Editing Idealism

[[File:George Berkeley.jpg|thumb|[[George Berkeley]], one of the most influential idealist philosophers]]'''Idealism''' is a [[Philosophy|philosophical]] outlook based on the principle that all reality—including matter—is a product of mind. As such, idealism frequently leads to assertions that all problems can be solved solely through one or more individual's intellectual or emotional effort, or that truth can be discovered through [[rationalism]] or 'pure reason', independently of engagement with the material world. This renders it ineffective at best for addressing real world problems.<ref>{{Citation|author=Maurice Cornforth|year=1971|title=Materialism and the dialectical method|page=20|quote=Idealism is the way of interpreting things which regards the spiritual as prior to the material, whereas materialism regards the material as prior. Idealism supposes that everything material is dependent on and determined by something spiritual, whereas materialism recognizes that everything spiritual is dependent on and determined by something material. And this difference manifests itself both in general philosophical conceptions of the world as a whole, and in conceptions of particular things and events.|city=New York|publisher=International Publishers|isbn=9780717803262|lg=http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=F4D51096FE2351CAEEE22A32017FFF74}}</ref><ref>{{Citation|author=[[Friedrich Engels]]|year=1886|title=Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy|chapter=Materialism|quote=The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. 
[...]
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other [...] comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.|library-title=Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy}}</ref>

Much of [[Karl Marx|Marx]]'s earlier work centered around taking [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]]'s dialectical idealism and converting it into dialectical materialism. Idealism stands in contrast to [[Dialectical materialism|materialism]] which holds that all reality—including mind—is a product of matter. As [[dialectical materialism]], it forms the basis of the scientific outlook of the world and [[scientific socialism]].<ref>{{Citation|author=Joseph Stalin|year=1938|title=Dialectical and Historical Materialism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm|quote=Contrary to idealism, which asserts that only our consciousness really exists, and that the material world, being, nature, exists only in our consciousness' in our sensations, ideas and perceptions, the Marxist philosophical materialism holds that matter, nature, being, is an objective reality existing outside and independent of our consciousness; that matter is primary, since it is the source of sensations, ideas, consciousness, and that consciousness is secondary, derivative, since it is a reflection of matter, a reflection of being; that thought is a product of matter which in its development has reached a high degree of perfection, namely, of the brain, and the brain is the organ of thought; and that therefore one cannot separate thought from matter without committing a grave error.}}</ref>

Idealism should not be confused with subjectivism which holds that reality is different depending from which perspective it is looked at. As a philosophy it should also not be confused with its more familiar definition of 'having ideals'.

==History==
Idealism and materialism have existed as schools of philosophy since at least [[Ancient Greece]], though these theories took centuries to mature. To the Ancient Greeks, materialism was merely the idea that everything in the world was made of matter. [[Plato]] is considered the father of idealism.

Yet idealism came to exist somewhat naturally.{{citation needed}} The first humans observed phenomena that they didn't understand (such as storms, volcano eruptions, seed germination...){{citation needed}} and attributed these activities to unseen spirits, which formed the basis of the first human religions, also known as animism (the belief that items, places, and things are inhabited by spirits).

Later, as humans experimented and learned about the world, animism would turn into polytheism, and then into monotheism and God{{citation needed}}—God being here not necessarily the Abrahamic God (of Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The idea of the spirit (or soul) is still at the center of idealist thought.

=== Modern philosophy ===
In modern philosophy idealism is generally broken down into three trends: [[subjective idealism]] associated with the work of [[George Berkeley]], [[transcendental idealism]] associated with the work of [[Immanuel Kant]], and [[German idealism]].

Idealist philosophers such as Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, and others were and are discussed by many important Marxists (such as Lenin's discussion of Berkeley in "Materialism and Empiro-criticism"). The most important idealist philosopher with respect to Marxism is Georg W.F. Hegel. His works, together with the works of the [[Young Hegelians]], formed the basis of Marxist philosophy after the issue of idealism itself had been dismantled and replaced with materialism.

==Theories and shortcomings==

=== George Berkeley ===
Berkeley claimed that reality only exists in one's head as, for example, some may find an object to be heavy while others, who are perhaps stronger, will find it to be quite easy to carry.
[[File:Sun15thcentury.jpg|thumb|The sun as drawn in a 15th century German manuscript]]
Yet the weight of an object is an objective quality; it weighs the same no matter who picks it up, and no matter how it feels in their hand. While there are subjective properties to an item (taste, size, shape and colour for example), Berkeley claimed that objective properties were in fact subjective. This would mean that reality does not exist and science would be unable to exist as well if that were true. Or in other words, while humans see the sun as an orange disc with a crown of rays (when seen from the Earth), science was able to determine that it is neither a disc nor orange, nor does it have rays. The sun exists in an objective reality independent from our subjective interpretations: it is a ball of bright white plasma. If reality did not exist—if objective properties did not exist—then we would have been fundamentally unable to determine what the sun actually looks like.

Idealists claim that mind creates matter. It follows, for subjective idealists, that the world does not exist outside of our subjective thoughts. And ultimately, our ideas create things, where things are the reflection of our thoughts. An apple becomes an apple only when we apply several properties to it such as colour, shape, taste, etc. Yet, as we have seen in the example of the sun, things exist in an objective reality that may be completely different from our subjective interpretation.

===Religious nature and opposition to science===
Idealism always ultimately turns to God to justify its arguments. Likewise it often is itself used to justify religious beliefs.<ref>{{Citation|author=Vladimir Lenin|year=March 1913|title=The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism|title-url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm|quote=The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.}}</ref> As it was born of human religious beliefs (themselves based on ignorance of the material world), it can only exist when supported by these beliefs. A view that many idealists come to is that the mind that creates reality is the mind of God, rather than of any subjective individual.

Idealists often explain human consciousness and the existence of thought with the claim that God imbued human beings with a soul and that this soul allows us to think. In the materialist framework, we understand that thoughts are created by the brain, something material.

God is an ultimate being, an affirmation that cannot be proven (and will not be proven by idealists, who simply accept that God exists). Science however demonstrates through practice and experience that the world exists objectively.

=== Dialectical idealism===
In the scope of [[dialectics]], idealists claim that ''ideas'' move things forward. That people had the right ideas at the right time and this moved society forward. For example, the steam engine was invented at the right time and thus allowed productivity to flourish, which led to capitalism establishing itself as the dominant mode of production.

In Hegelian idealism, it is ultimately God that is responsible for dialectics, much in the same way it was for Berkeley.

Yet ideas are dependent on [[material conditions]]. The steam engine could not have existed before steam was understood to create power which could be harnessed to move gears. It also had no practical use before the [[relations of production]] were organized enough that it became viable to use steam machines.

These same material conditions also create the ideas that people are capable of forming. Scientific socialism could not have existed as it does today before capitalism, since it is made possible with the productive capabilities of factories and steam machines (now electronic). While thinkers of the Middle Ages and earlier ''could'' have invented something close to communism (say common ownership of the means of production), they could not have foreseen capitalism and the machines it would use. They could not have foreseen the existence of the bourgeoisie and proletariat.

== Application of idealism ==

=== Religion ===
Religion, particularly organized religions such as [[Christianity]] or [[Islam]], contain highly immaterial and idealist thought. Religion commonly overlooks the mundane and observable parts of reality in favor of a often purely abstract and invisible deity. Adherents of organized religions typically view morality as not something that is an invention of humans, and that is dynamic, but as something largely stagnant; given by a god, and that is constant, regardless of the advancement of human civilization. Religion, with its commonly idealistic nature, has often been used as a tool by liberals to justify the idea of "natural rights", or by [[Reactionary|reactionaries]], as a means of claiming that social change is "decadence" or otherwise immoral.

=== Liberalism ===
[[Liberalism]] largely relies on immaterial values and policies. Liberals view certain legal rights as totally inherent to society, if not completely "god-given", furthermore, Liberals often care little for what real material conditions are like for the vast majority of the population. For example, Liberals will often speak about "economic freedom", however, what this really means is simply the degree throughout which a corporation can [[Exploitation|exploit]] their workers without the government caring. If one were to go by the Liberal definition of "economic freedom", then the more "economic freedom" a nation has, the worse it is for the [[working class]]. Freedom is not free if it does not exist anywhere outside the fantasy of a politician's mind, or if only a tiny amount of people can benefit from this "freedom", at the expense of the majority.<ref>{{Citation|author=Young, Shaun P.|year=2002|title=Beyond Rawls : an analysis of the concept of political liberalism|title-url=https://archive.org/details/beyondrawlsanaly0000youn|publisher=University Press of America|isbn=2002020126|trans-lang=English}}</ref>

==Opposition==
[[Materialism|Materialists]], such as [[Marxism|Marxists]], oppose idealism as the two are in [[contradiction]]. Moreover, materialism represents the scientific conception of the world (which when applied to socialism forms scientific socialism) whereas idealism represents the utopian conception of the world.

==References==
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===Specific===

===Bibliography===
Politzer, Georges: ''[http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/epop/contents.html Elementary Principles of Philosophy]'' (1946)
[[Category:Philosophy]]