The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. Idealism is usually distinguished from physicalism — the view that the physical is fundamental — and the related philosophical naturalism, the view that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, account for the universe. Physicalism and naturalism are the assumed consensus of modern culture, very much the product of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on pragmatic science and instrumental reason. Accordingly this essay will go against the grain of the mainstream consensus and even against what many will presume to be common sense. However I hope to present an argument that shows that common sense and this formulation of philosophical idealism are not necessarily in conflict.

Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise. In so doing I will draw on phenomenology as well as perspectives from non-dualist philosophy — an approach that will hopefully be become clear in the subsequent sections.

All in the Mind?

In philosophy it is customary to address objections after making your case, but I will mention two of the most frequent objections to idealism at the outset. First is the criticism that ‘idealism says that the world is all in the mind’ — the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then it would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way: that things pass into and and out of existence depending on whether they’re being perceived or not. G.E. Moore, for example, once said that idealism must entail that, when the passengers are all seated on the train, the wheels would go out of existence for their not being perceived.

The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or ‘mind-stuff’, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesn’t posit that there is any ‘mind-stuff’ existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).

At this stage I will only note these objections, as to counter them now would be premature, but I hope it will become clear in what follows that these objections are misplaced.

A Thought Experiment

Let’s start with a simple thought-experiment, to help bring the issues into focus.

Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.

Now picture the same scene — but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity — any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.

“Impossible!” you object. “How can I imagine any such thing?! It is really nothing at all, it is an impossibility, a jumble of stimuli, if anything — this is what you are asking me to imagine! It is completely unintelligible.”

But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists — even if what we’re discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.

These are the grounds on which I am appealing to the insights of philosophical idealism. But I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

A corollary of this is that ‘existence’ is a compound or complex idea. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms — that it either exists or does not exist — is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that ‘particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether they’re perceived’ is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things ‘go out of existence’ when not perceived, is simply their ‘imagined non-existence’. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.

So How Does Mind ‘Create Reality’?

So this is the sense that I’m arguing for the fundamental role that the mind plays in creating reality.

Let me address an obvious objection. ‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?

As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.

By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience.

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. And that is the subject of the remainder of this essay.