The important consequences of Idealism and materialism is that they express two poles of the same binary. Both are inadequate ways of explaining the relationship between subject and object. As Merleau-Ponty says:
“ “We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object.”

From that, it may be best to let “makeup” of the world denote the substance of its constituency, and if so, and by the same token, if ideas have no substance, then it follows ideas cannot partake in the constituency of material things, such as worlds. — Mww

But don't they partake as observed with the duck/rabbit? Isn't that sort of what Kant is saying here?:

"The capacity for receiving representations (receptivity) through the mode in which we are affected by objects, objects, is called sensibility. By means of sensibility, therefore, objects are given to us, and it alone furnishes us with intuitions; by the understanding they are thought, and from it arise conceptions. But an thought must directly, or indirectly, by means of certain signs, relate ultimately to intuitions; consequently, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by the said object, is sensation. That sort of intuition which relates to an object by means of sensation is called an empirical intuition. The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called phenomenon. That which in the phenomenon corresponds to the sensation, I term its matter; but that which effects that the content of the phenomenon can be arranged under certain relations, I call its form. But that in which our sensations are merely arranged, and by which they are susceptible of assuming a certain form, cannot be itself sensation. It is, then, the matter of all phenomena that is given to us à posteriori; the form must lie ready à priori for them in the mind, and consequently can be regarded separately from all sensation."

--CPR, intro to the TA

Two sides of the same coin?

It needn't be the case that idealism is opposed to realism at all. — Manuel

That’s right. Realism is actually a form of idealism.

yessir

@Joshs phenomenology or personal experience transcends this false choice of idealism or materialism,and subjective objective dichotomy.
But I don't think many take notice given their entrenchment on either side.

Sure. Unless someone considers themselves eliminitavists, which I think is just crazy.

Quite true

Unless someone considers themselves eliminitavists, which I think is just crazy. — Manuel

An eliminativist , like Dennett for instance , is also relying on a form of idealism.


From Rorty:
“ Dennett wants to say that it is as silly to ask whether beliefs are real as to ask whether his lost sock center is real. I quite agree, but not for Dennett's reasons. My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, spatially locatable, spatially divisible, tangible, visible, easily identified, made out of atoms, good to eat, and so on. Reality is a wheel that plays no part in any mechanism, once we have adopted the natural ontological attitude. So is the decision to be, or not be, "a realist about" something. So is the decision about what position to occupy on the spectrum that Dennett describes (with Fodor's industrial-strength realism at one end and what he calls, alas, "Rorty's milder-than-mild irrealism" at the other). Dennett should, on my view, drop his claim to have found "a mild and intermediate sort of realism" - the juste milieu along this spectrum. He should instead dismiss this spectrum as one of those things it is not useful to talk about - one of those metaphors that, like those which make up the image of the Cartesian Theater, looked promising but turned out to be more trouble than it was worth.”

My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, — Joshs

It would be useful for Jack Torrance. Maybe for a QAnon member?

It would be useful for Jack Torrance. Maybe for a QAnon member? — frank

So your facts are real and QAnon’a
facts are fake? You might be surprised to discover what a vast web of interpretive plumbing your ‘facts’ sit on top of , and how subjective that deep foundation is.

I think it's materialists who are subject to more unverifiable tosh. One of the more frustrating elements of reading through the philosophers of yore is dealing with endless discourses on absolute junk science that turned out to be hilariously wrong. What's worse is that success in creating technologies is taken as evidence that they are correct, as if it isn't possible to develop a useful tool while being totally mistaken about how it actually works. Thinking fire was a prime element of the world didn't stop Aristotle from cooking his fish.

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia.

I agree he relies on it. He just rejects that this is what he's doing.

So your facts are real and QAnon’a
facts are fake? You might be surprised to discover what a vast web of interpretive plumbing your ‘facts’ sit on top of , and how subjective that deep foundation is. — Joshs

The QAnon believer would do well to question whether the conspiracy he believes in is real.

So it's a valuable use for "real.”

What does subjectivity have to do with it?

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It sounds to me like qualia is serving a function for the idealist much like materialism is for the empiricist. In both cases we have the claim for an intrinsically real object ( qualia or material thing) whose pure self -identity can be located independently of its interactions with an outside.

Well, you don't, that's why they're not materialists. Principally, you don't get magical humans. Lots of people don't like being described as a the same sort of thing as rocks, rivers, or even trees, apes, and computers. They find that quite offensive. Bear in mind we're coming from a world that was taught that God made us bespoke, with His divine breath, and made the universe just for us: being ever so special is important to many.

I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. They want to be in the know. They are not like a toddler stumbling around a dinner party with only faint concepts of what is going on. Or maybe they are, but at least they know they are at a dinner party (they think). Meanwhile the skeptic is being carried off for changing because he couldn't make up his mind if he needed to take a shit or not, and the idealist is eating crayons in the corner.

Sure, they can't tell you why material behaves the way it does or where it came from. If you peel the onion too far you always end up at a dead end (to mix metaphors). But they have something real to posit as the basis of reality. It's material (whatever that means).

An idealist or skeptic can at least hold the materialist model as a useful if often unreliable tool, without falling into traps like claiming qualia isn't real, based solely on data received as qualia, while transmitting said argument to others solely through means that they will experience as qualia. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I hear you. Although I have to say qualia is not an idea that resonates with me - it seems to be such a nebulous concept.

t sounds to me like qualia is serving a function for the idealist much like materialism is for the empiricist. In both cases we have the the claIm for an intrinsically real object whose pure self -identity can be located independently of its interactions with an outside. — Joshs

That's a nice quip.

From Rorty:
“ Dennett wants to say that it is as silly to ask whether beliefs are real as to ask whether his lost sock center is real. I quite agree, but not for Dennett's reasons. My reason is that it is silly to ask whether anything is real - as opposed to asking whether it is useful to talk about, spatially locatable, spatially divisible, tangible, visible, easily identified, made out of atoms, good to eat, and so on. — Joshs

Some of the things Rorty says about 'reality' and futility of trying to locate things 'as they are' are quite seductive. When Rorty says 'We know how to justify beliefs, we don't know anything about truth.' you can sense his antipathy towards the remnants of Greek philosophy (esp idealism) that still tempt us.

I can't tell if Rorty is a significant thinker or hopelessly lost.

I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interesting - can you provide an example of a materialist wanting to be special?

All that intro is the groundwork for empirical knowledge, and as groundwork, we are not conscious of its operation. All that happens before conscious thought, which is shown by “...undetermined object...”. Ideas, on the other hand, are conscious thoughts insofar as we are aware of our ideas. So it is that ideas are not part of the groundwork of empirical knowledge, for ideas are not a product of sensibility. Ideas are not phenomena, which gives us the extension that ideas do not have objects that belong to them as intuitions, but only as conceptions.

As far as the duck/rabbit is concerned, it is the case that either the duck or the rabbit is given as sensible phenomenon. As far as our knowledge goes, it doesn’t matter which one it is; it just cannot be both simultaneously, and, it must be one or the other. Enter the conscious part of knowledge, found in the understanding, which is the source of concepts. If either one of the phenomenon is the immediate representation in intuition, then understanding relates the arrangement of that form (via imagination, if you were wondering) to the concept understanding thinks as belonging to it, and we cognize one or the other, each of its own time.

The duck/rabbit thing is not a fluke of perception, a “fancy of the mind”. There actually is a duck form and a rabbit form manifest in the illustration, thus it is not contradictory for understanding to synthesis one concept or the other, to it. Same with that table/little ol’ lady double perception. Even if a purposeful deceit, understanding compensates. But the system is not perfect, as the checkerboard/cylinder shadow illusion recently, and as far back as Plato’s equal lines, show. Those, and that damn dress. Leave it to a human, perhaps the most intelligent agency on the planet, to intentionally confuse himself.

The form of idealism I believe is true, is that the apparently external world is inextricably bound to and by our cognitive abilities - that we see the kind of world we see because of the kinds of beings we are. This doesn’t mean something as simple-minded as ‘the world exists in my mind’, but that the human mind is constitutive of everything we understand as reality.

'A physicist', said Neils Bohr, 'is an atom's way of looking at itself'.

Ultimately, we are not apart from, or outside of, reality. That is why the purported division of subjective and objective has no absolute foundation. That principle is made explicit in Kant and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I don’t accept has been superseded by anything that science has discovered since their day.

But, it’s exceedingly hard to grasp what exactly this means. As Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, humans are generally born with an instinctive sense of realism, the problems with which only become clear after considerable intellectual effort. Understanding the way the mind constructs the experience of the world from the elements of experience combined with the faculty of reason does not come naturally. That is why so few people, even philosophers, are inclined to accept it. On the whole, they don't see it, and since idealism fell out of favour they're not open to it. (It's one of the main reasons I discontinued undergraduate philosophy.)

In short - the world is not simply given. It is in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind. The sense in which it exists outside of or apart from that mind is an empty question, because nothing we can know is ever outside of or apart from the act of knowing by which we are concious of the existence of the world in the first place. This doesn't mean the world is all in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, the species and cultural mind of h. sapiens - is an inextricable foundation of the world we know, but we can't see it, because it is what we're looking through, and with.

The problem with this is that the same people reject any evidence that there are some animals that would do something remotely similar, — Kenosha Kid

what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent. — Jacques Maritain

It's just a quip in response to one. I don't actually think the main motivation for idealism is to be special and have magic things, or that materialism is primarily motivated by the psychological desire to have answers where there are none.

Just pointing out that if you apply the same kind of dismissive reduction to materialism you have someone claiming they know better than the idealist, and what they know is that the essence of reality is material. Material which is...oh right, something we're quite in the dark on.

You really have to wonder about the people who choose skepticism; there is plenty, pretty much everything, still left to doubt on the materialist side without having to take that fence sitters position.

I'm sure someone could point out that we know tons about material. And we do, and they are useful things to know from a technological or scientific perspective. They just aren't very useful from an ontological perspective.

As Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, humans are generally born with an instinctive sense of realism, the problems with which only become clear after considerable intellectual effort. — Wayfarer

A fantastic source, by the way. :up:

In short - the world is not simply given. — Wayfarer

This is a big problem. I want to start a thread on this topic one day, but I'm working on how to articulate it. I'm very slowly re-reading C.I. Lewis' book on the topic, which is very interesting and talks a good deal about this.

People often associate "the myth of the given" through Sellars' essay, which is quite epistemological and can become quite technical. Lewis makes it epistemic-metaphysical, which makes for a more interesting read.

I feel like a similar level of critique works against the materialist though. They want to think they are special. They want to be in the know. They are not like a toddler stumbling around a dinner party with only faint concepts of what is going on. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's not a particular feature of materialism. Any firm, undoubted, unexamined position, whether right or wrong, would qualify, including religious ones, but also political ideology, conspiracy theories and, yes, philosophical positions.

Ultimately, we are not apart from, or outside of, reality. That is why the purported division of subjective and objective has no absolute foundation. That principle is made explicit in Kant and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I don’t accept has been superseded by anything that science has discovered since their day.

But, it’s exceedingly hard to grasp what exactly this means. As Magee says in his book on Schopenhauer, humans are generally born with an instinctive sense of realism, the problems with which only become clear after considerable intellectual effort. Understanding the way the mind constructs the experience of the world from the elements of experience combined with the faculty of reason does not come naturally. That is why so few people, even philosophers, are inclined to accept it. On the whole, they don't see it, and since idealism fell out of favour they're not open to it. (It's one of the main reasons I discontinued undergraduate philosophy.)

In short - the world is not simply given. It is in some fundamental sense projected by the observing mind. The sense in which it exists outside of or apart from that mind is an empty question, because nothing we can know is ever outside of or apart from the act of knowing by which we are concious of the existence of the world in the first place. This doesn't mean the world is all in my mind, but that the mind - yours, mine, the species and cultural mind of h. sapiens - is an inextricable foundation of the world we know, but we can't see it, because it is what we're looking through, and with. — Wayfarer

Is it not possible that this is wrong and some version of realism might be the case instead?

Fascinating but very nebulous and how would you ever establish what is the case? There are so many theories about how human beings construct their 'reality' you almost need to choose one on faith... It's almost competing with postmodernism in the multifactorial construction of 'reality' stakes, except, presumably idealism has a foundation... is a foundation. If you can establish which version.

I discontinued undergraduate philosophy after being told by the professor that I was there to parrot back what he said, and not to learn. Incidentally he was a physicalist, objectivist. I went on instead to study Zoroastrianism, particularly the Gathas... go figure.

In short - the world is not simply given. — Wayfarer

I certainly wouldn't have thought so. I am not even sure what counts as 'the world'.

Fascinating but very nebulous and how would you ever establish what is the case? There are so many theories about how human beings construct their 'reality' you almost need to choose one on faith... It's almost competing with postmodernism in the multifactorial construction of 'reality' stakes, except, presumably idealism has a foundation... is a foundation. If you can establish which version. — Tom Storm

That's true. It's part of the issue. In my teens I wrote a song, never finished, called 'Jigsaw of Sky'. It was about the idea that, usually with a jigsaw, you can use the figures in the finished artwork to work out where all the pieces go, but if they were all the same color - a jigsaw of sky - then it would be much harder to put it all together. But faith also comes into it. I had various conversion experiences earlier in life - not much use trying to convey them here, but they do happen. Various key books. It's a journey. Hence my forum name.

I am not even sure what counts as 'the world'. — Tom Storm

'I am my world' ~ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Notebooks.

some version of realism might be the case instead? — Tom Storm

It's not either-or. This is where Kant maintained that he was at once an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. Not one or the other. I feel exactly the same way. You can't deny empirical facts, but you can always argue about their interpretation. (See this blog post.)

There's a parallel in Mahāyāna Buddhism, the docrtine of the two truths. There's conventional truth, samvrittisatya, which is roughly speaking the domain of empiricism. Then there's higher truth, paramarthasatya, which 'the Buddha' knows. (Although ultimately, even these are not two, as a working distinction it helps keep your bearings.)

'A physicist', said Neils Bohr, 'is an atom's way of looking at itself'.

Ultimately, we are not apart from, or outside of, reality. That is why the purported division of subjective and objective has no absolute foundation. That principle is made explicit in Kant and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and I don’t accept has been superseded by anything that science has discovered since their day. — Wayfarer

No dispute from me here. Say no to dualism, kids. But the rest seems to arise from the same prejudice: toward tying reality innately to the mind rather than trying the mind innately to (physical) reality. One of these follows logically from the fact that there are rocks and trees and insects and rodents and apes and humans; the other does not.

:up:

toward tying reality innately to the mind rather than trying the mind innately to (physical) reality. — Kenosha Kid

The problem being that physics, intent on discovering the fundamental physical constituents of reality, found itself embroiled in epistemology instead. Einstein asked, I presume exasperatedly, 'Doesn't the moon continue to exist when nobody is observing it?' Presumably, he asked this question rhetorically, with the implicit answer being that 'of course it does!' Nevertheless he was obliged to ask the question. Variations on this very question were at the centre of the famous Bohr Einstein debates which occupied the subsequent two decades. And I believe the overall consensus is that Bohr's view, the 'Copenhagen interpretation', has prevalied.

If, at that time, an unequivocable, 'mind-independent' stratum of reality had been disclosed by physics, then the sentiment might be truthful. But it was not. This was even noted by Bertrand Russell in the concluding chapter of HWP in 1946, so it's not news.

So it is that ideas are not part of the groundwork of empirical knowledge, for ideas are not a product of sensibility. Ideas are not phenomena, which gives us the extension that ideas do not have objects that belong to them as intuitions, but only as conceptions. — Mww

It's trickier than just adding idea to matter to equal a thing. It's that a thing is a fusion of idea, the unchanging identity, versus matter (in the sense of unformed or underdetermined) ever-changing, coming and passing away.

It's those pair of opposites: changing/unchanging, form/unformed, etc. They come as packages.

The duck rabbit reference was just supposed to point to the everpresent situation.

I think this is in the TA. It's in Schopenhauer, and he credits the TA as a good explanation.