Chapter 5 Chapter Four Idealism

The term "idealism" is used by various philosophers with slightly different meanings.We understand it as the doctrine that everything that exists, or at least everything known to exist, must in some sense be spiritual.This doctrine enjoys widespread support among philosophers, and has been advocated in several forms and for different reasons.This doctrine is so widely supported, and so interesting in its own right, that even the briefest introduction to philosophy calls for an account of it. A person unaccustomed to philosophizing may be apt to dismiss such a doctrine as manifestly absurd.There is no doubt that common sense regards the table, the chair, the sun, the moon, and certain physical objects as fundamentally distinct from the mind and its contents, and that they have an existence which would continue even if the mind ceased to exist. existing.We imagine that matter existed long before any mind existed; and it is difficult to imagine matter as a mere product of mental activity.However, no matter whether idealism is true or not, it cannot be dismissed as obviously absurd.

We have seen that, even if bodies did have independent existence, they would necessarily be quite different from sense-data; and they correspond to sense-data only as catalogs correspond to cataloged things.Common sense, therefore, leaves us quite in the dark as to the true inner nature of bodies; and therefore, if there are legitimate reasons for thinking of bodies as mental, we do not regard them as mental merely because they strike us as strange. This view is of course rejected.Truth about bodies is necessarily strange.It may be unattainable, but if any philosopher believes that he has attained it, no one can object to his opinion because what he presents as truth is strange.

The basis for advocating idealism is generally derived from the theory of knowledge, that is to say, from a discussion about what conditions things have before we can know them.The first person who seriously attempted to base idealism on this ground was Bishop Berkeley.First, he proves by a number of arguments (most of which are valid) that our sense-data cannot be assumed to exist independently of us, and must at least partly be "in" the mind, which is the In the sense that they cease to exist without seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting.So far, his claims are more or less valid, even if some of the arguments are not correct.But he goes on to argue that sense-data are the only things of which our perceptions can assure us of their existence, and that to be known is to exist "in" a mind, and thus to be mental.He concludes that nothing can be known to us but what exists in some mind; and whatever is known that is not in my mind must be in another mind.

To understand his argument, it is necessary to understand his use of the word "idea."He calls an "idea" anything that is directly known, for example, sense-data are known to us.Thus, a particular color we see is an idea; a word we hear is an idea, and so on.But the term is not entirely restricted to sense-data.It also includes those things which we remember or imagine, for we also have immediate knowledge of such things at the moment we remember or think of them.All such immediate data he calls "ideas." Then he examines an ordinary object such as a tree.He points out that when we "perceive" the tree, what we know immediately consists of what he calls "ideas"; and he argues that there is nothing about the tree other than what we perceive We have no basis for assuming that anything is real.He said that its existence lies in its being perceived. In the Latin language commonly used by scholastics, its "esse" (existence) is "percini" (being perceived).He fully acknowledges that the tree necessarily continues to exist, even when our eyes are closed or no one is near it.But this continued existence, he says, is due to God's continued perception of it; this "real" tree corresponds to what we call physical objects, and it is composed of ideas in God's mind, which are always related to ours. The ideas that one had when seeing the tree were similar, but the difference was that these ideas were forever in the mind of God as long as the tree lived.According to Berkeley, all our perceptions consist in a partial share in the perception of God, and it is because of this sharing that different people see more or less the same tree.Thus, since whatever is known is necessarily an idea, the world is nothing apart from the mind and its ideas, and nothing else can be known.

There are quite a few errors in this argument which are important in the history of philosophy and should be exposed.First there was confusion over the use of the term "idea."We think that "ideas" are essentially something in someone's mind, so when we are told that a tree consists entirely of ideas, we naturally assume that, if so, the tree must be entirely exists within the mind.But the reference to being "inside" the mind is ambiguous.When we say that there is a person in our heart, it does not mean that this person is in our heart, but that we think of him in our heart.When a man says that the business which he had to deal with was completely out of his mind, he does not mean that the business itself was in his mind, but only that the thought of the business was in his mind. Yes, it was no longer in his heart.So when Berkeley says that if we can know the tree, the tree must be in us, what he really has the right to say is that the thought of the tree must be in our mind .To argue that the tree itself must be in our minds is like arguing that a person whom we have in mind is himself in our minds.This confusion seems too obvious to be committed by any competent philosopher, but it is made possible by various incidental circumstances.In order to see how this is possible, we must delve deeper into the question of the nature of ideas.

Before addressing the general question of the nature of ideas, we must first discern two quite separate questions, that of sense-data, and that of physical objects.We have seen, in various details, that Berkeley was right to regard the sense-data which constitute our perception of trees as always more or less subjective.Of course, this is only in the sense that the sense-data depend on us as they depend on the tree, and the sense-data would not exist if the tree were not perceived.But this argument is quite different from the one used by Berkeley to show that everything that can be directly known must exist in a mind.It is in vain to demonstrate at length the dependence of sense-data on us for this purpose.Generally speaking, what must be proved is that a thing shows itself to be mental by being known.This is what Berkeley believed he had done.It is precisely this problem which we now have to deal with, and not our previous problem of the distinction between sense-data and bodies.

As far as Berkeley's word "idea" is concerned, whenever the mind has an idea before it, there are two distinct things to consider.On the one hand there is the thing we know—say, the color of my table—and on the other hand is really knowing itself, the mental act of knowing something.Mental acts are undoubtedly mental, but is there any reason to assume that what is known is in some sense mental?The arguments we have given above regarding color do not prove that color is mental; those arguments only show that the existence of color depends on the relation of our senses to objects (such as a table).That is to say, those arguments have proved that under certain light, the normal eye will see the presence of certain colors as long as it is at a certain point relatively close to the table.Those arguments do not prove that color is in the mind of the perceiver.

Berkeley's view, that color must obviously be in the mind, seems to have gained its admiration by confounding the thing perceived with the act of perception itself.Both may be called "ideas"; Berkeley presumably called them as such.There is no doubt that this action is in the mind; and therefore, when we think of this action, we readily agree with the view that ideas must be in the mind.We then forget that this view is only true when we take ideas as an act of cognition; so we transform the proposition "ideas are in the mind" into another sense Concepts are transformed into things themselves that we know through our cognitive behavior.Thus, by an unconscious tautology, we arrive at the conclusion that whatever we know must exist within our minds.This seems to be the real analysis of Berkeley's argument, and what is fundamentally wrong with his argument.

In our perception of things the question of distinguishing the role of perception from the object of perception is of great importance.For our whole capacity to acquire knowledge is bound up with it.The ability to perceive something other than itself is the central characteristic of the mind.The cognition of an object is constituted chiefly in the relation of the mind to something outside the mind; this constitutes the mind's faculty of knowing things.If we say that what is known necessarily exists in the mind, we are either unduly limiting the cognitive capacities of the mind, or we are speaking tautologically.If we understand "in the mind" to be the same as "before the mind," that is, we understand only to be known by the mind, then we are merely talking tautologically.But if we really mean this, we have to admit that whatever exists in the mind in this sense may still not be mental.Thus, when we recognize the nature of knowledge, it can be seen that Berkeley's argument, which assumes that "ideas"—that is, objects known—must be The grounds of the spirit we find all without any validity.His grounds for idealism, therefore, we can all dismantle.Let's see if there is any other basis.

It is often said that we cannot know whether there is something we do not know, as if it were a self-evident truth.This can be extended to say that anything is at least cognizable to us as long as it can be related in some way to our experience; it follows that if matter is at all something that we cannot know, then it is A thing that we cannot know whether it exists or not does not matter to us.In general, this implies, for some unclear reasons, that everything that is insignificant to us cannot be real; therefore, if matter is not composed of mind or mental ideas, it is Impossible, and it can only be a mirage.

At the present stage it is not possible for us to delve into this argument sufficiently, since the arguments it raises require a considerable degree of preliminary discussion; but for the present we can see what are the arguments against it.Let's start with the end: there is no reason why everything that has no practical importance to us should not be real.Of course, if the importance of theory is also included, then every real thing has some importance to us, because since people wish to know the truth about the universe, we will be interested in the truth contained in the universe. Feel some kind of interest in everything.But if this interest is included, then the question of the indifference of matter to us is not the point; as long as matter exists, it does not matter that we cannot know it exists.Obviously we can doubt whether matter can exist, and we can also doubt whether it exists; therefore, matter is connected with our desire for knowledge, and its importance lies in either satisfying this desire or hindering us. of this desire. Furthermore, to say that we cannot know the existence of things we do not know is not only not a truth, but in fact is false. The word "know" is used here in two different senses. (1) The first usage is that it applies to knowledge as opposed to error, in the sense that what we know is true, and I apply it also to our beliefs On and on the argument, that is, it can be applied to the so-called judgment.In this sense of the word we say that we know how something is.Such knowledge may be called the knowledge of truth. (2) The second use of the word "know" mentioned above is that it applies to our knowledge of things, which we may call cognition.It is in this sense that we perceive sense-data. (The difference between the two is roughly the difference between savoir (to understand) and connaitre (to know) in French, or between wissen (to understand) and kennen (to know) in German.) Therefore, if this seemingly true statement is re-stated, it becomes the following: "We can never really judge whether there is something we don't know."Far from being a truth, this is, on the contrary, a blatant falsehood.I did not have the honor of knowing the Emperor of Russia, but I can really judge that he existed.Naturally, it can also be said that I judged this way because others knew him.But this is an irrelevant objection, because even if the principle were true, I would not know who knew him.Again, there is no reason to say that I should not know of the existence of things that are unknown to everyone.This point is important and needs to be clarified. If I know that a thing exists, then my knowing gives me knowledge of its existence.But to say the other way around, as long as I can know that a certain thing exists, I or anyone must know it, this statement is not correct.If I do not know a thing, but can have a correct judgment; then, first of all, this thing must be known to me by means of description, and secondly, according to some general principle, I can judge it from what I know. In the existence of something, the existence of things that are inferred to fit this description.In order to fully understand this, it is best to first settle the distinction between cognitive and descriptive knowledge, and then consider which knowledge of general principles, if any, is of equal certainty to the knowledge of existence in our own experience. reliability.These issues will be discussed in the following chapters.