Jimmie Higgins
21st June 2012, 09:10
I've seen this word used on Revleft a lot, but to be honest I don't really have a clear understanding of it. It is thrown around sometimes it seems as an insult or attack on another poster, but what does it mean exactly?Idealism in essence is the notion that ideas themselves shape the world (as in your #1 explanation).
We live in a highly idealistic society and this view of the world is dominant pretty much everywhere except for hard and practical sciences. "Capitalists succeed by having the best ideas and inventions" is idealism - "if you work hard, then you will make it" is another - "we live in a color-blind society" - etc. In hard and practical sciences idealism would be like healing through prayer or using the power of positive thinking to avoid annoying co-workers or whatnot. The ruling class needs practical science because they know their trains and ships and factories won't run on Angel wings and prayers... but they do not mind if the general population has a view of history and social science and the economy that's the equivalent of alchemy or phrenology. The more we think that horrors like slavery ended because of good ideas and intentions rather than material struggle between people with different concrete interests in society, the better for our rulers.
I have a couple of basic views of it in my head. Are any of those three the correct definition of idealism?
1. Idealism is the belief that ideals are the primary driving force of the world and that ideals exist independent of the material world. That ideals simply form whole in a person's mind without any outside influence.
Yes, sounds about right.
2. The view that ideals are the only thing that exists. This seems extreme to me but someone mentioned in reference to Plato's allegory of the Cave so I thought I'd add it.Not sure what you mean here. In classical idealism there was sort of the concept of a sort of ultimate ideal which all things in the material world strove to try and live up to, but in flawed ways. But I think generally it isn't a total negation of the material world, just a confusion of how it works, a self-flattering effect of the division of mental and physical labor which creates the illusion among priests, and philosophers that ideas create reality. God, the ideal, created earth and Adam (unsuccessfully) and then Jesus are the ideal men which all other men try to live up to. Descartes rejecting all accrued knowledge of his day, all science, and looking within his own mind to try and understand the world. Buddah seeking answers within. Ancient priests promising that the right prayers or rituals will create better harvest conditions.
So again, not a negation of the material world, just an inversion in seeing ideas as shaping the material world.
3. This is 3rd one is a view that I hold, so I'm wondering if I am an idealist. The idea that while material condtions influence our views on things and how we think, our personal views and mindset can greatly influence how we perceive and interpret the world. For example an atheist would view and interpret the world very differently than a fundamentalist Christian. I think even psychologists would probably agree that our perception and point of view greatly influence how we view the world.I don't think this goes against materialism at all - maybe just some overly-deterministic variants. "Men make history, but not under conditions of their choosing" as Marx put it. So it's the material world from which our ideas about the world are shaped, but then, subjectively, the ideas we have can be more or less beneficial or accurate. People can argue over different conceptions of the world, different interpretations of it, just as engineers might argue about the best way to make a new car more fuel efficient. People might have different conceptions, but these ideas are just different interpretations of the world and are still the result of the material conditions of the world. Even idealism is the result of material conditions :lol:
Aristocles
26th June 2012, 01:54
I think your confusion (between #1 and #2 especially) stems from the fact that there are two entirely separate philosophical positions called 'idealism,' which have little to nothing to do with each other, each with their respective definition of 'idea.'
Idealism in the first sense seems to be mostly what you're talking about, and is closest to your #1, as Jimmie Higgins explained (so I won't recap that). It belongs to political philosophy more than anything else.
From #2, though, it seems like you are also thinking about metaphysical idealism, which is the notion that everything that exists is, at bottom, a mental property. This is Bishop Berkeley's philosophy, and the basic gist of it beings with the observation that all our observations are of mental properties. We don't have privileged empirical access to objects outside ourselves, we have access to our own sensory impressions, which we then assume are caused by objects outside us, but again, we don't ever actually engage with the external world. Berkeley then says something like, "well, we therefore don't have any justification for postulating a world outside ourselves, so there isn't one" He accomplishes object permanence by saying that all our perceptions are actually just sharing in the consciousness of God, who perceives all things at all times.
I'm not an idealist in that sense, myself, so I'm sure I didn't do justice to Berkeley. Check the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on him if you're curious. Anyway, that 'naive' idealism evolved into the more sophisticated idealism of Kant, which I'm not even going to try to summarize, but suffice it to say it's definitely a lot more convincing.
Regardless, I think that's the second kind of idealism you were talking about, and what's important to note is that it's not mutually exclusive with the idealism of political philosophy; they don't engage or interact on any level, so the truth of one doesn't really affect the truth of the other.
I hope this is at least slightly helpful, and doesn't just read as utter nonsense.
hatzel
26th June 2012, 11:16
Because actually bothering to come up with my own stuff and type it all out myself would be seriously tedious, I'm just going to cite a section from Laclau and Mouffe's Post-Marxism without apologies (http://libcom.org/library/post-marxism-without-apologies):
Idealism and Materialism
Geras’s fourth criticism concerns the problem of idealism and we have to consider it in a more detailed way. The first condition for having a rational discussion, of course, is that the meaning of the terms one is using should be clear. Conceptual elucidation of the idealism/materialism opposition is particularly important in view not only of the widely differing contexts in which it has been used, but also of the fact that these contexts have often overlapped and so led to innumerable confusions. The idealism/materialism opposition has been used in attempts to refer to, roughly speaking, three different types of problem.
(1) The problem of the existence or non-existence of a world of objects external to thought. This is a very popular mistake which Geras incurs throughout his discussion. For the distinction here is not between idealism and materialism, but between idealism and realism. A philosophy such as Aristotle’s, for example, which certainly is not materialist in any possible sense of the term, is clearly realist. The same can be said of the philosophy of Plato, since for him the Ideas exist in a heavenly place, where the mind contemplates them as something external to itself. In this sense, the whole of ancient philosophy was realist, since it did not put into question the existence of a world external to thought—it took it for granted. We have to reach the modern age, with a philosophy such as Berkeley’s, to find a total subordination of external reality to thought. However, it is important to realize that in this sense Hegel’s absolute idealism, far from denying the reality of an external world, is its unequivocal affirmation. As Charles Taylor has asserted: ‘This (absolute idealism) is paradoxically very different from all other forms of idealism, which tend to the denial of external reality, or material reality. In the extreme form of Berkeley’s philosophy, we have a denial of matter in favour of a radical dependence on the mind—of course God’s, not ours. Hegel’s idealism, far from being a denial of external material reality, is the strongest affirmation of it; it not only exists but necessarily exists.’ [13] If this is the question at issue our position is, therefore, unequivocally realist, but this has little to do with the question of materialism.
(2) What actually distinguishes idealism from materialism is its affirmation of the ultimately conceptual character of the real; for example, in Hegel, the assertion that everything that is real is rational. Idealism, in its sense of opposition to materialism and not to realism, is the affirmation not that there do not exist objects external to the mind, but rather that the innermost nature of these objects is identical to that of mind—that is to say, that it is ultimately thought. (Not thought of individual minds, of course; not even of a transcendent God, but objective thought.) Now, even if idealism in this second sense is only given in a fully coherent and developed form in Hegel, philosophers of antiquity are also predominantly idealist. Both Plato and Aristotle identified the ultimate reality of an object with its form—that is, with something ‘universal’, and hence conceptual. If I say that this object which is in front of me is rectangular, brown, a table, an object, etc. each of these determinants could also be applied to other objects—they are then ‘universals’, that is form. But what about the individual ‘it’ that receives all these determinations? Obviously, it is irrational and unknowable, since to know it would be to subsume it under a universal category. This last individual residue, which is irreducible to thought, is what the ancient philosophers called matter. And it was precisely this last residue which was eliminated by a consistent idealist philosophy such as Hegel’s: it asserted the ultimate rationality of the real and thus became absolute idealism.
Thus, form is, at the same time, both the organizing principle of the mind and the ultimate reality of an object. As it has been pointed out, form ‘cut(s) across the categories of epistemology and ontology for the being of the particular is itself exhaustively defined according to the requirements of knowledge . . . Thought, word and thing are defined in relation to thinkable form, and thinkable form is itself in a relation of reciprocal definition with the concept of entity.’ [14] The true line of divide between idealism and materialism is, therefore, the affirmation or negation of the ultimate irreducibility of the real to the concept. (For example, a philosophy such as that of the early Wittgenstein, which presented a picture theory of language in which language shared the same ‘logical form’ as the thing, is entirely within the idealist field.)
It is important to note that, from this point of view, what has been traditionally called ‘materialism’ is also to a great extent idealist. Hegel knew this so well that in his Greater Logic materialism is presented as one of the first and crudest forms of idealism, since it assumes identity between knowledge and being. (See Greater Logic, First Section, Chapter Two, final ‘remark’.) Commenting on this passage, W.T. Stace points out: ‘Atomism alleges that this thing, the atom, is the ultimate reality. Let it be so. But what is this thing? It is nothing but a congeries of universals, such perhaps as “indestructible”, “indivisible”, “small”, “round”, etc. All these are universals, or thoughts. “Atom” itself is a concept. Hence even out of this materialism proceeds idealism.’ [15] Where, in all this, does Marx fit in? The answer cannot be unambiguous. In a sense, Marx clearly remains within the idealist field—that is to say, within the ultimate affirmation of the rationality of the real. The well-known inversion of dialectics cannot but reproduce the latter’s structure. To affirm that the ultimate law of motion of History is given not by the change of ideas in the minds of human beings but rather by the contradiction, in each stage, between the development of productive forces and the existing relations of production, does not modify things at all. For what is idealist is not the affirmation that the law of motion of History is the one rather than the other, but the very idea that there is an ultimate law of motion that can be conceptually grasped. To affirm the transparency of the real to the concept is equivalent to affirming that the real is ‘form’. For this reason the most determinist tendencies within Marxism are also the most idealist, since they have to base their analyses and predictions on inexorable laws which are not immediately legible in the surface of historical life; they must base themselves on the internal logic of a closed conceptual model and transform that model into the (conceptual) essence of the real.
(3) This is not, however, the whole story. In a sense which we have to define more precisely, there is in Marx a definite movement away from idealism. But before we discuss this, we must characterize the structure and implications of any move away from idealism. As we have said, the essence of idealism is the reduction of the real to the concept (the affirmation of the rationality of the real or, in the terms of ancient philosophy, the affirmation that the reality of an object—as distinct from its existence—is form). This idealism can adopt the structure which we find in Plato and Aristotle—the reduction of the real to a hierarchical universe of static essences; or one can introduce movement into it, as Hegel does—on condition, of course, that it is movement of the concept and thus remains entirely within the realm of form. However, this clearly indicates that any move away from idealism cannot but systematically weaken the claims of form to exhaust the reality of the object (i.e. the claims of what Heidegger and Derrida have called the ‘metaphysics of presence’). But, this weakening cannot merely involve an affirmation of the thing’s existence outside thought, since this ‘realism’ is perfectly compatible with idealism in our second sense. As has been pointed out, ‘what is significant from a deconstructive viewpoint is that the sensible thing, even in a “realist” like Aristotle, is itself unthinkable except in relation to intelligible form. Hence the crucial boundary for Aristotle, and for philosophy generally, does not pass between thought and thing but within each of these, between form and formlessness or indefiniteness.’ [16]
The Instability of Objects
Thus, it is not possible to abandon idealism by a simple appeal to the external object, since (1) this is compatible with the affirmation that the object is form and thus remains within the field of idealism and the most traditional metaphysics; and (2) if we take refuge in the object’s mere ‘existence’, in the ‘it’ beyond all predication, we cannot say anything about it. But here another possibility opens up at once. We have seen that the ‘being’ of objects is different from their mere existence, and that objects are never given as mere ‘existences’ but are always articulated within discursive totalities. But in that case it is enough to show that no discursive totality is absolutely self-contained—that there will always be an outside which distorts it and prevents it from fully constituting itself—to see that the form and essence of objects are penetrated by a basic instability and precariousness, and that this is their most essential possibility. This is exactly the point at which the movement away from idealism starts.
Let us consider the problem more closely. Both Wittgenstein and Saussure broke with what can be called a referential theory of meaning—i.e., the idea that language is a nomenclature which is in a one-to-one relation to objects. They showed that the word ‘father’, for instance, only means what it does because the words ‘mother’, ‘son’, etc. also exist. The totality of language is, therefore, a system of differences in which the identity of the elements is purely relational. Hence, every individual act of signification involves the totality of language (in Derridean terms, the presence of something always has the traces of something else which is absent). This purely relational or differential character is not, of course, exclusive to linguistic identities but holds for all signifying structures—that is to say, for all social structures. This does not mean that everything is language in the restricted sense of speech or writing, but rather that the relational or differential structure of language is the same for all signifying structures. So, if all identity is differential, it is enough that the system of differences is not closed, that it suffers the action of external discursive structures, for any identity (i.e., the being, not the existence of things) to be unstable. This is what shows the impossibility of attributing to the being of things the character of a fixed essence, and what makes possible the weakening of form, which constituted the cornerstone of traditional metaphysics. Human beings socially construct their world, and it is through this construction—always precarious and incomplete—that they give to a thing its being. [17] There is, then, a third meaning of the idealism/materialism opposition which is related neither to the problem of the external existence of objects, nor to a rigid counterposition of form and matter in which the latter is conceived as the ‘individual existent’. In this third opposition, a world of fixed forms constituting the ultimate reality of the object (idealism) is challenged by the relational, historical and precarious character of the world of forms (materialism). For the latter, therefore, there is no possibility of eliminating the gap between ‘reality’ and ‘existence’. Here, strictly speaking, there are two possible conceptual strategies: either to take ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ as two variants of ‘essentialism’; or to consider that all essentialism, by subordinating the real to the concept, is idealism, and to see materialism as a variety of attempts to break with this subordination. Both strategies are, of course, perfectly legitimate.
Let us return at this point to Marx. There is in his work the beginning, but only the beginning, of a movement in the direction of materialism. His ‘materialism’ is linked to a radical relationalism: ideas do not constitute a closed and self-generated world, but are rooted in the ensemble of material conditions of society. However, his movement towards relationalism is weak and does not actually transcend the limits of Hegelianism (an inverted Hegelianism continues to be Hegelian). Let us look at these two moments:
(1) One possible way of understanding this embeddedness of ideas in the material conditions of society would be in terms of signifying totalities. The ‘State’ or the ‘ideas’ would not be self-constituted identities but rather ‘differences’ in the Saussurean sense, whose only identity is established relationally with other differences such as ‘productive forces’, ‘relations of production’, etc. The ‘materialist’ advance of Marx would be to have shown that the area of social differences which constitutes the signifying totalities is much wider and deeper than it had been supposed hitherto; that the material reproduction of society is part of the discursive totalities which determine the meaning of the most ‘sublime’ forms of political and intellectual life. This allows us to overcome the apparently insoluble problems concerning the base/superstructure relation: if State, ideas, relations of production, etc. have purely differential identities, the presence of each would involve the presence of the others—as the presence of ‘father’ involves the presence of ‘son’, ‘mother’, etc. In this sense, no causal theory about the efficacy of one element over another is necessary. This is the intuition that lies behind the Gramscian category of ‘historical bloc’: historical movement is explained not by laws of motion of History but by the organic link between base and superstructure.
(2) However, this radical relationalism of Marx is immediately translated into idealistic terms. ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ [18] This could be read, of course, as a reintegration of consciousness with existence, but the expression could not be more unfortunate, since if social existence determines consciousness, then consciousness cannot be part of social existence. [19] And when we are told that the anatomy of civil society is political economy, this can only mean that there is a specific logic—the logic of the development of productive forces—which constitutes the essence of historical development. In other words, historical development can be rationally grasped and is therefore form. It is not surprising that the ‘Preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy depicts the outcome of the historical process exclusively in terms of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production; nor is it surprising that class struggle is entirely absent from this account. All this is perfectly compatible with the basic premises of Hegelianism and metaphysical thought.
Let us now sum up our argument in this section. (1) The idealism/realism opposition is different from the idealism/materialism opposition. (2) Classical idealism and materialism are variants of an essentialism grounded on the reduction or the real to form. Hegel is, therefore, perfectly justified in regarding materialism as an imperfect and crude form of idealism. (3) A move away from idealism cannot be founded on the existence of the object, because nothing follows from this existence. (4) Such a move must, rather, he founded on a systematic weakening of form, which consists in showing the historical, contingent and constructed character of the being of objects; and in showing that this depends on the reinsertion of that being in the ensemble of relational conditions which constitute the life of a society as a whole. (5) In this process, Marx constitutes a transitional point: on the one hand, he showed that the meaning of any human reality is derived from a world of social relations much vaster than had previously been perceived; but on the other hand, he conceived the relational logic that links the various spheres in clearly essentialist or idealistic terms.
A first sense of our post-Marxism thus becomes clear. It consists in a deepening of that relational moment which Marx, thinking within a Hegelian and, in any case, nineteenth-century matrix, could only take so far. In an age when psychoanalysis has shown that the action of the unconscious makes all signification ambiguous; when the development of structural linguistics has enabled us to understand better the functioning of purely differential identities; when the transformation of thought—from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from pragmatism to Wittgenstein—has decisively undermined philosophical essentialism, we can reformulate the materialist programme in a much more radical way than was possible for Marx.
I do this partly because it's a shameless appeal to authority (clearly), and partly because I agree with the thrust of their argument there anyway, so if I were to make one of my own, it would most likely simply be regurgitating that one...
Aristocles
27th June 2012, 01:49
Words
If I understand this argument correctly, it is suggesting an analogy between what Wittgenstein did for the philosophy of language and what materialism proposes to do for social/political philosophy. The basic gist of Wittgenstein (at least his later work, after he recanted the Tractatus) is that the system of language resides in the relations between language-users, and not in the private consciousness of particular language-users (thus the impossibility of a private language). Carrying the analogy through, then, idealism (in the political philosophy sense) conceives of ideas (like, for example, my idea of a Coke that I get from perceiving a can of it) as unitary, self-contained entities that exist per se.
By contrast, I suppose, the argument of materialism is that my idea of Coke is dependent in a narrow sense on my understanding of the industrial process that got the can to where it is, and the whole system of global capitalism that made that industrial process possible. More broadly, this interdependence of ideas extends to every such idea (perhaps every possible idea?) so that no aspect of society can be understood, or even conceived of, in isolation from the whole system in which it exists.
If I'm right so far, then how can we explain the apparent fact that we do study particular aspects of society in isolation? Even economics declines to consider a whole host of apparently powerful sociological forces like religion, politics, etc. Is the orthodox Marxist answer just that all of society is determined my material conditions, so that religion and political economy and whatnot can just be reduced without remainder to the language of material economics? I suppose it's possible, I just find it a little hard to swallow.
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