the conditions of knowledge is the right starting point because knowledge understood as the activity of gaining conceptual access to the world is the only discursive attitude available to a subject towards determining what is objectively real, i.

The approach Hegel is pursuing in order to arrive at the desired result, i. The possibility of this correspondence depends on getting hold of structural features that are shared by subject and object on the basis of which a knowledge relation can be established. This is the assumption of isomorphism that underlies any epistemologically-motivated move toward idealism. With the concept of knowledge settled, Hegel chooses as the point of departure for his analysis a configuration of this knowledge relation between subject and object that proceeds on the assumption that the relata of this relation, i.

Such a conception of the knowledge relation proves to be unwarranted because, according to Hegel, it can be shown that the idea of a cognitive relation between totally independent items makes no sense. Instead one has to acknowledge that the very attempt to establish such a unreasonable conception already presupposes that there indeed is a structural affinity between subject and object, an affinity that enables an object to be an object for a subject and that enables the subject to relate to the object.

Hegel wants us to think of this mutual affinity in terms of conceptual determinations necessary to come up both with the concept of an object of knowledge and with a tenable account of a knowing subject. Thus in the case of e.

The entire process run through in the Phenomenology is meant to enrich the features a subject and an object have to share in order to arrive at a complete concept of both what a subject and an object are. This amounts according to Hegel to the insight that if knowledge is analyzed in terms of a subject-object relation there is for knowledge Erkennen in the end no difference between the subject and the object or, as he is fond of saying, that there is a difference that is no difference ein Unterschied, der keiner ist.

By this he and his idealistic allies mean a that knowledge is a relation between real relata and b that knowledge is real only if the relata are real. First of all it has to be such that the subject-object split can be grounded in it and secondly it must allow for an interpretation according to which it is real or has being Sein. Without meeting these two conditions all we have by now i.

These items have to be structurally identical. Hence if there is knowledge thinking must be real, must have being Sein haben. Now, thinking is an objective , a real activity in the sense that it gives rise to determinations that constitute both the subject and the object.

Conceived of that way thinking not only fulfills the two conditions mentioned above i. From this argument as to the sole reality of thinking, it is easy to derive a new conception of idealism that is not subject to the objections mentioned above that Hegel raised against the in his eyes one-sided attempts by his fellow post-Kantians, in particular of Fichte and Schelling.

Though Hegel definitely wants these connotations to obtain in certain contexts, they play no role in his metaphysical views. There the only relevant fact is the reality of thinking and the consequences of this fact. This is shown by the fact that he very rarely uses it to this purpose.

GW 21, 55f. Although this impression is by no means entirely groundless, it is still misleading because it does not do justice to the ontological connotations that Hegel wants to connect with this claim. And so it is. Thus, to use examples that Hegel mentions in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit , it makes perfectly good sense to describe a fully grown oak-tree as the realization of its concept, i.

It is this theory that commits him not just to idealism because of its radical conceptualism but also to metaphysical monism because of the singularity of the Concept, i. Within the framework of this theory the Concept is conceived of as providing something like the master plan or the universal structure that governs not only the conceptual structure of individual kinds of objects but the structure of individual objects as well. This process of self-determination is understood by Hegel as the way in which the Concept realizes itself.

After all, the Concept, being a thought-object or an object-thought itself, must also have reality or being and thus has to realize itself. In this way, Hegel does try to reconcile the need for conceptual elements constitutive of traditional epistemological idealism with most of the categorical commitments characteristic of traditional ontological idealism yet in a way that no longer requires the opposition between epistemology and ontology.

Arthur Schopenhauer — heaped a great deal of invective on Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For that reason, Schopenhauer is not always included among the German idealists. Nevertheless, since Schopenhauer works within a Kantian framework, and identifies underlying reality with pure activity, although of an arational rather than rational kind, it is useful to think of him within the framework of idealism.

Schopenhauer puts forward his theory in his main work The World as Will and Representation Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , first published in December, with an date on its title page , and then in a much-expanded second edition in and yet another expanded edition in This book had been preceded by a doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason , which Schopenhauer subsequently regarded as the introduction to his magnum opus.

Schopenhauer holds that. This simple and perhaps inescapable thought may be regarded as the most fundamental epistemological motivation for any form of idealism. On the basis of this proposition, Schopenhauer then tries to distinguish his position from what he takes to be the skepticism of Hume, that there is a real question about whether there is either a subject or an object in addition to representations, and from the dogmatism of Fichte, that both of these can be proved; his own view as initially stated is rather that.

This intuition is not some phantasm derived from repeated experience; rather, it is something independent of experience, and to such an extent that experience must in fact be conceived as dependent on it, since the properties of time and space, as they are known a priori in intuition, apply to all experience as laws that it must always come out in accordance with.

Schopenhauer also does not doubt that there is something other than the representing subject beyond what it represents, an underlying reality beginning with its own body as it is rather than as it merely appears.

We have immediate cognition of the thing in itself when it appears to us as our own body; but our cognition is only indirect when the thing in itself is objectified in other objects of intuition. What Schopenhauer means is that although we have an experience of our own bodies, as it were from the outside, through the same forms of space, time, and causality through which we experience all other bodies, including other animate bodies, and in this regard we experience all bodies including our own as mere appearance through the forms we impose on experience, we also have another experience, each of us of his or her own body, as it were from the inside, namely we have an experience of willing an action and of our bodies as the instruments of our wills, with no separation between will and action and thus no relevance of spatial separation, temporal succession, or difference between cause and effect.

However—and this is the argument of Book II—our immediate experience of our own bodies as instruments of our wills is an experience of our actions being immediately determined by desire rather than by reason.

Trying to truly satisfy desire is the height of irrationality, but for Schopenhauer there is nothing else we can will—we can at best try to escape from the clutches of will altogether, whether through art, asceticism, or compassion. But of course, if the underlying nature of reality, the thing in itself, is nothing other than will, then escape from its clutches should not really be possible but should at most be apparent.

Ultimate reality, because, Schopenhauer assumes,. Schopenhauer devotes many pages to empirical descriptions of the similarities between the forces at work throughout the rest of nature and the merely apparently rational but really non-rational character of our own behavior, but of course the character of things in themselves cannot be inferred directly from any amount of empirical data; Schopenhauer derives his conclusion not from all this empirical illustration but rather from our allegedly immediate rather than empirical insight into the character of our own wills and the very problematic premise that at bottom everything is essentially one.

His position thus begins from an epistemological premise, namely that we can know ultimate reality through knowing ourselves, and reaches an ontological conclusion, that ultimate reality must be like ourselves, but in opposition to Kant and the other German idealists he assumes that our own nature is essentially non-rational and therefore that the ultimate character of reality, although it is in a certain sense like the mental, is also fundamentally non-rational.

It may seem far-fetched to think of Friedrich Nietzsche — as an idealist. After all, he presented himself as an almost fanatical anti-idealist throughout his life. A telling summary of his position concerning idealism is to be found in his letter to Malvida von Meysenburg 20 October :. Considerations like these suggest that in spite of his protests, idealistic modes of thinking are not alien to Nietzsche.

At least some of his beliefs are compatible with what has been called here epistemological arguments for idealism although Nietzsche himself would have taken these beliefs to express a form of realism. Philosophy in this traditional shape he took to be a somewhat enigmatic endeavor to pursue the mutually excluding tasks of culture-forming art and religion on the one hand and of cognition-focused science on the other see Nachgelassene Fragmente : Notebook 19, [47], [62], []; KSA 7.

It is doomed to failure because of two fundamental shortcomings. The first is that it gives a privileged status to truth in declaring truth to be the ultimate goal at which it aims. This preoccupation with truth is based on the implicit assumption that truth has some overriding value. This assumption has never been justified, not even addressed by any philosopher. Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals Section 24 :.

Turn to the most ancient and most modern philosophies: all of them lack a consciousness of the extent to which the will to truth itself needs a justification, here is a gap in every philosophy—where does it come from? Because the ascetic ideal has so far been lord over all philosophy, because truth was set as being, as god, as the highest authority itself, because truth was not allowed to be a problem. KSA 5. It is the tendency of philosophers to deny the obvious, to neglect surfaces in favor of what is allegedly behind them, out of habitual weakness and anxiety to prefer the stable and immutable over and against change and becoming.

This critical sentiment Nietzsche expresses quite often at different places in many of his published and unpublished writings. A nice example is the following note:. On the psychology of metaphysics. This world is apparent—consequently there is a true world. This world is conditioned—consequently there is an unconditioned world. This world is full of contradiction—consequently there is a world free from contradiction. This world is becoming—consequently there is an existing [ seiende ] world.

All false inferences blind trust in reason: if A is, there must be its opposing concept B. It is suffering that inspires these inferences: at bottom there are wishes that such a world might be; similarly hatred of a world that causes suffering expresses itself through the imagination of another world, one full of value: the ressentiment of the metaphysicians against the actual world is here creative.

Notebook 8 [2]; reprinted in KSA Yet Nietzsche seems undecided how to evaluate the real motives that led Plato to his idealism.

Sometimes he wants to distinguish Plato from other idealists by crediting him with some obscure positive reason for endorsing idealism. In sum: all philosophical idealism until now was something like an illness, except where, as in the case of Plato, it was the caution of an overabundant and dangerous health, the fear of overpowerful senses, the shrewdness of a shrewd Socratic.

KSA 3. His ultimate verdict on metaphysics in all its ancient and modern forms is nicely expressed in the following note:. The influence of fearfulness. What has been most feared, the cause of the most powerful suffering the lust for domination, sexual lust, etc. Thus they have step by step wiped out the affects—claimed God to be the opposite of the evil, i. Likewise they hate the irrational, the arbitrary, the accidental as the cause of countless physical suffering.

In the same way they fear change, transitoriness: therein is expressed an oppressed soul, full of mistrust and bad experience The case of Spinoza: an inverted sort of person would count this change as charming.

A playful being overladen with power would call precisely the affects, unreason and change good in an eudaimonistic sense, together with their consequences, with danger, contrast, dissolution, etc.. KSA This Nietzschean view can give rise to the impression that in the end he might have been closer to endorsing some form of epistemologically motivated idealism. This leads to the topics of perspectivism and interpretation Auslegung in Nietzsche. Although the details are far from clear, the general tendency of his perspectivism is expressed quite well in aphorism from The Gay Science :.

This view, according to which, further, the world each of us is experiencing is the product of an interpretation forced on us by some unconscious overriding drive Trieb that is the formative mark of the individual character of each of us, might be seen as endorsing a version of idealism if, as it is here, idealism is understood as the claim that what appears to be known as it is independent of the mind is in the end inescapably marked by the creative, formative, constructive activities of human mind, whether individual or collective.

However, it is far from clear whether Nietzsche wants us to think of this process of interpretation which leads to a specific perspective as a mind-dependent activity. Sometimes it seems as if he is favoring a quasi-Humean view according to which the intellect operates in the service of some anonymous affective and emotional drives in such a way that it just provides a set of necessary means to consciously realize what drives force us to do.

The following note, for example, points in this direction:. It is our needs that interpret the world: our drives and their to and fro. Every drive is a kind of domination, every one has its perspective, which it would force on all other drives as a norm. Notebook 7 [60]. In other passages Nietzsche seems to be more in line with a by and large Kantian view according to which the intellect provides some rules of transformation of what is given by the senses as individual and discrete data into more general representations.

Thus we find him claiming in section of The Gay Science :. This is what I understand to be true phenomenalism and perspectivism: that due to the nature of animal consciousness , the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface- and sign-world, a world turned into generalities and thereby debased to its lowest common denominator,—that everything that enters consciousness thereby becomes superficial, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a mark of the herd, that all becoming-conscious involves a vast and fundamental corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization.

Be this as it may, at least as far as epistemological idealism is concerned it is by no means obvious that either his explicit criticism of idealism or his remarks on the ways we make up epistemic worlds prevent Nietzsche from coming close to an idealist position himself. This is so because in epistemology his main enemy does not seem to be idealism but all forms of realism. Although his epistemology does not explicitly imply any ontological claims, one could be tempted to see Nietzsche as toying with some ontologically idealistic fantasies.

His speculations concerning the will to power as the ultimate dynamic foundation of all reality fall into this category. For example,. Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity[.

And the process goes on…. Notebook 14 []. Thus, in the end there are no real obstacles to thinking of Nietzsche as an idealist on ontological as well as epistemological grounds, although the speculations that lead him in the former direction may be separable from the latter. Although it goes beyond the scope of this article, some hints about the fate of idealism in Germany might be appropriate.

Interest especially in metaphysical versions of idealism waned in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth although it remained lively in other parts of Europe, e. The decline of interest in idealism during this period had to do primarily with a certain aversion against what was taken to have been an excessive and extravagant usurpation of all fields of intellectual discourse by the classical German philosophers under the pretext of idealism.

This line of criticism was voiced most forcefully by influential natural scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz. Marginalization of idealism in these years also was an effect of the rise of Neo-Kantianism, which at least partly came into being both in its Marburg-school Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer and in its Southwest Heidelberg -school Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, Emil Lask version as a reaction against the German idealists.

Although insofar as Neo-Kantianism was a reaction mainly to absolute idealism it could not entirely reject epistemological arguments of the kind that had traditionally led to idealism, especially in its Kantian variety. In particular, the writings of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg — and Rudolf Hermann Lotze — are documents of a lasting influence of idealistic figures and practices of thought, as was highlighted in detail by Beiser It also has to be kept in mind that during this period there were still active right old and left new Hegelians who were either critically or apologetically committed to a broadly Hegelian or idealistic framework in philosophy.

All these voices had some impact on philosophical discussions mainly about religion e. In spite of all this, it is fair to say that idealism fell out of fashion in the German speaking world, and has stayed that way.

Things were different in the English-speaking world, where idealism became an important topic in a wide spectrum of philosophical discussions ranging from metaphysics via aesthetics to moral and social theories. In England, Scotland, and Wales an idealism that was ultimately both epistemological and ontological in motivation became the dominant approach to philosophy for several decades, while in the United States idealism could not monopolize philosophy, having to share the stage with and ultimately reach an accommodation with pragmatism, but it nevertheless also flourished for several decades.

In fact, these philosophers were more willing to call themselves idealists than had been the earlier German idealists who supposedly inspired them, but who as has been argued were just as interested in escaping as in accepting the label. This is shown most tellingly insofar as their approach to a defense of idealism goes back to a state of the discussion characteristic of the period prior to Hegel and German idealism in general, rather connecting more directly to an understanding of idealism influenced by eighteenth-century disputes in the wake of Berkeley.

None of these figures except perhaps Royce continued to explore a dynamic conception of idealism distinctive of Hegel and the other German idealists—Royce in fact wrote more extensively and insightfully on Hegel and his immediate predecessors than any of the others with the exception of McTaggart.

These philosophers were thus more willing to identify themselves as idealists than had been their predecessors. However, these philosophers were not all equally monists. But both Green at the beginning of the movement and Royce towards its end strove for more nuanced positions, not excluding the existence of matter from their idealisms, and thus resisted monism.

For the most part, however, after the attacks on Bradley and Royce, explicit avowal of idealism became rare, with a few exceptions such as the prominent defense of idealism by Brand Blanshard in the s and less prominent defenses by Timothy Sprigge and John Foster in the early s. Thomas Hill Green —82 was the first of the great Oxford idealists.

He is best remembered for a lengthy polemic with Hume that he published in the form of an introduction to a collected edition of Hume that he co-edited and for his posthumously published Prolegomena to Ethics , which is a polemic against utilitarianism from the point of view of a perfectionism inspired by Kant as well as by Hegel.

Green also left behind a set of Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation that form one of the crucial documents of the political and social philosophy of British idealism and of idealism in the broadest sense mentioned at the outset of this entry. First, and here also much influenced by Kant, he argues that knowledge never consists in the mere apprehension of discrete items, but in the recognition of order or relation, and that such order or relation is not given but is constituted by and in consciousness.

Prolegomena , Francis Herbert Bradley — , however, argued for a more exclusive spiritualism, or an idealist ontology. Bradley presents his metaphysical views on the constitution and the main characteristics of reality most explicitly in Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, which was first published in and reprinted many times during his lifetime.

He substantiates this claim by examining a range of central concepts from metaphysics and epistemology, among them the concepts of primary and secondary qualities, of substance and attribute, of quality and relation, space and time, of causality as well as the concept of a thing and that of the self.

The best known of his destructive arguments against these conceptions is that against qualities and relations because it played a role in the discussion that arose at the turn of the twentieth century between Bradley, Russell and Moore among others about the logical and ontological status of relations, i.

As to qualities and relations Bradley claims:. The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be necessary in practice, but it is theoretically unintelligible. The reality, so characterized, is not true reality, but is appearance.

This is so because in order to be qualities they have to differ from other qualities and hence have to be distinct. However, without relations they could not be distinct.

But distinctiveness presupposes plurality and plurality relations. Their plurality depends on relation, and, without that relation, they are not distinct. But, if not distinct, then not different, and therefore not qualities.

The same holds, according to Bradley, from the side of relations. Bradley summarizes as the result:. The conclusion to which I am brought is that a relational way of thought—any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations—must give appearance, and not truth. The result of his examination not just of the concepts of quality and relation but of all the other concepts he deals with consists in the verdict that all attempts to capture the true nature of reality in terms of these categories are futile because all these concepts are unintelligible, inconsistent and in the end self-contradictory.

This means that what is designated by means of them cannot be real, but can only reflect the way the world appears to us, not the way it really is. However, to be just appearance is not to be unreal in the sense of an illusion. But does this ontological argument for idealism exclude epistemology altogether? That is, since appearance always proves to be an inadequate way in which reality is present to us, is it beyond our means ever to become acquainted with the true essence of ultimate reality or can we avoid skepticism and claim that it is indeed possible for us to have access to the constitutive nature of reality?

Bradley emphatically endorses the latter possibility. According to him, the self-contradictoriness of what is appearance already implies that there is positive knowledge of reality: reality has to be One in the sense that it does not allow discord and it must be such that it can include diversity cf. This character of reality as an internally diversified individual system is revealed to us in sentient experience.

The material basis of sentient experience is exhausted in feeling, thought, and volition. Thus reality consists in what has to be taken as the undifferentiated unity of these modes of sentient experience before these modes make their appearance as different aspects of experience. This leads Bradley to assume that what is ultimately real is just what gives rise to appearances where appearances have to be understood as specific forms under which the underlying undifferentiated unity appears in each of these different aspects of experience.

In his words:. The identification of idealism with spiritualism, thus again an ontological interpretation of idealism, is most explicit in the works of John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart — The progress of an idealistic philosophy may, from some points of view, be divided into three stages.

The problem of the first is to prove that reality is not exclusively matter. The problem of the second is to prove that reality is exclusively spirit. The problem of the third is to determine what is the fundamental nature of spirit. He takes spirit to be the sum total of individual spirits or selves connected by the relation of love and bases this conviction on the claim that only this conception of what ultimate reality consists in allows us to overcome unavoidable contradictions connected with all other attempts to reconcile unity and diversity as the distinguishing marks of reality.

Harmony between unity and diversity can be established only on the basis of an all-encompassing relation of love between all the characteristic elements of reality, which in turn presupposes thinking of ultimate reality as a community of spirits or as Spirit.

These—as McTaggart himself admits [ f. In his earliest writing he relies heavily on views held by Bradley to the effect that we have to accept that contradictions are a criterion for non-reality. However, he does not employ this criterion as a logical maxim but transforms it into an ontological principle according to which everything that prevents harmony cannot be real.

Substances according to McTaggart are infinitely divisible and therefore cannot have simple parts. Between substances and their individual features there obtains a relation of determining correspondence such that each feature determines and is determined by all the other. Given these a priori characteristics of what can exist the task McTaggart tackles in the second volume is to.

This double task cannot be settled by a priori means but has to be approached by starting from empirical assumptions based on experience. If one has to acknowledge that the ways we are bound to conceive of all these experiential or phenomenal characteristics lead to contradictions then these characteristics cannot be true of reality. The empirically given characteristics McTaggart discusses primarily are a time, b matter, c sensa, d spirit and e cogitation. He distinguishes between two ways of ordering in time.

The result:. We conclude that the distinctions of past, present and future are essential to time, and that, if the distinctions are never true of reality, then no reality is in time. This is so because all that exists are substances that have to be infinitely divisible. An idealist might decide to eat less meat because she thinks that her diet is unsustainable, and in an ideal world the average person would be eating less meat than she is. However, a realist might decide to cut out meat all together, not necessarily because he thinks it is wrong to eat meat, but because eating less meat will have more of an impact on the real world.

A realist lives a life that responds to the real world around her. An idealist instead first thinks of what a perfect life would be, and then tries his hardest to live it. Pret A Manger, the high street sandwich shop, recently made an idealistic decision. However, Pret recently decided to modify this process to limit donations to registered and trusted charities.

This coincided with the idealistic decision to strive for a more holistic response to the problem of homelessness by addressing a number of its causes and symptoms - not just hunger. Was this a good decision? No need to take offense, the reality we perceive is a matter of perception. Like yours and mine wich will never fully line up due to our unique history that only you and i can make and emotional status while we experience life, causing us to feel one way or another about….

If in a realist world they were afforded the opportunity to truly be hopeful i am sure the would choose to be. If not for Idealist how can realist be…inventions for for example come from thought and dreams.

On due time they become our reality.. Great minds think about idealism while tje masses can only see realism…. I think there is correlation between idealist and realist, idealist emphasis on positive thinking which i refer as spirit of i can do it.

This is a very good beginners guide to understanding both concepts of Idealism and Realism. Thanks for the effort. Thanks for the useful definitions. I am a bit of all actually. But sometimes the glass has poison in it Therefore arealist can see this. Before i came to this site i never understood what this was all about now i understand it better thanks. Realism always believed in tangible and intangible force, deceit and use of violence to achieve their goal.

Idealists are basically fantasists,happy to use up all the worlds resources in order to create a perpetual motion machine. Name required. Email required. Please note: comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Written by : Julita.