So I propose philosophical idealism as the most adequate, consistent, and plausible metaphysical view of reality. It carries with it a theory of human persons as experientially unique, morally free, and fully embodied subjects of experience and action, living in an interpersonal world of similar beings – a community of social and self-realizing conscious agents. Idealism is not to be accepted because it is comforting or wish-fulfilling. It is to be accepted because it makes a reasoned claim to be the most intellectually adequate view of reality and of human personhood that human thought has devised.
Of course any philosophical view will remain contested and less than overwhelmingly convincing. This is, after all, philosophy and not chemistry. But we can scarcely escape having some such view, and idealism will always continue to be one of the most intellectually impressive high-points among human attempts to achieve real insight into the nature of the complex and mysterious reality of which we humans are part.
The point of this discussion has been to emphasize that we all have privileged, though not infallible or complete, access to our own inner lives, our thoughts, memories, feelings, and intentions. This fact gives us very important information about the world – namely, that conscious experiences and intentional actions are real, not reducible to material and publicly observable facts, and morally crucial for the way we live.
Materialists, however, have a very different view. They would in general say that conscious experiences, if they exist, are byproducts of material processes, so thinking and feeling does not give any special or privileged access to reality. Reality is accessed through scientific (and materialist) theories. Yet for materialists such theories are a by-product, and an unforeseen one at that, of blind laws of nature. So, on a materialist theory, we would not expect that our theories (including the theory of materialism) are particularly reliable or informative vehicles of information about the world.
Materialism gives abstract theory priority over concrete experience, while at the same time it undermines the reliability of the reason and understanding that provides us with our abstract theories. That is like saying that we should trust reason even when what it tells us is that reason is untrustworthy. Something seems to be wrong somewhere.
The idealist resolution of this paradoxical situation is to say that our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions do give us access to reality. They suggest that reality itself may be founded not on blind chance or unconscious necessity, but on some form of purposive consciousness.
Materialists will probably protest that consciousness is a very late evolutionary development, requiring complex brains for its existence. But we need to distinguish the embodied consciousness of beings that exist in a common space-time manifold from a possible non-embodied consciousness that expresses itself in, or forms the causal basis of, the whole space-time manifold itself. The former types of consciousness do come into being as the result of a long process of evolutionary development, and they have a strong causal and epistemic dependence upon their physical environment. The latter type of consciousness does not come into being at all. The physical world depends for its very existence upon the primordial consciousness and perhaps expresses the inner nature of that consciousness, as it brings into being dependent consciousnesses which can share relationships with it.
Why should we think that there is such a primordial consciousness? The strongest form of idealism, that of Bishop Berkeley for instance, would say that only minds are fully real, and there cannot be material things that are not contents of some consciousness. Also the only sort of causal power we directly experience is our own intentional action, which brings things about for a reason. The idea of “material causality” or, more exactly, regularity of succession, is by contrast a relatively abstract notion. On this strong idealist view, the ultimate reality has to be mind, and ultimate causality has to be intentional agency.
Weaker versions of idealism would insist that value (the positive evaluation of personal experiences) and purpose (the effort to bring about future states) are elements of reality that are not analysable in purely material terms. Therefore, mind must at least be a fundamental component of what there is, and if there is some ultimate explanation for the existence of the universe, it must include a mind-like element. Personal explanation (explaining something by saying that it is chosen for a good reason) must be part of the explanation of why the cosmos exists as it does. And it implies that alleged experience of a non-embodied mind, known in and through material appearances, is a real possibility that may be veridical and could provide confirming evidence of the existence of such a mind.
If we give great importance and value to the inner personal lives of human beings, and if we find the distinctiveness of human life to lie largely in the ability to choose goodness for its own sake, then we are committing ourselves to a view of reality that affirms the reality and value of conscious experience and moral goodness. This is opposed to any hard-line materialism that denies the existence or importance of consciousness, and it is opposed to any relativist view of ethics that maintains that the good is whatever certain people happen to prefer. There are real values and they lie in conscious states or actions. Since such values are objective, they suggest the existence of an objective non-human consciousness in which they can be found.
We may also feel that two very different sorts of reality, the material cosmos and the existence of free conscious and intelligent agents, need to be integrated within a coherent and plausible metaphysical framework. The materialist thesis that inner experience and purpose just happen to originate by chance and have no lasting significance does not seem very plausible. Consciousness and purpose simply become inexplicable add-ons to the physical process, and for a tough-minded materialist they may even be quite illusory.
An idealist framework will explain the physical cosmos as existing in order to permit beings who have personal experiences and purposes to share a common environment in which they can learn, develop, and act. But this “in order to” introduces purpose into the basic structure of the physical cosmos, and that introduction suggests that the basic structure of the physical cosmos is mind-like in important respects.
Further, the apparent intelligibility of the world suggests that there are good reasons for why things are as they are; that events do not happen solely by chance. Even the laws of nature exist for a reason, and the best reason is that they exist for the sake of desirable goals which the universe may realize. We are then thinking of a primordial mind that can envisage and evaluate possible goals and bring them about intentionally. That is the heart of the idealist case.
Many idealists would call this primordial consciousness “God”. But others find it better to avoid the word “God”, because of the many different, and often silly, things that it might mean to them. Idealists do not mean to speak of a person, probably male, who lives outside the universe and interferes in it from time to time, in completely unpredictable ways. They believe that the ultimate nature of reality is more like consciousness than either blind necessity or pure chance. It is a consciousness very unlike human embodied consciousness. It is an independent and generative consciousness, not a dependent and largely receptive one. It contains as part of its substance something like a set of ideal possibilities, which perhaps necessarily express themselves in varied forms of finite material being. Its nature is known by human beings, if it is, as all other minds are known, by seeing the temporal processes of the phenomenal world as expressions of a largely hidden mental content.
For idealists like Hegel, primordial mind is not some being apart from the physical universe. It is the inner nature of the universe itself. It does not conjure up the universe out of nothing by some arbitrary act of will. It realizes its own necessary nature in a progressive process of temporal unfolding. It is not a person who chooses to create suffering and tragedy just because it wants to, when it could easily have chosen otherwise. Suffering and tragedy are parts of its own being, possibilities necessarily inherent in its self-objectification. Nevertheless, it could be said to have a moral goal or purpose – as a rational consciousness, it “aims at” the realization of many sorts of valuable states for their own sake. And it may actualize freedom and mutuality as well as necessity and a monopoly of causal power. That is, the cosmos it objectifies may generate many personal agencies capable of moral choice and social relationship, with a degree of autonomous causal power. Indeed in this cosmos it seems to do precisely that.
Presumably such a mind will have knowledge of whatever becomes actual in the cosmos. Most idealists suppose that while it will retain complete knowledge of all that has ever existed, within its own cosmic experience it will mitigate destructive and painful experiences by subordinating them to and placing them in a wider context of creative and valuable experiences. Within that context they may be seen as inevitable, or at least as non-removable, parts of an emergent cosmos in which societies of creatively and morally free finite agents exist. In this way it will fulfil the goal of its own self-realization.
Idealism is certainly a “grand metaphysical theory”, and as such it is the main philosophical competitor with materialism. And both idealism and materialism are competitors with a Rylean or Wittgensteinian disinterestedness in such grand metaphysical systems.
Philosophy and metaphysics
I suspect that Ryle would say, in response to all this, that if we are thinking about the concept of mind, and we get too far away from the ordinary language that we use about human minds and the everyday contexts in which we use that language, our concepts will no longer have any purchase on reality. They will be like cog wheels spinning energetically on their own without connecting to any useful mechanism. We should look at the informal logic of mental-conduct concepts as they are actually used, and not try to invent purely hypothetical and untestable theories about how they might be used in totally different, probably inconceivable, circumstances. Talk of “ultimate reality” is like talk of “ultimate Platonic trousers”: all very well in theory but not very good for covering your legs.
Unfortunately, once philosophers had eliminated the great classical philosophical systems as based on grammatical mistakes, and had demonstrated that the language that ordinary people speak is quite in order as it is, as long as ordinary people do not ask silly questions about it, there was nothing left for philosophers to do. It is rather ironic that Ryle, as a great philosophy teacher, was able to place most of his pupils (including me) in university jobs as professional philosophers, where they were paid to proclaim that there was no such profession as philosophy.
I had to teach a course in moral philosophy in the 1960s (I will not say where), and I recall the widespread philosophical view that there was no point in asking moral philosophers about difficult ethical issues, since their opinion was no better than anyone else’s. Moral philosophers could write long monographs about how people use words like “good” or “right”, but they were not qualified to express any moral opinions. Looking around at some of my colleagues, I thought that perhaps this was a very good thing.
In a similar way, metaphysics was a form of armchair palaeontology – the study of fossilized philosophical systems that were now all extinct. If asked what the nature of reality was, philosophers would reply, “It all depends on what you mean by real,” and then patiently explain that real hair consisted in not wearing a wig or that real antiques were not new things that had been shot full of holes to look like ancient woodworm. If unwise undergraduates persisted in saying that they were seeking for what things were made of, they would be told that some things were made of wood, some of plastic, and some had not been made at all. It is not surprising that philosophy classes became progressively less well attended. Ancient philosophers like David Hume had played backgammon because philosophy was too difficult. Modern philosophers played backgammon because philosophy was too easy and consisted mostly in getting people to stop asking philosophical questions – which they could do best by not going to philosophy lectures.
That, however, is no longer the case. Partly because physicists have stepped in where philosophers refused to tread, and partly because medical practice and new technology generated a new range of ethical problems that do need some expertise to address, philosophy has started to get interested in the large traditional metaphysical and ethical issues again. “What is the real?” and “What is the good?” are no longer naive questions. People really want to know if the natural sciences are the only ways of finding out the truth, and if there is any way of reasonably resolving the ethical dilemmas that modern medicine puts before us.
Imagining minds
Materialism battles with idealism – and scientists line up on both sides. Utilitarianism battles with moral absolutism – and both politicians and doctors find themselves on opposing sides here too. Any objective observer would say that we are in a situation where many diverse and competing views can be reasonably defended. I am not persuaded that ordinary linguistic usage should be the final test of whether we are talking sense or making sense of human existence. If anything, I tend to think that ordinary linguistic usages are liable to be quite misleading, to express prejudices and half-digested philosophical theories whose origin has been forgotten.
I certainly think that if we are considering the concept of mind, we should not limit ourselves to the sorts of minds we know best – human minds. We should explore the possibility of other kinds of minds, by imaginative extrapolation. The idea of a cosmic mind is a particularly interesting one, because it takes the notions of knowledge, feeling, and power to the highest degree we can think of. If we grant the existence of consciousness and objective value, we can try to conceive a consciousness of supreme value, knowledge, feeling, and power, and try to say what in general it would be like. That is indeed what many writers of science fiction do – and they often describe possible realities that some philosophers cannot imagine. Perhaps, as Tom Stoppard once said, “There are more things in my philosophy than are dreamed of in reality.” Or perhaps such dreams give a hint of what reality might really be like.
The cosmic mind may not have all these properties to the highest possible degree, and, if not, it should perhaps try harder. Anyhow, idealist views are not committed to the “highest degree of mind” view, pleasing though that might be. What they are committed to is that the reality underlying sensory appearances is more like a conscious and purposive cause of the phenomenal cosmos than it is like unconscious globs of unintelligent stuff (or maybe one super-glob of super-stupidity) from which the cosmos emerges without purpose or design. Or if purpose and design remind you too much of God, we might say that an idealist cosmos would at least exist for a reason, and it would exhibit an intelligible order.
If an idealist philosophy is adopted, this will have implications for the way human persons see themselves in relation to the cosmos of which they are parts. Most basically, they will find in their own inner lives of apprehension, feeling, and intention, a resonance or unity with the inner reality of the cosmos. Human consciousness will not be a freak, transient accident in a basically lifeless and indifferent universe. It will have a place in the self-realization of cosmic mind. The world revealed to us in sensory experience will be seen as an expression of cosmic mind – sometimes terrifying and dangerous, sometimes beautiful and awe-inspiring, but always expressive of a deep consciousness beyond the veil of the senses. The world may be “read” as an interaction with cosmic mind, somewhat as other human bodies are read as expressions of conscious feelings and aims. Humans will be fundamentally “at home” in the universe; not alien intrusions into a realm of blind laws, but integral parts of a self-expressive process oriented toward the realization of objective personal values.
Within such a world view, the arts can be seen as participations in the creativity of the cosmos, in a power beyond the finite self that yet works through and can heighten the insights and skills of artistic endeavour. Great works of art, music, and literature will be disclosive of what George Steiner calls “real presence”, communications of transcendent mind as perceived by the immanent and embodied minds of human beings.
Science will be seen as the discovery of a real intelligible order in the natural world, an order with a beauty and rationality that can be partly captured by mathematical exploration. The ancient Greeks were right – mathematics is the key to the order of the universe. For some peculiar reason, they did not devote much time to testing their mathematical theories by experimental observation, insisting that their maths was right without looking to see. But they did see what modern science has often failed to see, that a rational universe will be one in which the laws of nature will themselves have a reason. The only plausible candidate for such a reason is not the existence of a further set of hyper-laws. It is that for the sake of which all laws exist, the efficient realization of intrinsic values.
Morality will be a response to an objective moral ideal and goal for the cosmos itself, a goal which humans can play a part in realizing. It will not be the construction of compromise rules which can mediate between opposing social interests. The good life will be a life lived for the sake of good, both in oneself and in society. It will be part of the realization of distinctive values which forms the ultimate reason for the existence of the cosmos. Devotion to the good for its own sake will thus also be devotion to that ultimate mind by which the good is conceived and in which it is progressively realized. This makes possible that “intellectual love of God”, of the source and completion of the good, which was the centre of Spinoza’s philosophy.
Human history will not only be a story of the interactions of human persons as they formulate cultural ideals and seek to make a distinctive contribution to the human world. It will also be an expression of the self-realization of transcendent mind, as it generates many diverse embodied minds, allows them creative and moral freedom, interacts with them as they impede or realize its purposes, and leads them through objectification and alienation toward a wider goal of a global society of societies. Hegel developed most fully this view of what he saw as the planetary history of Absolute Spirit. We may view his specific analyses and predictions with some scepticism. Karl Marx even found it necessary to stand Hegel on his head and get rid of a higher consciousness altogether, though he did not do any better himself. But that should not put us off the thought that in some way human relationships may also be the vehicles of the expression of the inner nature of the cosmos as it moves toward a moral goal that is inherent in its own inner being.
Cosmic optimism
Idealists tend to be optimistic about the universe, thinking that value will be progressively realized in it. Even then, however, they usually accept that the universe will come to an end in a few billion years or so. Their optimism is not unqualified. Indeed some of them go around looking rather gloomy, and saying, “It may seem good now, but mark my words, in a few billion years this will all be gone.” The super-optimists, however, refuse to accept this depressing thought. Bolstered by some of the weirder extremes of cosmology and artificial intelligence research, they think that human beings will manage to download themselves into supercomputers and move off into inter-galactic space, as our sun runs out of steam (more precisely, out of heat).
By the time our universe runs down, they will then have become even cleverer, and will be able to travel through a black hole into a brand new universe. So they can keep going forever, moving from one universe to another, intelligences of immense knowledge and power, living in the huge seeming emptiness between the galaxies, hidden from all the relatively minute intelligences slowly emerging in those universes.
If this is so, then in our universe today there are probably huge numbers of super-intelligences living in outer space, and having super-committee-meetings about how they might guide the affairs of the little primitive carbon-based life forms emerging in their local universe. Religions may sometimes seem weird, but they have nothing on some modern cosmological speculations. A favourite among such speculations as I write is the many-worlds or multiverse theory. It holds that every possible universe exists, the whole set of universes forming a super-universe or multiverse.
It is not often realized that on this theory, every possible array of gods, goddesses, devils, and angels will exist somewhere in some universe. So every possible religion and philosophy will be true, but all in different universes. We can correctly believe in God in one universe and correctly be an atheist in another. We can even be parts of God in some universes and parts of Lucifer in others. The possibilities are endless. Even materialist atheism can be true in some universes, where no super-intelligences ever visit, and only the illusion of consciousness exists (I am not sure what that would feel like or who would be having the illusion, but now we’ve got the story going, let’s run with it as far as possible).
Speculative science has thus far outstripped idealism in its classical forms. But the surprising thing is that these possibilities, though they are indeed fantastic, seem to be not only logically possible, but physically possible. Common-sense philosophy can be seen to be merely a restriction on human imagination. Perhaps common-sense philosophers should stay in more and read more science fiction. If they do that, they will soon find themselves asking, “Which universe do I actually live in?” And I do not think the answer is at all clear.
Of course that is the main reason for being a common-sense philosopher. We cannot make our minds up between all the possible universes we might be living in, and so we drop the subject and just respond to particular problems as and when they come up.
On making ultimate metaphysical decisions
Idealists, like everyone else, can distinguish between speculation and real existential decisions – decisions which make a real, practical, important difference to the way we live. The question of whether our descendants might one day decant themselves into a supercomputer and disappear down a black hole is purely speculative. It opens the mind to the possibility of the continued existence of intelligent life even after this universe has run down and given up the ghost (or all its ghosts). But it is not something we should count on or look forward to in the next decade or so.
However, our answer to the question of whether this cosmos has an objective moral goal which we can play a part in actualizing might make a difference to how we see our lives and to how we live. If we see human lives as lived in a dialectical or ambiguous relationship to the goals of cosmic mind, as alienated by hatred, greed, and ambition and yet haunted by the ideal of a more creative and compassionate global community, that might make us see ourselves and other persons in a new light. We might see persons as “called” to a distinctive way of life, which is to be achieved only by overcoming the attractions of pleasure, power, and indifference that would frustrate such a life. Each person would be both a potential vehicle of expressing a higher consciousness and also a partial obstacle to its expression. In that dialectic of expression and obstruction each person would be part of a continuing interplay between transcendent mind and many socially embodied minds, an interplay which weaves history into the complex patterns it displays.
Whether the pattern of history moves inevitably toward a society on this planet in which values are freely created and shared without restriction is perhaps not as clear as Hegel and Marx both thought. It might be that our world will, despite T. S. Eliot, end with a bang and not with a whimper. Humanity could be a cosmic experiment that is about to fail, and, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy predicts, our planet might be removed to make way for a cosmic motorway or for some more successful form of life. Since we cannot be sure, maybe the best we can do is to hope and work for the best and yet prepare for the worst. That way we might at least find, as tourists do when they contemplate the weather while on holiday in England, that we will be very pleased that things did not turn out to be quite as bad as they could have been. And that could be part of the recipe for a happy life.
Idealism need not be religious, in the sense of leading to membership of some religious institution. Many idealists regard most religions as a mass of superstitions and legends, with unduly submissive attitudes toward various holy books, all of which contradict one another. But idealism may be sympathetic to some kinds of religion or spirituality, as attempted human responses to transcendent mind, intended to achieve liberation from self-centred egoism and to evoke a sense of union with or positive relation to a reality of wisdom, compassion, and bliss.
For some people, idealism is best seen as an abstract intellectual attempt by weak and partly corrupted human reason to approach a truth that has been independently revealed in a more emotionally accessible way by God – that is, I think, what most Christians think about Hegel. Even if that is so, idealism will remain an intriguing testimony to a residual sense of the ontological primacy of mind, of the reality of the soul and of God. For others, the reverse will be true, and various religions may be symbolic and pictorial ways of approaching the philosophical truth of idealism – that is what Hegel thought about most Christians.
Whatever view you take about that, idealism seems to me the most coherent, comprehensive, integrative, and plausible conceptual scheme for understanding the world of which we are parts. As a basic metaphysical scheme, it does not need and cannot have “evidence”, in the sense of publicly observable experimental demonstration. Like any ambitiously large-scale philosophy, it is based on reasons drawn from a wide range of data. Different philosophies stress different aspects of these data as of primary importance, and idealism stresses the irreducibility and importance of consciousness, reason, and morality.
There are alternative metaphysical schemes. For some, the conceptual disentangling of mind from the context of its human embodiment in brain, body, and society is a step too far, and may seem like the invention of a fantastic fiction. They will not be able to see the life of the human mind as one of response to transcendent mind through art, science, morality, and quotidian experience. It will still be possible, however, to see the life of the mind as one of creative and empathetic interaction with other embodied minds, and to find the best kind of human life to be the common pursuit of the good and the beautiful, even in a world plagued by violence and injustice and destined to end in universal cosmic death. Some would hold that human life becomes more precious by recognition of its sheer fortuitousness, its brevity, and its inevitable end.
While not sharing that view myself, I recognize in it a tragic nobility, and I feel that a life committed to such a pursuit would be a life well worth living. Maybe it is really all one can have. Yet it would not be unreasonable to hope for more. Some of us think we have more, not particularly in visions or peculiar and overwhelming “religious experiences”, but in a general confirmation throughout many forms of personal experience of a sense of transcendent presence that speaks of a mind other and greater than ours or of what Matthew Arnold called “an enduring Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”. I doubt if this is a matter that philosophy alone can resolve, although philosophical reflection may help to make clearer the different presuppositions it is reasonable to adopt and some of the logical consequences of adopting them.