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[Consul]

Reposted from here: viewtopic.php?p=407975#p407975

A usual way to come to understand idealism is to start with Bishop George Berkeley' s version of idealism. "To be is to be perceived".

And thank you for the answers. I have struggled to understand Idealism for decades, but can never make sense out of it. I suppose Berkeley was the first to talk about it. Never understood him. Don't get how Physical/Material reality does not exist.

What makes understanding idealism complicated is that there is more than one type of it:

* subjective idealism
* objective idealism
* absolute idealism
* transcendental idealism
* …?

QUOTE>
"Types of philosophical idealism:

Berkeley’s idealism is called subjective idealism, because he reduced reality to spirits (his name for subjects) and to the ideas entertained by spirits. In Berkeley’s philosophy the apparent objectivity of the world outside the self was accommodated to his subjectivism by claiming that its objects are ideas in the mind of God. The foundation for a series of more-objective idealisms was laid by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose epochal work Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; 2nd ed. 1787; Critique of Pure Reason) presented a formalistic or transcendental idealism, so named because Kant thought that the human self, or “transcendental ego,” constructs knowledge out of sense impressions, upon which are imposed certain universal concepts that he called categories. Three systems constructed in Germany in the early 19th century by, respectively, the moral idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the aesthetic idealist Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel, all on a foundation laid by Kant, are referred to as objective idealism, in contrast to Berkeley’s subjective idealism. The designations, however, are not consistent, and when the contrast with Berkeley is not at issue, Fichte himself is often called a subjective idealist, inasmuch as he exalted the subject above the object, employing the term Ego to mean God in the two memorable propositions: “The Ego posits itself” and “The Ego posits the non-Ego (or nature).” In contrast to the subjective idealism of Fichte, Schelling’s is called an objective idealism, and Hegel’s is called an absolute idealism.
All those terms form backgrounds for modern Western idealisms, most of which are based either on Kant’s transcendental idealism or on those of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. Exceptions are those based on other great idealists of the past—Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and others. ……"

Types of Philosophical Idealism: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ideali ... l-idealism
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"Idealism is difficult to define precisely. In this it is similar to other general and rival approaches to metaphysics, including materialism and dualism. Roughly speaking, we may say that idealists endorse the priority of the mental. This definition needs some unpacking and different versions of idealism will unpack it differently. As we will see, different idealistic theories attribute very different sorts of priority to the mental.

George Berkeley’s view that minds and their ideas are all the beings there are is the most famous version of idealism. According to Berkeley, minds enjoy ontological priority: minds alone are fundamental and everything else depends on them. Berkeley particularly emphasizes the ontological priority of minds over bodies. However, there are many other versions of idealism. Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Bradley, for instance, each espoused a different version.

While many of these philosophical views are plausibly interpreted as attributing some kind of ontological priority to minds over bodies, they also often include other idealistic theses. For instance, Kantian transcendental idealism attributes a distinctive kind of explanatory priority to the mental: Kant argues that the structure of the understanding explains the structure of the empirical world. Idealism, in one or another of these versions, was the dominant philosophical view in Western philosophy throughout the nineteenth century.

But then idealism was given up. In the contemporary metaphysical debate about the contents of concrete reality, the two opposing camps are materialism and dualism. Materialism takes the world to be fundamentally material (or physical). Dualism takes a part of the world to be fundamentally mental and another part to be fundamentally material. In each case, the assumption is usually that the world or a part of it cannot at once be fundamentally mental and fundamentally material. These views then reject Berkeley’s claim of the ontological priority of the mental. Typically, they also reject other idealistic claims, holding that the mental is either posterior to or coordinate with the physical in any metaphysically interesting priority ordering."

(Goldschmidt, Tyron, and Kenneth L. Pearce. Introduction to Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce, ix-xii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. ix)
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[Consul]

QUOTE>
"There was first of all the “subjective” or “formal” idealism of Kant and Fichte, according to which the transcendental subject is the source of the form but not the matter of experience. Contrary to it, there was the “objective” or “absolute” idealism of the romantics (Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling, and the young Hegel), according to which the forms of experience are self-subsistent and transcend both the subject and object. The basic difference between these forms is simple and straightforward. While subjective idealism attaches the forms of experience to the transcendental subject, which is their source and precondition, objective idealism detaches them from that subject, making them hold for the realm of pure being as such.

Both subjective and objective idealism can be understood as idealism in a broad sense because they both claim that reality depends upon the ideal or the rational. But they give very different meanings to the ideal or rational corresponding to the two senses noted above (…). In subjective idealism the ideal or the rational is the subjective, mental, or spiritual; in objective idealism it is the archetypical, intelligible, and structural. Very crudely, Kant’s and Fichte’s subjective idealism maintains that the form of experience derives from the transcendental subject, even though the matter of experience is given. Conversely, the romantics’ objective idealism holds that everything is a manifestation of the archetypical or rational form. Obviously, these are distinct doctrines. Unlike subjective idealism, objective idealism does not privilege the subject over the object. Rather, both the subjective and objective are equal instances of the archtypical; in other words, both the mental and the material conform to rational necessity.
…
Although the ideal has a different meaning in subjective and objective idealism, it would be artificial to draw too rigid a distinction between these forms of idealism."
(pp. 11-2)

"Spinoza understood substance to be that which has an independent or self-sufficient existence and essence, or that whose being and nature does not depend on anything else. It was on the basis of this definition that he argued that substance must be infinite, equivalent to the universe as a whole, because anything less than the whole of all things must depend on something else outside itself. While the absolute idealists often disagreed with Spinoza’s specific conception of the absolute, they understood the concept of the absolute in the same general sense as Spinoza. Their absolute was like Spinoza’s substance because it was that which has a self-sufficient essence or existence. For the same reasons as Spinoza, they insisted that the absolute has to be nothing less than the universe as a whole.

It is this Spinozist context, then, that defines the general meaning of the term ‘absolute’ among the romantics. Though it has religious and mystical associations, the term usually meant nothing more than the universe as a whole. Hence its cognates were sometimes ‘the universe’ (das Universum), ‘the one and all’ (Hen kai pan) or, more simply, ‘being’ (Seyn).

Of course, the romantics had a much more specific conception of the absolute than simply the universe simpliciter. Their conception could be summarised in three theses. The first thesis is straightforward monism: that the universe consists in not a plurality of substances but a single substance; in other words, the only independent and self-sufficient thing is the universe itself. The second thesis is a version of vitalism: that the single universal substance is an organism, which is in a constant process of growth and development. The third thesis is a form of rationalism: that this process of development has a purpose, or conforms to some form, archetype, or idea. Putting these theses together, absolute idealism is the doctrine that everything is a part of the single universal organism, or that everything conforms to, or is an appearance of, its purpose, design, or idea.

Clearly, these are distinct theses. It is possible to be a monist and not a vitalist: one might hold, with Spinoza, that the universe is static and eternal. Conversely, it is also possible to be a vitalist and not a monist: one might maintain, with Leibniz, that there are a plurality of substances that consist in living force. It is even possible to be a vitalist and monist but not a rationalist: one might claim, with Schopenhauer, that the universe consists in a single irrational will struggling for power. What is distinctive of absolute idealism is its synthesis of monism, vitalism, and rationalism: it is a monistic vitalism or a vitalistic monism; or it is a monistic rationalism or a rationalistic monism."
(pp. 351-2)

"What, though, makes absolute idealism idealism? What is the genus of which monism and vitalism are only the species? The idealist dimension of absolute idealism comes from its rationalism. It should be obvious that this makes it idealism in a very different sense from the critical idealism of Kant and Fichte, or even the empirical idealism of Descartes and Berkeley. The ideal does not refer to the mental, subjective, or conscious, but to the rational, archetypical, or intelligible. To claim that everything is ideal in this sense does not mean that it is an appearance existing for some consciousness, but that it is a manifestation or embodiment of the rational, archetypical, or intelligible. In this latter sense the ideal can have manifestations in either the subjective or objective, in mind or matter, and it would be a mistake to limit it to either the mental or the physical. In absolute idealism a distinction is finally made between two senses of the ideal that had been constantly confused before Kant and by Kant: the distinction between the noumenal and archtypical on the one hand and the mental and spiritual on the other hand."
(p. 353)

"To have a more concrete idea of absolute idealism it is necessary to consider its main sources, the chief influences on it. There were three such sources: Spinozism, Platonism, and vital materialism. All these doctrines enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in late-eighteenth-century Germany, the gestation period of absolute idealism. What is characteristic of absolute idealism is its synthesis of all these strands of thought."
(p. 361)

"Spinoza’s monism, Herder’s vitalism, and Plato’s ideas are the basic components of absolute idealism."
(p. 368)

"If we read Schelling’s doctrine of objective idealism in this context, then it essentially consists in the central thesis of Naturphilosophie. Objective idealism is then the view that reason is within nature itself, that its rationality is not created by the transcendental ego alone but is inherent in the purposive activity of nature itself. The difference between subjective and objective idealism then reflects two opposing theories about the ontological status of reason itself, or about the sources and conditions of its existence. The main question at stake between these forms of idealism is whether rationality is something that we create and impose on the world, or whether it is something that exists within the world itself and is reflected in our own activity. Is human reason the lawgiver of nature, as Kant maintains, or is nature its own lawgiver, so that it is autonomous, as Schelling claims? That, in short, is the issue between subjective and objective idealism."
(pp. 555-6)

"In short, objective idealism holds that reason is not created by or imposed on reality by the transcendental subject but is inherent in nature itself; it sees the rational or the intelligible not as the form of consciousness but as the form of being itself."
(p. 558)

(Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.)
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[Consul]

QUOTE>
"…Both subjective and objective idealism can be understood as idealism in a broad sense because they both claim that reality depends upon the ideal or the rational. But they give very different meanings to the ideal or rational corresponding to the two senses noted above (…). In subjective idealism the ideal or the rational is the subjective, mental, or spiritual; in objective idealism it is the archetypical, intelligible, and structural.…"
(pp. 11-2)

(Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.)
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"Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea."

(Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. II:viii.8 )

According to Locke's & Berkeley's subjectivistic conception of ideas, they are mental items in the minds of individual subjects, whereas according to Plato's conception and following objectivistic ones, they are not. Ideas in the latter sense are part of an "objective spirit", a world-immanent or world-transcendent impersonal logos (ratio). So this type of idealism can be called logical idealism, as opposed to psychological idealism.

[stevie]

Reposted from here: viewtopic.php?p=407975#p407975

A usual way to come to understand idealism is to start with Bishop George Berkeley' s version of idealism. "To be is to be perceived".

And thank you for the answers. I have struggled to understand Idealism for decades, but can never make sense out of it. I suppose Berkeley was the first to talk about it. Never understood him. Don't get how Physical/Material reality does not exist.

What makes understanding idealism complicated is that there is more than one type of it:

* subjective idealism
* objective idealism
* absolute idealism
* transcendental idealism
* …?

Don't make it too complicated, Actually all kinds of idealism have in common that credibility is imputed (by mind) to the mere fabrications (or "constructions " if you prefer) of itself. Mind imputes credibility to itself independent of external stimuli. The direct opposite of idealism is science because science relies on material evidence exclusively and material evidence necessarily is 'stimulus external to and independent of mind'.

[Consul]

According to Locke's & Berkeley's subjectivistic conception of ideas, they are mental items in the minds of individual subjects, whereas according to Plato's conception and following objectivistic ones, they are not. Ideas in the latter sense are part of an "objective spirit", a world-immanent or world-transcendent impersonal logos (ratio). So this type of idealism can be called logical idealism, as opposed to psychological idealism.

QUOTE>
"[W]hen Hegel speaks of “objective thought,” he means to affirm a concept that is radically anti-subjectivist. In order to approach it, one can initially say that Hegel’s notion has certain roots in the classic connection of the Platonic and Aristotelian logos and the nous, but it also in some ways suggests that which would later come to be known as the Fregean conception of thought (taken in general terms, since the parallel perhaps does not apply to all the details of the two conceptions). In the ancient Greek world, logos is not simply some sort of “property” that “belongs” to thinkers which they are able to apply to the world in order to render it intelligible; rather, it is logos of the world, the rational structure of that which is. In a similar way, for Frege, the objectivity of concepts cannot be reduced or fully explained in terms of some psychological or subjective element. As for Hegel, for Frege thinking as such (der Gedanke) is never reducible to representation (Vorstellung). If thought were identifiable simply by the content of my consciousness, Frege said, one would not have “the Pythagorean theorem” but only “my [mein] Pythagorean theorem,” “your Pythagorean theorem,” and so on (here one cannot help but think of the meinen that Hegel speaks of in the Phenomenology of the Spirit). Moreover, in Hegel as in Frege, the conception of thought is developed in terms of a radicalization, which is also a critique, of Kant’s transcendental approach."
(pp. 151-2)

"The significance of the Fregean conception of the “third realm of thought” is summarized by Dummett with a formulation that risks being ambiguous, because it suggests a peculiar priority of the subjective with regard to the objective contained in the formula “the extrusion of thoughts from the mind.” This is, according to Dummett, the guiding idea that Frege shares with other German thinkers of the eighteenth century (Bolzano, Lotze, Meinong, the early Husserl): “For Frege, thoughts—the contents of acts of thinking—are not constituents of the stream of consciousness: he asserts repeatedly that they are not contents of the mind or of all that he includes under the general term ‘idea (Vorstellung)’. He allows that grasping a thought is a mental act: but it is an act whereby the mind apprehends that which is external to it in the sense of existing independently of being grasped by that or any other subject. The reason is that thoughts are objective, whereas ideas are not. I can tell you something of what my idea is like, but it remains intrinsically my idea, and, for that reason, there is no telling how far it is the same as your idea. By contrast, I can communicate to you the very thought which I am entertaining or which I judge to be true or false: if it were not so, we should never know whether or not we were really disagreeing. No thought, therefore, can be mine in the sense in which a sensation is mine: it is common to all, as being accessible to all. Frege maintained a very stark dichotomy between the objective and the subjective, recognizing no intermediate category of the intersubjective. The subjective was for him essentially private and incommunicable; he therefore held that the existence of whatever is common to all must be independent of any. On Frege’s view, thoughts and their constituent senses form a ‘third realm’ of timeless and immutable entities which do not depend for their existence on being grasped or expressed. The practical consequence of this ontological doctrine was the rejection of psychologism” (Dummett 1996 [Origins of Analytical Philosophy], pp. 22–23)."
(pp. 151-2n7)

(Illetterati, Luca. "The Semantics of Objectivity in Hegel’s Science of Logic." In Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism: Logik/Logic, edited by Dina Emundts and Sally Sedgwick, 139-163. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2017.)
<QUOTE

If the thoughts of objective idealism are like Fregean thoughts (Gedanken), they are abstract, nonmental (and nonphysical) entities corresponding to what is called propositions in contemporary ontology. Propositions can be represented and expressed by linguistic sentences, but they are different from and independent of these.

[SteveKlinko]

Reposted from here: viewtopic.php?p=407975#p407975

A usual way to come to understand idealism is to start with Bishop George Berkeley' s version of idealism. "To be is to be perceived".

And thank you for the answers. I have struggled to understand Idealism for decades, but can never make sense out of it. I suppose Berkeley was the first to talk about it. Never understood him. Don't get how Physical/Material reality does not exist.

What makes understanding idealism complicated is that there is more than one type of it:

* subjective idealism
* objective idealism
* absolute idealism
* transcendental idealism
* …?

QUOTE>
"Types of philosophical idealism:

Berkeley’s idealism is called subjective idealism, because he reduced reality to spirits (his name for subjects) and to the ideas entertained by spirits. In Berkeley’s philosophy the apparent objectivity of the world outside the self was accommodated to his subjectivism by claiming that its objects are ideas in the mind of God. The foundation for a series of more-objective idealisms was laid by the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose epochal work Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; 2nd ed. 1787; Critique of Pure Reason) presented a formalistic or transcendental idealism, so named because Kant thought that the human self, or “transcendental ego,” constructs knowledge out of sense impressions, upon which are imposed certain universal concepts that he called categories. Three systems constructed in Germany in the early 19th century by, respectively, the moral idealist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the aesthetic idealist Friedrich Schelling, and Hegel, all on a foundation laid by Kant, are referred to as objective idealism, in contrast to Berkeley’s subjective idealism. The designations, however, are not consistent, and when the contrast with Berkeley is not at issue, Fichte himself is often called a subjective idealist, inasmuch as he exalted the subject above the object, employing the term Ego to mean God in the two memorable propositions: “The Ego posits itself” and “The Ego posits the non-Ego (or nature).” In contrast to the subjective idealism of Fichte, Schelling’s is called an objective idealism, and Hegel’s is called an absolute idealism.
All those terms form backgrounds for modern Western idealisms, most of which are based either on Kant’s transcendental idealism or on those of Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel. Exceptions are those based on other great idealists of the past—Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and others. ……"

Types of Philosophical Idealism: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ideali ... l-idealism
<QUOTE

QUOTE>
"Idealism is difficult to define precisely. In this it is similar to other general and rival approaches to metaphysics, including materialism and dualism. Roughly speaking, we may say that idealists endorse the priority of the mental. This definition needs some unpacking and different versions of idealism will unpack it differently. As we will see, different idealistic theories attribute very different sorts of priority to the mental.

George Berkeley’s view that minds and their ideas are all the beings there are is the most famous version of idealism. According to Berkeley, minds enjoy ontological priority: minds alone are fundamental and everything else depends on them. Berkeley particularly emphasizes the ontological priority of minds over bodies. However, there are many other versions of idealism. Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Bradley, for instance, each espoused a different version.

While many of these philosophical views are plausibly interpreted as attributing some kind of ontological priority to minds over bodies, they also often include other idealistic theses. For instance, Kantian transcendental idealism attributes a distinctive kind of explanatory priority to the mental: Kant argues that the structure of the understanding explains the structure of the empirical world. Idealism, in one or another of these versions, was the dominant philosophical view in Western philosophy throughout the nineteenth century.

But then idealism was given up. In the contemporary metaphysical debate about the contents of concrete reality, the two opposing camps are materialism and dualism. Materialism takes the world to be fundamentally material (or physical). Dualism takes a part of the world to be fundamentally mental and another part to be fundamentally material. In each case, the assumption is usually that the world or a part of it cannot at once be fundamentally mental and fundamentally material. These views then reject Berkeley’s claim of the ontological priority of the mental. Typically, they also reject other idealistic claims, holding that the mental is either posterior to or coordinate with the physical in any metaphysically interesting priority ordering."

(Goldschmidt, Tyron, and Kenneth L. Pearce. Introduction to Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce, ix-xii. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. ix)
<QUOTE

There is not only a backwards Priority Ordering but there is a backwards Causality Trajectory with Idealism. I have come to my views about the Visual Experience by studying the Mechanism of the Human Visual System from Light reflecting off surfaces to Light hitting the Retina and stimulating Neural Activity that cascades across the Brain down the Optic Nerve to the Visual Cortex areas. This is where Science hits a Brick Wall because Science cannot yet Explain that beautiful Wide Screen High Definition Full Color Visual Experience that is embedded in the front of our faces. From a Systems Engineering and Signal Processing point of view there has got to be a further processing stage that takes the Neural Activity in the Cortex and converts it into the Visual Conscious Experience. What Science does not know yet is what that further processing stage could be. In any case, the point is that the causality is from reflected Light from objects to the Retina down the Optic Nerve to the Cortex and then somehow to that Visual Experience. You could call this the forward Causality Trajectory of the Visual Experience.

The Idealists that I have talked to say that the Visual Experience literally Causes the Neural Activity in the Cortex which Causes the signal to run down the Optic Nerve (somehow in the opposite direction ) and then back to the Retina and to other Incoherent sequences of events. All Idealisms will necessarily need to Explain the Backwards Causality Trajectory that their Belief necessarily creates.

[Consul]

Don't make it too complicated, Actually all kinds of idealism have in common that credibility is imputed (by mind) to the mere fabrications (or "constructions " if you prefer) of itself. Mind imputes credibility to itself independent of external stimuli. The direct opposite of idealism is science because science relies on material evidence exclusively and material evidence necessarily is 'stimulus external to and independent of mind'.

No, it is not the case that "the direct opposite of idealism is science." You can consistently be a psychological idealist about physical things and do empirical science as usual.

See: George Berkeley > Scientific Explanation: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/#3.2.3

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Being an ontological thesis about what there is, Berkeleyan idealism is consistent with science. To be sure, science posits material substances and entities and physical interactions among them. But according to idealism, these are not irreducibly material and physical entities. Does that imply that idealism should be committed to the actual (analytical) reduction of all material/physical concepts to ideas and their connections? That is, should idealism be committed to the view that for each and every physical/material concept P there is a network of actual (and possible) ideas (or mental/experiential concepts) M such that P iff M? Though some idealists might be tempted to assert this, it should be clear that this is absurd: physical concepts have excess content over and above (collections of ) ideas. A claim such as ‘electrons have negative charge’ is not conceptually equivalent to any claim or collections of claims about human ideas or mental entities.

Hence, an idealist should take the reduction of the physical/material to the mental/experiential to be a metaphysical thesis in the sense that, ultimately, physical reality (which is talked about using irreducibly physical concepts) is derivative and dependent upon a more fundamental level of non-physical non-material entities. Idealism then offers itself as a philosophical framework that makes the point that, ultimately, reality (and in particular the reality described by science) is mind-dependent.

If Berkeleyan idealism is consistent with science, this consistency comes with a rather heavy price: the ineliminable dependence of everything on God as a universal and eternal perceiver. The complete account of being of everything there is must make reference to God. Insofar as the existence of things (qua reducible to ideas) and, in particular, the existence of invisible entities is not tied to them being sensed by human minds; that is, insofar as Berkeley denies that they are collections of ideas possessed (actually and counterfactually) by humans, he allows that what exists is not tied to a humanly realizable epistemic condition: to wit, perceivability by humans. But from this it does not follow that they exist objectively since, for something to exist, it must be perceivable by God even if it is not perceived by humans; differently put, the very objectivity of science is grounded in God and cannot be there without him. Hence, even though it is consistent with idealism that there are unperceived-by-humans entities and even though an idealist, pretty much like a scientific realist, could believe in the existence of electrons and their ilk, this is because of the ineliminable role of God in grounding the existence of unperceived things.

In the Berkeleyan idealist view of things, then, no scientific claim is intelligible (let alone correct) unless it is understood as dependent on God. This does not imply that God should legitimately be appealed to in every scientific explanation. Still, however, God is the ultimate ground of scientific explanation, not simply as the primary cause of everything nor simply as the author of laws of nature, but as the entity that constitutes the very subject matter of science – viz, the physical world – by being able to observe everything. As a result, science loses its autonomy.

To see this more clearly let us ask: What makes true claims about the remote past or the remote in space, where there are not (and there could not be) human experiences? What makes it the case that there was an earth before humans inhabited it, or black holes or quarks and the like? The answer scientific theories give is in fully objective physical-causal terms, which do not involve human minds and experiences. The answer idealist science should give will, indeed, reproduce the explanatory accounts offered by science, but, at the same time, it will imply that these accounts are correct insofar as an all-perceiving God constitutes their subject matters."

(Psillos, Stathis. "Idealism and Science." In The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism, edited by Joshua Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke, 576-588. Abingdon: Routledge, 2022. pp. 578-9)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

Anyway, a subjectless subjective idealism cannot be true, because it is ontologically incoherent.

That's right. That is why I like absolute idealism where there are no objects or subjects but experience only. (See Bradley)

In particular, Bradley rejected on these grounds the view that reality can be understood as consisting of many objects existing independently of each other (pluralism) and of our experience of them (realism). Consistently, his own view combined substance monism — the claim that reality is one, that there are no real separate things — with metaphysical idealism — the claim that reality consists solely of idea or experience. This vision of the world had a profound effect on the verse of T.S. Eliot, who studied philosophy at Harvard and wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Bradley.

(Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy)

Absolute idealism isn't a subjectless subjective idealism, so I doubt that Bradley's claim really is "that reality consists solely of idea or experience." – I'll check it!

Okay, Bradley's absolute idealism is different from Hegel's, and Bradley does believe in absolute, i.e. subjectless, experience—incoherently, I'm afraid!

Experience (in the phenomenological sense) is subjective experience; so where there is experience, there is subjectivity. But there cannot be any (mental) subjectivity without any (mental) subjects: Experiences cannot be non-experienced by anything and they cannot be self-experiencing either, so there must be experiencing subjects which aren't experiences themselves. This is a necessary truth following from the essence of (subjective) experience!

Bradley writes that "everything is experience"; but if nothing is nonexperience, with subjects of experience being nonexperiences, then nothing is experience either. For experiences depend for their being on the being of those nonexperiences which are experiencers (experiencing subjects).

QUOTE>
"We perceive, on reflection, that to be real, or even, barely to exist, must be to fall within sentience. Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real. We may say, in other words, that there is no being or fact outside of that which is commonly called psychical existence. Feeling, thought, and volition (any groups under which we class psychical phenomena) are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible. This result in its general form seems evident at once; and, however serious a step we now seem to have taken, there would be no advantage at this point in discussing it at length. For the test in the main lies ready to our hand, and the decision rests on the manner in which it is applied. I will state the case briefly thus. Find any piece of existence, take up anything that any one could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realizing either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible.

This conclusion is open, of course, to grave objection, and must in its consequences give rise to serious difficulties. I will not attempt to anticipate the discussion of these, but before passing on, will try to obviate a dangerous mistake. For, in asserting that the real is nothing but experience, I may be understood to endorse a common error. I may be taken first to divide the percipient subject from the universe; and then, resting on that subject, as on a thing actual by itself, I may be supposed to urge that it cannot transcend its own states. Such an argument would lead to impossible results, and would stand on a foundation of faulty abstraction. To set up the subject as real independently of the whole, and to make the whole into experience in the sense of an adjective of that subject, seems to me indefensible. And when I contend that reality must be sentient, my conclusion almost consists in the denial of this fundamental error. For if, seeking for reality, we go to experience, what we certainly do not find is a subject or an object, or indeed any other thing whatever, standing separate and on its own bottom. What we discover rather is a whole in which distinctions can be made, but in which divisions do not exist. And this is the point on which I insist, and it is the very ground on which I stand, when I urge that reality is sentient experience. I mean that to be real is to be indissolubly one thing with sentience . It is to be something which comes as a feature and aspect within one whole of feeling, something which, except as an integral element of such sentience, has no meaning at all. And what I repudiate is the separation of feeling from the felt, or of the desired from desire, or of what is thought from thinking, or the division—I might add—of anything from anything else. Nothing is ever so presented as real by itself, or can be argued so to exist without demonstrable fallacy. And in asserting that the reality is experience, I rest throughout on this foundation. You cannot find fact unless in unity with sentience, and one cannot in the end be divided from the other, either actually or in idea. But to be utterly indivisible from feeling or perception, to be an integral element in a whole which is experienced, this surely is itself to be experience. Being and reality are, in brief, one thing with sentience: they can neither be opposed to, nor even in the end distinguished from it.

I am well aware that this statement stands in need of explanation and defence. This will, I hope, be supplied by succeeding chapters, and I think it better for the present to attempt to go forward. Our conclusion, so far, will be this, that the Absolute is one system, and that its contents are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of any kind, can fall outside its limits. And if it is more than any feeling or thought which we know, it must still remain more of the same nature. It cannot pass into another region beyond what falls under the general head of sentience. For to assert that possibility would be in the end to use words without a meaning. We can entertain no such suggestion except as self-contradictory, and as therefore impossible."
(pp. 127-9)

"There is but one Reality, and its being consists in experience. In this one whole all appearances come together, and in coming together they in various degrees lose their distinctive natures. The essence of reality lies in the union and agreement of existence and content, and, on the other side, appearance consists in the discrepancy between these two aspects. And reality in the end belongs to nothing but the single Real."
(p. 403)

"Everything is experience, and also experience is one."
(p. 404)

"Reality then is one, and it is experience. It is not merely my experience, nor again can we say that it consists of souls or selves."
(p. 469)

(Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. 1897 [2nd ed.]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930 [9th impr.].)
<QUOTE

——————

QUOTE>
"Absolute reality lies beyond any distinction between subject and object, or self and not-self. Yet how, if there are no experiencing selves, can anything, let alone everything, be experienced? The impossibility of conceiving anything that is not experienced is surely one with the impossibility of conceiving anything that is not experienced by someone, by some subject.

It is to be noted that Bradley himself does not present his conclusion as saying that everything must be experienced; rather he says that everything is experience or sentience itself. Presumably this formulation is supposed to bring out the fact that the sentience of the Absolute is not that of some experiencing self. But the change of words hardly helps us. While we think of the claim as the conclusion of some quasi-Berkelian line of reasoning, it still seems to involve a subject or self, in at least some minimal sense of these terms; but, if we think of the conclusion as characterizing something wholly beyond any distinction between subject and object, it is hard to see it as the appropriate conclusion of the argument under consideration, for that argument operates at the level of ordinary experience which is subject-object in structure.

(Mander, W. J. An Introduction to Bradley's Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. p. 131)
———
According to Bradley…

"Reality is somehow one vast eternal self-experiencing many-in-one."

("Bradley, F. H.", by T. L. S. Sprigge. In The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. p. 105)
———
"[O]ne has to consider Bradley’s treatment of the notion of the self. In his view, there cannot be a subject without an object. Since self and not-self, subject and object, are correlative and can’t therefore be divorced from one another, they form a relational structure that, as such, can only develop within the larger whole of feeling. The self is, as Bradley says, ‘one of the results gained by transcending the first . . . form of experience’ (AR 525). But whose experience, then, is immediate experience? Bradley answers this question in terms of the notion of a finite centre. This is to be viewed as the metaphysical point in which all of a person’s experiences unfold. However, such a centre is neither a self (as we have just seen) nor can it properly be called a ‘soul’ (AR 529), for according to Bradley a soul’s life must be capable of enduring for a significant amount of time, while the experiences unfolding within a finite centre might be as brief as a momentary occurrence, breaking into existence, as it were, like a light flashing in the dark. Bradley also thinks that finite centres are not themselves in time, although there obviously is a temporal quality to the experiences unfolding within them. Most importantly, and puzzling as it might seem on a first hearing, Bradley denies that a finite centre is in any deep metaphysical sense a reality distinct from its experiences. There is nothing more to the centre than the stream of its experiences—each is a quantum of flowing feeling."

(Basile, Pierfrancesco. "Bradley's Metaphysics." In The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by W. J. Mander, 189-208. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 203)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

The essentials of Bradley's absolute idealism:

QUOTE>
"First, we must consider what the Absolute is supposed to be. The answer is that it is the universe as it really is, as opposed to as it seems to be to ordinary human thought. However, in speaking of the universe as it truly is as the Absolute, Bradley is making certain definite claims about it which may be summarily presented as follows.

(1) The Absolute, or totality of all things, is not a mere aggregate or assemblage of things; it is much more truly one than many. This means both that it is an organized system, and that it has, to a supreme degree, those features which make one regard something as a single thing rather than as a collection of things, and therefore has these features in a much higher degree than do what count as ordinary single things in daily life.

(2) The Absolute is a timeless experience or state of mind, inconceivably rich in the elements which go to make it up, but still having something like the kind of unity which belongs to a human person's experience as it occurs at any moment. It contains every experience which any conscious being has had or will have, and thereby contains everything, since for Bradley there is nothing except experience. Just as what a human hears, feels, sees, thinks, and so on at anyone moment is multiple, yet makes up one single experience, so does every ingredient of the world go to make up this single vast cosmic experience, which is the Absolute, or, the universe as it really is.

(3) The Absolute is not a person. A person must feel itself in contrast to a world, which provides its environment, whereas the Absolute experiences everything as an element in its own being.

(4) Although the Absolute is the All, there is a sense in which the All or Whole is present in each of its parts or aspects. As a first suggestion of what this means, one might say that it is present in all its parts somewhat as someone's personality may be present in all his acts, or in which the total character of a work of art permeates all its elements.

If the Absolute is all there really is, how come we can talk about anything else? Well, in a sense we cannot. However, Bradley distinguishes two other sorts of reality from the Absolute: namely, finite centres of experience and the constructed object world.

A finite centre of experience is, roughly speaking, the total psychical state which constitutes what it is like to be some sentient individual at a particular moment. Or rather, it is anything of the same basic sort as what constitutes this. It is not very different from what other thinkers might call a total state of consciousness, though Bradley gives a more restricted meaning to 'consciousness'. In a somewhat different sense, a finite centre of experience is a continuant of which such a state is a momentary phase.

The constructed object world is the shared posit of a system of communicating finite centres achieved through synthetic judgements of sense which interpret any given perceptual fields as different fragments of a single spatia-temporal whole extending them in a manner homogeneous with them in character. Its existence consists simply in the pragmatic value of such positings. There may be many different object worlds constructed by different systems of communicating finite centres.

Both finite centres and the object world are simply appearances of the Absolute."

(Sprigge, T. L. S. "Bradley's Doctrine of the Absolute." In Appearance versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley's Metaphysics, edited by Guy Stock, 193-217. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 194-5)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"…(2) The Absolute is a timeless experience or state of mind…"

(Sprigge, T. L. S. "Bradley's Doctrine of the Absolute." In Appearance versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley's Metaphysics, edited by Guy Stock, 193-217. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 194-5)
<QUOTE

1. There is no "state of mind" unless there is some object/subject whose mental state it is.

2. "Timeless experience" is a contradiction in terms, since experiences are a kind of events or processes, and all events and processes are temporal occurrences by definition.

[Consul]

Note that Berkeley's subjective idealism is not subjectless; and according to it a subject of ideas is not reducible to "a system of floating ideas without any substance to support them":

QUOTE>
(Hylas:) "Notwithstanding all you have said, to me it seems, that according to your own way of thinking, and in consequence of your own principles, it should follow that you are only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them."

(Philonus:) "How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas. I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colours and sounds: that a colour cannot perceive a sound, nor a sound a colour: That I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from colour and sound; and, for the same reason, from all other sensible things and inert ideas."

(Berkeley, George. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonus, Third Dialogue. 1713.)

"Besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them; and exercises divers operations, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived."
(Part 1, §2)

"Thing or being is the most general name of all, it comprehends under it two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous, and which have nothing common but the name, to wit, spirits and ideas. The former are active, indivisible substances: the latter are inert, fleeting, dependent beings, which subsist not by themselves, but are supported by, or exist in minds or spiritual substances."
(Part 1, §89)

"[T]he unthinking beings perceived by sense, have no existence distinct from being perceived, and cannot therefore exist in any other substance, than those unextended, indivisible substances, or spirits, which act, and think, and perceive them[.]"
(Part 1, §91)

"[A] spirit has been shown to be the only substance or support, wherein the unthinking beings or ideas can exist: but that this substance which supports or perceives ideas should itself be an idea or like an idea, is evidently absurd."
Part 1, §135)

(Berkeley, George. Principles of Human Knowledge. 1710.)
<QUOTE

[Belindi]

The essentials of Bradley's absolute idealism:

QUOTE>
"First, we must consider what the Absolute is supposed to be. The answer is that it is the universe as it really is, as opposed to as it seems to be to ordinary human thought. However, in speaking of the universe as it truly is as the Absolute, Bradley is making certain definite claims about it which may be summarily presented as follows.

(1) The Absolute, or totality of all things, is not a mere aggregate or assemblage of things; it is much more truly one than many. This means both that it is an organized system, and that it has, to a supreme degree, those features which make one regard something as a single thing rather than as a collection of things, and therefore has these features in a much higher degree than do what count as ordinary single things in daily life.

Your post dated 29 March includes:

While the absolute idealists often disagreed with Spinoza’s specific conception of the absolute, they understood the concept of the absolute in the same general sense as Spinoza. Their absolute was like Spinoza’s substance because it was that which has a self-sufficient essence or existence. For the same reasons as Spinoza, they insisted that the absolute has to be nothing less than the universe as a whole.

It is this Spinozist context, then, that defines the general meaning of the term ‘absolute’ among the romantics. Though it has religious and mystical associations, the term usually meant nothing more than the universe as a whole. Hence its cognates were sometimes ‘the universe’ (das Universum), ‘the one and all’ (Hen kai pan) or, more simply, ‘being’ (Seyn).

(2) The Absolute is a timeless experience or state of mind, inconceivably rich in the elements which go to make it up, but still having something like the kind of unity which belongs to a human person's experience as it occurs at any moment. It contains every experience which any conscious being has had or will have, and thereby contains everything, since for Bradley there is nothing except experience. Just as what a human hears, feels, sees, thinks, and so on at anyone moment is multiple, yet makes up one single experience, so does every ingredient of the world go to make up this single vast cosmic experience, which is the Absolute, or, the universe as it really is.

(3) The Absolute is not a person. A person must feel itself in contrast to a world, which provides its environment, whereas the Absolute experiences everything as an element in its own being.

(4) Although the Absolute is the All, there is a sense in which the All or Whole is present in each of its parts or aspects. As a first suggestion of what this means, one might say that it is present in all its parts somewhat as someone's personality may be present in all his acts, or in which the total character of a work of art permeates all its elements.

If the Absolute is all there really is, how come we can talk about anything else? Well, in a sense we cannot. However, Bradley distinguishes two other sorts of reality from the Absolute: namely, finite centres of experience and the constructed object world.

A finite centre of experience is, roughly speaking, the total psychical state which constitutes what it is like to be some sentient individual at a particular moment. Or rather, it is anything of the same basic sort as what constitutes this. It is not very different from what other thinkers might call a total state of consciousness, though Bradley gives a more restricted meaning to 'consciousness'. In a somewhat different sense, a finite centre of experience is a continuant of which such a state is a momentary phase.

The constructed object world is the shared posit of a system of communicating finite centres achieved through synthetic judgements of sense which interpret any given perceptual fields as different fragments of a single spatia-temporal whole extending them in a manner homogeneous with them in character. Its existence consists simply in the pragmatic value of such positings. There may be many different object worlds constructed by different systems of communicating finite centres.

Both finite centres and the object world are simply appearances of the Absolute."

(Sprigge, T. L. S. "Bradley's Doctrine of the Absolute." In Appearance versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley's Metaphysics, edited by Guy Stock, 193-217. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 194-5)
<QUOTE

Thanks for copying and pasting Sprigge on absolute idealism. I have not yet bought the book and will do so soon. Sprigge's own belief combined Bradley and Spinoza. I sometimes 'see' how Spinoza's dual aspect monism fits Bradley' absolute idealism. I think the two philosophers are mutually consistent when (Spinoza) subjective aspect and natura naturans aspect are dominant over respectively (Spinoza) objective aspect and natura naturata.

It seems to me that all the discrepancies of the less than absolute idealists are swept away by absolute idealism. BTW it's interesting how absolute idealism accords with Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. Naturally, as finite beings we can't proceed with daily life without finite awareness of other finite things, however
when we are doing metaphysics, or encountering death, grief, or ecstasy we can be absolute idealists.

Your post dated 29 March includes the quotation:

While the absolute idealists often disagreed with Spinoza’s specific conception of the absolute, they understood the concept of the absolute in the same general sense as Spinoza. Their absolute was like Spinoza’s substance because it was that which has a self-sufficient essence or existence. For the same reasons as Spinoza, they insisted that the absolute has to be nothing less than the universe as a whole.

It is this Spinozist context, then, that defines the general meaning of the term ‘absolute’ among the romantics. Though it has religious and mystical associations, the term usually meant nothing more than the universe as a whole. Hence its cognates were sometimes ‘the universe’ (das Universum), ‘the one and all’ (Hen kai pan) or, more simply, ‘being’ (Seyn).

Which would place Sprigge's Bradley + Spinoza version of absolute idealism among the romantics.

Their absolute was like Spinoza’s substance because it was that which has a self-sufficient essence or existence.

[Consul]

"Spinoza’s doctrine was the chief source of the monism of absolute idealism."

(Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 363)

"[Bradley's] own view combined substance monism — the claim that reality is one, that there are no real separate things — with metaphysical idealism — the claim that reality consists solely of idea or experience."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bradley/

"Reality then is one, and it is experience. It is not merely my experience, nor again can we say that it consists of souls or selves."

(Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. 1897 [2nd ed.]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930 [9th impr.]. p. 469)

If Reality or the Absolute is nothing but experience, in what sense is Bradley's idealism an example of substance monism—when his absolute experience is an occurrence without any substance functioning as its substrate or subject?

"In summary, that there are at least six overlapping ideas that contribute to the philosophical concept of substance. Substances are typified as:
i. being ontologically basic—substances are the things from which everything else is made or by which it is metaphysically sustained;
ii. being, at least compared to other things, relatively independent and durable, and, perhaps, absolutely so;
iii. being the paradigm subjects of predication and bearers of properties;
iv. being, at least for the more ordinary kinds of substance, the subjects of change;
v. being typified by those things we normally classify as objects, or kinds of objects;
vi. being typified by kinds of stuff."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/

Okay, Bradley's Absolute Experience is a substance in senses i.+ii: It is a fundamental and absolutely independent (self-existent) entity, with everything else being an "appearance" of it. But it doesn't seem to be a substance in senses iii.+v., i.e. a concrete object functioning as a possessor, substratum, or subject of attributes (properties or relations).

Contrary to Bradley's one substance, Spinoza's one substance has attributes and modes, with its central attributes being extension and thought. Another difference from Spinoza's substance monism is that for Bradley (spatial or temporal) extension is "mere appearance" and hence not an attribute of the Absolute.

QUOTE>
"The object of this chapter is far from being an attempt to discuss fully the nature of space or of time. It will content itself with stating our main justification for regarding them as appearance. It will explain why we deny that, in the character which they exhibit, they either have or belong to reality."
(p. 30)

"Time, like space, has most evidently proved not to be real, but to be a contradictory appearance."
(p. 36)

"Both time and space have been shown to be unreal as such. We found in both such contradiction that to predicate either of the reality was out of the question. Time and space are mere appearance, and that result is quite certain. Both, on the other hand, exist; and both must somehow in some way belong to our Absolute."
(p. 181)

(Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. 1897 [2nd ed.]. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930 [9th impr.].)
<QUOTE

[Belindi]

Consul wrote:

Contrary to Bradley's one substance, Spinoza's one substance has attributes and modes, with its central attributes being extension and thought. Another difference from Spinoza's substance monism is that for Bradley (spatial or temporal) extension is "mere appearance" and hence not an attribute of the Absolute.

But Bradley's substance, experience, includes experiences of extension and of thought. If the one substance is experience(of both extension and thought) then experience and Nature/God are the same. The naming of Nature/God "experience" is a means to separate Nature/God from the array of natura naturata.

Experience is both natura naturata and natura naturans. Nature also is
both natura naturata and natura naturans. To be the uncaused cause it's necessary and sufficient to be the nomic connection(the law of connection) for natura naturata and natura naturans, i.e. experience.

(NB the Latin terms are Spinoza's and are a concise and precise way to pin down the initial split of Nature so that Nature is understood as everyday experience.)