I'd like an answer to this too. I don't know much about Hegel.

Hegel I have not learned (yet), he is infamously impossible to read and understand. One of the issues with very academic ivory-tower (Early Modern) philosophy.

Berkeley's subjective idealism is basically that ideas exist solely in the mind, and that God put all those ideas in there. It gets a bit more complicated than that but that's the simplest way to put it. May I suggest messaging me privately? I have notes on Berkeley from my class I took on him last semester (fourth year undergrad level) that I could take some pictures of and send to you...to help me understand I often draw little cartoons in my academic notes, which may also be helpful.

Berkeley's idealism is "representational", subjectivist, empiricist, epistemological, whereas Hegel's idealism is more like ontological realism. For Hegel subject is the constitution of reality itself. Subject and object are more or less identical. Perception is only a moment in a dynamic constitution or development of the absolute knowing (which is the presentation of the identity of subject and object). Hegel's point of view is not a general particular subject but holistic. Absolute knowing is concretely realized through spirit i.e. history, culture, art, religion, philosophy. Absolute means that there is something trans-historical, trans-subjectivist (infinite vs. finite).


The following is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"The pantheistic legacy inherited by Hegel meant that he had no problem in considering an objective outer world beyond any particular subjective mind. But this objective world itself had to be understood as conceptually informed: it was objectified spirit. Thus in contrast to Berkeleian subjective idealism it became common to talk of Hegel as incorporating the objective idealism of views, especially common among German historians, in which social life and thought were understood in terms of the conceptual or spiritual structures that informed them. But in contrast to both forms of idealism, Hegel, according to this reading, postulated a form of absolute idealism by including both subjective life and the objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and self-actualization of God, the Absolute Spirit."

...

“Idealism” is a term that had been used sporadically by Leibniz and his followers to refer to a type of philosophy that was opposed to materialism. Thus, for example, Leibniz had contrasted Plato as an idealist with Epicurus as a materialist. The opposition to materialism here, together with the fact that in the English-speaking world the Irish philosopher and clergyman George Berkeley (1685–1753) is often taken as a prototypical idealist, has given rise to the assumption that idealism is necessarily an immaterialist doctrine. This assumption, however, is mistaken. With the possible exception of Leibniz, the idealism of the Germans was not committed to the type of doctrine found in Berkeley according to which immaterial minds, both infinite (God’s) and finite (those of humans), were the ultimately real entities, with apparently material things to be understood as reducible to states of such minds—that is, to ideas in the sense meant by the British empiricists.

As Leibniz’s use of Plato to exemplify idealism suggests, idealists in the German tradition tended to hold to the reality or objectivity of ideas in the Platonic sense, and for Plato, it would seem, such ideas were not conceived as in any mind at all—not even the mind of Plato’s god. The type of picture found in Berkeley was only to be found in certain late antique Platonists and, especially, early Christian Platonists like Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. But especially for the German idealists like Hegel, Plato’s philosophy was understood through the lenses of more Aristotelian varieties of neo-Platonism, which pictured the thoughts of a divine mind as immanent in matter, and not as contained in some purely immaterial or spiritual mind. It thus had features closer to the more pantheistic picture of divine thought found in Spinoza, for example, for whom matter and mind were attributes of the one substance."


https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/#Aca

There's a great website called Early Modern Texts which contains a trove of writings by the early modern philosophers (of which Berkeley is one) updated into a more current form of English, with helpful commentary. The reproductions of Berkeley's dialogues on that site are especially useful, and well worth perusing.

Berkeley's philosophy is not really that 'ideas exist in the mind' so much as 'everything we know is an idea'. We think we see external material objects but on analysis, the act of knowing comprises ideas and sensations. Even an apparently external object is really an idea in our mind, and everything that is real is minds (or actually spirits, in Berkeley's philosophy.) It's an interesting fact that Berkeley is categorized as empiricist - because of his insistence that only the facts of experience can be taken to be real. In fact it was on this grounds that C S Pierce criticized him, saying Berkeley's nominalism was the major flaw in a philosophy that he agreed with in many other respects.

Hegel was, as said above, regarded as an 'absolute idealist', but I think there is lot of confusion and unclarity around all these categorisations, and indeed what 'idealism' means in itself. Huge topic to unpack, though.

that there is one perceiver, or mind; God, or the Absolute. — philosophy

I suspect that Berkeley and Hegel were looking at the same thing from different perspectives. Berkeley was discussing how a human perceives the world from inside the system (subjective). Hegel was trying to imagine the world from outside the system, from God's point of view (objective).

So, actually, there are two "perceivers" (perspectives), the relative creature and the absolute Creator. We get confused when we don't make clear which point of view we are talking about.

I suspect that Berkeley and Hegel were looking at the same thing from different perspectives. Berkeley was discussing how a human perceives the world from inside the system (subjective). Hegel was trying to imagine the world from outside the system, from God's point of view (objective).

So, actually, there are two "perceivers" (perspectives), the relative creature and the absolute Creator. We get confused when we don't make clear which point of view we are talking about. — Gnomon

@Wayfarer

I think that a lot of this has to do with point of view. We can never step outside our point of view. We generally accept other "selves" have a point of view (other humans and animals). However, we can never fully understand what it means to have the "point of view of everything" or the "point of view from everywhere". However, that is what Hegel wants to get at, in his overly simplistic way of historicizing human history as some apex narrative.

The view I am coming around to is that 'nothing exists without a perspective'. Even if we are to picture the early Earth before life began, and even if we have a scientifically-informed picture of what that would be like, there is still an implicit organising perspective that the mind brings to bear in establishing that picture. We are imagining a world in which there were no humans; and it is empirically true that there was such a world, up until very recent times, in a geological sense. But there's still a sense of scale and perspective in such reckonings, which we overlook or neglect (which I think correspond with Kant's 'primary intuitions of space and time'). We instinctively say that in such a world, there can be no viewpoint or perspective, because there was no being to attribute such a thing to; but this is treating 'perspective' as the attribute of some being, in other words, externalising it, or reifying it as an objective reality, which it is not. It is part of the fabric of thought and cognition, something which we can't think or conceive without, but it's not an objective reality, as it is logically and ontologically prior to the ability to conceive of objective reality - including the apparently objective reality of a world with no beings in it!

I think this is the sense that underlies idealist philosophy generally. But because understanding this requires a kind of inversion of perspective, then it's most often misunderstood. The typical reaction is: oh, you mean the world disappears when you're not observing it. Oh, you mean the world exists in the mind. It means neither of those, but what it takes to understand it is a kind of introspective awareness of the nature of the mind, and the work the mind does in 'creating' the world.

The issue is that post-Enlightenment philosophy - today's empiricism and naturalism - begin with the assumption that the objective~phenomenal domain is independently real, and that metaphysics in any sense is derivative, secondary and inconsequential.

Quine’s belief that we should defer all questions about 'what exists' to natural science is really an expression of what he calls, and has come to be known as, naturalism. He describes naturalism as, “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy. It sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method. — Theories and Things, p82

So here you have the notion that the object of scientific enquiry, viz, the natural world, is real 'in its own right' and without reference to any cognitive act on the part of the observing subject. And in my view, this is leading further and further into tremendously sophisticated and mathematically-elaborated confusion, as 'the natural world' has no intrinsic or mind-independent reality. But understanding that is not a scientific matter, and if it's not a scientific matter, then, for most people, it's simply incomprehensible.

The view I am coming around to is that 'nothing exists without a perspective'. Even if we are to picture the early Earth before life began, and even if we have a scientifically-informed picture of what that would be like, there is still an implicit organising perspective that the mind brings to bear in establishing that picture. We are imagining a world in which there were no humans; and it is empirically true that there was such a world, up until very recent times, in a geological sense. But there's still a sense of scale and perspective in such reckonings, which we overlook or neglect (which I think correspond with Kant's 'primary intuitions of space and time'). We instinctively say that in such a world, there can be no viewpoint or perspective, because there was no being to attribute such a thing to; but this is treating 'perspective' as the attribute of some being, in other words, externalising it, or reifying it as an objective reality, which it is not. It is part of the fabric of thought and cognition, something which we can't think or conceive without, but it's not an objective reality, as it is logically and ontologically prior to the ability to conceive of objective reality - including the apparently objective reality of a world with no beings in it! — Wayfarer

I am a bit confused on your position.. First you say "nothing exists without a perspective" and then you say that "it's not an objective reality". To put the two together would be "perspective is not an objective reality" which is essentially a Berkleyean position. Is that a correct interpretation then?

The view I am coming around to is that 'nothing exists without a perspective'. — Wayfarer

I find that this is easy to understand when one considers the temporal perspective. If you imagine what the world, or the universe, would be like with no human beings, then there is nothing to establish the temporal perspective. So you can ask yourself, at what time, in the existence of the universe, are you thinking about. Now, you cannot tell yourself that you are thinking about now, the time when human beings would have been here, and the universe would be exactly the same at this time, as it is now, because the exercise is to remove the presence of human beings.

This leaves you with the entirety of the temporal extension of the universe from its beginning to end, with no means of choosing one particular time, at which time you could say that the universe would be like this or like that. And, since things are moving, there is no way to say this would be here, or that would be there, because we are considering all of time now, so everything would sort of be everywhere. Furthermore, If you wanted to imagine how things would be like at a particular point in time, you would need some way of determining what a particular point in time is. We experience time as passing, so how long of a period of time would a point in time be, a Planck length? a nanosecond? a second? a minute? an hour? a year?, a few billion years? It doesn't even make sense to talk about a particular point in time without the human perspective, because the point in time is a product of the human perspective

First you say "nothing exists without a perspective" and then you say that "it's not an objective reality". To put the two together would be "perspective is not an objective reality" which is essentially a Berkleyean position. Is that a correct interpretation then? — schopenhauer1

I don't disagree that there are objective facts and that there are better and worse ways of understanding. The facts that have been disclosed by modern science weren't known previously and they clearly ought to inform our understanding (as per Copernican as opposed to the Ptolemaic cosmology). As a culture and also a species, there is an enormous range of things about which objective judgements can be made. What I'm rejecting is the tendency to 'absolutize' the objective - to declare as per the Quine quote, that we should defer all questions about what exists to science and naturalism. It limits philosophical enquiry to what can be objectively validated, whereas philosophy points to what underlies objectivity, the 'conditions for objectivity', if you like.

We experience time as passing, so how long of a period of time would a point in time be, a Planck length? a nanosecond? a second? a minute? an hour? a year?, a few billion years? It doesn't even make sense to talk about a particular point in time without the human perspective, because the point in time is a product of the human perspective — Metaphysician Undercover

Right - that is my point. Same for distance, which, as Einstein pointed out, is actually the same thing (i.e. spacetime.) It's not as if the vast universe would not exist if humans weren't in it, but that only from the human perspective is any statement about the existence of the Universe meaningful. But modern science tends to occlude or block that out, which gives rise to statements such as 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems meaningless'. That's because the discipline of mathematical physics is grounded in 'bracketing out' the subjective from the outset. But it can't really do it, which is why it has now come back with a vengeance in the form of the 'observer problem'.

There's something behind all of this which is actually very simple, but which sounds diabolically complicated when you try and spell it out. :roll:

Same for distance, which, as Einstein pointed out, is actually the same thing (i.e. spacetime.) — Wayfarer

But this is a mistaken perspective. The concept of "the expansion of the universe", which is a consequence of the Einsteinian perspective, gives us a sort of movement which is incompatible with "movement" within the theoretical framework, distances which are not distances. So the theoretical framework given by Einsteinian relativity must adapted, exceptions described, in order to account for this movement which is not movement according to the framework. This indicates that the proposed relationship between space and time, which is described by Einsteinian relativity, is deficient, it's incorrect.

When a theory is supposed to describe the relationship between two things, and it comes up short, we can conclude that the theory is incorrect. But modern physics is trapped within the confines of this incorrect theory, and this is really what is behind the "observer problem". Physicists have assigned to the observer a perspective which is false. The physicist observes through the lens of 'spacetime', and doesn't understand how the deficiencies of the theory affect the observations. From this false perspective the observations are incomprehensible.

What I'm rejecting is the tendency to 'absolutize' the objective - to declare as per the Quine quote, that we should defer all questions about what exists to science and naturalism. It limits philosophical enquiry to what can be objectively validated, whereas philosophy points to what underlies objectivity, the 'conditions for objectivity', if you like. — Wayfarer

Granted- this was essentially what Kant was trying to do. But my question here wasn't so much whether we can get objective facts, but what a non-self perspective of the universe (or existence) would be.

The concept of "the expansion of the universe", which is a consequence of the Einsteinian perspective, gives us a sort of movement which is incompatible with "movement" within the theoretical framework, distances which are not distances — Metaphysician Undercover

Einstein didn’t predict the expansion of the universe, or rather this theory made no such prediction. I think it was Hubble and Le Maître that discovered the expanding universe some years after Einstein published his general theory.

what a non-self perspective of the universe (or existence) would be. — schopenhauer1

Again, Kant said that it was a meaningless question. Buddhism is somewhat similar; there is an expression you encounter in the texts of 'mind-only' (Vijñānavāda) Buddhism that 'everything is mere appearance' (the significance of 'mere' being to defuse the suggestion that there is a reality over and above that of 'appearance'.) This ties into the 'doctrine of emptiness', i.e. the lack of intrinsic reality in things.

Then the chicken egg argument. Whence arises appearance?

The view I am coming around to is that 'nothing exists without a perspective'. — Wayfarer

For me (and for Kant as I read him) it's not that nothing exists without a perspective but that we cannot say what anything is like absent a perspective, because things are only like something from a perspective.

Quine’s belief that we should defer all questions about 'what exists' to natural science is really an expression of what he calls, and has come to be known as, naturalism. He describes naturalism as, “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy. It sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method. — Theories and Things, p82


So here you have the notion that the object of scientific enquiry, viz, the natural world, is real 'in its own right' and without reference to any cognitive act on the part of the observing subject. And in my view, this is leading further and further into tremendously sophisticated and mathematically-elaborated confusion, as 'the natural world' has no intrinsic or mind-independent reality. But understanding that is not a scientific matter, and if it's not a scientific matter, then, for most people, it's simply incomprehensible. — Wayfarer

So, I think you're misinterpreting Quine here. It is precisely because " 'the natural world' has no [determinate] intrinsic or mind-independent reality" (brackets mine) that Quine says there can be no first philosophy, and that all we have to work with is natural science's inquiry into reality (as it appears to us). Of course "understanding that is not a scientific matter", but a phenomenological or pragmatic one; which Quine acknowledges. You do know Quine was an anti-realist?

how do you interpret the ‘abandonment of the goal of first philosophy’? What do you think that means?

It is the abandonment of the idea of a metaphysical foundation to our inquiries. It is to accept that the only foundations we have are epistemological, semantic and phenomenological. We have grounds for claims in those domains, but metaphysical speculations, although they may be valuable, poetically, spiritually and in terms of what new epistemological, semantic and phenomenological insights and inquiries they may lead to, have no grounds.

For example, it could be argued that Presocratic metaphysical speculations about the ultimate constitution or substance of reality were the fertile soils for the genesis of what we understand as scientific inquiry. Or it could be argued that metaphysical speculations lead to new and beautiful poetic ideas in the arts.

The article from which the Quine quote is taken goes on to say 'Instead of starting with sense data and reconstructing a world of trees and persons, Quine assumes that ordinary objects exist.' This is the crucial point for naturalism: starting with the reality of ordinary objects along with 'abandoning first philosophy'. This is paradigmatic for current analytical philosophy.

The article that this quote was taken from was about the ontology of number. As you know, I am drawn to a Platonist view - that number is real, but not material, i.e. real for a mind capable of counting. The whole point of the article is to deflate this view. But I don't regard the argument as a matter of 'speculative metaphysics'; to me, it's 'practical reason'. If numbers are real, but not material, then there is at least a class of entities that are real, and immaterial, therefore, materialism is defeated.* It's amusing to see the lengths that analytical philosophy will go to to avoid this conclusion.

----

* 'Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects which aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.' SEP

Einstein didn’t predict the expansion of the universe, or rather this theory made no such prediction. I think it was Hubble and Le Maître that discovered the expanding universe some years after Einstein published his general theory. — Wayfarer

That's right, Einstein wanted a static universe, and introduced the 'cosmological constant'. It was meant to counter the effects of gravity which Einstein thought should be making the universe contract. Friedman argued otherwise. The point is that this principle could not be held because observations of the universe, interpreted through the lens of general relativity, revealed an expanding universe, which is not what Einstein thought general relativity should predict.

Now it is understood that expansion is accelerating, so dark energy is posited to account for this. In reality, general relativity cannot predict anything concerning the expansion of the universe, it has no mechanism for dealing with this phenomenon. And that's why the issue is so confused, the phenomenon known as "the expansion of the universe" is completely inconsistent with general relativity. The appearance of "the expansion of the universe" (which is a completely confused concept) is produced because the universe is observed from the artificial perspective of general relativity, and this perspective is faulty, so confusion results. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia page on "cosmological constant":

According to quantum field theory (QFT) which underlies modern particle physics, empty space is defined by the vacuum state which is a collection of quantum fields. All these quantum fields exhibit fluctuations in their ground state (lowest energy density) arising from the zero-point energy present everywhere in space. These zero-point fluctuations should act as a contribution to the cosmological constant Λ, but when calculations are performed these fluctuations give rise to an enormous vacuum energy.[7] The discrepancy between theorized vacuum energy from QFT and observed vacuum energy from cosmology is a source of major contention, with the values predicted exceeding observation by some 120 orders of magnitude, a discrepancy that has been called "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics!".[8] This issue is called the cosmological constant problem and it is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science with many physicists believing that "the vacuum holds the key to a full understanding of nature".[9] — Wikipedia

The article from which the Quine quote is taken goes on to say 'Instead of starting with sense data and reconstructing a world of trees and persons, Quine assumes that ordinary objects exist.' This is the crucial point for naturalism: starting with the reality of ordinary objects along with 'abandoning first philosophy'. This is paradigmatic for current analytical philosophy. — Wayfarer

It's not as simple as you and the article (apparently, although I haven't read it) are claiming.

This is an abstract from a Paper about Quine's realism and antirealism:

"W. V. Quine describes himself as a “robust realist” about physical objects in the external world. This realism about objects is due to Quine's naturalism. On the other hand, Quine's naturalistic epistemology involves a conception of objects as posits that we introduce in our theories about the world. This conception of objects can be seen as anti-realist rather than realist. In this article, I discuss the questions whether there is a tension between Quine's realism and his epistemological conception of objects, and how Quine's conception of objects should be understood if he is also to be regarded as a realist. I also address the question whether Quine should be placed on the realist or the anti-realist side of the current realism debate. I argue that Quine's conception of objects as posits is a general account of the nature of objects, and that this account does not conflict with Quine's realism as long as this realism is properly understood. I also argue that Quine cannot be placed on either side of the contemporary realism debate, since his realism is not metaphysical realism and his conception of objects is not an anti-realist doctrine according to which objects would be less than real.

You can request the entire paper here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264205494_Quine_on_Objects_Realism_or_Anti-Realism

On the other hand, Quine's naturalistic epistemology involves a conception of objects as posits that we introduce in our theories about the world. — Janus

When you have to posit the existence of something, whose existence is not justified by anything other than that it is needed to make a particular theory work, you can be sure that the theory is faulty. This is the case with the cosmological constant (post above). But the existence of objects is much more complicated than this because it is supported at a fundamental level, empirically. Individuating, and identifying objects is a fundamental object (goal) of sensation. So empirical experience itself, as sensation, is fundamentally guided by this 'posit', that there are objects.

This places that 'posit' (the existence of objects) as prior to sensation itself because sensation is guided toward recognizing objects.. But when we reflect on this we see that this original, or primitive posit, is not really a posit of the existence of objects, but of what is required for us to conceive of objects. This is evident in Kant, as what is required for the "possibility" of experience, and it is manifest in Aristotle as the concept of "matter". There is not a primitive positing of the existence of objects, but a preconditioning which establishes the attitude (belief?) which allows us to apprehend the world as consisting of objects.

So the process of understanding the existence of objects might be something like this. Objects are present to the conscious mind, so we are inclined to simply assume or 'posit' their existence. But when we reflect on this, we see that this assumption is not really justified, it is only supported as a precondition for sensation. And, we are warned by philosophers to be skeptical of sensation. With a healthy dose of skepticism, and analysis, we see that this precondition doesn't really exist as an assumption of the existence of objects, or a positing of objects, what it is is extremely complicated and difficult to understand, and that's why metaphysics is not simple.

Another interpretation, if I may:

It is not the job of sensation to identify objects of perception, but to inform that an object is present.
“...The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by the said object, is sensation...”
———————-

There is certainly a primitive positing of the existence of objects.....
(“....For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd....”)

.....but it is not that particular positing that is the ground of the possibility of all experience.
(“.....that space and time, as the necessary conditions of all our external experience....”)
———————-

In Kant, the existence of objects of perception is given, there are no ontological predicates being questioned. As such, we have no need to understand the existence of objects, but only that we rightly determine what the matter of them may be, the form already resident a priori in intuition. In this way, the circularity of positing that which the theory is trying to establish, is negated.

Also in Kant, it is not sensation of which we need to be skeptical.....
(“...It is, therefore, quite correct to say that the senses do not err, not because they always judge correctly, but because they do not judge at all....”)

.....but instead, it is judgement itself.
(“... It is not at present our business to treat of empirical illusory appearance (...) and in which the judgement is misled by the influence of imagination....)

Ok...butting out now.