Meaning of Idealism - encyclopedia - 2023

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What is Idealism:

What idealism the set of philosophical systems according to which the idea is the principle and foundation of being and knowledge. Its origin can be traced to Plato, who considered that the true reality was that of the world of ideas, only accessible to reason.

As idealism we also call exaggerated or naive confidence in the ethical and moral values ​​of society; in the way people and institutions conduct themselves according to what is fair and good. In this sense, he opposes realism.

The word, as such, is formed with the words ideal, which means belonging to or relative to the idea, and the suffix -ism, which indicates ‘school’ or ‘doctrine’.

Idealism in Philosophy

In philosophy, idealism is called the branch of philosophical thought that bases its doctrines on the preponderance of ideas as the principle of being and knowing, as opposed to materialism. In this sense, for idealism objects cannot exist if they have not been first conceived by a mind that is aware of them. The term, as such, was first used in the 17th century to refer to the philosophy of Plato, according to which the true reality is the ideas, and not the material things. As such, there are two variants of idealism: objective idealism and subjective idealism.


Objective idealism

According to objective idealism, ideas exist by themselves and we can only access them through experience. Some recognized philosophers in this current were Plato, Leibniz, Hegel or Dilthey.

Subjective idealism

For subjective idealism, ideas only exist in the subject's mind, so that without him there is no autonomous external world. Some philosophers of this current were Discards, Berkeley, Kant Y Fichte.

See also Philosophical Currents.

Transcendental idealism

Transcendental idealism is part of the doctrine proposed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. According to transcendental idealism, for knowledge to take place the concurrence of two elements is necessary: ​​an object and a subject. The object, external to the subject, would be the material principle of knowledge; and the subject, that is, the subject himself who knows, would be the formal principle.


In this sense, the subject is the one who sets the conditions for knowledge to occur, since everything intuited in space and time are nothing more than phenomena, which have no independent existence outside of our thinking as subjects.

German idealism

As German idealism is known the philosophical school that, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, developed in Germany. As such, it grew out of Immanuel Kant and his postulates of transcendental idealism, and had notable followers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.