 Idealism
With Immanuel Kant, German philosophy took a hard left turn away
from the rationalist thinking of Liebnitz and his successors, into
transcendental idealism. Kant realized, versus John Locke and others
who believe we obtain our ideas about the world from our senses, that
the mathematical and logical framework with which we construct our
world cannot itself have been imported through the senses. The ancient
philosopher Plato had realized the same thing, though to a much
different outcome. To no one in the ancient world did it seem much of a
conundrum that innate ideas, such as those of mathematics, prove useful
in modeling the external world. Walking along, one finds a key; picking
it up and trying it in the lock, the door opens! Success! So streamed through the open door the grateful hordes in
antiquity; but Kant demands we throw the key back down, because we
don't know where it came from or whose fingerprints are on it; besides
it might have germs. Or maybe we can use it, but not to open the door;
to draw pictures in the air, perhaps. Some people might say, that the
keys fits the lock to perfection shows that it is the key for that
lock; others might say, this must be a dream, otherwise how could the
key fit the lock? It's impossible!— which is much like 'proving' that
bumblebees cannot fly.
The crisis which required action was Newtonian physics. Kant could not abide the idea that our best, most
scientific, ideas about the world, such as Newton's physics,
are ultimately empirical, that we compare these idealized projections
to our experience and accept or reject them accordingly. He
reconfigured the physical sciences on, in his mind, a much more solid basis by
proclaiming that they have nothing to do with the world out there, but
only with 'our' world: we find law in nature, because we give law to
nature. We are the law-givers, not God. There is, admittedly, some
mysterious input from something 'out there,' but we cannot know
what. His successors, such as G. W. F. Hegel, built upon this
foundation. Some of the wildest things Mary Baker Eddy says, including
her outright denial of the reality of the material world, were
hum-drum common-places in those august German universities which
retailed this material: ". . .the body is only an objectified will,
the shape which the will assumes in the material world. . ." (Arthur
Schopenhauer, The Complete Essays, 'Ethical Reflections,' Kindle
location 5824). Of course these people had too much common sense to
act as if they believed their own philosophy. That there is a real, material
world out there is by far the most economical explanation for the
phenomena, and especially of their mutually corroborating testimony, and so a few slashes of Ockham's razor shreds all rival
theories, but that this could not be proven deductively and mathematically took it
off the table for these people:
"Let me illustrate what I mean. Take any large, massive,
heavy building: this hard, ponderous body that fills so much space
exists, I tell you, only in the soft pulp of the brain. There alone,
in the human brain, has it any being. Unless you understand this,
you can go no further." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The Collected Essays
of Arthur Schopenhauer, Halcyon Classics, Kindle location 6919).
Consistently, said "soft pulp" can itself exist only in a mind! Mrs. Eddy believed, as did Schopenhauer: "'The world is my
idea:'— this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives
and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and
abstract consciousness." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Representation, Volume 1, Kindle location 246). Of course the German
philosophers were not such dolts as to conclude, 'we give laws to
nature; therefore I can throw myself off the barn roof and fly,'
although one may fairly wonder why this is not a legitimate conclusion
to their researches. One can ask, with the Mrs. Eddy's of the world,
why on earth not? If the world is my idea, then I hold the
copyright, and am allowed to make whatever modifications I see fit.
Indeed the stubborn recalcitrance of 'the world' under this sort of
regime might well serve as the reductio ad aburdum of German
transcendentalism, as we are forced to conclude, 'the world is,
after all, somebody else's idea, not mine.' This approach seems
overblown; it is premised on the assumption we could not experience
any world which did not have just these characteristic features, and
yet every night in dreams we experience worlds which don't make
sense, marked by unexplained dislocations of space and time.
Pathological conditions like schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease
can induce abnormal experiences which do not conform to Euclidean
space or cause-and-effect sequence. While the mechanism is broken if
people are experiencing these conditions, there is certainly nothing
inherent in the human mind which prevents people from experiencing
and describing these alternative worlds. We all can
imagine such worlds very easily. We don't experience them, because
the only real world is rational to a fault. Our key fits the lock. It's not our idea, it's
somebody's else's.
While I can't speak for the reader, I must confess I am not able
to go very far down the path with these people: "For, 'no object
without a subject,' is the principle which renders all materialism
for ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them,
and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in
words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless. .
.The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject
as the supporter of its existence." (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World
as Will and Representation, Volume 1 of 3, Kindle location 868).
Materialism is indeed impossible, but let us perform the 'thought
experiment' of imagining all human life, indeed all sentient beings,
to be wiped off the face of the earth by a monumental tsunami. Would
the planets, thereafter deprived of an audience for their celestial
dance, cease to obey the laws of planetary motion? Who but a voodoo
doctor could expect such an outcome? It is impossible to imagine
this catastrophic tragedy having much of any effect on them at all.
These ideas about the world are not Biblical; Jesus did not go about
curing people of the illusion that they were sick. For a time
idealism was actually popular in some quarters of the church world;
there used to be 'Christian Hegelians' and such folk. Has their tribe gone extinct? Most of them however did not jump out
the window with Mrs. Eddy under the impression they could fly.
Walter Martin offers an interesting comparison between
contemporary writing on Hegel and Mrs. Eddy's work: "'For Hegel and
his true disciples there is no truth, substance, life or
intelligence in matter; all is Infinite Mind. Thus matter has no
reality; it is only the manifestation of spirit. .
.We learn from Hegel that Mind is universal the first and only cause
of all that really is.'" (quotations from 'The Metaphysical Religion
of Hegel,' by Francis Lieber, quoted p. 113, The Kingdom of the
Cults by Walter R. Martin.) Whether plagiarism or not, this
certainly shows minds moving in the same orbit. These nineteenth century
paradigms do seem to have been a real influence, although some older
conceptions also peek through at times.
This nineteenth century development was not altogether a return to views already expressed by Plato in
the ancient world, because Plato was sure the 'ideas' undergirded
reality. The German idealists were quite sure these ideas could not
undergird reality, because they certainly do condition our
experience of reality (see if you can find the force in that
refutation, dear reader; I confess I cannot). In a general sense, Mary Baker Eddy falls into
the idealist category; her assumption that Spirit is real and matter
only apparently so is not something she thought up for herself. Some of her beliefs about the world
are essentially Platonic: notice there is an original, and a copy:
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