Bob asked:

What is Objective Idealism? Is it considered a tenable position today?

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Idealism is a complex subject with several facets, Objective Idealism, better known as Absolute
Idealism, is one of them. To come to some understanding of what is a fairly obscure concept, it is
perhaps advisable to briefly consider the development of idealism from Berkeley to Hegel. Very often
when we refer to development in philosophy, it must not be regarded in an evolutionary sense, it
simply means that someone has addeda new idea to what has gone before, or maybe has
substituted their own idea for the previous one, but none of it can be said to fully supersede what has
gone before. Take for example the graded progress to Absolute Idealism, from Berkeley's Subjective
Idealism, through Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and finally the total Absolute in
Hegel. No development has completely eliminated what has gone before, and we find that there are
supporters of each variation of idealism who will not modify their enthusiasm for the variation they
adopt. Hence, what we find is a range of alternative approaches to a difficult question; What is
reality? or; What really exists?

I obviously cannot go through a detailed history of the development of idealism here, but I will try to
construct a brief indication of the general trend towards Absolutism.You can learn more about each
of the philosophers mentioned and their ideas, by reading about them in a good encyclopedia of
Western Philosophy.

Idealism is a term originating in the concept of ideasin the mind. Idealism does not quarrel with the
naive view that material things exist; rather, it disagrees with the analysis of a material thing that
many philosophers have offered, according to which the material world is wholly independent of
minds. Berkeley asked how an observer who was aware of nothing but his own ideas could know
anything about an external world.The situation is made more absurd when we realise that senses
can deceive us, i.e. a sense can present us with alternative ideas about which we have to rationalise
to obtain what we might call the correct choice. As there is no way of proving the presence of an
external material world, why should we presume there is such a presence? It is more likely that the
only world we can justifiably accept is an internal world of ideas. Things that exist are things that are
perceived, when no human mind is perceiving an object, we have to presume that it continues to exist
because God is perceiving it.

Unlike Berkeley, Kant did not refute the notion of the existence of things outside the mind. However,
he believed that we could have no direct access to what was there, all we could be aware of are
representations by way of the senses, mere shadows or phenomena of what could exist, which he
called things in themselves.To make sense of the phenomena we receive, the mind adds a priori
knowledge, knowledge in a way gifted to us by nature, to form mind constructs.Thus, the popular
notion that the mind conforms to objects in the world is reversed, and, according to Kant, objects
conform to the mind. The world out there is called the noumenal world,the things in themselves
which constitute the noumenal world are thinkable but not knowable. Kant called this doctrine
"transcendental idealism."

Fichte, though influenced by Kant, could not accept the notion of things in themselves. He asked, how
we could actually postulate hypotheses about a noumenal world that we knew nothing about, and for
which we had no proof whatsoever that it existed at all. He decided that the noumenal world had to
go; there could be no grounds for asserting something quite unknown, and no meaning in doing so.
After this rejection we are left with just minds and objects of experience. Fichte developed the idea
further by referring to two parts of mind, the Iand the non-I,the I observes what goes on in the non-I,
thus eliminating an outside objective world. The I is considered subjectiveand the non-I objective.
The I is what the Greeks might have called the soul.So we have now entered what Fichte called
"Absolute Idealism."

The development of absolute idealism proceeded through Schelling, who introduced a spiritual
concept, to Schopenhauer, an atheist who considered the absolute to be the will,this he considered
to be the ultimate reality. Absolute idealism comes to fruition in Hegel. The absolute for Hegel was the
Universal Mind,an interpersonal consciousness. Berkeleian subjective idealism and Kantian
transcendental idealism, construe reality in terms of the content of individual minds, absolute idealism
on the other hand, tends to construe it in terms of an interpersonal consciousness. The distinction
between one 'self' and another tends to lapse, leading to a form of monism,according to which there
is only one thing, the mind divided up into appearances. All reality is in the mind, there is nothing
outside it.

Complicated stuff, but I trust you will grasp the general idea of what absolute idealism is about. Yes, it
is considered a tenable position today by some philosophers. In fact, idealism in general is
experiencing a revival. Oddly enough it is receiving a boost from science, particularly physics, which
no longer sees the world as a great machine or technical construction, but is seen by many as a great
'thought!' Matter keeps disappearing and re-appearing under their very eyes. Personally, I can only
make sense of the world by way of the Kantian idea of mental constructs, but, like the absolutists, I
find it difficult to conceive a noumenal world. Like Bradley, I am out on a limb with the notion of the
mind contemplating itself, the real absolute!!

John Brandon