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Objective idealism is an idealistic metaphysics that postulates that there is in an important sense only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived. One important advocate of such a metaphysics, Josiah Royce, wrote that he was indifferent "whether anybody calls all this Theism or Pantheism". Plato is regarded as one of the earliest representatives of objective idealism.[1] It is distinct from the subjective idealism of George Berkeley, and it abandons the thing-in-itself of Kant's dualism.
Difference to other Idealisms
Idealism, in terms of metaphysics, is the philosophical view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality. It has taken several distinct but related forms. Among them are Objective and Subjective idealism. Objective idealism accepts common sense Realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects Naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism.
Schelling and Hegel had forms of objective idealism. But it is first associated with Plato. The philosopher Charles Peirce (1839-1914) stated his own version of objective idealism in the following manner:
The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws (Peirce, CP 6.25).
References
- Peirce, C.S. (1891), "The Architecture of Theories", The Monist vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1891), pp. 161-176 (via Google Book Search beta; users outside the USA may not yet be able to gain full-view access). Also viewable at the Internet Archive The Monist vol. 1. Reprinted (The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 6 (1935), paragraphs 7–34), The Essential Peirce, vol. 1 (1992), pp. 285-297).
- Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), vols. 7–8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1931–1935, 1958. Cited as CP vol.para.
See also
