A wonderful account

[findingblanks]

The Essentia Foundation has just published a very brief account of critical idealism that is aimed at going directly at the core misrepresentations it receives. I have to assume that Bernardo played a major hand in putting this together. It's outstanding.

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/read ... you-think/

[AshvinP]

The Essentia Foundation has just published a very brief account of critical idealism that is aimed at going directly at the core misrepresentations it receives. I have to assume that Bernardo played a major hand in putting this together. It's outstanding.

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/read ... you-think/

Well, this account tries to clear up misrepresentations about idealism by misrepresenting it even more...

An often-repeated criticism of idealism is that the obvious existence of an external world of tables and chairs, independent of our thoughts, wishes or fantasies, contradicts idealism. But this is just not true. Idealists—even subjective idealists a la Berkeley, let alone objective or analytic idealists—acknowledge the existence of an external world independent of our personal mentation; they simply state that such external world, in and of itself, is also mental in essence, just as the inner life of another person is mental, even though not constituted of our mentation. The external world is not in your or our minds alone, but unfolds instead in a spatially-unbound field of subjectivity underlying all nature, in the same sense that quantum fields are thought to span the entire universe. In other words, the external world is what the ‘thoughts’ of nature’s mind-at-large look like when observed from our vantage point, given the peculiarities of how our perceptual and cognitive apparatus represents the world internally. But in and of itself, the external world is constituted of transpersonal thought-like processes outside and independent of your and our minds.

I am glad they wrote this, because it serves as a clear reminder of the implict dualism in "critical idealism". It is so deeply embedded in Western thought that even the most sophistcated idealist philosophers cannot recognize it. That is the dualism of personal/transpersonal and internal/external. The critical idealist knows how to spot this dualism when challenging metaphysical materialist-dualist thinkers, but not in their own accounts! Neither Berkeley, nor Hegel, nor early Fichte nor Schelling held to this dualism, and they are pretty important Western idealist philosophers to consider. It is this simple dualism which throws off all subsequent philosophizing about metaphysics, ethics, science, etc. and also makes idealism so hard to accept for non-idealists. Why should anyone accept that the tiny mineralized abstractions in our minds are responsible for the entire phenomenal world we perceive, if we simply attribute those tiny thoughts to "Nature" or "MAL" instead of our "personal" minds? That stretches credulity beyond any reasonable bounds and it should be rejected by non-idealists. Here it becomes even more explicit what we are dealing with:

Often an opposition is suggested between reductionists and idealists, as if these were contradictory positions. But that, too, is a misunderstanding

Reductionism - exactly! A consistent idealism is in no way reconcilable with reductionism. It doesn't matter what you are reducing, because consistent idealism simply does not reduce. And we can verify the irreducibility of idea in our own immanent experience. So here again Essentia presents a clear reason why non-idealists should reject the critical idealism they are putting forward. It cannot be reconciled with our experience whatsoever.

PS - the core points made above were tweeted out to BK and Essentia as well.