The True Essence of Modern Philosophy - Part Two (2/4)

The Claims of Idealism

Idealism presents itself as the original philosophy, the most radical, the most spiritual, rigorous, irrefutable, the foundation of realism and at the same time the refutation of realism or a legitimate alternative to it, the new that replaces the old, the truth that replaces appearance. These are all lies, which I won't refute here because it would be too long to do so, but which have been refuted by realists, scholastic philosophers, and Thomists for centuries.

Idealism claims to judge realism as contradictory when it is based on the breach of the principle of non-contradiction, as will be explicitly shown in Hegel, violating the sacred principle of honesty and coherence of thought, which it replaces with duplicity and hypocrisy.

Thought is naturally realistic. Even Husserl speaks of realism as a 'natural attitude,' and all idealists acknowledge that realism belongs to common sense and the physical sciences. For this reason, idealists, when they think, cannot help but be realists in the sense of the so-called adequatio intellectus et rei realism. In advocating idealism, which seeks to deny that principle, they fall into contradiction. They refute themselves because the nature and demand of thought to be true forces them to maintain that their system is true. Consequently, they are compelled, against their will, to rely on the principle of adequatio intellectus et rei, which they, in the name of idealism, wish to reject

Idealism, in words, does not deny reality, does not deny being. However, it says that being and reality are not external, but within thought, and thus, Bontadini, affirms:

"If we are in contact only with our representations or, let us also say, impressions; then these, as acts of knowledge, must necessarily be knowledge of something, of being, we will say, in general. Being in contact only with consciousness already means being in contact with reality. Nor will there be an enlightened realist who claims to arrive at reality, leaving aside knowledge, or jumping out of it."[1]

We see here how the idealist fails to conceive the real as real, independent of our thought, that is, external reality (extra animam). What does external reality mean? It means it is in front of us without us having made it. And who made it? Another reality, a superior one, which we call God. Therefore, to deny external reality leads to atheism or to replacing God in creating reality.

Undoubtedly, we grasp reality in thought and it is impossible to contact it directly without using thought. Nonetheless, to engage with external reality through thought, we need not ontologically transcend ourselves, as this is impossible. Yet in knowledge, it somehow happens just like that; it makes us go out of ourselves, and it opens us to receive the essence or form of external things, external not only spatially, but ontologically, therefore moral and spiritual values and God himself.

In a sense, we reach external reality by stepping outside ourselves. How do we do this? Immaterially and intentionally, through the act of thinking. We grasp reality as it exists outside of us, yet within us—in our thought and consciousness. In this respect, the idealist is correct.

Their mistake is to believe that the real is not external simply because in knowing it we have it within ourselves, without realizing that what we have within us is not the real in the ontological sense, which would be an absurdity, since a substance (object) cannot enter into the essence of another substance (subject), but precisely as mentioned in an intentional sense, that is, through the concept, so in this way, there is an intentional identity between subject and object. Here the idealist is right. They are wrong in confusing the ideal or intentional with the real, the logical with the ontological, and thought with being. The concept is not an external thing, but it is only a mental representation of it.

In concept and consciousness, we perceive the real, which is true. However, the mere presence of an idea within us does not necessarily mean we truly know the object, as the notice might not correspond to reality. Thus, to ascertain truth, we must compare our perceptions with external reality and acknowledge its existence. Possessing ideas does not always guarantee truth, as they can be erroneous or not correspond to anything real. This explains the dogmatism and presumption of the idealist, who claims infallibility because they equate having a clear and distinct idea with the existence of the thing itself.

Idealism, moreover, stems from a form of pride, whereby man cannot accept his condition of animality, that is, dismiss sensory knowledge, does not give objective sensory rule to his will, and therefore aspires to replace God in regulating his own life. The idealist does not want to recognize himself as a creature in a world existing outside of him, not created by him, but wants to attribute his and the world's existence to an act of his thought and will.

Certainly, they acknowledge the existence of absolute thought and absolute freedom. However, rather than recognizing a God who is above them, whose essence infinitely exceeds their understanding, and to whom they are accountable for their actions, they accept only what is rationally comprehensible. They reject any transcendent moral law that might regulate or limit their freedom. They cannot tolerate the idea of a being beyond their thought, one that surpasses their intellect, because it would challenge their gnostic inclinations. They seek to control everything and have all things subordinate to their reason. Nothing should elude their grasp, and everything must conform to their understanding.

Certainly, Fichte assures the idealist that he grasps reality better than the realist. But then why are they called idealists? Be a realist with us and take the idea as a simple means to know the real, without putting it above. If we then ask ourselves what reality is, we will see that the answer can only come from the realist, rendering the question ultimately useless because it presupposes the answer. In fact, it is equivalent to asking: what reality is reality? What is the thing? Reality comes from res, things, and entities: all basic and intuitive concepts that we form on our own from childhood, without anyone teaching us or defining them for us. Everyone knows what they mean. But that is realism.

The Cartesian cogito meets in Kant with the ancient German Gemüt, already present in Eckhart [2], a term that is difficult to translate, which Gentile in his translation of the Critique of Pure Reason renders as "spirit," but in German is Geist. Gemüt, on the other hand, is closer to mind and feeling (Gefühl). Gemüt is in Kant in turn the organ of feelings and aesthetic taste. Kant thus founds aesthetic idealism, which will have further developments in romanticism with Schlegel and Novalis and Schelling, for whom, as Lo Sacco reports [3],

"Art is the true and only organ and document of philosophy; it is for the philosopher the highest, because 'it almost opens to him the sanctuary, where an eternal and original union burns as in a flame what in nature and history is separated.'"

An heir of Schelling in this is Von Balthasar, for whom the pulchrum takes the place of the verum as a source of truth. Why see idealism in Kantian-Schellingian aestheticism? For Kant, aesthetic judgment does not have objective universality but subjectivity [4].

The Deception of Idealism

The fundamental deception of idealism, which only realism can unmask, lies in wanting to make us believe that the object of our knowledge is not a real, a being, a thing distinct from our thought and therefore from our self, but it is a thought of our thought. "Thought, as Bontadini says, is intranscendable." Truth, for them, always remains an adjustment of thought to the object, and yet the object, for them, is our own deep and radical self, which they call "transcendental ego," the metaphysical mode of the theological ego, that is, the "absolute ego." For this reason, for them, truth is not given by an adjustment of the subject to reality, but an adjustment of the subject to itself, as Kant himself says.

Therefore, in their view, the reality is not created by a God, a transcendent Thou, but is - as Fichte says - "posited" by our absolute Ego, with Fichte not having the audacity to speak of "creation," while the term will be openly used by Gentile, with his famous "autoctisi."

Conversely, the realist distinguishes, with St. Thomas, intellect from thing and the concept of the thing. Let's read his words:

"I call intention as understood (intentionem intellectam), what the intellect conceives in itself" (the content of the concept) "about the thing understood, which intention in us is not the thing itself that is understood, and is not even the same substance of the intellect, but it is a certain likeness conceived in the intellect about the thing understood, a conception that is signified by the word; for which that intention is called "inner word" (verbum interius), which is signified by the external word. ... That the intention understood is not the same intellect in us is evident from the fact that the being of the intention understood consists in its being understood (intelligi); which is not the case for our intellect, whose being does not consist in its understanding" (intelligere) [5].

Therefore, essentially, the idealist would like to persuade us - let's say it frankly without so much circumlocution - that we are God or as wise as God [6]. However, since all idealists believe themselves to be God, the problem arises for them of how to agree on the question of who is God, since God is one. Husserl will deal with the problem in his theory of "intersubjectivity," evidently involving himself in inextricable contradictions, because if I am God, what am I to you, given that you also consider yourself God?

In idealism, there is a profound need for unity, unity of being and thought, which is also correct. With Fichte, they feel the need for a unitary system that starts from a single principle. With Severino, they feel the need for the unity of being.

However, in this need, the idealist exaggerates because they lack an analogical conception of being, which reconciles unity with multiplicity, and are slaves to a univocal conception of being: "Being cannot not be," as Severino says misunderstanding the principle of non-contradiction and reducing the contingent to the necessary. Thus, they identify being with a divine being and therefore come to say with a modern idealist that "only God exists." The consequence is that everything is God, that is, all things are God, and therefore pantheism. Instead, it can be said that God is everything in the sense that He is infinite perfection.

The idealist is right in saying in this sense that God is everything; however, their concept of "everything" is ambiguous because they confuse everything in the sense of "all things" with everything in the sense of "absolute perfection."

Due to their intemperate need for unity, the idealist shies away from every duality, which for them is dualism, which must be removed. For them, simply distinguishing is opposing; the external is not different, but is alien, the enemy; the non-self is not the other self, but my adversary; therefore, by avoiding distinction, diversities, and differences, they flatten everything and fall into total confusion, putting everything against everything else.

Not only do they reject the distinction between thought and being, subject and object, being and becoming, spirit and matter, substance, and accident, but also the distinction between being and nothing, between true and false, between good and evil. Everything is identified and confused with everything. And everything is God.

Some have sought to assimilate idealistic monism with Plotinus; however, Plotinus does not reject multiplicity and difference. Instead of creation, he proposes emanation, where the world is not the result of God's free will—something that could exist even without the world—but a finite extension of itself, an outpouring that remains inherently tied to the divine essence. This emanation is a necessary manifestation of that essence. Plotinus thus distinguishes the world from God not as substance from substance, but as substance from accident, a distinction later explored by Spinoza and Schelling.

Idealistic pantheism goes further, because it is not satisfied, as Hegel will say, with substance, but wants the "subject." And what is the subject? Nothing other than Descartes' cogito: the identity of thought with being. Therefore, for the pantheist, finite and infinite are not two substances, two realities, two natures, two things, two entities.

The idealist confuses metaphysical substance with a chemical substance, and then it is understood why they say that the soul or God is not a substance, because they are spirit and not matter. But by understanding spirit not as substance, and reducing it to an idea (Hegel) [6], to an act of thinking (Gentile), they reduce being to a mere intentional being (esse intentionale), a concept created not by God but by our mind.

For Descartes and Kant, the mind, to have certainty of truth, must not turn towards the thing, but towards itself. Indeed, for idealism, the object of knowledge is not the thing, produced by God, but the concept [7], produced by man. Idealism is nothing but the execution of the devil's proposal to Adam to replace God in laying the foundation of knowledge [8].

In the Garden of Eden, God forbids Adam from taking possession of what belongs to Him, namely to lay the foundation of knowledge of truth, because attempting to do so would bring him death. The devil, on the other hand, presents God to Adam as a liar, jealous of a power that allows Him to dominate man by hiding from him the power that would make him His rival, a power that Adam can snatch by disobeying the divine prohibition, and thus obtaining for himself instead of God the establishment of the foundation of truth.

But it is the devil, the false god who reveals himself as a liar, the god of idealism, because of the execution of the idealist plan, as demonstrated by history, especially in the last century with the two world wars unleashed by Nazism and communism, has caused the death of hundreds of millions of people, in addition to all the souls that go to hell deceived by the pride of idealism. (emphasis mine)

By suggesting to man to turn from orientation towards the thing (being) to orientation towards himself (thought), idealism does nothing but implement Satan's suggestion to replace himself with God, to attribute to oneself what belongs to God.

The devil suggests to Adam not to leave to God the being the rule of truth, but to be himself this rule and therefore to make of his thought not something regulated by reality, but itself the rule of reality.

In any case, idealists refute themselves, because realism is the natural and therefore inevitable attitude of human thought, so idealists, in rejecting realism, are forced to do so using the same realism. They come to say that realism does not correspond to reality. But precisely the comparison with reality is the method of realism. Like Fichte, they condemn realism in the name of reality, asserting that it is idealism that provides us with reality. However, isn’t it realism that aims to give us a true perspective on reality?

Idealism, as Julius Evola rightly noted [9], leads to magic because ultimately what interests the idealist more than knowledge is power (emphasis mine). Indeed, he conceives knowledge as production, therefore as praxis. For him, acting is knowing, and knowing is acting. Blondel is on this line. Maréchal is also with his false doctrine of the purpose of the intellect, which confuses intellect and will.

Starting from Ockham, idealism generates voluntarism and therefore violence and coercion. Marx derives from Hegel. Hegel is the great theoretician of the logical necessity of war. Progress happens through violence. Today's truth is yesterday's falsehood and vice versa. Identity is abstract and dead staticity. Not identity, but contradiction is the principle of truth, an idea that is already found in Jakob Böhme and Giordano Bruno.

Totalitarianism, fascism, and Nazism are the fruits of idealism. Gentile was the philosopher of fascism, and Heidegger was the philosopher of Nazism. As Heidegger highlighted, Nietzsche's "will to power" is Nietzsche's metaphysics and ethics [10]. Alexandr Dugin, the current theorist advocating Russia's duty to defeat the West in war, is a follower of Nietzsche and Evola.

The contrast between realism and idealism on the practical level can be expressed in very simple, almost evangelical terms, by saying that while the realist practices the will of God, the idealist clings to their own will. Because while the realist is oriented towards God, the idealist is turned inward towards their self. Therefore, while realistic ethics is the ethics of altruism, idealistic ethics is the ethics of egoism. While realistic ethics is the ethics of humility that bows down before God, it is the ethics of adequatio and obedience; idealistic ethics is the ethics of pride, of the self that elevates itself to replace God, following the promise of the ancient serpent.

The idealist theist is therefore a deception. With their a priori theological intuitionism, they seem to be a champion of interiority and more spiritual than the realist, who reaches God a posteriori through material things and seems to get lost in externality, conceiving God as nothing more than a thing or an object among others.

Instead, it is precisely the idealist who hides their atheism and impiety behind a concept of God that is nothing but the absolutization of their self, because a God intuited or imagined or experienced or felt a priori before empirical a posteriori is not at all the true God, the creator of heaven and earth, but an invention of one's mind, as well as the result of a flawed epistemology.

Idealism arises from the pride of a man who does not accept his animality and pretends to be more than he is. We possess sensible knowledge like animals, and it is only by exercising this knowledge that we ascend to spiritual knowledge. From the heights of their proud thoughts and their pride, they believe they can descend into the world of the senses and matter with supreme freedom to dominate them ad libitum. But in reality, since they do not submit to the law established by God in human nature, believing themselves to be free, they blind their minds and become slaves to the passions of the flesh.

Attempts to Reconcile Realism and Idealism

Some, in the last century, like Armando Carlini, confusing idealism with Augustinian interiority, argue that not realism but idealism is the basis of Christian philosophy [11]. Others, like Gentile, assert that not realism, but idealism is the best interpreter of Christianity [12].

Even the thesis of Przywara, for whom realism and idealism complement each other, or that of Bontadini, for whom realism completes and surpasses Kantianism, is not valid. True Thomists refrain from making these mix-ups but refute Kantian idealism as a false philosophy. This doesn’t mean they’re unwilling to recognize some truth in it.

The position of Laberthonnière is unique [13] as he does support realism against idealism, but while misunderstanding idealism by confusing it with the simple exercise of abstract thought and its ideational function, he misunderstands realism by conceiving it not as the adequation of the knowing subject to the object but as interaction between subject and object, a contradictory compromise between idealism and realism, based on self-consciousness in the manner of Descartes or the Kantian dualism of phenomenon-thing-in-itself or the "consciousness-related being" of Husserlian phenomenology or according to the theory of interpretation of Heidegger and Gadamer, where the pre-understanding of reality combines with the experience of the same reality.

Even the immanent God to the consciousness of Luther and Blondel can be traced back to idealism, although both consent to biblical realism. However, even before Descartes and Luther, many were no longer interested in God-in-itself, but in God-in-me, God-for-me. Luther, in other words, could not conceive of a transcendent God, a pure God, like the one in the Old Testament, who was not an incarnate God, a God for man, that is, the God of the New Testament, Jesus Christ. In this way, in Luther, man no longer appears as directed towards God, but it seems that God is functional to man. With his distinction between the thing-in-itself and the phenomenon, Kant, following Descartes, provided a gnoseological and metaphysical foundation for Lutheran theology.

Indeed, Descartes associates doubt about external reality, namely the thing-in-itself, with the certainty of the cogito, which is the thing-for-me, namely the thing as conceived or thought by me, the thing transformed into an idea, the being-in-consciousness or the "being of consciousness," as Moretti-Costanzi (an Italian philosopher, Ed.) used to say. And what is this if not idealism?

Certainly, Luther was not interested in ideas, Plato did not interest him, because he was an Ockhamist, he was intuitive, an empiricist. In this sense, although Luther was Augustinian, he betrayed, so to speak, Augustinian Platonism—the only truly robust form of idealism. Instead, he replaced it with a crude mysticism, where experiencing God became as immediate and mundane as tasting chocolate.

However, he was by no means devoid of spiritual intuition, and in him, there is a revival of Augustine's self-awareness, but while Augustine had a vivid sense of divine transcendence and eternal ideas, in Luther, there is no interest in eternal ideas replaced by concrete Christological Ockhamism, for which speculative abstract thought is not valid, but voluntary and existential contact with Christ.

The interference of the will in the intellect remains a defect of idealism. The productive orientation, the setzen of Fichte, who boasted of having interpreted Kant's deep soul, despite the protests he encountered from Kant, actually springs from Kant's conception of knowledge, in which the object, on the one hand, is received by the subject by sensory experience, and on the other hand, is constructed by the subject from the standpoint of formal a priori, one might say "ideal" in a Platonic sense.

This explains why Maréchal, in his attempt to see in Kantian epistemology an idealistic "transposition" of Thomistic realism, understands the action of the intellect as a tension towards an end, as if judgment were a striving towards God, confusing the intentional being of the act of knowing with the real being of the inclination of the will. Likewise, Blondel believes that the intellect is constitutionally insufficient to grasp the truth without being internally and in its work supported by the act of willingness.

Now, there is no doubt that the will moves the intellect to its act, but it has no power or competence to be part of or contribute to the dynamism of this act, which is not efficient but formal, does not concern action but being, the verum and not the bonum. Maréchal finds it repugnant that knowing has a static aspect, but such an aspect is entirely normal and obligatory, and here Kant agrees with Thomas. Instead, Maréchal, to support his pragmatism, resorts to Fichte, who further distorts the nature of knowing to the point of confusing human knowledge with divine knowledge.

On the other hand, given the idealistic confusion of thinking with being, it is not surprising that Blondel, showing here evident influence from idealism, confuses the outward motion of the will with the inward act of understanding. The will tends towards the res or the person in their concrete external reality: the intellect internalizes and immaterializes it in the spirit in the form of a concept.

Immanentism is not far from idealism. The difference lies in the fact that while in immanentism, God is by essence in man, in idealism, God is an idea of man. Pushing this thesis further, idealism leads to pantheism when human thought identifies itself with divine thought due to an identification of thought with being, that is, of the ideal with the real.

End of Part Two (2/4)

Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP

Fontanellato, September 6, 2022

Source:

https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/la-vera-essenza-della-filosofia-moderna_20.html

[1] Gustavo Bontadini,Studi sull’idealismo (Studies on Idealism), Vita e Pensiero, 1995, p.280.

[2] Giuseppe Faggin, Meister Eckhart e la mistica preprotestante (Meister Eckhart and Pre-Protestant Mysticism), Fratelli Bocca Publishers, Milan 1946, pp.133,192, 194, 208, 296, 298ss.

[3] Schelling, Remo Sandron Editions 1915, p.153.

[4] Critica del giudizio (Critique of Judgment), Laterza Editions, Bari 1963, pp.30, 31, 56, 72, 76, 83. 85, 94, 108, 135.

[5] Contra Gentes, Book IV, Chapter 11.

[6] This is the aim of Gnosticism, which is evident in Hegel's Logic and Absolute Science.

[7] Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 85, Article 2.

[8] Cf. my booklet Il progetto del demonio (The Devil's Project), Chorabooks Editions, Hong Kong 2021.

[9] Saggio sull’idealismo magico (Essay on Magical Idealism), Mediterranee Editions, Rome 2006.

[10] Heidegger, Nietzsche, Adelphi Editions. Milan 2013.

[11] Il mito del realismo (The Myth of Realism), Sansoni, Florence 1936, p.104.

[12] La religione, Sansoni, Florence, 1965, p.441.

[13] Il realismo cristiano e l’idealismo greco (Christian Realism and Greek Idealism), Vallecchi Publisher, Florence 1949, pp.75-76.