Idealism Make Sense in Philosophy,

¶ … Idealism Make Sense

In philosophy, idealism is a grouping of ideas that assert that what we know about our universe, that is reality, is really mentally constructed. For centuries, humans have been concerned about knowing -- what we know, how we know it, and can we prove it. Idealism is central to many other -- isms in that it emphasizes the mental character of all things. One way to understand the 20th century mindset of idealism is British scientist Sir James Jeans' comment: "The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine" (Haisch, 2007).

One of the finest minds of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, who is sometimes vilified in the modern world because of his views on atheism and agnosticism, wrote a great deal on logic and analytical philosophy. Like Stephen Hawking, Russell had comments and found ways of integrating his philosophical ideas into most disciplines, often seeing the elusive "commonality" between all human thought and action, as well as science. Russell says that we must be grounded in the three major branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. There are, of course, other ways to study and address these problems, but the philosophical approach is self-critical, and based on a series of rational arguments (Monk, 2004). Rather than arguing from a specific point-of-view as most philosophers do, the seminal importance for Russell is that it is the act of contemplation that drives the ability to actualize and move forward on a topic -- not the viewpoint or epistemology:

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps -- friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad -- it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative… (Russell, 2004).

Further, if we think of idealism as being what the mind perceives as being real, we can turn to Plato for an explanation of how this might remain relevant for the 21st century. In Plato's the Republic, Book VII, we are presented with a situation called "The Allegory of the Cave." In essence, this is Plato's view on reality vs. belief -- or idealism -- and the way humans must evolve through a process to become actualized. In essence, we are presented with a dark cave in which there are prisoners who have been chained since birth so they can look only forward. Behind these unfortunates is a fire, the only light in their universe. Behind the fire are people manipulating puppets so that shadows are cast on the walls. So, the only "reality" the prisoners know are the lessons from the shadows -- reality, or their view of idealism. If suddenly a prisoner is freed he notices that the shadows are not real, but the puppets are. Now imagine if this same prisoner is forced out of the cave and into the light. As soon as the pain from the brightness diminishes he discovers that the most real things, the ideal, are those physical outside of the cave (Huard, 2006).