Thoughts are more real than objects
Jeremy Dunham, PhD
Jeremy Dunham, PhD
Quote:Idealism is often regarded as a philosophy entailing that the world exists just in our heads, which is obviously false. Rising philosophical star Dr. Jeremy Dunham argues that this view of idealism is a misconception. Idealism is a much more realist worldview than we think, and more realist than its alternatives, as it does not deny the existence of the most real things there are: thoughts. This essay is the latest instalment of our The Return of Idealism series, produced in a collaboration with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IA). It was first published by the IAI on 19 April 2024.
Quote:Berkeley opposed his view to those who regard our rich conscious phenomenal world, the world of tastes, feels, colours, and sounds, as in some way less real than the physical world. For Berkeley, the real stone is the coloured object which we see and feel and that resists us when kicked. If Johnson kicked the stone as hard as I imagine, he entered a world of pain. For Berkeley, this world is the real world. His idealism is ampliative, not reductive. Its aim is to account for the full extent of our reality. Berkeley, then, is not anti-stone. He argued that only idealism can do justice to stones.
Quote:The result of this is that we owe our individuality to a larger whole in which we are all systematically related and which relates us to each other in a fundamental way. Earlier I claimed that many people incorrectly regard idealism as a philosophy that is characterised by the things that it is against. However, here we find something that this kind of idealist really is anti: the idea of fundamental separateness. This has significant ethical implications. The most important absolute idealist of the twenty-first century, Timothy Sprigge (1932-2007), wrote that absolute idealism’s main message is that ‘we are nearer the core of things when we partly transcend it [our separateness] in cooperative ethical, cultural, and intellectual endeavours and in mutual aid.’
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell