“…the idealist denies the mind-independent reality of matter, but hardly denies the reality of mind…” - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Idealism
Idealism, a particular form of what philosophers call ‘anti-realism’, has bedeviled thinkers in western civilization for millennia. Idealists hold that it is impossible for us to know exactly what really exists outside ourselves, apart from and beyond, perhaps, the impressions derived from our own sense perceptions. Essentially, what we know are ideas about things, which can only ever be internal to us, and which will likely never exactly correspond to the external things from which our ideas are derived. As Kant famously claimed, the thing-in-itself is unknowable.
There are two very serious problems entailed by idealism which manifest themselves vehemently today. The first of these is skepticism, something Descartes gamely tried to address with his cogito ergo sum. His argument ultimately failed to prove anything beyond his own existence, and four centuries later we remain inveterate skeptics. One need look no further than the popularity of films like The Matrix and the ubiquitous references to being ‘red-pilled’ to see that our collective fear of Descartes’ evil demon has not been assuaged.
The second problem is relativism, which has decimated our morality and looks likely to destroy our civilization. If your ‘lived experience’ doesn’t jive with mine, what can we have to left talk about? Without an objective ‘view from nowhere’ who can ever determine the truth about anything? Given idealism, there can be no received morality, because nothing can be known with any certainty beyond the sense experiences of our own selves. If whatever constitutes ‘the good’ for me is not ‘the good’ for you who decides what is actually good? If we are to believe truth, or what is sometimes called ‘the really real’, exists we must first be able to trust there are knowable, permanent things outside of and entirely beyond ourselves. If there is objective truth it can only exist in a shared, objective reality, something idealists must deny.
Idealism permeates our western society. It makes our emotivist personal morality and broadly utilitarian societal moral structure more or less inevitable. The skepticism baked into idealism makes anything but a relativistic morality impossible. Because idealism assumes the only knowledge possible comes from our sense experience it also helps explain the widely held but somewhat incongruent ‘belief’ in ‘science’, something even idealist analytic philosophers can embrace as ‘scientific realism’. In the centuries following the Enlightenment, idealism settled like a fog over our western intellectual discourse and has now become a foundational assumption of our thought, whether we realize it or not. We feel like it’s just true that we can’t really know the world, but it is?
One of the Enlightenment philosophers most responsible for the prevalence of idealism in our times is not strictly considered an idealist and rather thought of himself as an empiricist. Even so, it was David Hume’s theory of human cognition that managed to so firmly root idealism into our collective western intellect. Hume believed that it is the ‘impressions’ made by sense experiences that constitute our thinking. When we think, we are thinking about the ideas which we have formed from our sense experience and about which we can then reason. He wasn’t the first to propose such a model, but his version had enormous influence on later philosophers, especially the analytic philosophers of the west.
Empiricists like Hume insisted that our only real knowledge comes from sense experience and whatever other phenomena can be measured by instruments or derived from science and mathematics. Everything else, including, or perhaps especially, religious belief, was relegated to the realm of superstition and indeed for many decades the majority of analytical philosophers have been atheists. Even so, some atheist philosophers have pushed back against the empiricist materialism that has dominated analytic philosophy for at least the past century. Thomas Nagel and Iain McGilchrist, for example, have both come to the conclusion that the mind body problem, and particularly that of consciousness are likely impossible to solve under strict materialism.
McGilchrist’s idealist metaphysics claims, roughly, that human beings exist in a reality which they co-create with the whatever-it-is outside themselves through an all-encompassing consciousness. This view, while perhaps more agnostic than atheistic, causes some serious difficulties for religious believers, especially Christians. First, the notion that we co-create reality together with the whatever-it-is that is outside ourselves would appear to put us on an equal or near-equal footing with God. Second, where exactly does the doctrine of salvation fit into a co-created existence? How could an omnipotent God depend upon us to co-create our own conscious existence and therefore our salvation? Regardless, while McGilchrist seems to question strict materialism he continues to cling tenaciously to idealism.
This brings us back to Hume’s idealist model of cognition. While it may seem plausible, it’s quite possible it’s wrong. If we consider another model, where the mechanism by which we think are ‘ideas’ and that about which we think are ‘things’ perhaps we get to a more realistic description of how cognition actually works.1 For Hume, when I think about my husband what I am thinking about is the impression my husband makes or has made on my senses. I am thinking about the ‘idea’ of my husband my brain has constructed from my sense impressions. Under the other model, when I think about my husband, what I’m thinking about is my husband. The object of my thought is the person who exists in the world, about whom I can think using ‘ideas’.
It may seem this is a distinction without a difference, but it actually makes an enormous difference to one’s conception of the world. First of all, and quite obviously, if we’re thinking about ‘things’ instead of ‘ideas’ our focus moves from our own minds out into the larger world. It’s a bit tricky at first, not only because the idealist view is so pervasive, but also because the word ‘idea’ is fraught with so much baggage. To say one thinks with ideas seems to be the same as saying one thinks about ideas, so it’s helpful to try and think about what an ‘idea’ actually is to understand the difference. What is an idea? Is it possible to think about an idea without any content in it at all? In fact, it’s not possible, because to imagine an empty idea still requires one to imagine the concept of an idea itself. Ideas always have content, and it is that content, those ‘things’, about which we are thinking. We always and only use ideas to think about things.
The now “controversial” philosophical view that the world exists independently of our minds is called metaphysical realism and was long held to be just plain common sense. Metaphysical realism claims that we are able to communicate with each other about things in the world intelligibly because they exist and we can perceive them. We can communicate our thoughts to each other because they refer to a common, shared, objective reality. For metaphysical realists, the world outside of you both exists and is knowable.
So what does this have to do with enchantment? In C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man there is a famous passage about what he calls ‘Coleridge’s waterfall’. In that passage Lewis was, of course, decrying how horrid it was for educators to teach young people to reduce what would otherwise be meaningful experiences to subjective feelings:
“The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.”
So whether the waterfall was “sublime” or merely “pretty” will make no difference apart from how the individual feels about it. Lewis points out that this is ridiculous for a number of reasons, one of which is that the correct feeling produced in one who calls a waterfall “sublime” is that of veneration, not sublimity.
If this is true, must there not then exist some objective, external thing capable of producing such veneration, even if that veneration is not universal. Coleridge was at the waterfall with two other tourists. He silently agreed with the one who thought the waterfall was sublime and was quite disgusted with the tourist who described the waterfall as merely pretty. Now, if idealism is true, what we are reacting to is not the waterfall itself, it is only the impression made by the waterfall on our senses. If the waterfall is sublime, it is only so in our minds. In fact, it might as well not even exist if we are not there to view it. The waterfall can never be objectively sublime, no matter how many people view it and perceive it as such.
It seems that enchantment might be much better served by the metaphysical realist view, despite the tendency for people to want to exclude the supernatural from realism. Under realism the world is a place absolutely chock full of things to discover and marvel at instead of being reduced to a mind-space full of subjective impressions. Under realism, our experiences are real, our emotions are responses to our real experiences and our suffering and our joy are meaningful.
This explanation was adapted from Mortimer J. Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, (New York: Touchstone, 1985), 15.