Idealism

Idealism – One of the reasons that students of philosophy generally find idealism a repellent position is to do with the way we are naturally inclined to conceive of it, on the basis of a hegemonic realism. The conception of idealism we are liable to form is as follows: that all of this stuff, this world that we experience, which seems so independent of us, so rich and so surprising, so satisfyingly alien to us, is really something that is just inside my head as it were, generated by my own limited psychic capacities. This is what scares us: it then seems that according to idealism there is nothing in existence that amounts to more than the creations of a limited, erring individual mind, or that has the robust autonomy that we would want of it. And it does not help much if someone then explains the Berkeleyan line that the existence of the world is not dependent on my head or on any finite number of heads, but instead subsists permanently and securely in the infinite mind of God – or in some sort of universal mind, if we want to leave Berkeley’s God out of it. For on such a view, reality is still seen as having a kind of ‘inside a head’ quality, since we model the idea of God’s mind or even of a universal mind at least partially still on a human mind and what that can produce. So the reality generated on such a view is something conjured up within a divine ‘head’ as it were, and still lacking the kind of solidity, majesty and autonomy we thought reality possessed.

However, if one really takes seriously the proposition that ‘consciousness is all that exists’ then of course reality is not something ‘inside of a head’: rather the ‘head,’ or the ‘brain,’ is itself nothing but one particular manifestation of a universal consciousness.

Such a universal consciousness is something which encompasses all heads, and which is just as surprising, rich and autonomous as we could want it to be. The problem with the former view of idealism, as something ‘inside of a head,’ is that a latent materialism is hidden within it, a materialism according to which the human brain is thought of as just one particular product of physical forces. According to this kind of materialism, consciousness is seen as emergent from and epiphenomenal to the real matter of the world. So on this view it of course seems bizarre and paradoxical that consciousness can somehow be thought to be responsible for the whole of that world. In other words, in this case idealism is seen from a perspective which has already presupposed materialism, rather than from the perspective that is really required here: a thoroughgoing ‘deconstruction’ of the opposition between materialism and idealism. (Some idealists continue to operate on the basis of this opposition, insofar as they will insist that reality is, for example, ‘immaterial.’ But we should realize that, once this deconstruction is really thought through, the reality we are left with is neither ‘material’ nor ‘immaterial,’ and it might partake just as much of those qualities we think of as ‘material’ qualities as ‘immaterial’ ones.) Once we really work out the kind of reality that might emerge from this deconstruction, the way is clear for a cogent form of idealism, such as that espoused by Bernardo Kastrup.

According to this idealism, there is nothing outside of consciousness. I am not concerned here to argue for all of the reasons this might a good view to adopt, but the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is one of them. There can never be a good explanation of how consciousness emerges from matter; it makes much more sense to suppose that matter is just one way in which consciousness manifests itself: the conscious experience of things having an underlying ‘substance,’ of being robustly independent of us as finite beings and of our individual finite minds. (The Indian tradition of Vedanta, and many of the classical Indian schools of thought, are in agreement on this). The one absolutely untenable hypothesis is materialism in the following sense: what the world fundamentally consists in is matter, where matter is understood as something fundamentally different from consciousness, something non-conscious and ‘outside’ of consciousness.

I say all of this, and yet I am not an idealist. If there were no other alternatives than the usual versions of realism, physicalism and transcendental idealism, I would have to espouse idealism (in some sense other than transcendental idealism). However, there is one other metaphysical view that makes even more sense to me than idealism…